9 Vital Stories
9 Vital Stories (9 Historias Vitales) was an intergenerational documentary, heritage and education project created and developed by Uruguayan-Australian journalist Florencia Melgar and Peruvian-Australian journalist Jorge Jordan. Supported through the community website Latinhub and Australian Government's Your Community Heritage – Sharing Community Heritage Stories program, the project documented the experiences of nine Latin American political refugees who rebuilt their lives in Australia, preserving an important but insufficiently documented part of Australia's multicultural history.
At the heart of the project was an intergenerational model. Young Latin Australians were trained in audiovisual storytelling and participated in documenting the experiences of an older generation. The process resulted in nine short documentaries, recorded in Spanish and subtitled in English, preserving personal histories of political persecution, displacement, migration, human rights, settlement and the rebuilding of lives in Australia.
The project was designed not simply to record oral histories, but to create a conversation between generations. Younger Latin Australians were able to explore why earlier generations had come to Australia and what they had experienced before and after migration, while first-generation migrants were given an opportunity to preserve those experiences in their own voices.
The documentaries subsequently became the basis for a broader educational project. They were shown to young people in New South Wales, who were invited to engage with the stories and develop their own questions for the protagonists. Those questions and the refugees' responses were incorporated into the bilingual English-Spanish book 9 Vital Stories, extending the project from documentary filmmaking into an educational and historical resource.
Language and cultural continuity were also central to the project. The documentaries and bilingual material provided younger generations with an opportunity to engage with Spanish through the histories of their own communities. At the same time, they opened conversations about democracy, human rights, political persecution, migration, identity, belonging and Australia's role as a place of refuge and resettlement.
The project also reached audiences beyond the immediate Latin American community. Instituto Cervantes Sydney presented 9 Vital Stories as a documentary film series, bringing the stories into a broader cultural and educational setting. The project was subsequently named a finalist in the 2014 NSW Premier's Multicultural Media Awards for Best Use of Online and Digital Media, recognising its innovative combination of digital storytelling, community participation, heritage and education.
9 Vital Stories was developed as part of the broader work associated with LatinHub Australia, the independent Spanish-language digital media and community platform founded by Florencia Melgar. It reflected an approach to multicultural journalism centred not only on reporting about communities, but on creating the tools, skills and spaces through which communities could document their own histories, connect generations and contribute those experiences to Australia's wider historical record.
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