Albany Is is an app-based immersive audio experience that draws on more than 170 recorded interviews to create something available on the phone you carry in your pocket. Part oral history, part interactive podcast, the app invites listeners to walk through Kinjarling/Albany and hear the region narrated by the people who know it best. From Menang Elders and broader Nyoongar community members whose connection to this country stretches back tens of thousands of years, to post-war migrants who built new lives from the groundup, to teenagers figuring out what this place means to them right now.
The stories are organised around themes that emerged directly from the interviews: the visceral industrial past of the whaling station and the Woollen Mills; the farmers and scientists now repairing the ecological damage those industries left behind; the routes people have taken to reach this corner of the continent, and the reasons they stayed. Other threads explore Albany's position on the edge of the world, the invisible labour of the women who kept the settlement running, the kinetic energy of the Snake Run, the decades-long fight for a surf reef, and the powerful convergence where Western science is finally catching up to millennia of Menang knowledge.
The interview archive spans voices from the 1890s to today. You will hear from pharmacists, fishermen, poets, skaters, lighthouse keepers' wives, and a 92-year-old who has spent a lifetime reading the harbour's water temperatures, while recent workshops with Albany Senior High School and the Follow the Dream program bring younger voices into the mix, capturing perspectives on growing up in Albany that haven’t been heard before. The final experience will feature over a hundred unique voices, with each theme serving as an interactive episode that listeners can navigate at their own pace.
Presented by FORM and produced by Envelope Audio and Barking Wolf, as part of the Albany 2026 program. Lotterywest is a Major Supporter of the City of Albany 2026 Program.
