Whereas there exists a plethora of studies that engage with the ethics, theory, and methodology of oral history interviewing, the same cannot be said about working with existing oral history collections. This study turns to the Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History (FAFCM) Project (2010-12), spearheaded by the National Library of Australia. Borne out of advocacy and transitional justice efforts, this collection showcases the life stories of British, Maltese and Australian children who grew up either in institutional “care” or with foster families. As this thesis argues, by reconstructing the ecosystem(s) of large-scale oral history projects – including their conceptual underpinnings, methodological approaches, institutional frameworks, and interview praxis – we can critically and ethically engage with existing oral history collections as oral history. Indeed, it is imperative that we develop frameworks and protocols to this end, given the countless oral history collections that are preserved, if rarely listened to, in local, state, and federal archival repositories. This study explores three principal pathways through which to reconstruct the ecosystems of the FAFCM collection: first, by foregrounding the experiences of curator Dr. Joanna Sassoon, alongside internal project documentation; second, by interviewing the interviewers, who conducted fieldwork across Australia; and third, by offering a close reading of archived oral history interviews with former British child migrants that speak of resilience, trauma, and shared rites of passage. By mobilizing both metadata and local knowledge of interview contexts, researchers working with archived oral histories can honour the intellectual labour invested in the creation of collections, capture interview dynamics in the field, and explore the subjective and intimate knowledge that resides in oral life stories.