Wollongong's history is everywhere - even in the hospital bed next to yours.

Dr Glenn Mitchell, senior lecturer in the History and Politics faculty at the University of Wollongong, has quite a fascination for the history of his city.

And it's a city that always seems to throw up fresh stories, even when you're in hospital waiting to have an operation.

"The guy in the bed next to me started talking about some of the things he witnessed during the war," Mitchell said.

"He tells me something that I really didn't know - that on a particular day, a group of Lancaster bombers flew so low that they flattened this large paddock of grass. In and of itself that is not a big story. But added to a lot of other little stories about what happened to Wollongong during the war, that can become an interesting thing."

Stories like the time during the war that the large gun located where WIN TV studios are now was fired and smashed every bit of glass within a radius several kilometres.

Stories like spotting Japanese warplanes over Wollongong during World War II.

"We got another story from someone else who saw Japanese Zeros fly over the Illawarra during the war," he said.

"They were possibly scoping out bombing the steelworks. On one occasion, the planes were heard coming and they cut the power at Port Kembla steelworks and there were more injuries from blokes falling down pits and running into poles because there was no light than if they had have dropped a bomb."

These stories will likely form a part of Yesterday's Stories, an ambitious project started by Mitchell and Why Documentaries film-maker Sandra Pires.

Yesterday's Stories aims to collect 200 video stories about the Illawarra and combine them with audio text, newspaper clippings and photos to make a cutting-edge website detailing the history of the area.

Down the line, there are also plans for an interactive smartphone app, "where you can walk through the streets of Wollongong and see the stories around you", Pires said.

Pires is known for making historical documentaries such as Beneath Black Skies, about the coal mining disasters at Bulli and Mt Kembla.

While she admitted she studied no history subjects for any of her university degrees, she has been drawn to the field after seeing the effect that hearing the stories has on people.

"I did Beneath Black Skies, the history of coalmining, and I saw what that did for the audience," Pires said.

"People were like, 'I never knew that. I've lived in Bulli all my life'. These are 60, 70-year-old people and they didn't know about the Bulli disaster or that kind of history.

"I've seen what producing these stories does at a community level and does to people in understanding why we are the way we are. It's so important."

Pires has been getting more and more commissions to make online short stories and that, plus the popularity of the Facebook group Lost Wollongong, which has more than 12,000 members, tells her there is definitely an interest in history.

"We know there's a target audience," she said.

"We need to empower people to tell their stories and to realise that their history is just as important as any historian trying to do history.

"That's also Glenn's philosophy. He wants to see a lot more people interested in history, doing history, being part of history.

"The byline for me is 'yesterday is as important as tomorrow'. I want people to know that it is important and it shapes us, and we understand ourselves through our history."

One of the stories already collected is "a love story about World War II", but which also illustrates the breadth of what "history" can be.

"For instance we just did a love story about a couple who were a couple before the war," Pires said.

"He went away, came back and then married someone else.

"Those marriages fell apart, and when they were 70 they met again and fell in love. They got married again at the age of 78 and now they're 90 and they're still in love."

It's stories like this that Mitchell said they were looking for with the Yesterday's Stories project - stories from "Auntie Mabel and Uncle Ernie". The trick will be getting them to understand that their stories are important too.

"That information from ordinary folk is not captured at the moment," Mitchell said.

"We don't know it, we don't have it and is not in the big histories written by historians. Getting it will allow us to go along the line of building a bigger history house, if you will.

"It's history from below. The idea of history being about kings and queens, that's history from the top down where we only look at the important poobahs.

"We're on about making history from below and getting ordinary people who have never studied history to understand that (a), they have an important story to tell and that we would like to hear it, and (b), that they can make a valuable contribution to the production of history.

And they will be asked to make a contribution in more ways than one. Pires isn't going to be able to make all 200 of the two- to three-minute films, so they're looking for others to get involved and supply their own films.

Also, they're on the hunt for home movies, photos and artefacts and other items from the past - starting with the 1960s and 1970s.

"We want people to start bringing in their films," Pires said.

"We want to see films from the 1960s and 1970s in Wollongong. Anybody's old films, we will convert them from their VHS to proper digital format.

"We will need things from every era, but 1960s was when people started to film with their handycams."

Mitchell said this starting point was chosen because it was a time far enough away to carry some historical significance but also close enough for people to have a living memory of it.

It also helps that the era was "quite dramatic" for Wollongong, said Mitchell, with two separate themes emerging.

"On the one hand we have this Groundhog Day scenario of stability and a feeling of permanency," Mitchell said.

"There was full employment because the steel industry was in full swing, the coalmines were digging up black gold as fast as they could and the harbour was full of ships. Nothing much changed in Wollongong.

"Then suddenly we start seeing massive social change. Surfing was becoming popular and kids are putting lemon juice in their hair to look like surfers and Levi's jeans are all the rage. The Beach Boys play two sold-out shows at the Northern Bowl in Corrimal and discos start popping up."

At the same time, our very identity and perception of who we were as a nation was being transformed, particularly here in the Illawarra, as thousands of migrants from Europe were changing everything - from the food we ate to our local identity. This was a time of radical change for the region."

As well as memories, the project also needs money - Mitchell estimates it's about 20 per cent funded. Pires added that businesses can sponsor the production of any of the stories that are relevant to them.

"If people have got a story, that's great," Mitchell said. "But if they've got a cheque book or a bank account than that would be even better - and then I'll come to them."

But there's a chance some stories might have a hard time attracting a sponsor if Mitchell includes some of the tales from his tour of Wollongong's underbelly.

The Australian Historical Association held its conference in Wollongong last year, and some sort of tour is usually organised.

So Mitchell took the guests on a tour of Wollongong's dark side - visiting murder sites like Splashes Nightclub, Amigo's Restaurant, the Oxford Tavern (where a woman was murdered in the 1950s) and the home of Frank Arkell.

"We could run that quite a lot and we'd get a lot of people," Mitchell admitted.

"I think it's just showing people something which is central to the bigger project, which is that seemingly ordinary places have got extraordinary stories. And Wollongong's got a lot of those, so why shouldn't we tell them?"

To help out with the Yesterday's Stories, people can contact Sandra Pires through whydocumentaries.com.au or Glenn Mitchell at gmichel@uow.edu.au.