[2] Her father was a Methodist minister, whose pastoral work led to the family moving around country New South Wales during de Berg's childhood, living in Cessnock,[3] Cobar,[3] Orange[4] and Kempsey.

At a meeting in October 1958 of the Book Collectors' Society of Australia at the Public Library of New South Wales, de Berg played some of her recordings, of Dame Mary Gilmore, Frank Dalby Davison and others addressing their personal messages to the blind.

"[1]De Berg had no special connections in Australian literature apart from being a distant cousin of poet David Campbell,[7] though in a 1956 ABC radio feature My Friend Keats for the 'Poets Corner' program, she relates how, from childhood, she enjoyed the poet whose On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, and his I Had a Dove and the Sweet Dove Died were dear to her.

[16] She also photographed each of her interviewees,[17] funding that, travel to capital cities, and the recording out of her own pocket,[18][19] until in 1960 she was granted £100 from the Commonwealth Literary Fund after presenting her work at the Adelaide Festival,[15][14] and for donating the tapes to the National Library of Australia was provided a further Commonwealth Literary Grant by Sir Harold White, the Federal Parliamentary Librarian and National Librarian.

[21] The 1963 annual National Library report to Parliament notes that "Further recordings have also been made by Mrs. Hazel de Berg, this time of Australian artists discussing their work.

[24] Among them John Bell speaks of a desire to found a permanent Shakespearean company; Colleen McCullough is interviewed just as her bestselling novel The Thorn Birds was published and reveals how scientific training develops a "first class brain and absolutely phenomenal memory;" David Williamson tells how his interest in language as an instrument of power informed the construction of his protagonists' relationships; Howard Florey was recorded the year before his death and explains how his work was driven by curiosity, not as a mission to save humankind; and Barry Humphries discusses how theatre became his favoured means of self-expression over painting in his university years.

[28]When publisher Angus & Robertson launched six books of poetry together at a spring event in 1961, they included De Berg as an invitee among critics Leonie Kramer and Nancy Keesing, academics Cecil Hadgraft and Eunice Hanger, journalist Ross Campbell and poets Ronald McCuaig, Elizabeth Riddell, A. D. Hope, R. D. Fitzgerald, Douglas Stewart, Kenneth Slessor, John Thompson, Vivian Smith and Charles Higham.

[24]David Foster, in his book Self Portraits based on the recordings and released through the Library's distributor, Allen & Unwin, in June 1991,[31] notes that in 1970 bibliographer and librarian Pauline Fanning, in her commentary on the collection, remarked that de Berg was not herself a scholar of literature so "is not sufficiently well informed to know what questions to ask, and furthermore, she has so edited the tapes as to eliminate the questions she asks.

[2] During the last months of her life, her daughter Diana Ritch assisted with the recordings before de Berg died at home in Sydney on 3 February 1984.

[41][42] De Berg's collection of sound tape reels of interviews with writers, historians, artists, musicians and scientists such as Peter Sculthorpe, A. P. Elkin, Manning Clark, H. C. Coombs, Howard Florey, Jack Lang and Cardinal Norman Gilroy,[26] is held by the National Library of Australia[43] whose pioneering role as Australia's main collector and preserver of oral history (with more than 44,000 recordings by 1990) was initiated by de Berg's early efforts and Harold White's interest in the medium, and was a project that State Libraries have since followed.

[10] Though men outnumber women in de Berg's recordings, ANU academic Barry York notes that it is a distinction of de Berg's collection that her subjects include so many Australian women,[44] among them being Barbara Blackman who also recorded interviews, with artists in her case, Anne Summers, Bronwyn Yeates, Cheryl Adamson, Clair Isbister, Dulcie Deamer, Dulcie Holland, Elizabeth Durack, Elizabeth Guy, Elizabeth Harrower, Elizabeth Riddell, Enid Conley, Essie Coffey, Esther Paterson, Gwen Harwood, H. F. Brinsmead, Heather George, Helen Garner, May Gibbs, Hilda Abbott, Irene Greenwood, Jean Skuse, Jessie Scotford, Jessie Street, Jill Hellyer, Dorothea Mackellar,[45] Joan Phipson, Judy Cassab, Kath Walker, Kathleen O'Connor, Kylie Tennant, Lorna Hayter, Maie Casey, Margaret Curtis-Otter, Marjorie Pizer, Miriam Hyde, Nancy Cato, Nancy Keesing, Nancy Robinson, Nerida Goodman, Ninette Dutton, Patsy Adam-Smith, Ruby Rich, Stroma Buttrose, Thelma Bate, Thelma Clune, Vicki Viidikas, and Vida Lahey.

In 1989 a directory of her work, The Hazel de Berg Recordings: From the Oral History Collection of the National Library of Australia, was published.

[46] In reviewing it, Barry York called it a "unique and invaluable oral history source" for "Australian researchers, librarians, broadcasters, teachers, students and writers.