CHART is delighted to announce the receipt of a significant grant to digitise an important Timor archival collection.
The Herb Feith Foundation (HFF) grant of $24,400 will be used to begin an extensive digitisation of the Human Rights Office collection of the Australian Council for Overseas Aid (ACFOA, now ACFID). The collection, recording the work of Pat Walsh and associates from 1979-2000, is among the highest-ranking Timor archival collections still in private hands anywhere.
The most recent CHART guide to the collection contents can be found here.
Digitisation for Timor
The ultimate focus of the project is to make the digital copies available for East Timorese access through institutions in Timor Leste. The bulk of the grant will be used to train and pay assistants to conduct the scanning work. CHART hopes to engage, on a part-time basis, East Timorese students in Melbourne to do this work.
Smaller elements of the grant include equipment and software purchases as well as translation of key documents into Tetun and development of a Tetun-language version of the CHART website.
![Herb Feith (second from right) with Jose Ramos-Horta and Australian Timor solidarity activists, c.1984. [Photo: Ian Bell]](https://timorarchives.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/herb-f_ian-bell.jpg?w=450)
Herb Feith (second from right) with Jose Ramos-Horta and Australian Timor solidarity activists, c.1984. [Photo: Ian Bell]
Based at Monash University, the HFF was established in honour of the late Herb Feith (1930-2001). Herb was an internationally-recognised expert on Indonesia and one of very few Australian academics to work for justice for East Timor under Indonesian military occupation. More information on Herb’s life and work can be found here.
The Foundation funds a range of activities. A notable project with Timor parallels is the translation into English of Indonesian-language accounts of mass violence in Indonesia associated with General Suharto’s rise to power in 1965-66.
