‘East Timor Calling’ – Digitisation project

2 November 2009

Volunteers are currently digitising up to 200 episodes of an Australian radio program about East Timor, broadcast in Melbourne during the early years of the Indonesian military occupation.

From 1977-1980 the Media Group of Melbourne’s venerable Australia East Timor Association produced East Timor Calling on community radio station 3CR. The weekly program combined resistance radio messages and other news from inside Timor, commentary on mainstream Australian media reports and exclusive interviews with key individuals like Jim Dunn, Jill Jolliffe, Helen Hill, Denis Freney, Bill Roberts and Chris Santos – all interspersed with Timorese and other music.

Rod Harris and Guat Kin Chew are painstakingly converting their audio-cassette recordings of the program to digital format for long-term preservation. Both were key members of the original East Timor Calling production team.

Digitisation of the tapes will ensure the survival of this record of Australian activist efforts to inform and keep the Timor issue alive during very difficult times. It’s not yet decided where the digital versions will be deposited, but options include offering them to interested East Timorese archival repositories.

Program samples

You can hear a few selections of segments from East Timor Calling on the player below (click ‘Play’ symbol).

The selections begin with a sample of the program’s signature beginning and ending (taken from the inaugural program in January 1977). Later segments include Denis Freney interview on Fretilin resistance (1977), a report on Fretilin’s arrest of Xavier do Amaral (1977),  Mari Alkatiri’s statement on negotiations (1978),  interviews with Brian Manning and Rob Wesley-Smith on Alarico Fernandes’ capture/surrender (1979).

[soundcloud url=”http://soundcloud.com/timorarchives/east-timor-calling-compilation1″]

Note: Hover mouse pointer over figures in blue band to locate individual segments. Original sound file is large so may take some time to load on slow connections. Once file is fully downloaded, you can click to play any segment rather than listening to whole file from start to finish.

Leave a Comment » | Australian collections | Permalink
Posted by timorarchives

International Timor Solidarity Exhibition in Dili

7 September 2009

dili_exhibition

A small but instructive and eye-catching selection of materials from the archives of Timor solidarity groups worldwide was recently exhibited in Dili.

Titled Solidarity through the years, 1974-1999, the exhibition was organised by Klibur Solidaridade, a collective of young Timorese groups and international activists. The exhibition, designed to strenghten existing ties and encourage new contacts between Timorese and internationals, coincided with a 3-day activists conference and other activities as part of a larger national celebration of the tenth anniversary of the 1999 independence ballot.

Australian materials
Materials came from all parts of the world with Australian materials featuring prominently – especially covering the first ten years of the occupation. Cecily Gilbert and I carried from Australia representative items from the collections of Friends of East Timor in Perth, Denis Freney’s Campaign for an Independent East Timor roneos of resistance radio messages and the East Timor News periodical, posters, publications and leaflets from Melbourne’s Timor Information Service, the Australia East Timor Association and the Australian Council for Overseas Aid Human Rights office run by Pat Walsh. It was a treat to experience young East Timorese seeing these materials for the first time and having the opportunity to explain the background to some of the items.

Memorial to martyrs of 1999

Memorial to martyrs of 1999

The exhibition was held at the Fundasaun Oriente, the former home of the recently deceased Manuel Carrascalao and site of a militia massacre in April 1999. A well on the site has been transformed into a poignant memorial to the victims of militia/TNI violence.

The Timorese Resistance Archive and Museum has reportedly expressed interest in some exhibition materials for future display. Australian items we carried to Timor will be held by the Reception, Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CAVR) archive.

Some background to the exhibition can be found here.

A random sample of our images from the exhibition launch can be found here.

Leave a Comment » | Australian collections, International collections | Permalink
Posted by timorarchives

Balibo papers at National Archives

5 August 2009

The August newsletter from National Archives of Australia draws attention to NAA’s  holdings of Australian Government records concerning the Balibo Five.

The newsletter provides links to a ‘Fact Sheet’ on the issue (brief background and selected links to some online records) and advice on how to find other Balibo records in NAA’s vast RecordSearch database.

Woolcott & Yoga Sugama

Woolcott & Yoga Sugama

A link is also given to a 614-page file of newsclippings and internal Jakarta Embassy correspondence covering the October-December 1975 period. The correspondence provides an insight into the games being played by senior Indonesian officials as the Australian embassy sought information on the journalists’ fate. Click image at left for sample. Both Indonesian and Australian sides in the correspondence are notable for almost complete silence on direct Indonesian military involvement at Balibo.

An interesting selection from NAA’s broader Timor collection can be found on Clinton Fernandes’ Timor history website (see sample links here). Dr Fernandes was consulting historian for the Balibo film.

1 Comment | Australian collections | Permalink
Posted by timorarchives

Solidarity archives: Canada’s example

22 June 2009

The archives of Canada’s East Timor Alert Network (ETAN) have been deposited for public access at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.

ETAN Canada campaigned from 1986 for a shift in Canadian foreign policy to support human rights and self-determination for East Timor. David Webster, now at the University of San Francisco, organised the papers and made the box list available here.

Perhaps ETAN Canada’s listing will encourage other similar organisations to get their papers into order as well.

Australian solidarity collections

Some surviving records of Australian solidarity group work are already available for study (with more to come!).

Friends of East Timor (FOET WA) members sorting files, Perth, 2005.

Friends of East Timor (FOET WA) members sorting files, Perth, 2005.

The papers of the legendary Denis Freney (National Library of Australia) contain records of the original Campaign for an Independent East Timor (CIET) in Sydney. Andrew McNaughtan’s papers at the Mitchell Library include material from Sydney’s newer Australia East Timor Association (AETA). Early fragments of (the original) AETA in Victoria can be found in the papers of Community Aid Abroad (at University of Melbourne Archives). Bill Tully’s papers at the Noel Butlin Archives in Canberra includes records of CIET and AETA activities there.

I have worked with AETA Victoria and Friends of East Timor (FOET WA) on their collections, but in each case there’s still much work to be done. I know of similar collections in Hobart, Adelaide and Darwin but have no recent knowledge of progress on preserving them.

Let me know if you are aware of other collections elsewhere.

Timorese access

A key question remains. How do we achieve Timorese access to materials like this in Timor-Leste itself? More from me on this issue in coming weeks.

Leave a Comment » | Australian collections, International collections | Permalink
Posted by timorarchives

Andrew McNaughtan papers: Guide now public

15 June 2009

The CHART-produced guide to the Timor papers of the late Dr Andrew McNaughtan – hitherto only available in printed form at the Mitchell Library in Sydney – is now available online here.

In 2006 Cecily Gilbert and I examined and listed Andrew McNaughtan’s papers. This work was done, with some assistance from members of Sydney’s Australia East Timor Association, at the invitation of Andrew’s executors who had been holding the papers since his unexpected early death in December 2003.

The executors lodged the papers at the Mitchell Library for public access and our listing became the principal finding aid for researchers using the collection there. The executors have since agreed to allow us to make the listing more accessible to researchers unable to view it in person at the Mitchell.

Prepared under tight time restrictions, the physical arrangement and listing of the materials has some shortcomings. We are currently preparing a new guide which will have a more thematic or subject approach to the collection contents – bringing together some of the major elements of Andrew’s Timor papers covering his work on photographic exhibitions, Timor oil, Balibo, Timor Aid, AETA and other solidarity organisations.

This guide joins those of  ‘accidental activist’ David Scott and former Labor senator Gordon McIntosh in our first installment of CHART listings in the Collections section of this blog. More to come.

2 Comments | Access, Australian collections | Permalink
Posted by timorarchives

Next Entries »