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.

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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.

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National Archives digitised records: A better view

14 June 2009

There’s a great free tool to view and print digitised records in the National Archives of Australia’s (NAA) vast RecordSearch database.

Many Australian government Timor-related records are available through NAA’s ongoing digitising-for-access program and researcher activity is increasing that number. These records are directly viewable online and can be printed from the work or home computer for personal research and reference purposes.

Good as this facility is, there are some practical limitations. You can only print one page at a time and the resulting print-out details the archival item’s barcode only (see image below). I find the latter a puzzling choice by NAA because the barcode is not part of NAA’s recommendations on citation of its records (and curiously, the barcode must be entered in the Keywords rather than Reference number RecordSearch field if you want to find the item again later).

Standard NAA print-out

Standard NAA print-out

A better view

If (and only if) you use the Firefox web browser, you are in for a treat.

Science historian and web developer Tim Sherratt has created a script for Firefox which changes the RecordSearch digital record view entirely. Instead of this:

Standard NAA viewer

Standard NAA viewer

You see this:

Firefox script viewer

Firefox script viewer

This viewer allows you to select a page range to print, including the whole file. Access to Adobe Acrobat or other PDF file creators allows you to ‘print’ the whole file to PDF on your computer for much more efficient off-line viewing.

Script print format

Script print-out

The physical print-out is also an improvement over the NAA original (click thumbnail image at left). In addition to providing the file barcode, it also records the source in a form compliant with NAA’s short citation recommendations (in the example here: NAA: A11443, 3) and indicates the page number in the digital file (both crucial for reference purposes).

Browsing in 3D

Optional: Install the Firefox add-on called CoolIris and you can view a whole file on a virtual wall of pages by clicking on the ‘Browse in 3D’ button. A fascinating experience but I find larger files cause my computer to slow down.

Instructions for installation of the RecordSearch viewer script can be found here. More information on the CoolIris option on Tim Sherratt’s website.

Highly recommended to any researcher frequently accessing National Archives of Australia digital records.

Note: The example shown here is one page of  NAA’s Series A11443, item 3 – which is three copies of the official record of talks in Australia in 1975 between Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and Indonesia’s President Suharto. Portuguese Timor was a significant agenda item. See whole file here; pages 18-24 for the substantive Timor discussion.

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National Archives of Australia: Closed period to shorten

13 June 2009

Researchers of Australian Government records about East Timor should note the recent announcement of a ten-year reduction in the so-called ‘closed period’.

Normally, Federal Government records held by the National Archives of Australia (NAA) are only accessible to the public 30 years after their year of creation.

Subject to legislation passing, from 2011 this closed period will be reduced to 20 years. However, because of the extra work required at NAA to make the records ready for release, the change will be phased in over ten years.

In practical terms, this means that records from 1983, for example  – the first year of the Hawke Labor Government and a very eventful year Timor-wise  –  become available at the beginning of  2012 instead of the expected 2014.

The Timor records of tumultuous 1998 and 1999 will become available in 2020 instead of 2029 & 2030.

So it is still quite a wait, but a welcome development.

Mind you, this change remains subject to a caveat which applies to current records in the open period. They will be kept secret if they violate privacy or have current national security implications.

Sources: Special Minister of State media release; NAA media release.

Afterthought:

Former politicians often lodge personal collections of papers in Australian repositories like the National Library of Australia. These collections typically contain parliamentary or government records to which the standard 30 year closed rule also applies. Will the reduction of the closed period at National Archives also apply to these collections in public repositories? Watch this space.

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Why this Blog?

12 June 2009

Timor Archives blog is an off-shoot of the Australian archival project known as CHART (Clearing House for Archival Records on Timor).

CHART’s main aim is to identify any privately-held Australian collections of documentary material on East Timor (1974-1999) and promote their preservation and access for future generations of Australians and East Timorese. See the Collections, Timorese Archives and CHART sections for more project detail.

Reconstruction of the limited, shamefully out-of-date project website is currently beyond my capacity. For the predictable future, this blog will be the primary window into CHART work.

In addition to the more formal aspects of the CHART project, this blog will feature regular blog posts on any Timor archives issue which I think interesting. Some of these posts will feed into a series of  debateable ‘position papers’ on matters arising from my CHART project work (see Issues section).

All of this will be enriched by your comments or other contributions. See the About section for more on how you might add to the discussion on Timor archives.

Keep an eye on timorfile posts on Twitter for blog update info and other Timor archival miscellany.

Any feedback, suggestions most welcome.

John Waddingham

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