Timor Archives

The CHART Project has established a new website to view copies of 1974-1999 East Timor newsletters.

Newsletters produced internationally by solidarity activists and non-government organisations, along with the Timorese external resistance and broader Timorese diaspora, were a key means of circulating information about East Timor. They were especially important and influential in the pre-internet days of the 1970s and 1980s.

Digitising for access

Timor Archives: Newsletters is designed as an interim access point for newsletters digitised in a larger scanning project by CHART.

The new website now holds a full set of Timor Information Service (TIS), 1975-1983. This word-searchable digital set of TIS supersedes the newsletter samples described on this Blog in June.

More to come

We hope to include as many newsletters as possible on the website – subject to the availability of original print copies and agreement from the original creators.

Newsletters currently in the scanning pipeline include the Denis Freney / ETNA  East Timor News newspaper, the Pat Walsh / ACFOA East Timor Report and Timor Link from the (British) Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR, now known as Progressio, has an active presence in Timor Leste today).

Still early days, but more to come.

If your organisation would like to include its newsletter in this collection, please email us: blog [at] timorarchives.info

Helen Hill’s influential 1976 booklet, The Timor Story, is now available online.

The Timor Story was written during the last months of 1975 and finalised and printed in the desperately tragic weeks after the December 1975 Indonesian invasion. It rapidly became the principal backgrounder and educational tool for the first generation of Timor activists in Australia and overseas.

The initial print run of one or two thousand was soon exhausted, leading to a cheaper format reprint of 5,000 copies.

Distribution and sales of the booklet were handled by the nominal publisher, Timor Information Service (TIS), which also funded the large April 1976 reprint.

While priced at a little above cost, the modest profits from sales allowed TIS to circulate copies internationally and build stock of other distributable Timor literature. This stock of resources was later handed over to Melbourne’s Australia-East Timor Association which, through John Sinnott, developed a highly effective Timor literature sales and distribution regime which continues to this day.

From memory, I  don’t think Helen was ever paid much, if any, royalty for this work. In a much more important way, however, the early activist networks owed much to Helen for her effort in writing this valuable booklet.

Note on digital copy

Scanning The Timor Story is part of pilot work by CHART to digitise a broader selection of important materials for online access.

The item scanned is from the first print run of The Timor Story. To keep file size down, the scan was done as black & white – so eliminating the original coloured cover shown above and reducing the quality of half-tone images.

This scan also includes a rough, uncorrected conversion of the page images to readable text, making at least some of the text searchable and accessible to ‘cut & paste’.

Your feedback on scan type and quality will be much appreciated.

TIS special issue, February 1980

The newsletter of the Timor Information Service, Melbourne, is going online for long term international access.

Click here to access issues digitised to date. More to come.

TIS (as it was known) was one of the first formal newsletters in English serving the information needs of the Australian and international East Timor solidarity movement. Issue #1 was published 11 November 1975. The last issue (#40) was issued in March 1983.

Origins

TIS arose from informal gatherings of Melbourne activists connected to church and aid organisations. Created initially for educational use in Melbourne, TIS aimed to present a regular, credible account of the rapidly evolving situation inside Timor. While often drawing on the valuable and voluminous output of Sydney’s Campaign for Independent East Timor / Denis Freney, the TIS style was generally less polemical.

The first issues were put together by me (John Waddingham), Fr Maurie Heading from the Jesuits’ Asian Bureau Australia and Mary Considine from the joint Catholic-Protestant churches’ development education organisation Action for World Development (AWD). The name ‘Timor Information Service’ was suggested by Ian Bell who, with other Community Aid Abroad and International Development Action activists like Christine Carolan, also contributed to a $20 per week ‘stipend’ to allow me to work full time on developing the TIS.

TIS initially operated from spare office space at the Victorian Council of Churches in central Melbourne and from 1976 in a small attic rented from AWD when it re-located to inner-city Fitzroy. I continued to be the core (unpaid) TIS worker, aided by my partner Cecily Gilbert and a myriad of other volunteers who came and went over the years. TIS formally ceased to exist at the end of 1984.

Digitisation: Your comments sought

Scanning all issues of the TIS newsletter is a pilot project of a larger digitisation program planned by CHART. A random set of ten issues is available now. The remainder will be added in the next few weeks.

The scanning method chosen for this pilot is to scan the pages as images only. This means the text is not accessible for searching or cutting/pasting.  Your comments on these scans will be appreciated – especially on readability and the scan-as-image format.