Dear friends and colleagues, There have been some requests for the process and journey taken by us down-under to have the Archives become part of the National Library of Australia collection and therefore accessible to others. Katrin wrote this piece for the December issue of Pacific Waves - our regular publication. We thought we would share with you.

ICA Archives have been accepted by the National Library of Australia, Canberra. "To see these treasures is to better understand history." (Margaret Dent, Curator, Treasures from the World's Great Libraries) Our newspapers over the last weeks alerted us to a coming exhibition at the National Library of Australia in Canberra Treasures from the World's Great Libraries. While the final touches to this exhibition were completed, the exhibition will open in Canberra on December 7 and remain open until February 24, our ICA Archives, located at the Firkins Garage Cottage, were inspected by the Assistant Director of Manuscripts, Margy Burge. She visited the Firkins in September and received a background briefing about the history of EI/ICA and shown the archives by Joan Firkins and Katrin Ogilvy.

From the beginning of her visit she showed great interest, especially in journals, letters, and descriptions of daily life, but also in the method manuals and rituals of our work and especially our work with Australian Aborigines. After an hour or so of talking and inspecting the record examples from documents of Religious Studies I (RSI) and Fifth City to copies of Pacific Waves which we had prepared for her, Margy asked to be allowed to look herself at the contents of twelve filing cabinets and as many boxes in the cottage on the Firkins estate. After another hour or so Margy expressed the wish to bring the collection to Canberra.

Our written history, our hard-won expressions of over thirty years of bringing about a new depth understanding of our being in the world in the latter half of the 20th Century and about our efforts of enabling social justice in many places around the globe will be incorporated in our Nation's "treasures" and through the work of our most experienced librarians be stored safely and be made available to a wider public, to students, researchers and any other interested persons.

As I write this article for the Christmas edition of Pacific Waves, I think of all our colleagues who wrote these archives. All the drafts and redrafts, all the conversations and discussions, the meetings and consensus, and the solitary brooding that went on before one of us could get up in front of a seminar group, in front of an International Training Institute or an Academy, or utter a prayer or a witness in a Daily Office, or sing a song anywhere. I think of all those heated exchanges for a right word, a descriptive phrase, another missing paragraph, a point; all the astonished participants of a short course, a lecture, a spirit conversation, and the often shocked responses and accusations that we were spouting jargons. I think of the journals we wrote that enabled us to care for the world, the brochures to inform about the local church work, the LENS, the Community Meetings, and the Human Development projects, the letters we sent to each other and the letters we wrote and received from governments and departments. I think of the telephone lists and the in-kind donor cards, the budgets and balance sheets, the charts, grids, triangles and rituals which undergirded our endeavours.

The archives came to Adelaide in an array of greengrocer boxes in 1989 after the close of the Sydney House. They were housed in Frank Bremners garage first and after some discussions at our retreats and annual and board meetings they were brought to Mt Osmond and housed in the Firkins Cottage. Now they are going to be packed by the Adelaide Archive Team into the archive boxes provided by the National Library, to be freighted to Canberra.

These papers, books and photos, slides and films are a small and somewhat grubby remnant of a vast sea of written materials. I try to envisage what they will look like when Carmel Larry, who visited Mt Osmond in October and who with her team will do the actual work in Canberra, and her colleagues have worked on them. Will they be in folders, in boxes, on shelves, in books, in cabinets, on the ground floor of the library or under the roof? Here I think of the different ways of storing which we developed when we worked with those papers. Donna McCleskey (LiDona Wagner) had a rope-woven square bag the size of foolscap folders and about 15 cm across, her files always in immaculate condition. She was seldom without this bag. Many of us had banana boxes into which the foolscap as well as the A4 folders fitted, others had satchels of all kinds, but we also carried cloth bags. Colleagues with greater confidence and better memory had a folded piece of paper with their notes in their backpockets or a small purse. What excitement when a new paper, a new book, a new way of holding an image was discovered and handed on and duplicated and worked upon around the world. What distress when a copy of a particular lecture, paper or manual could not be found. What dark thoughts and accusations when something was mislaid or somebody took somebody else's document. How we were glad and satisfied when we were near a decent typewriter, a spirit duplicator, a Gestetner, a photocopier, or even just found our favourite pen or biro. I typed for the first time on a IBM golfball electric typewriter borrowed every night from the Rehabilitation Hospital in Jakarta for the Consult at Kelapa Dua 26km away. How some of us typed, typed, and re-typed. How we saw the sentences, the paragraphs, the papers made visible, made complete under our very own fingers. How we wrestled with the English language, the American English, the Australian and any other English and many other languages. How we translated, copied, stapled and bound.

Our remnant which goes to Canberra is made up of many, many bits and pieces. Over the last five years the Archive Team received contributions of material from many of you. Thank you! Other have promised to send more now. Once the collection has been ordered and catalogued and listed on the net, there is still always the opportunity to add to it.

Our thanks go to the known and unknown writers, typists and printers, but especially to our bower-bird collectors among our colleagues and to our 'storers', Frank Bremner and Joan and Michael Firkins, and last but not least to the Archive Team in Adelaide and their Diaspora members who sorted, stacked, labeled and filed. They all made it possible that this record of a people with a mission will be among the treasures in a Great Library of the World.

Katrin Ogilvy 26 November 2001

-- LenHockley - 06 Jun 2006