austraLasia 1000
1000 links for a chain of islands and continents
EAST ASIA-OCEANIA: 16th January 2005 -- Yes, that's correct - anywhere in East Asia-Oceania or further abroad. With this number, austraLasia reaches 1000. There would be many readers who have been with us from the beginning, many others however who have joined along the way and may appreciate just this one piece of 'metanews', or news about the news!
austraLasia #1 was despatched on 7th November 1997 to fifty or so initial recipients. The news item concerned the Salesian parish of Tetere, some 35 kms from Honiara in the Solomon Islands. Since that first item, austraLasia has returned to SI from time to time, thanks especially to a couple of very active correspondents there, but has ranged around the area broadly covering what used to be a single Salesian geographical and administrative region taking in the Indian subcontinent, all of Asia, then south to Oceania: Australia, Melanesia (PNG, SI) and Polynesia. The region was restructured into two regions, but many recipients from the Subcontinent asked to remain on the list and continued to send news, and besides, a place like Pakistan was linked with a province in our new EAO region. We did not need a tsunami to realise that we are all inextricably linked together,
The initiative came from a meeting of Social Communications delegates and aficionados held at Batulao, near Manila in October 1997. There the participants were grappling with a hugely disparate region in terms of cultures, languages, distances. How could we develop a sense of unity in an area where the water surface was at least as great if not more than the land surface, where a Salesian community's nearest Salesian neighbours might be a thousand kilometres and two hour's flying time away (Fiji, Mongolia), where we might be totally absorbed amongst the several largest populations of human beings in the world (India, China, Indonesia, for starters..)?
One answer was staring us in the face - email. It only needed the decision to begin and a willingness to work together to make it happen. There was and it did. When the regional structure changed there seemed no need to change the name. By then austraLasia had established itself. If you have Harlow Solid Italic in your font set, you will also see the actual link in the title!
But it grows and grows. I used to say, to the question of how many readers there were, that it was around 500. But an actual count, yesterday, of individual email addresses on the regular list revealed nearly 900. And these days there is little need to go looking for news; it arrives from a scatter of correspondents all around the region. Some are regular, others occasional, but their number, as with the number of readers, is growing.
austraLasia is rather more than news however. It has been a source of support at times for confreres in very difficult situations - one thinks of the Timor crisis not so many years back and the recent Tsunami tragedy, both of which events involved significant numbers of Salesian confreres, friends, co-workers, both within and beyond the area of immediate difficulty. austraLasia has functioned as a connector for such as these, occasionally succeeding even in finding someone thought to be lost, to the overwhelming relief of the seeker. In more normal times it has been a meeting point especially for confreres or Salesian Family members wanting to know where someone is working or what he or she is doing. And if we can oblige in those requests, we do.
austraLasia feeds news from the region to ANS, ad intra, and then ad extra to other Catholic outlets in the world. In a very real sense it operates as a regional level office for ANS, a model that appears to be growing. India, at the level of the South Asia Conference, has BIS. North America, Boscolink, Greater Britain - to coin an area which takes in more than just GBR province, Rualink. And at a meeting today I noted that there is now DonBoscoNews linking members of CNOS or the National Centre for Salesian Works in Italy.
You can help for the next thousand editions, by (1) sending in an item of news from time to time - no need to write it up to perfection; even notes are acceptable (2) advising of a change of email address - after some five returns, an address is removed (3) inviting other members of the Salesian Family to receive a copy, and if necessary sending along their address.
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'austraLasia' is an email service for the Salesian Family of Asia-Pacific. It functions also as an agency for ANS, based in Rome. Try also www.bosconet.aust.com and Lexisdb If you would like a copy of the Salesian Thesaurus, do not hesitate to ask by return mail. In hard copy 132 pages; in digital form 157 kb.
