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.
___________________________
'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.
