IFRC Headquarters, 2019.

As Honours student Anna Wilkinson boarded her flight from Geneva to Adelaide on Friday 14 February 2020, Resilient Humanitarianism team members at Flinders University were busy planning their own trips to the archives of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). Airline tickets had been booked, itineraries were being finalised, and arrangements had been made with Grant Mitchell (Manager, Library and Archive Services at the IFRC) to access valuable documents relating to the history of the League of Red Cross Societies.

2020 looked to be a busy and exciting year, with team members organising a symposium at the Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po (Paris, France) in June, plans underway to visit national societies in Cuba, Canada, Germany, England and France, and trips organised to archives and libraries across the USA, Australia, Europe and the UK. Professor Neville Wylie and Dr Rosemary Cresswell, based in the UK, planned to meet up with Australian researchers Professor Melanie Oppenheimer and Dr Romain Fathi in Paris, while Professor Susanne Schech was looking forward to speaking at a number of international conferences.

Instead, we received the news only two weeks after Anna’s homecoming of Australia’s first death from Covid-19 and by 20 March, Australian borders were closed to all non-residents. Travel plans were put on hold as outgoing travel was also banned and state borders within Australia closed.

Anna had returned just in time.

The American Red Cross Magazine, October 1920. Artwork by F. Luis Mora.

With the news that overseas travel is off the cards for the foreseeable future, Australian researchers in the Resilient Humanitarianism Project have had to rely on digital archive and library collections, and on the goodwill of the many librarians and archivists who have photographed, scanned and uploaded documents for our use. Where would we be without their wonderful assistance?

Thanks to Grant Mitchell and Mélanie Blondin at the IFRC we have been able to access important bulletins, reports, circulars, and letters needed for our research. Plans are underway to digitise a selection of IFRC archival files, with Project travel funds being redirected to cover the cost of digitisation by Arkhênum.

The pandemic has also seen colleagues from around the world reaching out to help each other. Melanie Oppenheimer could not believe her luck when Marian Moser Jones, from the University of Maryland School of Public Health, who she met at the Red Cross history conference in Geneva in June 2019, recently contacted her and provided vital digital documents concerning Alice Fitzpatrick, the League of Red Cross Societies’ first Director of Nursing.

 

We have sourced digital documents from the following libraries and archives:

League of Red Cross Societies, Information Circular, 1923.

With the assistance of colleagues, we were also able to access materials from:

The Resilient Humanitarian team wish to thank all of the librarians and archivists around the world who have helped us to locate materials during this period of isolation, along with colleagues who have so generously shared items from their own collections, and digital copies of their own work.