Doctoral candidate Jordan Evans reflects on the difficulties he has faced over the past year.

To immerse oneself in the archive is one of the true privileges of historical study, but like many things, archival research has been complicated by COVID-19. My thesis seeks to investigate the role of the League of Red Cross Societies in blood transfusion during the post-war period in post-colonial states. This thesis relies heavily on archival documents stored in the IFRC archives in Geneva. The original plan was to travel to Geneva myself, but this became impossible as the Australian government closed the borders in early 2020, and COVID-19 case numbers increased in Europe.

During 2020, I liaised with IFRC archivists Grant Mitchell and Mélanie Blondin, creating a catalogue of over one hundred files to be examined. However, COVID frustrated the plans for this research and sent Geneva into lock-down several times. The solution was to work with a research assistant, Yassine Halila, an International History MA candidate at the Graduate Institute of Geneva, who was finally able to enter the archives in June 2021 and take photos of the extensive catalogue of documents on my behalf. The documents were then uploaded by Yassine in Genva, saved to a cloud service, and I began working through them from my office in Adelaide.

So far as I am aware, the documents I received have never been used within a research project until now. The aim is to use these documents to trace the untold story of the League’s blood transfusion service. Documents include transcripts and minutes of meetings where critical decisions were discussed, correspondence between national societies concerning the gift of blood, receipts for the donation of resources, financial reports of various blood transfusion services, the transcripts of seminars, and numerous items expressing the wishes and needs of national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies amidst Cold War drama and the technological development of blood transfusion technology.

Report on the 15th Seminar of the Yugoslav Red Cross for training of cadres in developing countries by Ebou G. Sarr, 1983.

Accessing the IFRC archives during a global pandemic has proved challenging. However, it has also provided some surprising outcomes. The difficulties of distance meant that I was never totally confident with which documents I would receive. A box with a specific title that I had included under the assumption that its contents might be helpful could be completely irrelevant, in a different language, or outside of the time-period I am examining. On the other hand, the box could also be full of fascinating documents from the archive that expanded the scope and detail of the thesis or informed my research. Discovering items such as a song about blood transfusion written by the Empress of Japan or the transcript of a particular seminar that I had believed missing, while also failing to find particular documents that I was searching for encapsulates the highs and lows of historical research. To my surprise, working from a distance with photographed documents has also allowed my note-taking to proceed faster than it would have done from inside the archives.

Overall, the pandemic has proved difficult, but with support from the IFRC archivists and the Resilient Humanitarianism team, my journey to the archive from afar proved fruitful and full of historical discoveries.