some of the baha'i history of wa

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    Historians in the future will find in this emerging world Order of

    Bahaullah, especially in the last six decades, since the beginning of the

    Kingdom of God on earth in 1953(1) and the beginning of that ninth stage

    of history as the Guardian called the Ten Year Crusade, a rich archival

    base among the many local and regional Baha'i institutions in WesternAustralia. There are now thousands of archives emerging in local and

    regional Bahai communities around the world. The archives in WA are

    but a microcosm of this enormous field of paper and now electronic data.

    These archives " offer our knowledge an extra bonus, says Arlette Farge

    in her book Fragile Lives(2). They are not so much the truth as the

    beginnings of the truth and, she goes on, they possess an eruption of

    meanings with the greatest possible number of connections with reality.

    For most of the Bahai community at the local level, archives are just somuch paper in old boxes. Sometimes, rarely, there exists an individual or

    a local Baha'i community with an obsessive tendency to admit too much

    meaning to archives. Usually local Baha'is regard most of the archival

    material as irrelevant circularized correspondence, dusty old minutes and

    letters that could easily be discarded without any loss. But the rare gem

    and, for assiduous research students, useful resources are often found

    amidst such irrelevant material. The historian must learn to see the forrest

    amidst the individual trees and detect old growth forests worth preserving

    from new shoots and useless undergrowth that contributes little to the

    history. History and its documents tell the story of so many different

    lives: impoverished and tragic, rich and joyful, mean and lackluster

    personalities, saints and heros. There is also a certain grandeur, humour,

    absurdity and irony to be found in the fine detail. Archives are both

    seductress and deceptive mirror of reality. They can falsify and distort the

    object being studied; they can be too facile or too ambiguous a means of

    entering into a discourse with history. They can tell very little of the real

    events of Bahai community life. They can often be just a pile of dry

    bones transferred from one graveyard to another.

    There have been many Bah's who have been travel teachers to the north,

    east and south of Perth in Western Australia in the half century from 1958

    to 2008. They have helped at shows, talked at public meetings, visited

    Bah' friends, driven long distances and taught the Cause, whereever

    possible, en route. The fifty-year history, 1958-2008, will not describe the

    experience of all the travel teachers to the NT. Many deserve a mention,

    but I will say a few words here about Helen Gordon. I include only a brief

    reference to Helen and her husband Don; any detailed account of their

    activity since 1975, over 30 years, in and around the outback: north, eastand south of Perth in WA would be a story unto itself. It is a story that

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    goes back to 1975 in Derby, continues to Narrogin in 1997 and then to

    Tom Price. It can be read in much more detail in back issues of Bush

    Honey, a magazine of the Outback Project of which Helen is now the

    editor. This story of Helen and Don includes the Kimberley and many

    country towns in Western Australia.

    Occasionally they drove to Darwin from Kununurra in the 1970s to help

    with events organized by the Darwin LSA. They also travelled to

    Melville Island to visit Jackie Aipierspack, a Baha'i on that remote island

    in the NT. I give a special mention to Helen because of all those travel

    teachers in those fifty years, most did not stay in the region. Helen and

    Don have worked from Derby to Narrogin, to Kununurra for over thirty

    years in places with few to no Bah's. They have worked in Aboriginal

    and non-Aboriginal communities. They deserve a place in the history ofthis region, as representatives, models, of the travel teacher, a critical

    component in the success of the global teaching campaign we have all

    been part of since the Plans began here in Australia in 1947. For more

    details of Helen's experience and those of others in the last decade see the

    journal Bush Honey in its first 24 issues.

    Nearly thirty years ago, in 1982, I began to collect information, notes on

    the history of the Bah' Faith in the Northern Territory and outback WA.

    I continued this activity for the years I lived in the NT, 1982 to 1986, the

    years I lived in the northern part of WA, in South Hedland, 1986 to 1987

    and in Perth from 1987 to 1999. Over the next nine years I tried to

    discontinue the exercise, but something kept bringing me back to this

    narrative account. In 2000 I began to write instalments of this history for

    the Northern Lights, a Bah' monthly newsletter for the Bah' Council

    for the Northern Territory. By the end of 2002 I had written over thirty

    instalments of some two hundred to four hundred words each, some ten

    thousand words. This was far more than I had originally planned. It was

    obvious by the early months of 2003 that I had written all that I could

    write on the first fifty years of Bah' history in the NT: 1947 to 1997 andthe first fifty years of Baha'i experience in outback WA: 1958 to 2008.

    Since I had no plans to continue this history in another form and since I

    had other writing projects that were claiming my attention, I sent all my

    notes to the Bah' Council of the NT c/-Mrs. Debra Bisa, the secretary

    back in 2002. Debra has since then been the editor of Bush Honey until

    very recently; her files are full of archival resources for up-and-coming

    students of the history of the outback in WA. I felt that, if I no longer

    had any of the resources relating to that history, I would not be tempted todelve into its labyrinth again and the several hundred pages of material I

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    had gathered could be used by other people investigating that history in

    the years to come.

    I sent Debra and the Baha'i Council a booklet of poetry and in the

    introduction to that booklet I pointed out that I had begun writing poetryabout the same time as I began writing the history of these regions, in

    1982. It was to this poetry that my writing interests had become centred.

    I also said that I had turned my attention to the internet which seemed to

    be a much more fertile ground for the teaching work. I was amazed at the

    progress of the Cause in those twenty years that I had been gathering

    historical data and at how much of a foundation of historical material I

    had been able to gather for future historians of the Cause.

    As Moojan Momen informs us, "it is unfortunately true that the Bah'shave been lamentably neglectful in gathering materials for the history of

    their religion, and many of those who could have provided the most

    detailed knowledge of important episodes have died without recording

    their memoirs." "Much of what has been written in the way of historical

    accounts," he goes on, "was recorded many years after the events took

    place." This pattern, for the most part, has continued into the first fifty

    years of this history and, indeed, much of the history of Baha'i

    communities all around the world.

    Most of what I have written about the years 1958 to 2008 was written

    years after the events, from a distance, from second and third-hand

    accounts, although I have often drawn on anecdotes and letters written by

    those who actually were there, on the spot so to speak, even if it was

    many years earlier in that writer's life or the life of the person providing

    the anecdote. Looked at another way, an attempt to write the history of

    the first fifty years of Bah' Faith in outback WA took place in the last

    twenty-five years, 1983-2008, of that fifty year period and especially in

    Baha'i newsletters like those of the regional councils and in Bush Honey.

    Finally, with respect to Momen's general comments on the writing of

    Bah' history in the heroic period, 1844-1921, he notes that those who

    recorded events were often "unable to understand fully the significance of

    the events that they recorded." That problem we still have with us. This

    inability to see significance or, more accurately, the inability to write

    down the story for what reasons, may be a reality of history for anyone at

    any time in the long centuries and millennia back to the beginnings of the

    emergence of written history from oral, in the west with Herodotus and

    Thucydides in the 5th century BC and among a number of Old Testamentwriters in the 7th and 8th centuries B.C.

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    Perhaps, as Shoghi Effendi pointed out to us on several occasions in his

    letters, we stand too close to the edifice we are building to appreciate the

    significance of the overall project in which we are engaged. Many of the

    apparently small dramas we participate in during our work for the Faith

    remain just that: small dramas. In many ways this is quite understandablefor life must go on amidst a sea of the quotidian and the trivial. A start

    has been made, though, to the writing of this history and future historians

    will, I hope, find the resources I gathered of some use.

    With the archives of the Bah' Councils of the NT and of WA and their

    predecessors the RTCs(BROs), the archives of the LSAs, the Groups and

    the isolated believers in the NT and in outback WA, there will be material

    for more than a rough sketch of the history of the Cause during the years

    1958 to 2008. As I presented my booklet of poetry to the RegionalCouncil of the NT in 2002, as a going-away present, so to speak, I bowed

    out of history writing in these vast regions.

    I was thirty-eight when I put the first piece of paper in a file on this

    history and now I am sixty-three, a quarter century of time. I had no idea

    when I began this project how much it would consume me, and consume

    me it did for many years. But I tired of it, for various reasons in the

    1990s. I tired of many things in the 1990s during my fifties, but I also

    gained a new lease on life. Part of this lease on life was found in a turn to

    poetry and to writing on the internet which was just then emerging as a

    fertile field for Baha'is all around the world. I will soon be on an old-age

    pension and I have been able to devote more time to what I am finding to

    be a very enriching teaching activity of internet writing. Poetry, prose-

    poetry in my case, allows me to write history as well as material from

    many other disciplines, to post it on the internet and interact with literally

    thousands in varying degrees of intimacy from meaningful to

    meaningless.

    This history is a trace of my life, a trace of my time in the NT andnorthern WA when the call in Australia to go north of Capricorn was

    raised throughout the country in 1982. With this trace I have also

    recounted traces of the experience and contribution of other Baha'is. I

    will include some of those experiences in Part 2 of this account in the nest

    posting.

    It is difficult to grasp the nature and the meaning of these earliest years of

    the Cause in the NT and outback WA. The implications of what occurred,

    the significance of the historical transformation that resulted both withinthe Cause and in the wider secular society of which it is and was a part---

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    in the years 1958 to 2008--is difficult to appreciate although easy to

    document as it has been done in many forms in the print and electronic

    media. They were turbulent years for so many of the believers in those

    years as they were for mankind. As that first half century closed in the

    last decade, 1998-2008, a "series of soul-stirring events" that celebratedthe completion of the Terraces on Mount Carmel opened before us all

    both a "revolutionary vision" and a sense of the magnitude of what had

    been "so amazingly accomplished."

    As we all go through these early years associated with what the House of

    Justice called "a change of time," "a new state of mind," "a coherence of

    understanding," taking part as we all do in a "divinely driven enterprise,"

    I wish you all well in your service to the Cause. I hope you are able to

    enjoy this brief survey of the history of outback WA in this first post andthe second one which follows.

    -----------------------FOOTNOTES------------------------------------------------

    (1) Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, Wilmette, 1957(1944), p.351.

    (2) Arlette Farge, Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in

    Eighteenth Century Paris, Harvard UP,Cambridge, Mass., 1993,

    Introduction.

    Ron Price