Function and purpose

In April and May 1976, three Foreign Affairs officers, Messrs Taylor, Rutter and Johnson, visited East Timor with the agreement of the Provisional Government of East Timor to carry out investigations into the deaths of the five Australia-based journalists at Balibo in mid October 1975. They visited Balibo on 29 April and 9 May 1976 and took photographs of the town and its surrounds as evidence of what they saw. A number of these photographs were included in Annex C to the report submitted on 26 May 1976.

This series was reconstructed in 2000 by the Historical Documents Unit of DFAT from photographic prints and negatives held in the Indonesia Section. It comprises colour negatives from four films filed in inert plastic strip-holders and sheets of contact prints made of the negatives in 1998. Many of the original prints, which have faded badly over time, now form part of the records of the Sherman inquiry of 1995.