09/10/2026
We opened the archive.
It started as a fairly practical exercise. Years of photographs, old folders, hard drives and files had accumulated across LifeAid. Some had sensible names. Plenty were called things like DSC00217. Some existed twice. Some appeared to belong nowhere.
Then we started looking properly.
We found medical rooms at remote mine sites. Old LifeAid ambulances covered in the dust of another era. Crews training beneath enormous pieces of industrial machinery. Bushfire deployments. Rescue exercises. Events. People sitting around between jobs. People doing difficult work in difficult places.
There are beautiful photographs in the collection, and there are some objectively terrible photographs that happen to be extraordinary historical records. Together, they tell a story we have probably never told particularly well. It is the story of how LifeAid’s capability was built: not only in courses or offices, but in mines, firegrounds, medical rooms, paddocks, industrial sites and remote communities.
Over the coming months, we are going to share some of what we found. Not simply for nostalgia. Much of what LifeAid does today — onsite medical support, emergency response and training — has grown from experience accumulated in places like these.
This is the LifeAid archive. We think it deserves to be seen.
