When we first heard, improbably, that the Panchen Lama was coming to Australia, we didn’t really know what to do. It was 30 years ago, early 1986, and we were a small group, calling ourselves the Tibet Information Service (TIS), based largely in just one of Australia’s cities, trying since 1982 to help Australians hear the concerns of the Tibetans. As far as average Australians were concerned we might as well have been lobbying for the little green men of the planet Mars; that’s how far Tibet was from popular consciousness back then.[Source]
