Sargon Joseph Hallaby, an Iraqi Christian born in the oil city of Kirkuk in 1934, joined the Basra Petroleum Company (BPC) in the early 1950s as a communication apprentice and was sent to Lebanon and England as a company trainee. In 1971 he left Iraq and migrated to Australia where he started working as a telecommunications technician for the Sydney Postal Services. Interviewed in the early 1990s by the Migration Heritage Centre of New South Wales for a project that collected memories of homeland among immigrants, Sargon chose to be photographed holding a copy of The Basra Auto Radio System – one of BPC's publications – with a photo of himself as a young apprentice in one of the company's audio equipment rooms (Figure 4.1). He recalled: ‘One day in 1954, a photographer came to the company and photographed us for the book. In England, in 1967 one of the engineers said to me “You know there is a journal about your company?” and he arranged to give me a copy. It is a very good memory of those days in Iraq.’

The copy of the Basra Audio System and Sargon's photo as a young man taken by an unknown BPC photographer are part of a large corpus of public relations materials produced by foreign oil companies in the Arab world since the early 1950s: photographs of employees, public projects, oil infrastructure and modern townships; magazines, technical reports, brochures and posters; and videos and films used to train, educate and entertain the workforce. Much of this public relations archive is elusive. It is ‘slippery’ like the crude hidden underground, but also piecemeal, reflecting the painful incompleteness of and lack of access to many archives on and in the Middle East, an area where document absence and displacement are often the work of authoritarian regimes, political upheaval and, in some cases, simple carelessness. Oil company materials related to the period before the nationalisation of the industry are often scattered across several libraries and private collections in the West and Middle East, not having been made available to the public in bulk by the British and American consortia that controlled the petroleum industry.