‘So far in blood’

André Gide once remarked that while fiction was history that might have happened, history was fiction that had happened. It seems an appropriate remark to cite in an essay focused on Australia’s relationship with East Timor – largely because so much fiction has been interpolated into that relationship’s history. The official story of Australia’s role in East Timor’s independence is especially conspicuous in this regard, capped as it is with the triumphant arrival of an Australian-led UN peacekeeping force and the beginnings of a civil administration that led to the 2002 birth of Timor-Leste. 

‘The deployment was for the vast majority of Australians one of the more noble things their country had done in many years,’ Craig Stockings, the official historian of Australia’s peacekeeping operations in East Timor, wrote in 2022, ‘and a decisive demonstration of Australian willingness and capacity to do the “right” thing in the region.’ And yet, as Stockings pointed out, the ‘gritty detail’ of the events leading up to that deployment betrays a more complicated story. Australia’s actions in relation to East Timor in 1999 are among its ‘more noble things’ largely because they departed so markedly from past policies – policies that were much less noble, much less talked about, and to this day much less willingly acknowledged.  

Researchers such as Clinton Fernandes have shown repeatedly throughout the past two decades that the official narrative promulgated about Australian policy towards East Timor is shaded by myth. A more even-handed view would suggest that the ‘noble actions’ of 1999 were the accidental and inadequate restitution for an era of policymaking characterised by narrow-minded self-interest and uncritical thinking. Twenty-five years where successive Australian governments chose to accept only evidence that fit pre-conceived policy goals. A quarter of a century – time enough for a whole generation to come of age – where Australia decided that an acceptable price for the fulfilment of its strategic goals was the suffering of the East Timorese people. 

Our earliest governments were idly tantalised by Timor, even when it was a much-exploited colony of the Portuguese. In 1915, prime minister Andrew Fisher mused that this little portion of land, barely a quarter of the size of Tasmania, could be a ‘summer resort’ for Australians. In the following year, defence minister George Pearce advised Fisher’s successor, Billy Hughes, that mineral and phosphate deposits in the surrounding islands were of ‘incalculable value to Australia’. 

During the Second World War, however, Timor only alarmed Australian governments. Lying 650km from Darwin – well within the swimming range of an enthusiastic and energetic Australian saltwater crocodile, as Stockings wryly comments – Timor, Australia worried, might become a launch pad for Japanese attacks. The military force Australia sent to occupy it ironically provoked the Japanese into dispatching 20,000 troops, thus beginning a two-year guerrilla campaign that cost 40,000-60,000 Timorese lives. 

In the post-war period, Australian officials saw Timor as only a problem to be solved with realpolitik calculation. They looked with disdain on Portugal’s efforts to re-occupy it, seeing a mistaken assertion of colonial power that would only invite unrest and disturbance. They looked equally askance at independence, regarding Timor as too impoverished to be economically viable. On the grounds that political stability would prevent communist interference in a country on Australia’s doorstep, Australian policymakers became convinced that Timor should become part of Indonesia. The 1974 Portuguese revolution gave them the opportunity to make that view reality. As Portugal began to divest its colonial empire, prime minister Gough Whitlam met Indonesian president Suharto to say that East Timor should become a part of Indonesia – though, Whitlam added, this should be as an expression of the locals’ free will. Having already overseen a sham ‘act of free choice’ in West Irian in 1969, in which that territory became part of Indonesia, Suharto readily agreed.  

But his comment to Whitlam that an independent East Timor could be ‘a thorn in the eye of Australia and a thorn in Indonesia’s back’ echoed a threat that hardliners in his government were perceiving in the political groups stirring in East Timor. Foremost among them was Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente (FRETILIN), which argued for full independence and worked to define a national identity distinct from Indonesia and West Timor. FRETILIN always had competitors, including the Timorese Democratic Party (UDT), but its voice was loud and always compelling. For Indonesia, which had warred with communists in 1965–66, FRETILIN’s was a voice that sounded much too similar. 

Only a few months after Suharto’s meeting with Whitlam, then, Indonesia was gearing up to annex East Timor; simultaneously, some within Australia began to venture that its dual desires – of East Timorese incorporation with Indonesia, and the East Timorese people’s self-determination – were incompatible, especially in light of emerging evidence that the East Timorese were not as happy to become Indonesian as had been supposed. In East Timor, matters became fractious. A FRETILIN-UDT coalition was dissolved and UDT launched a coup, putatively pre-empting FRETILIN plans for a takeover. Violence broke out and the Portuguese fled. Within three weeks, however, UDT had been toppled, FRETILIN was in, and Indonesia was highly alarmed. Within two months, the Indonesian military was undertaking clandestine raids across the border to sabotage and undermine the FRETILIN government. They murdered five Australian journalists at Balibo on 16 October 1975 to ensure that their actions remained hidden from the world, and they were surprised when the Australian government barely reacted. A policy of deliberate indifference was at work; so was the distraction of events at home. On 11 November, governor-general John Kerr dismissed Whitlam and his colleagues from office, commissioned Malcolm Fraser as caretaker prime minister, and dissolved the Australian parliament for an election.  

Fraser sent word to Indonesia that Australia wanted to see a solution to the Timor problem in terms of Indonesia’s interests. Suharto puzzled over the exact meaning, but it was clear enough that Australia was not going to interfere. In his memoirs, Fraser cites the conventions of caretaker governments to deny that he had the ability to do anything but stand by: ‘I couldn’t change policy.’ Two weeks later, on 28 November, FRETILIN declared East Timor’s independence. Nine days after that, Indonesia began a full-scale invasion. By the end of the year, Indonesia controlled the bulk of East Timor, and FRETILIN had retreated to the mountains to wage a guerrilla war, with its armed wing FALINTIL, that would last for more than twenty years. 

As the invasion became an occupation, and as the resulting guerrilla war ground on, with its inevitable cost for the civilian population, Australia’s policy remained unchanged. Over and over, Australia’s governments prioritised the relationship with Indonesia. Every issue was subordinated to this relationship: the humanitarian catastrophe that resulted from a famine, the constant warfare, the brutality and violence. As Stockings writes, ‘In the contest between interests and values in foreign policy in this period, it was all about interest.’ Australia constantly defended Indonesian actions, usually with some reference to how the present was a vast improvement on Portugal’s neglectful colonial rule. 

This attitude cut across both sides of Australian politics. In his memoirs, Fraser portrays his government as conflicted but pragmatic. He had ‘time and power’ to reconsider Australia’s policy but, justifying the unwillingness to use either, throws up his hands: ‘By this stage there was little that could be done.’ Inactivity, however, equated with support for Indonesia. The Fraser government suppressed two-way radio links between East Timor and FRETILIN supporters in Darwin, had Australia abstain from UN condemnations of Indonesian military intervention, and recognised Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor in 1979. While the Labor Party condemned Fraser for that decision, it did not rescind it when taking government four years later. Bob Hawke explained that he was facing up to reality, but he also directed the diplomat Richard Woolcott, now at the UN, to do his best to keep East Timor off the agenda. Under Hawke, Australia negotiated with Indonesia about sovereignty over the seabed boundary in the Timor Gap – the location of valuable gas and mineral deposits – and signed the Timor Gap Treaty in 1989. 

Even Indonesia’s brutal massacre on 12 November 1991 of over one hundred protestors – mostly students who had gathered in a Dili cemetery for the burial of an independence campaigner – was downplayed by Australia. The official line was that the violence was ‘aberrant behaviour’; there was no cause to be ‘supremely critical’. Paul Keating, who became prime minister a month later, was so unbothered as to urge the United States in 1993 to withdraw human rights considerations when drafting contracts with Indonesia. He also claimed that any free vote in East Timor about its future would favour continued incorporation with Indonesia. Again, priorities had been determined. ‘No country is more important to Australia than Indonesia,’ Keating said, in 1994. When the Howard government came to office in 1996, it also saw no need for change, doing nothing throughout its first term. 

But after a quarter of a century, stability was giving way. Suharto resigned in 1998 amid economic turmoil and protests by pro-democracy activists. Conscious that Indonesia attracted international opprobrium for its occupation of East Timor and garnered no benefits from doing so, a new generation of Indonesian leaders became cautiously open to compromise. New president Bacharuddin Jusuf (B.J.) Habibie decided to offer East Timor a special status and autonomy while keeping it part of Indonesia. East Timorese leaders, who wanted a formal vote on independence, rebuffed him. 

While Australia publicly backed Indonesia and dismissed a vote on independence, privately it was dismayed. Stockings points out that Australia’s unsuccessful 1997 bid for a seat on the UN Security Council was partly attributed to its support of Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor; behind the scenes, meanwhile, the bipartisan policy consensus toward East Timor was fraying and change within the government bureaucracy seemed to present opportunities for addressing the reputational problems that East Timor aroused. Shortly after his 1998 re-election, Howard signed a letter to Habibie that simultaneously endorsed East Timor staying part of Indonesia and suggested that Indonesia negotiate directly with the East Timorese about granting, after a lengthy period of autonomy, ‘an act of self-determination’. In his memoirs, Howard quotes foreign minister Alexander Downer guffawing that ‘This is really big.’ Yet there was nothing specific about the nature of the proposed autonomy in that letter; the ‘act of self-determination’ was not described. It was not the historic shift Howard suggests.  In fact, the letter can more easily be read as suggesting a way to legitimise Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor. ‘The whole purpose,’ writes Stockings, ‘was therefore to defuse the East Timor issue while continuing to support the long-standing preference of keeping the territory within Indonesia.’ 

Affronted by an implication that Indonesia might be a colonial power and disdainful of Indonesia’s throwing money at a mendicant province that might, in the end, demand independence, Habibie announced that: ‘If, after twenty-two years, the East Timorese people cannot feel united with the Indonesian people, it would be reasonable and wise if […] East Timor can be honourably separated from the unitary nation of the Republic of Indonesia.’ Events moved quickly. In the ensuing ballot that took place in August 1999 under UN auspices, 98 per cent of registered voters cast a ballot, and 78 per cent of them chose independence over autonomy within Indonesia. They did so in defiance of militia gangs supported by Indonesian military and security forces that had, since January, attempted to influence the result through violence and intimidation. Observers afar were horrified. Stockings records that Australian policymakers knew that the violence was likely, but, not wanting to offend Indonesia, were reluctant to countenance using Australian troops or building a UN peacekeeping force to stop it. The secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, for example, dismissed US concerns with a blithe remark that the East Timorese would need to sort themselves out. 

The announcement of the ballot results marked an escalation in violence. The militias began killing indiscriminately and putting villages to the flame. Refugees flooded into UN compounds seeking help; the militias forced more than 200,000 refugees over the border, into West Timor. Finally, after an international outcry, Indonesia agreed to allow an international peacekeeping force. In September, that peacekeeping force, led by Australians and commanded by an Australian, Major General Peter Cosgrove, arrived in East Timor. Under the blanket of security they provided, the East Timorese and the United Nations began setting up a transitional civil administration. 

In Australia, these penultimate events have overwhelmingly shaped the public understanding of Australia’s policies and history with East Timor. In this view, Australia was a fighter for East Timor’s independence, not an abetter of its occupation. It was a helpful and willing neighbour, not a reluctant and slow acting one. It is a view that has been reinforced repeatedly since 1999. Howard’s memoirs fudge the Whitlam government’s record and leap over the Fraser government’s, in which he was treasurer. He presents his letter to Habibie as purposeful, even though its effects were unexpected and completely unwelcome. He overlooks Australia’s willingness to accept violence in East Timor in the early months of 1999, and offers no accounting for the cost of Australia’s role before, during, and after the ballot. In Howard’s telling, what happened in 1999 was only a feather in the cap, something for himself and Australians more broadly to trumpet and feel good about. ‘When asked to list the achievements of my prime ministership of which I am most proud,’ Howard writes, ‘I always include the liberation of East Timor in 1999.’ 

The wish to narrow the focus to the moment of liberation was at its peak during the preparation of Stockings’ official history of Australia’s role in East Timor. The government bureaucrats involved in reviewing the draft manuscript of Born of Fire and Ash (2022) were profoundly ambivalent about the book’s divergent narrative and the imprimatur it would enjoy. ‘I remember one particular high-level meeting,’ Stockings recounted after publication, ‘with very senior departmental representatives [of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade] who congratulated me on such a fine book – an excellent book! – but then asked for the first nine chapters to be removed, on grounds that it should begin when the first Australian boot was on the ground.’ This request, apparently a suggestion of then-Australian War Memorial director and former Howard government minister Brendan Nelson, ultimately went nowhere. Stockings refused it and publication, in grudging circumstances, went ahead late in 2022. It is a sterling work of history – a forceful rebuke of fudged accounts and a much-needed dispelling of an overly comforting myth. Time will tell whether it permeates public understanding. Until then, go back to Gidé. Perhaps a history of Australia’s relationship to East Timor might better be found in an actual work of fiction.  

Nicholas Jose is a respected literary scholar and writer and a former diplomat. Having authored eight novels, he has shown a fondness for using mysteries to spark action, a comfort in writing about far-flung places, an astute understanding of manners and social dynamics, and a prose style whose tone of cool reportage lends it immediate credibility.  

In The Idealist, set in 1998-99, the mystery is presented in the initial pages: why is Jake Treweek, a defence analyst in Australia’s embassy in Washington, DC, dead? And why were there, in the garage where this non-smoker apparently gassed himself, three stubbed out Winfield Blue cigarettes? Jake’s widow puts these questions to an old barrister friend on whose Bronte doorstep she arrives in the wake of her husband’s death. Anne Treweek is doubtful of the official explanation and suspects that Jake’s experiences in East Timor, where he was sent before his Washington posting, has something to do with it. She wants David St George to be her gallant knight and help discover the truth. 

From this short, tense opening, The Idealist seems set to follow a straight line: we will have a quest, led by Anne and David, that goes to the heart of government, with the truth of Jake’s death emerging second-hand and uncertain, in much the same way that John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener (2001) did. But Jose – while aware of the dramatic potential of the withheld fact – has aims more important than the mundane revelation of plot. He is intent, for one, on establishing the truthful foundations of his novel. There is the careful realist prose; there are expository passages on Australia-East Timorese history that would not be out of place in Stockings’ official history; there are characters whose silhouettes are snipped from real-world counterparts. There is a polemical sensibility at work in this novel, too – a somewhat frustrated desire to wake people up by laying bare atrocities and blatant self-interest. There are mentions of gas reserves and Australia’s interest in exploiting them, a topic still in our newspapers; there are allusions to commercial interests and actors; there is a startling grasp of the emptiness of moral rhetoric that has been disconnected from action. There is even a list of ‘further reading’ that Jose appends, all of them histories and accounts of Australia and East Timor. 

Jose is also interested in merging those truthful foundations with a moral quandary. This is most apparent in his construction of Jake Treweek, who bears an obvious debt – whatever Jose’s disclaimer about unintended resemblances – to Mervyn Jenkins. A career army intelligence officer, Jenkins worked in the Australian embassy in Washington, DC, liaising in the latter half of the 1990s between Australia’s Defence Intelligence Organisation and America’s Defence Intelligence Agency and the CIA. He was at the crunch-point in 1999 when the US became concerned that Australia was withholding information about Indonesian sponsorship of the militia gangs in East Timor. When, under US pressure and contradictory and ambiguous instruction from his superiors, Jenkins passed to the Americans material marked AUSTEO – ‘Australian Eyes Only’ – that confirmed Indonesian sponsorship, the diplomatic game was up. America became more vocal about the need for peacekeepers and, in apparent retribution, Jenkins became the subject of an investigation. 

His career seemingly in ruins and with talk of treason charges and threat of imprisonment under the Crimes Act hanging over him, Jenkins suicided. He left behind a wife, three children, and a final email to his superiors in Canberra: ‘The pressure on me to pass on information has been intense and is building. I am experiencing a range of emotions from frustration to anger to remorse.’ An inquiry carefully cleared Jenkins of espionage and conceded that the investigation had too much of an appearance of ‘disciplinary proceedings’, but made no finding about the influence of the whole affair on Jenkins’ death – an outcome Jenkins’ mother saw coming. ‘It’s the old boy stuff again, you know?’ she told the ABC’s Four Corners in 2001. ‘Here’s the bottle of whiskey. Here’s the gun. You know what to do.’ 

In The Idealist, Jose adopts much of Jenkins’ story, but swaps out the process-driven retribution that drove Jenkins to his death for a more pointed exploration of how an individual may, in ways that provoke admiration and ambivalence, struggle to find a moral path and become stranded in the no man’s land between morality and expediency. Jake is by turns distant, elusive, self-involved, yearning for connection, subservient and acquiescent, angry and impotent. At times he is reminiscent of Larry Durrell, subject of Somerset Maugham’s Razor’s Edge, in his search for purity; at others, his guilelessness and naivety test his verisimilitude. In some ways, he is less the subject of the book than an object in it: proof, perhaps, that to understand a murder you must understand the murdered. He comes over-freighted with historical baggage: Jose gives Jake a November 9 birthday, the anniversary both of Kristallnacht and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. It is therefore ‘a date with two faces, a rampage of destruction and an assembly of hope’; it is also, Jose adds, three days before the anniversary of the Santa Cruz massacre. 

Another historically informed narrative works on Jake. His father was a Second World War signaller who served in East Timor and may, like so many soldiers, have given to an East Timorese a silver medallion in thanks and acknowledgement of help. Despite dying while Jake is young, Larry Treweek’s influence lingers. His example leads Jake to the military; his inability to fathom the ways of the world bedevils Jake, too. As a family friend explains, Larry returned to peacetime profoundly troubled. ‘He couldn’t understand the morality of it, why people did things, who owed what to who. There was no answer to those questions that he carried round with him.’ In every one of Jake’s actions is Larry Treweek’s ghost. Is it Jake’s task to repay the debt his father incurred, to answer the questions his father could not? 

Overarching all of this, and repeatedly re-enacted in different forms, is the choice between morality and self-interest. Jose stages it first at an undergraduate party in 1985. Jake and Anne are there; so is St George, who has known Jake since a high school stint in the cadets. It is St George – forensic, reflective, and ultimately effective – who pegs Jake as the titular idealist; it is St George’s Whiggish faith in truth and the law that becomes the grace note in the novel’s conclusion. His opposite is Henry Hunt, a gold-haired South Australian mediocrity who relied on Jake’s tutelage when they were adolescents and does so again when he enters the Department of Foreign Affairs. This notwithstanding, Hunt is absolutely certain of himself, even when he arrives at this drunken party uninvited and espousing the necessities of realpolitik. St George asks if he has any ideals, but Hunt merely smirks: ‘It’s called reality.’ As they inevitably get to scuffling, Jake comes to make peace: ‘He manoeuvred himself so he was between Henry and David.’ 

Time and again Jose restages that moment. Jake stands with moral principle on one side, expediency and pragmatism and self-interest on the other. That he might come to choose one and act – or, indeed, realise that by inaction he is already acting – is not a prospect countenanced by Hunt. When Hunt inherits his father’s seat in parliament and becomes minister for foreign affairs, he contacts Jake to send him to East Timor, undercover, as his personal eyes and ears. Things are changing; the old approach is under question; Australia is being pressed to look again at its policies. Ostensibly, the mission calls for discretion, judgement, and honesty. But Hunt is not much interested in this. He sees only the schoolboy who helped him pass his exams (in a very wry touch, Jose puts Jake into clothes reminiscent of his school uniform during his meetings with Hunt). 

Hunt will be surprised. For Jake finds that the official narrative about Australia and East Timor is threadbare. East Timor is simmering. Violence is liable to break out at any moment. The East Timorese want to determine their own future. Indonesia will not stand for it. Caution is required, but a side must be picked. And yet the Australian government is now so eager to be moral, to squirrel away the opprobrium of its earlier policies, that it is choosing the facts that align with a new narrative and hiding all those which do not. ‘He can smell his Falklands moment,’ Jake tells Anne, of the ‘rat-like’ Australian prime minister (please enjoy Jose’s homage to a real-life counterpart). Hunt, meanwhile, he says, ‘has wet his finger and is holding it up to the wind to see what direction it’s blowing in.’ 

But Jake is not as fixed in place as he would like to think. He is supposed to be an analyst, with a mind that gathers information, filters and assesses it, and identifies a logical course of action. As a soldier, he is ostensibly practised in acting with unsentimental and brutal realism. In Timor, however, Jake comes quickly unmoored. It tests the reader’s credulousness: is a soldier so likely to lose himself, as Jake does? Is a soldier-turned-defence analyst on a personal mission from the minister for foreign affairs likely to forget that neighbourly benevolence is not the dominant tenor of geopolitics?  

And yet Jake does. He meets a liaison officer from the Department of Industry at a Thank God It’s Friday party and asks why she’s in East Timor. 

Jake is disgusted. He has been warned that thinking in terms of sides is not helpful, but within minutes he is sorting out the good and bad, drawing a sharp line between the East Timorese  – people who ‘seemed able to absorb suffering and transform it’ – and everyone else: the decrepit colonial aristocrat who serves Jake pasteis de nata, the cowardly European Union diplomats, the unpredictable Indonesian military, the Australian government that wants everything just so: stability, peace, economic rights over that oil and gas, moral law on its side. The idealist is deeply naïve and utterly discombobulated by reality. ‘He could sense a picture,’ Jose writes, ‘but he seemed to have lost the means to depict it. His mind was drifting. He was purblind, like an animal sniffing its way through the dark, through tunnels in the earth.’ 

Part of why Jake is so scrambled is because he perceives Timor to be wholly exotic. Jose evokes this from the first moments: sandalwood smoulders by the gearstick in a taxi; the scent of ‘sea and diesel and fragrance’ floats in through the window from the bay. ‘When the coffee bushes are flowering,’ he is told, ‘they have a scent you’ll never forget.’ Subtly, Jose shows that Jake is projecting, and already feeling himself betwixt and between: 

Is Jake about to be the quintessential white saviour? The subconscious slowly becomes conscious. Soon Jake sees in the East Timorese a faith that is deeply admirable and wholly unknown in Australia. He spies in an aged man selling soft drinks by the roadside a fidelity to his ancestors and their spirit: ‘Nuno’s demeanour gave away his commitment to independence. He would die for it if necessary.’ Jake’s veneration of this allegiance underscores his attraction to a young independence activist. Elisa Gomes Santos is married to a FALINTIL guerrilla with whom she has had a child, yet Jake regards her in terms akin to the Virgin Mary and falls over himself for this one-dimensional ideal. He thinks her noble, strong, otherworldly. In their first meeting, she takes Jake to a clearing on a mountain and meditates. He is awestruck to see her drawing on ‘a source and spirit […] that disappeared in the clouds above them.’  

Elisa has ‘burned into him’ and he acts as though scalded: he asks all and sundry about her, worries about her, devises ways that he might see her, brings TimTams for her son. It is a portrait of entitlement and desire that makes for uneasy reading. Jake knows he is being irrational. Is it the adrenaline? He asks why he should have a right to know about Elisa, yet his projection remains unshaken. He catches sight of her in the rain at a requiem mass and is elated: 

The prospect that Jake’s adoration might turn rancid, implicit in that final line, is never followed up, partly because he interprets the smallest gesture from Elisa as a recognition of his desire to be useful to her: ‘They had a pact, or was he imagining it?’ What Jake’s infatuation means for his marriage he does not even stop to think about. His is a convert’s love: zealous, public, absolute. The people around Jake see that he has lost his head. ‘What’s your mission?’ they ask him. Others further afield learn about it. Anne senses the distance, can see plainly that her husband is estranged, focused elsewhere. 

But Jake’s fixation on Elisa is not merely erotic. Larry Treweek figures, too. On the eve of his penultimate departure, Elisa gives Jake a Second World War-era medallion that her great-aunt was given by an Australian soldier. It’s a plea for Jake to do all he can to expose what he has seen in East Timor. He takes it as that – but he also seizes on the fantasy of repaying a familial debt. ‘What are the odds that the woman’s mother came across my dad?’ he asks a sceptical Anne. 

Jake arrives in Washington with the medallion in hand to join Australia’s embassy. That he will resist the return to normalcy, and choose to repay the debt, is not really in question during this headlong, final act. What keeps the reader’s interest is the unsparing depiction of how Jake tries to resist the bleached reality that is pervasive in the US capital, where people are nothing but numbers on a balance sheet. An American government official asks at a cocktail party what is happening in East Timor and is so alarmed when Jake begins giving an honest answer that he cuts him off. Australia’s national interest, meanwhile, is given its own moral weighting equivalent to that of the East Timorese people. The interests of major resources companies and the self-interest of bureaucrats converge. The secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs arrives for talks and accidentally drops a revealing meeting schedule. If Jake had any doubts before, his decision to act is confirmed by what he sees and hears. Anything his government says of decency is just hot air: ‘There was no moral concern with the rights or wellbeing of the people of East Timor.’ 

Soon, there will be none for him either. Jake will leak to the Americans the truth of what is happening in East Timor, and he will in turn be crushed by inexorable institutional revenge. He will be sacrificed to Australia’s self-interest. Jose loops literary parallels around that decision, sending Jake to the theatre for Richard III to hear the eponymous villain confess to being ‘so far in blood that sin will pluck on sin’. On the eve of a final trip to East Timor, Jake gives that Second World War-era medallion to his daughter, handing on yet again the debt of past generations. On that trip he encounters the beachside wreck of HMAS Voyager, an Australian supply ship that ran aground and was scuttled during Japan’s capture of Timor in the Second World War. Jose’s metaphor – ‘swords becoming monumental ploughshares’ – is not exactly subtle, but neither is the official narrative of Australia’s role in East Timor. There is no reason for The Idealist to end subtly. Anne’s belief that Jake had ‘the quiet gift of making conflict go away’ is swiftly proved right. His story, just as much as the reality of Australia’s history with East Timor, is buried by another, one more clearly in hock to myth.  

More than two decades on, work has been done to dispel that myth. Books like Craig Stockings’ show the truth in black and white; novels like The Idealist create the space to imagine how and why it has been constructed, and how and why it remains so strong. Yet the desire for concealment has not abated. As of May 2024, the clearance process for the second volume of the official history of Australia’s military operations in East Timor had been stymied by objections from DFAT. At issue was whether the history should include mention of another one of Australia’s ‘noble actions’: its efforts to spy on Timor-Leste officials during contentious 2004 negotiations over ownership of the rich oil and gas fields in the Timor Sea. This sustained pressure might very quickly close the space for interrogating the past that writers like Stockings and Jose have taken such pains to open up. Much of the emphasis on truth-telling has, very rightly, come in the context of our domestic politics. The case of Australia’s engagement with East Timor shows how urgently it’s needed in our foreign policy.