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Memory and History: World Matters

JA September 21

The Diamond Valley Oxfam and Eltham Bookshop are hosting a wonderful celebration of new questions and fresh alternatives from October 17–19, and November 19.

As part of the festival, Sian Prior, Maggie MacKellar and Carolyn Fraser will take part in a moving panel on history and memory, alongside Middle East scholar Ian Bickerton. The session, chaired by Sophie Cunningham, will draw on several essays in the September issue of Meanjin, including Sian Prior’s ‘Remembering Balibo’, which is now available online.

Where: Edendale Community Farm, Gastons Lane, Eltham. (Melway 22 A1)

When: Sat Oct 17, 2-3pm

Cost: $6 per session

Bookings are essential so for tickets, or information on other sessions, please contact the Eltham Bookshop on 03 9439 8700 or elthambookshop@bigpond.com. The full program is also available on our Noticeboard page.

For more on the themes of remembering and guilt, have a read of Sophie Cunningham's editorial below, which recalls the political climate during the deaths of the Balibo Five, and the effects of the killings on the Australian consciousness many years after.

I kept a diary in 1975, through my first year of high school. I retain a particular fondness for my entry of 11 November: ‘Today the Prime Minister of Australia was sacked. Mum and Dad say it’s the end of democracy as we know it. Janice and I smoked a menthol cigarette.’ At the time, of course, I was unaware of the Whitlam government’s culpable actions regarding Indonesia’s imminent invasion of East Timor, which took place a few weeks after Whitlam’s sacking. His government had, however, already been made aware of the death of five Australian-based journalists in East Timor, and accepted the Suharto government’s version of the stories that the Balibo Five were (variously) blown up in a house or caught in crossfire during battle. That culpability was passed, like a baton, from Whitlam to Fraser, to Hawke, to Keating and then to John Howard. It was Howard who finally supported East Timor’s Declaration of Independence on 20 May 1999, though his government’s refusal to put Australian troops on the ground for the referendum of 20 August allowed the Indonesians—in violent and graceless defeat—to kill around 1400 (more) Timorese, forcibly move 300,000 East Timorese into West Timor, and destroy around 90 per cent of East Timor’s buildings and infrastructure, thus condemning it to several more generations of struggle. Australian troops finally went into East Timor in September 1999.

It is a strange feeling when one’s childhood makes the shift from recent past to history. Things blur and it becomes harder to separate personal memory from media memory. Perhaps that’s why Generation Jones kids (I’m one, apparently) are described as having ‘a certain unrequited, jonesing quality’. It seems we’re that ‘large anonymous generation … Jonesers were given huge expectations as children in the 1960s, and then confronted with a different reality as they came of age in the 1970s.’ But I digress. At the time of the initial invasion I was allowed to watch only an hour of television a day—but news and current affairs shows were not included in that quota so I watched a lot of those. I can’t remember if I’m so familiar with the footage of Greg Shackleton’s reports from East Timor because I saw them at the time, or later, in the wake of media coverage of his disappearance—along with that of four colleagues—on 16 October 1975. Nonetheless my familiarity with the look and feel of that kind of footage made my response to Robert Connolly’s film Balibo particularly visceral and I was surprised by the extent to which the story of the Balibo Five felt deeply personal. I also felt a deep shame. As Connolly said in my interview with him (p. 150), ‘there’s every reason for that shame to be part of our own national story’.

Shame is a word that was much used when I was growing up, and ‘Shame Fraser, shame’ was often chanted at demonstrations in the seventies. But shame strikes me as an emotion, like guilt, that is difficult to convert into any kind of meaningful outcome. It’s an emotion that I felt most recently when watching the extraordinary Four Corners report on 8 June of the death of an Aboriginal elder who died after being transported hundreds of kilometres and for four hours in a metal van in temperatures in the mid-forties. He suffered third-degree burns sitting on the metal floor of the van. The fact that people employed by a government agency can still perpetrate violence this gross against our indigenous population beggars belief. It would seem our current Prime Minister’s moving and public shame back on 12 February 2008—‘We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians’—has not made a difference.

One of the things that is extraordinary about the story of both the Balibo Five and Roger East (the journalist who was assassinated on the docks of Dili soon after uncovering the details of their death) is that the shame their story provoked, the ramifications of those murders, contributed to East Timor’s eventual independence. The tenth anniversary of Independence was celebrated on 30 August 2009. It is in solidarity with that anniversary that Meanjin is publishing the interview with Robert Connolly and an essay on the deaths at Balibo by Sian Prior that reminds us just how important memory, and remembering, is.


 

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