AustLit

'From the invasion of East Timor by Indonesia in 1975 until the referendum on independence in 1999 and up until the present, East Timor has been a place whose destiny Australian governments have felt they have the right to intervene in. Indeed, this assumed right goes back to the invasion of neutral Portuguese Timor by Australian forces in World War II, thereby condemning thousands of Timorese to their deaths at the hands of Japanese soldiers. Of this initial assumption of Australia’s agency in East Timor there has been surprisingly little creative remediation, although there has been much and moving commentary in nonfiction. The marginality of Portuguese Timor to Australia in the 1940s may be read both in the decision to invade and in subsequent uninterest in interpreting what is one of Australia's closest neighbours. Although the Indonesian invasion and brutal occupation vastly increased the amount of coverage given to the territory, somehow this too was almost never accompanied by the analytical possibilities of creative work. From Tony Maniaty’s anguished representation of the period immediately before the invasion, The Children Must Dance (1987), through Gail Jones’s theoretically reflective short story ‘Other Places’ (1992), Bill Green’s satire on Australian political immorality, Cleaning Up (1993), or Libby Gleeson’s book for children Refuge (1998), to take some of the registers through which the country was dealt with, East Timor was rarely processed in Australia through the protocols of imaginative narrative (on these texts, see Callahan 2010; 2012a; 2012b).' (Introduction)