History curriculum perpetuates East Timor myths

Thank you Susan for recognising this distortion in the proposed national curriculum. Is this today's version of writing our own version of our shameful treatment of indigenous people? At the heart of my involvement in TL is awareness of Aust's position post WWII, 1975 & now the oil/gas issue. Not an admirable record, as these failures to provide genuine support to the people of TL have contributed to poverty & inadequate resources for the enormous of building a nation from the ground up. Gabrielle Kirby BMETS

Having spent 3 months in East Timor last year I really appreciated this article. I also feel that students may be encouraged to help East Timor more if they were given the correct information in their studies. Thank you for this article.

I sometimes think after speaking with groups and writing that I don't publicly recognise sufficiently the effort which so many Australian groups and individuals are putting into Timor-Leste. As someone said to me once, the people are doing what the Government won't do. One only has to speak to people like the CWA who are looking at East Timor as their country of study in 2012 to know how the story affects people and how mystified many are that they hadn't heard it before. Then when they know some of the facts, a number of them take off and do something, because the Timor story is so much our story too. We're slogging away doing our level best, and we know that so many others are doing the same, groups like BMETS (you're great, girls) and so many who have visited, like you, Breda. I just heard tonight what a couple of our current soldiers have done, and there are so many more who know the promise that has to be kept, "Your friends do not forget you." But with over 60% of under 5s in Timor stunted through lack of proper food, there's a lot to be done.

An excellent article, Susan. Well done.

WW1 was a brawl between the imperialist powers, out of which came the Russian Revolution. WW2 was a continuation of WW1. Out of that came the Cold War and the Chinese Revolution of 1949. The Vietnam War began as a colonial war (1945-54) and then became the arena of the main armed conflict of the Cold War (1955-75). Indonesia's imperial expansion by invasion into East Timor was rationalised by Suharto and the rest of the military junta in Cold War terms: ‘to avoid a Cuba on our doorstep'. It was supported by the leaderships of the major political parties in both the US and Australia, and most enthusiastically by the Keating Labor government. To omit the role played in support of Indonesia by the successive Australian governments (Fraser to Keating) amounts to brainwashing the youth. Out of an East Timorese population of around 700,000, the casualties of the Indonesian occupation were horrendous. The subsequent East Timorese Commission for Resettlement and National Reconciliation (CAVR ) put the number of civilian deaths at between 102,800 and 183,000: on a pro-rata basis, comparable to the performance of the Nazis in Poland. Arising from all that and the ‘human rights violations’ (read systematic murder, rape, torture, assault and robbery) of 1999, not one Indonesian soldier or official was ever put on trial, let alone found guilty. The indications are that Australian politicians have learnt nothing: they are back spending our taxpayer revenue on training Indonesian troops and providing them with expensive equipment. The most notable instance of this was Gillard’s recent presentation to the Indonesian president ‘SBY’ of four transport aircraft out of the Air Force fleet. These are of course highly likely to be used by the Indonesian military in the course of further ‘human rights violations’ in the Indonesian colony of West Papua. CAVR ”engaged top statistical experts and collected new data, but was only able to establish in a scientifically-defensible matter the lowest possible number of conflict-related civilian deaths which it put at 102,800. CAVR did not estimate an upper limit though it speculated that this could have been as high as 183,000.” 1. http://www.cavr-timorleste.org/en/cavr.htm 2. http://www.cavr-timorleste.org/en/Brief.htm

Eureka Street's comment processing software is apparently of the stream of consciousness variety, averse to any paragraph breaks supplied by commenters. The results are like extracts from Finnegan's Wake.

I think, Susan, you probably have a more detailed knowledge of the history of TL, as well as continuous active involvement in the area, than whoever framed the fairly broad Draft Curriculum on Modern History. One of the things many historians do is to try to remain objective. Writing purely objective History, in the spirit of Leopold von Ranke, is, I think, a hard call. I think there does have to be an underlying theme and I think the theme you would wish to follow is social justice and how our engagement in TL did, or did not, contribute to this. The Draft Curriculum sets out fairly broad guidelines which could be fulfilled by a variety of approaches. A lot depends on the sources used by particular schools to actually teach the course. I think someone like you could be useful in getting the Catholic and other secondary school systems to consider a wider range of sources and to focus on topics which might otherwise be ignored. There may be conscious, or subconscious, efforts to steer clear of topics in the course which seem inimical to our political aims in the area and the interests of our nearest and most powerful neighbour in Asia. This has to be resisted but with some subtlety. Many people still involved in the internal politics of TL seem, at times, to be somewhat morally ambiguous and perhaps not the cardboard cut-out heroes we once thought them to be. Ditto some past and current Australian and Indonesian politicians. Like the History of Germany in 1945, or of India just post-Independence, this is a complex field and I suspect we have not yet established sufficient space to treat it both as objectively and as sympathetically as we should.