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How we can honour the 'Balibo Five' 40 years on

By Damien Kingsbury

It's fitting that exactly 40 years after the "Balibo Five" journalists were killed, a media award in their honour will be relaunched and will ensure their story and the issues they reported on continue to resonate, writes Damien Kingsbury.


About seven weeks later, Indonesian soldiers murdered Australian journalist Roger East, along with hundreds of others, at the wharf in Dili.

The Australian-based journalists had been in Balibo to report on Indonesia's illegal invasion of what was then the colony of Portuguese Timor. Balibo sits on top of a mountain range overlooking the Ombai-Wetar Strait and, from the vantage point of the old Portuguese fort at the peak, there was an uninterrupted view of the ocean and Indonesian military shipping offshore from the village of Batugade, where Indonesian forces and their proxy Timorese militia had begun the invasion.

It was already a dangerous environment, so Shackleton had daubed two Australian flags and the word "Australia" on a corner shop where they were staying. They joked that it was the "Australian embassy" and that Indonesian soldiers would recognise that they were non-combatants.


Indonesian forces had also probed further along the border, engaging in clashes with Falintil troops, who had been formed from the Portuguese garrison after the Portuguese administration fled the colony in August of that year. The Indonesians knew the Australian-based journalists were in Balibo and did not want them reporting to the world on the invasion the Indonesian government was busily denying.

Early on October 16, 1975, Indonesian forces circled around and approached the Portuguese fort from the east. The journalists fled the fort, towards what was to become known as the "Flag House". They were intercepted and murdered near and in a building nearby the "Flag House".

Although aware of the events, the Australian government denied knowledge of what had happened and the Indonesian government has always maintained that it was not responsible for the deaths of the journalists. Not believing these protestations, Darwin-based journalist Roger East went to Dili to investigate.

East was soon roped into writing for the interim administration on the impending full-scale Indonesian invasion. When Indonesian forces invaded openly on December 8, East was captured, taken to the Dili wharf and, with many others, summarily executed.

The murder of these journalists, and the continuing refusal to acknowledge what happened, much less agree to legal redress, has remained as a marker of distrust between Australia and Indonesia. It also presaged the wholesale deaths of Timorese, through shooting, bombing and starvation, not ending until the Australian-led Interfet intervention of 1999.

There is, and can be, no precise figure on how many people died as a direct consequence of Indonesia's invasion. But official and somewhat conservative estimates put the death toll at between 130,000 and 180,000 people, or about a quarter of what was then Timor-Leste's population. The Balibo Five and Roger East have become as one with the other dead of Timor-Leste.

To remember these journalists, in 1982, Australian media organisations established the Australian News Correspondents Memorial Award, to send a young journalist to study at the Columbia University Journalism School. The first award, in honour of the journalists murdered in Timor-Leste, was to Geraldine Brooks, who went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and become a successful novelist. I won the second award, in honour of Tony Joyce, a leading ABC correspondent who was shot at the border of Zambia in late 1979, dying two months later.

The award and its associated scholarship was expensive and, in 1984, the media organisations withdrew their support. Residual funds were held in trust by the then Australian Journalists Association, now the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA).

To continue to commemorate the Balibo Five and Roger East, the MEAA has now relaunched the award, to be made to East Timorese journalists for training in Australia. This is a fitting tribute to the continued interconnectedness of Australia and Timor-Leste, and is supported by the families of the Balibo Five.

The Balibo Five and Roger East are also remembered through the establishment, by the Victorian Government, of the Balibo House Trust, which has refurbished the "Flag House" as a community learning centre, supports the Balibo kindergarten, has built heritage-sensitive visitor accommodation in the old Portuguese fort, and is now raising funds to establish a dental clinic for the Balibo and regional community.

Forty years ago, the Balibo Five and Roger East could not have envisaged they would come to symbolise a key part of Australia's sense of connectedness to Timor-Leste. It is fitting, however, that their story continues to resonate and, by so doing, continues to remind us of the larger story they were sent to report on.

Damien Kingsbury is Professor of International Politics at Deakin University. He is vice-president/deputy chair of the board of the Balibo House Trust.


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