A few weeks ago, John Pilger made some interesting claims that the script of Balibo had been toned down to expunge Australian Government (and media?) complicity. Pilger’s quotes from director Robert Connolly don’t exactly refute the claims but the Australian media doesn’t seem interested in it either, perhaps preferring the official version once again that it was all Indonesia’s fault:
Claiming to be a “true story”, it is a travesty of omissions. In eight of sixteen drafts of his screenplay, David Williamson, the distinguished Australian playwright, graphically depicted the chain of true events that began with the original radio intercepts by Australian intelligence and went all the way to prime minister Gough Whitlam, who believed East Timor should be “integrated” into Indonesia. This is reduced in the film to a fleeting image of Whitlam and Suharto in a newspaper wrapped around fish and chips. Williamson’s original script described the effect of the cover up on the families of the murdered journalists and their anger and frustration at being denied information and despair at Canberra’s scandalous decision to have the journalists’ ashes buried in Jakarta with ambassador Woolcott, the arch apologist, reading the oration. What the government feared if the ashes came home was public outrage directed at the West’s client in Jakarta. All this was cut.
The “true story” is largely fictitious. Finely dramatised, acted and located, the film is reminiscent of the genre of Vietnam movies, such as The Deer Hunter, which artistically airbrushed the truth of that atrocious war from popular history. Not surprisingly, it has been lauded in the Australian media, which took minimal interest in East Timor’s suffering during the long years of Indonesian occupation. So enamoured of General Suharto was the country’s only national daily, The Australian, owned by Rupert Murdoch, that its editor-in-chief, Paul Kelly, led Australia’s principal newspaper editors to Jakarta to shake the tyrant’s hand. There is a photograph of one of them bowing.
I asked Balibo’s director, Robert Connolly, why he had cut the original Williamson script and omitted all government complicity. He replied that the film had “generated huge discussion in the media and the Australian government” and in that way “Australia would be best held accountable”. Milan Kundera’s truism comes to mind: “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Well, as long as it’s a good movie, right?
3 Comments
Here’s what the Coroner had to say about Pilger’s claim that “Australian intelligence had known 12 hours in advance that the journalists in Balibo faced imminent death, and the government did nothing.”:
“None of the witnesses who gave evidence at the inquest about sigint material they saw from 1975 onwards saw any material in terms of the alleged Murdani-Dading intercept. In summary, therefore,
a) there is no extant intercept or report referring to it;
b) no witness has ever seen such an intercept or report; and
c) those nominated as being able to validate its existence, namely, Messrs. Brownbill, Cunliffe and Cameron have specifically given evidence to the contrary.
Hence, there is nothing before the inquest to indicate that such a document ever existed.”
What do we gain by going over this over and over again? Let’s not let this become our JFK, particularly as it involves a key overseas relationship. Not that fear of offence should dissuaed us from pursuing the truth, but this issues has been so thouroughly gone over that any ‘truth’ that can be gleaned has been done so, and the rest is mere speculation bordering on conspiracy theory.
“this issues has been so thouroughly gone over that any ‘truth’ that can be gleaned has been done so”. I would say we’ve only just begun to open our eyes to the lies we’ve been told by successive Australian governments regarding not only East Timor, but also Indonesian history, including the ousting of Sukarno. Congratulations to Bob Connolly for getting the film up, David Williamson for telling it like it was and the startlingly brave and candid John Pilger for setting the record straight. As Sukarno once wrote,”Injustice is fast forgotten by those who inflict it, but long remembered by those who suffer it.” It’s time we taught Indonesian and Timorese history in schools, even if Australia is not shown as a the blameless nation which our politicians and our half baked media like to portray.