By Paula Nassif
Her husband was killed in 1975. She was not told the truth of what had happened — not then and not now. She has spent much of 17 years piecing together the jigsaw of what happened to him, a jigsaw many would rather leave unsolved.
At 60, Shirley Shackleton feels only "frustration", "anger" and "almost total disbelief" at what she calls the "hypocrisy" of the Australian government.
"My husband was simply pushed aside as though he didn't exist. No kind of investigation was held. No-one in Indonesia was told to account for what they had done."
Greg Shackleton and four other journalists were killed in East Timor in 1975, shortly before the Indonesian invasion in December that year.
Shirley Shackleton met Greg while working as a publicity director at radio station 3AW in Melbourne. He was working in the news room at the time.
"He used to make me laugh and so we got married."
Soon after the couple were married in 1965, Greg had a terrible nightmare.
"He wouldn't tell me what the nightmare was, but he wanted a baby right away, so I stopped taking the pill, became pregnant, and Evan was born within the first year."
She then worked in public relations part-time, and when Evan was two and a half, the family went to
America, where Greg had a job promoting Australian
tourism.
When they returned to Australia two years later, Shirley supported her husband while he studied for his bachelor of arts degree.
"It was my idea for him to do that. I said I'm perfectly prepared to pay for all your fees and all your books."
A trained nurse, she worked 12 hours a night in a Red Cross blood bank and paid a friend, Lucy, across the road to mind her son.
She picked her son up in the mornings, took him home, made his lunch, walked him to school, went home and went to sleep, got up at 3 and picked her son up, took him to Lucy's, read him a bedtime story and put him to bed, got back to the blood bank and started work again.
"It was very tough work, but it was worth it because my husband was happy and he was doing something for our future."
Because Greg could both read and write the news, Shirley knew he was "rare". He read the 6 o'clock and 11 o'clock news at Channel 7, and had a program, Meet the Press, on Sunday nights.
"After 10-20 years of that he would have gone into teaching. It never occurred to me he would get killed on assignment because he was so academic."
The Channel 7 news room was receiving "frantic calls" from East Timor saying the country was being raided, people were being shot, and villages were being set alight by the Indonesian military.
"My husband felt if in fact a military dictatorship was about to move that close to Australia, we had better know about it, and that's
why he went."
Shirley's initial reaction was that she did not want her husband going into such a dangerous situation. However, he told her he would be extra careful. The real worry was if he was taken prisoner, because he was asthmatic.
"He said, 'I'd probably die — can you imagine an Indonesian prison?' He said I was to do anything — sell the house, anything — to get him out."
Shirley does not know the exact day in October 1975 that her husband disappeared, only that it was about 10 days after he went into Timor. She heard the tail end of an ABC radio report saying some journalists were missing there.
"I immediately got this terrible cold feeling, this terrible fear that it was Greg, and I rang the ABC. The fellow there wasn't too happy about it, because he said the family would have been told. And I said, 'I am the family', and he said, 'I don't believe it, the government wouldn't have allowed you to just hear this on the radio'. And I said, 'Well I'm the wife of one of them'. I said, 'Was it Greg Shackleton?' And he said, 'I really can't discuss it'."
It was six in the morning, and there was no-one she could ring or ask for help at that time. As she waited, she became convinced that it was Greg.
"The Timorese were saying they were probably killed by Indonesians, but the Indonesians were saying, we've got no interest in East Timor. But Indonesia in fact was definitely interested in East Timor, and that's why he was killed, to shut him up."
Shirley then received a telegram from an Australian doctor in Jakarta, who had been asked to examine the remains of the five journalists. The most this
doctor said was that the remains "might" be human.
"So I know what he was given to identify by the Indonesians was so minimal, so useless, that he could not even identify it as human. I'd say he knew, he was perfectly aware of the cover-up that was going on, and he just decided he could not be party to it."
When Shirley did get a call from Foreign Affairs (coincidentally the same day she received the telegram from the doctor), she was told she had to pay for the bodies if she wanted them. She believed the department was trying to frighten her at the thought of five coffins.
"I said, 'Are these bodies in five coffins?' There was a long silence, and he said, 'Well, no'.
"I said, 'Are they crammed into one coffin?' And he said, 'Well, no'.
"I said, 'Will they fit into a suitcase, or a shoe box?' And I said, 'I'll read you what I've got in my hand."
She read the telegram the doctor had sent her. "'So that means the remains of the five journalists you're threatening to charge me to bring home would fit into a matchbox and they could come in the pilot's pocket.' I said, 'I'll tell you one thing, my husband was human; therefore I won't be going to the airport to collect that', and I slammed the phone down."
Today, Shirley regrets she did not insist on the remains being brought to Australia and subjected to forensic examination.
Greg had been on dangerous assignments before, but she had not worried their son, Evan, by telling him about them. This time she had no choice.
When she sent her son to school that day, she assumed no-one would say anything to him. She was outraged when Evan told her what the children had said: "Ding dong, your dad's dead. King Kong bashed his head."
She told him Greg had been killed 4-5 days earlier, and it had been a quick death. However, she did not believe it was a quick death.
"I know how they kill Timorese with short knives. They attack them sexually, then string them up by their feet upside down, and they stab them with their short knives so that they begin to bleed profusely. Then they cut their mouths in such a way so while they're upside down, they look as if they're smiling and they virtually either suffocate or bleed to death.
"I suspect that is what happened to those journalists and because it was so horrific, people in the Australian government who know, and who I know are only interested in aid or trade with Indonesia, don't want it ever to come out."
Over the past 17 years, Shirley has sought to understand what happened to her husband by understanding what was happening in Timor.
For years she has written articles for newspapers, letters to editors and given interviews to the media in an attempt to broaden the public's knowledge of what is happening in East Timor.
Her participation in the effort of the Lusitania Expresso to go to Dili was a sign of her dedication to the freedom of the East Timorese people.
Shirley has done everything she legally can to find out about her husband's death. After the Santa Cruz massacre in Dili last November, she wrote to foreign minister Gareth Evans and asked him to reopen the inquiry into her husband while he was in
Indonesia. She received no reply.
In 1989 she went to East Timor for three weeks when Pope John Paul II was there. She went because she was told it would be a safe period. This was not quite the case.
"Even though the military operations were scaled down, and even though the intelligence department was virtually not operating, there was an enormous number of Indonesian military there."
She met an Indonesian soldier there, who told her how the journalists were killed — with short knives.
"And I said, 'Why did the Indonesians say they were shot?' He said, 'Because it's acceptable to Westerners'. So the whole thing has been a lie and a cover-up and a sham right from the beginning."