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Telling — East Timor: Personal Testimonies 1942-1992
By Michele Turner
University of NSW Press, 1992. 218 pp., $19.95
Reviewed by Wendy Lowenstein This is a superb book; the best oral history I have read. It is moving and passionate, and above all courageous. Michele Turner embraced an awesome responsibility and displayed amazing tenacity during the 10 years spent writing and talking with Australian WWII veterans and East Timorese in Australia. The resulting book could have been depressing, but "with the vividness of direct involvement" it inspires. It took about three years for informants "to articulate their own horror" and she relied on Timorese friends to tell when someone was ready to speak. Fatima Guzmao: "Don't cry, Michele ... I do not mind talking to you of these painful things because we must speak for our dead ... We must keep telling so people know the truth ... They ask us who wants to be first to die. I say to kill me first ... I want Jose to see me die. He knows then that after he is dead they cannot use me as their prostitute, pass me from hand to hand ... before he closes his eyes, I want him to see that I am dead." Turner's grandfather was an Australian commando kept alive by Timorese in WWII, as were many other Australian servicemen. After the Indonesian invasion of East Timor she started asking Australian war veterans about their experiences and began talking to Timorese in Australia. A range of opinions and testimonies, gathered at multiple sessions, are used. Interviews were usually carried out with trusted interpreters in Tetun, Portuguese or Hakka. Meticulous concentration and cross-questioning were needed; "One misunderstood pronoun could throw out the whole sense of a story". The evidence proved extremely accurate, the tellers trained by years of re-telling genealogies to informed audiences. East Timor: A Debt to Repay, produced by the ABC's Social History Unit and based on some material from this book, won the 1991 Human Rights Award for the best radio documentary. Michele Turner died in 1994, aged 43. The establishment of a prize for humanist oral history, in her name, is being discussed. For more details, ring the author on (03) 9510 8379, PO Box 33, Hawksburn Vic, 3142.[Wendy Lowenstein has published several oral histories of Australian working class life and is now researching a book about work.]