HISTORY AND SHAME

Abstract

This essay examines a series of Australian texts in an attempt to perceive the ways in which East Timor has functioned as a test of the operation of Australian memory and the processing of national shame over the failure of the nation to aid a neighbouring people who had aided Australia at great cost during the Second World War. After introducing the notion of shame and the contrast between official Australian policy and public sentiment over the issue of East Timor from the date of the Indonesian invasion in 1975, a contrast rooted in the nation's sense of itself as being a sponsor of freedom, democracy and the fair go, the essay examines a series of fictional texts dealing with East Timor in some way, and then returns to the concept of shame and its relevance in this context. The texts dealt with include fiction for adults and children: Tony Maniaty's The Children Must Dance (1984), Gail Jones's Other Places (1992), Bill Green's Cleaning Up (1993), Kerry Collison's The Timor Man (1998), Libby Gleeson's Refuge (1998) and Josef Vondra's No-name Bird (2000), along with the Australian–Canadian miniseries Answered by Fire (2006) and the Australian film Balibo (Robert Connolly, 2009). As expected, concerned observers share many features of their reaction to events in East Timor, but inevitably, as they read East Timor they are also reading Australia and its relation to an ethics of conviction that might have dealt more honourably with the invasion and oppression on its doorstep. The analysis draws on the work of Jeffrey Olick, Avishai Margalit and Michael Morgan in its approach to regret, shame and memory.