Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I recently met His Excellency Jose Ramos-Horta, the President of East Timor. We talked of Tony Stewart, the youngest of the Balibo Five, and his murder in the small crossroads town of Balibo, East Timor, on 16 October 1975. He was 21 years old. The events happened before I was born, but my parents shared the story with me, knowing it through their friendship with Anne E Stewart, younger sister of Tony and a well-known storyteller. Today Anne is in the chamber as we head to the 50th anniversary of the murder of her brother and his colleagues. No-one has been brought to justice or said sorry to the family in all this time.

To honour her brother, Tony, and to tell her family's story, she has published a collection of poems and prose, Crossroads: My Stories of Balibo. Almost every aspect of the events surrounding the murders, from the appalling duplicity of the Australian government's response to the devastating lifelong consequences for that family, is detailed. It is moving and deeply disturbing. Anne E, a dear friend and the Shannie—our nickname for grandmother—to my children, has written a moving account of small moments in time that tell the story and honour her brother. Quoting her parents, Anne shared:

The only contact we had with the Department of Foreign Affairs was when some fellow rang up and said…that he hoped we realised that we would have to pay for the body to be brought back to Australia.

That just about finished us off.

… tacit approval had been given by the Australian Government to the invasion

In one of Anne's poems, titled 'Gough', she writes:

Pompous pissant Gough

Gave the green light to Suharto's invasion

…we'll do absolutely nothing.

This was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald three days before the invasion. And here, in the hallowed halls of parliament, with axis to the national War Memorial, I quote from the poem entitled 'Family Lore':

We weren't told about his funeral until it was over

Anthony John Stewart

Loved son of Noel and June

R.I.P.

Inscribed on the headstone

in a Jakarta cemetery

Fake funeral held December 5th 1975

Woolcott and Whitlam's duplicity

Is part of our lore

Buried

The charred remains of five men

Collected from their hasty pyre in Balibo

Was it the Square? The Crossroads?

Or near the Chinese house

Where they died

Days later the fire

Like shards of pottery from an archaeological dig

their bones,

remnants raked and shovelled together

only enough for one coffin.

Years later some of the families wanted to exhume

Those fragments of five lives

Mum said "It's probably only chicken bones"

She'd always wondered

Reading the words of a World War 1 artist

Who'd written

The saddest thing on the battlefield

Was to hear grown men

In their last moments

Crying out for their mothers

Was there a faint call in that crossroads town under the banyan tree

"Mum"

We have let this family down. It wasn't until 2007, as written in the poem 'Whispering Down the Line, the Truth':

Pinch, Deputy Coroner, said 'deliberate'

They weren't caught in crossfire, as the Indonesians had proclaimed and the Australian government had accepted. From the same poem:

In 2014

An invitation to a briefing with the Australian Federal Police

who announced

"They were abandoning the enquiry,

After 1868 days of gathering evidence

…they had the names of

Those responsible for the slaughter

But hadn't interviewed one person in Indonesia

We were white with rage

I speak of this today to remind you of the importance of storytelling. Anne recorded many of my late father's, Rod May's, stories, and if she hadn't this knowledge would have been lost. But Anne assures me that amongst all of the clouds, there have been rainbows—the East Timor friendship network having just celebrated 25 years; Old rockers the Dili Allstars having received the Order of Timor-Leste; the work of the Balibo House Trust; the boite world music community, who commemorated 50 years of Timorese refugees in Australia; and the Alma nuns, who I have met and who have so much to teach us about gratitude and compassion.

I'm thankful for Anne's moving testimony, which has uncovered the true story from inside a family who lost a beloved son and brother. With 50 to 60 wars happening across the world today, I think of the collective grief that so many have endured and will endure.

Senate adjourned at 20 : 29