Penguin Books Australia

1

At the wheel, behind a dirt-scraped, dangerously opaque windscreen, John Maynard is buoyant. 'We're in East Timor, the craziest little country in the world. Isn't it wonderful? I reckon people who come to Timor once always come again. And there's no surf. So why come back?' I know he doesn't expect an answer and I can't provide one yet. 'Sure it can be dif­ficult. But you,' he says, 'are going to absolutely love it.'

As producer of the feature film Balibo, John has survived life in the East Timorese capital Dili for the past seven weeks, organising everything from bottled water supplies and wartime Jeeps to fake guns, compressed air and film extras from Falintil – Forças de Defesa de Timor-Leste, the nation's fledgling army. His face, framed by a playboyish mane of silver hair, is tanned but more lined than usual, scarred by too many nights hunched over spreadsheets. The heat so early in the day doesn't help. I've known John for a decade or so; he's both beaming and unsettled, and more mercurial than ever, eyes darting around. With an active volcano rumbling under his bum, also known as a film in production, things are never easy. I steer the conversation away from celluloid.

'Over there,' I indicate as we head towards town. 'What's going on?'

John glances out. 'They're pulling down the UN refugee camp.'

The temporary structures that had housed thousands are being dis­mantled with some enthusiasm by hammer-wielding young men – an encouraging sign. It's paid work, but I'm eager to believe they're also engaged in a symbolic act of moving forward. I also can't help wonder­ing if some of them have, in the darker past, wielded machetes against their countrymen. This much I know about Timor: for every advance, an undertow. They struggle forward, then attack each other. Winners are rare. The ground is littered with the browned remains of once-white UNHCR refugee tents.

'I met a house builder in Sydney,' I say. 'He's coming up here to live. Building hundreds of new homes for the refugees.' A neighbour's house was being extended and I'd fallen into conversation with the builder, a rugged Australian of about sixty. It quickly emerged he was off to East Timor to start a new life managing a housing cooperative. His wife had found work starting up a credit union in Dili. He wasn't a do-gooder or an aid worker, he insisted – what they were both looking for, he declared, was escape from certainty. Where would they live? 'We'll buy a place in Dili and live there,' he said, as if East Timor was a suburb of Sydney. When I tell this to John, he nods agreement.

'Not a bad place to retire,' he says. 'Plenty to do.'

As we move towards the centre of town, activity picks up but the poverty and disrepair are still obvious. It wasn't meant to be like this. Mil­lions in foreign aid has poured into the country and income from Timor's oil reserves is streaming in. Growth should be starting to take off, yet central Dili seems in no better shape in 2008 than when I left, over three decades ago. Blame the occupying Indonesians for their viciousness, their callousness, their superiority over the East Timorese and the vandalism they inflicted on their way out in 1999; all abundantly certified in news reports. But when I dig through my experience, whatever is awry in East Timor ultimately funnels back to 1975, to those crazy days in Dili when I was younger and the territory was trying to emerge from the desperate legacy of Portuguese colonialism, and when a confused elite ran the place, attempting to solve myriad domestic problems while gearing up for war. The roots of East Timor's pain are historically deep and hopelessly tan­gled; the ghosts of the centuries hover and still rule the present.

In 1948, the American author John Dos Passos wrote of the 'scar-faced public buildings' he found in the decadently lush Amazonian city of

Manaus, a place of neglected parks where rampant trees had invaded the footpaths and other signs that 'still echo memories of mighty projects that have failed'. Brazil had long been free of Portuguese rule and whenever the post-colonial world challenged Lisbon's ludicrous pretensions to being a global power, it was elsewhere – mostly in Africa, hardly ever in Asia. Countries like Angola and Mozambique sat on vast mineral resources, while outposts like Goa, Macau and Timor remained, at best, symbolic territories and, at worst, dumping grounds for Portugal's deportados or dis­sidents. East Timor sat at the very bottom of the colonial pecking order. Four hundred years of authoritarian rule had left the half-island in mis­erable shape: under-educated and undeveloped, Catholic by belief and animist in spirit, its western border buffering the world's most populous Muslim nation, its chief export coffee and its tourism industry confined to visiting yachtsmen and hippies bound for Nepal.

That was how I found things in 1975 and they don't seem to have moved along since. The drive into Dili confirms this with a hefty slap to my senses. I was expecting far more development after nearly a quarter of a century of Indonesian occupation, and all I can locate is despair; the tiny nation I'm so eager to embrace is closer to nineteenth-century impov­erishment than 21st-century advancement. Buildings of all sizes – offices and houses and factories – are gutted, windows broken. Kids wave to the sky as we drive past, clutching broken toys. The scattered adults are young and old, but an entire swathe of middle-aged Timorese seems to be miss­ing, as if there's a blank space where the bulk of the population should be. Even on this sunny Saturday morning the street markets operate at half speed, without the energy of renewal or hope. Shanties border the traffic-tangled road and a shroud of dry-season dust settles over the landscape. Only days ago, I was told, the Balibo production had brought the centre of Dili to a halt; now it seems not such an achievement.

Anger about East Timor, I realise, has been brewing in me for years. It's not only about the abuses, about the torture and waste, it's also about me. For much of my adult life I've been accused of not being involved enough, of being too remote, of being too diplomatic, of being an Aus­tralian spy, of being a Communist, of sitting on the fence, of being a stooge of Canberra, of working for the Indonesians and the Americans, of being too close to the story, of abandoning the East Timorese in their hour of need, of cowardice. In all this I'm not alone, nor in such bad company: the President of the Republic has repeatedly suffered the same accusations. More than ever, I need to connect once again with José Ramos-Horta, mano a mano, and compare notes.

In 1993, fresh from a stint as European Correspondent for Australia's SBS network, I opted for a career change, from journalism to film writing by way of fiction. I'd already published two novels: the first, The Children Must Dance, was based on my experiences in East Timor in 1975. I was forty-four and bursting with ideas, and my bold experiments with human relationships had been tempered – I'd met the woman who would become my wife. New directions were in the air. I'd been offered a screenwriting attachment to the Australian Film Television and Radio School. Every day I fled Sydney domesticity to focus on scenes, three-act structures, character development and plot points. The plan was to write an Oscar-winner, a movie that would link the surrealism of my cinematic hero, Luis Buñuel, to the fluid visions of my other cinematic hero, Martin Scorsese. What I wrote instead was a short film about a young Japanese business­man on his first overseas trip.

I'd seen Robert Connolly around the school. He was a producing stu­dent and aspiring director: short, intense, hard to miss. He had a slightly hunched back (the result of some childhood illness), an erratic red splotch of a birthmark on his head, penetrating eyes and an intensely-focused attitude to performance. I immediately saw a creative partner. Soon he'd turned Mr Ikegami's Flight, my twelve sheets of coffee-stained script, into a highly polished, seventeen-minute, 35mm Panavision production that might have been the lost reel of a Hollywood film.

One night, Rob came to our place for a Greek dinner. After dessert, I screened a video of The Passenger. Rob sat on our sofa, utterly absorbed. Eighteen years earlier, Penelope Gilliatt in The New Yorker had called Antonioni's film the 'un-idealised portrait of a drained man whose one remaining stimulus is to push his luck'. That sounded like me, even in 1993. Having failed to connect with a guerrilla army in Africa, David

Locke, a world-weary TV journalist played by Jack Nicholson, decides to assume the identity of another traveller, who turns out to be a gun dealer. Gilliatt described a man whose existential, careless journey could end only in death.

At the closing credits, Rob turned slowly to me. 'Incredible.'

'That's the film you're going to make one day,' I said. 'Not in Africa.'

Rob glanced back to the credits, absorbed again. 'So where?'

'Closer. Maybe in East Timor.'

We swing onto the seafront road bordered by banyan trees and I catch the sign. Hotel Turismo. A cream concrete post thrusts with modernist pre­tensions towards the water, topped with the child-like, carefree name of the hotel. It implies more of Brazilian beach culture than Portuguese Old World refinement, though neither is evident. What the Turismo really offers, historically speaking, is continuity. Guests come and go, return year in and out, and notice nothing, for the simple reason that noth­ing changes. Civil conflicts and foreign invasions, machete murders, riots and demonstrations, the march of time and salty air off the Timor Sea: all batter at its yellowing façade and make no impression. All they do is reinforce the Turismo's reputation for time-warped order and a near-stultifying degree of sameness. And sadness; even those pink oleanders in the driveway look sad. The Turismo has hovered in my thoughts and dreams for three decades.

For five weeks, this was the hub of my East Timor experience, the hotel I returned to nightly, exhausted from hours in the field, and left every morning, refreshed by even a few hours' sleep and burning with ambition to find stories that nobody else had stumbled upon, stories that would shake a sleepy Australian public from its slumber and create alarm about great and unforeseeable outcomes to the north. It proved to be, with one exception, a wasted exercise. The exception was, of course, the deaths of five of my television news colleagues. Apparently the Turismo was owned by a Portuguese who'd already fled with his family to Aus­tralia, but that hardly mattered: Carolina, the manageress, ran the place as if she owned it. The Turismo, despite its name, was never a tourist hotel in those few desperate months in late 1975, when its lace-filled dining room became the de facto headquarters of Fretilin's Central Committee, com­bining silver service with well-polished hand grenades and barely dirtied combat uniforms.

I step up to the reception counter. The place is deserted. John sighs and hits the desk bell, and again for good measure. Every room has a pigeon hole and every pigeon hole is empty. A neon glow dissolves the harsher light from the beach and increasingly I feel that I've stepped onto an empty film set. The previous week, the lead actor in Balibo, Anthony LaPaglia, had stood in the same spot to receive his room keys, in 1975 ­movie time, from a girl behind the counter. I'd viewed the edited scene and where I am standing now is no different, since nothing has changed in the subsequent thirty years. (This, as production designer Bob Cousins would tell me, is happily known in the business as a 'walk up': no set adjustments needed, just place the actors in situ and roll the cameras.) As the seconds pass, I begin to wonder if the Turismo is receiving guests. Then a teenage boy with a slight fuzz on his face appears dreamily from an inner office where a computer glows.

A friendly chat seems unlikely. 'Maniaty. I'm booked in.'

The boy nods and tosses some paperwork onto the counter. He enters a few details, including my name, then swivels the paper around to face me. 'Sign here,' he says. I sign at the bottom and follow his pen up the page. 'This is your room.' He points to the top, to the empty space under 'Room No.', and draws two equal strokes. 'Room Eleven.' He nods, waits for some acknowledgement, then senses my unease and silence. Perhaps I want a better room. He produces the old brass key. 'Room Eleven,' he repeats.

'It's just down the corridor,' says John. 'They're all much the same.'

I look at him. 'It's the room I stayed in thirty-three years ago.'

Flying into Melbourne a month earlier to brief the cast. What can I tell a group of actors that they don't already know from the files they've been given? They've got the basics, the family photos, the TV reports that sur­vive; they've been allotted tasks – reporter, cameraman, sound man – and

replicated their looks. Enough to get a grip on, but more tantalising for that. Who was the enigma known as Greg Shackleton? What were my fears in those final days? Why did Roger East go to Timor in the face of near-certain death? Interesting that these questions can occupy historians and actors equally, yet at different levels. What the actors are eager for can't be distilled from profiles. Rob, as director, has asked me to open their minds to the era, to make them question why the fate of a small group of journalists from a past generation matters in this one. As the plane descends, the task seems huge. All I can offer are glimpses from the Timor cyclorama in my head.

'Mate, mate!' Rob greets me with a bear-hug as the actors hold back. They're looking at a relic: a living survivor of 1975, full of baggage that can be mined for their greedy thespian needs. If only they knew how little my offerings will compare to what they'll unearth for themselves in the weeks ahead. 'Come and meet the guys,' Rob says.

He reels off a tangle of names soon to be attached not only to faces but to personalities, complexities – as they grow deeper into their film roles, they'll also open their lives to me. Character names are tagged to theirs. 'Gyton Grantley, playing Gary Cunningham; Tom Wright, Brian Peters; Mark Winter, who's Tony Stewart; and Nathan Phillips, Malcolm Rennie.' That's only four actors – four of the Balibo Five – and the one missing is central to the story. Damon Gameau, who'll be Greg Shack­leton, is in Ireland, playing a gay, plate-throwing chef in a BBC drama series. ('It's all work, mate,' he'll later explain.) We'll catch up in Sydney shortly for the same briefing exercise, where I'll also meet Simon Stone, who plays my character in the film.

We were young, I explain, and reckless. Baby boomers, products of postwar consumerism, escaping the grind and conformity of our parents' lives. We'd spent our teens attached to the Beatles, the Beach Boys and long hair, and then we'd cracked the job lottery spectacularly, entering the still-exotic world of television news without a day's experience. Back then, I explained, journalism still had an aura, a mystery about it: even landing a cadetship was an arcane process in which there were no fixed rules. It was a club in which very old men with nicotine stains and rasping coughs mixed with baby-faced youngsters. Once you were in the door, you were in, and you stayed for years. Once deemed a journalist, you enjoyed a sort of unspoken power as you moved about the city, able to talk your way across police lines or into forbidden places. You moved with rich and poor, the weak and the strong, and adopted the moral high ground on injustice and wrongdoings, even if your own existence was a shambles. If you were anything politically, you were on the left, but not radically so; you were on the side of underdogs, against anything that smelled fishy. Your curiosity was immense, insatiable. You'd drop anything, even nights of unending pleasure, for the chance to chase a great story.

Journalism was a job, certainly not a profession; we felt bulletproof and thought we were brilliant, and some were and most were not; we stayed up far too late, smoked till our lungs were dry, took the piss out of our bosses while drinking heavily with them, laid the charm on any attrac­tive female and too frequently ended up in strange beds. We worked like rabid dogs, ignoring the clock but hoping to be mentioned in dispatches. We were not sportsmen but we followed sport, mainly the horses, and we were not musicians but some of us were hooked on Motown soul, others on movie soundtracks, and most on the hit parade. Cars were vital indica­tors of culture, the European rating over the local. We were pretentious and down to earth, ambitious and committed. We were a mess of contra­dictions. Our heroes were people just like us who had risen above us.

I hope Balibo will be, I tell them, a paean to the last rays of that lifestyle, to the notion of journalism as a wild adventure, at once carefree and committed. To say as journalists we lived and worked for the moment was not entirely true, but it wasn't so wrong either. What few hours of life we had beyond journalism were spent living wildly and randomly, unworried by lack of sleep and ridiculously eager to get back to work the next day. Even though we were all relatively young, time seemed to be running out. Maybe none of us expected to live that long anyway.

In the media, the Balibo Five had been portrayed as 'Australian news­men', a shorthand description that was incorrect, I point out. Only two, Shackleton and Stewart, who worked in Melbourne for Channel Seven, held Australian passports; their colleague at Seven, Cunningham, was a New Zealander, and both Peters and Rennie, who worked in Melbourne for Channel Nine, were British citizens. They were not so different from hundreds of eager young journalists working inside nascent television news services across Australia. This, naturally, made them harder to play than those cavalier war correspondents who'd spent the past decade dodging incoming fire in Vietnam. The Five were essentially a bunch of local TV journos who took up the offer to go to East Timor. They went to Balibo and stayed five days trying to film Indonesian military action, and when the Indonesians finally came with guns blazing, they were murdered. At one level, that was the story. On the other hand, they'd become iconic, even mythological figures through their deaths. The actors playing the Balibo Five will have to work hard to discover the everyday reality of the newsmen they're portraying, to bring them to life through their very ordinariness.

At lunch in a nearby café, Anthony LaPaglia turns up smiling. He's playing the central role of Roger East, the older journalist who, inex­plicably, ventures to East Timor to investigate the deaths of the Balibo Five, in the knowledge that he'll be in Dili when the Indonesians invade. The day after they do, he is executed. LaPaglia is a TV drama star in the United States, his usual persona the husky voiced forensic cop of few words ('Dust the prints'). In the crime series Without A Trace he plays a special agent who tracks missing persons; in Balibo, the missing persons are the five newsmen. Tony, as he's known to associates, is deeply com­mitted to Balibo, having invested heavily in the film. In a nylon bomber jacket and white runners, munching on Caesar salad, he's trying to work out if Roger East was a saint or a lunatic, straight or gay, a Marxist or CIA spy, altruistic or suicidal. 'I figure this guy had a lot of baggage,' he says dryly. What's fascinating about East, I reply, was his desperate effort at fifty-two to reinvent himself. To pump some life into his disillusioned being, only to have it destroyed with a single bullet.

By the time I'd arrived in London in 1973, eager to take on the world, war had become a central component of my life. Vietnam not only hung like a black cloud over the Western world but had also held me back: for three years I'd lived with a draft notice, unable to leave Australia without the authority of the Department of National Service, who sought my services in the last-ditch defence of South Vietnam. Six years earlier, I'd joined the Australian Broadcasting Commission, fresh out of high school. They were looking not for a media superstar but for anyone of passable talent with a surname that wasn't Anglo-Irish and with skin that wasn't milky-white and freckled; not enough migrants' kids were appearing in the media or public life. I had a Greek father and a perfect Australian accent. My plan was to take international journalism by storm. In the languor of Brisbane, Australia, this proved highly unlikely.

When the draft ended, I fled to England and worked at Visnews, later to become Reuters Television but then a raggedly busy operation run out of the former Singer sewing-machine factory at the western edge of London. From all corners of the planet we received exposed news film; processed, edited and scripted it; placed in it yellow canvas sacks; and sent it via motorcycle to Heathrow for distribution to the world. Viet­nam followed me to London; every third news film I scripted, it seemed, came from South-East Asia's bloody hellholes. The geography of the con­flict (Saigon, Da Nang, Cam Ranh Bay, Nha Trang, Tay Ninh, Kompong Cham, Bien Hoa, An Loc) superimposed itself on the geography of my London (Camden Town, Acton, King's Road, South Kensington, Porto-bello Road, Notting Hill). I'd fled to the hub of Western civilisation, but Asia kept following me to work and the pub.

Into the hectic newsroom one afternoon bounced a young man slightly older than me, looking for anyone to talk with. He seemed a spiv, wearing a cheap flashy suit and mandatory thin tie, but the moment he spoke I knew he was an Australian. He was, even then, with his cheeky smile and flood of blond locks, a living legend. Neil Davis was normally to be found in a rice paddy under fire, filming 'bang-bang' with his CP16camera, or wrapped in the sensuous arms of an Asian beauty, or drinking the opposi­tion under the table at his usual haunt, Saigon's Formula One bar. Davis was said to be fearless: 'I wasn't afraid of being killed,' he declared later, 'because that's that, and you're done.' Our then mutual boss, the majesti­cally titled World Editor John Tulloh, claimed Neil Davis knew 'more about what was going on in Vietnam than just about anyone there'.

'Who's up for a drink?' Neil asked. Hours later the beers were still flow­ing in the watering hole at the Acton Sporting Club across the back lane. The new suit was critical, Neil explained, because he'd flown to London

to impress the Visnews chiefs; he wanted to negotiate a better deal, or else he'd take the offers being dangled by NBC and CBS. Neil tried to weep his frustrations on us, but what we wanted, in that liquid June afternoon, were combat tales from Vietnam.

Only days earlier, I'd handled Neil's story on a fierce battle along the banks of the Tonle Sap River in Cambodia. Out of the yellow bag had tumbled not only several rolls of spectacular footage, but Neil's notes, typed on flimsy paper with a hand-drawn map showing how the Khmer Rouge had confronted loyal government troops. 'Badly wounded woman treated, much blood. She dies later. A small child stands nearby, runs off. Woman hit seconds before by mortar shrapnel. Two soldiers seen weep­ing over body of their friend. Dead man's small dog sits close by. Later they light joss sticks.' The government troops had been cut to shreds. The Communists seemed on an unstoppable roll, and so too was Neil.

Somewhere in that boozy session, from which Neil staggered off to negotiate his better deal, my own intentions took shape. Vietnam was dying down but beyond those monochrome backblocks of west London and the clubby domains of Chelsea and Kensington, I would find a new conflict, one of my own, and cover it intensely. I wanted to move through the creative territory that Neil Davis inhabited, which in 1973still read like the pages of a Graham Greene or Hemingway novel: war, men under fire, the smell of cordite and earth on the one hand, and an exotic lab­yrinth of spies and bars, women and endless hotel rooms on the other. Had I known Neil's ultimate fate, splayed dead on a Bangkok sidewalk in 1986, cut down by shrapnel in a minor coup, I might have reconsidered. Or maybe not.

Returning to work, to the long night shift that followed, I churned out scripts on growing turmoil in Latin America, on President Richard Nix­on's talks with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, on worsening abuses by the Greek colonel's junta, but my mind was locked on Neil's example of a life less ordinary, by journalistic standards anyway. Chile seemed a possible launching pad, or maybe Argentina. Somewhere Latin and exotic, prefer­ably where the women were also beautiful and clever. At it happened, the fate awaiting me was elsewhere, completely off the map. In two years I would be under fire in a tiny, abandoned Portuguese colony.

By now, writing news scripts was as natural as breathing. John Tulloh had hired me on a bleak January day, promoted me rapidly up the desk and made sure I was given decent stories. A decade earlier, in 1963, John had himself arrived starry-eyed at Visnews from Sydney and churned out scripts too, night after night. His supervisor at the head of the desk was another wandering Australian reporter, a journeyman also searching for adventure.

His name was Roger East.

The basin is chipped, of course. The shower still dribbles, naturalmente. The curtains have been refreshed in a cheap baroque plum, the walls recoated in stark white, and a new ceiling fan has replaced the arthritic rattler of before, but everything else is preserved in aspic. Room Eleven at the Turismo has seen a thousand guests come and go since the day I had departed, never expecting to return, in 1975. All have aged since, but Room Eleven has not and, at this curious moment of re-entry – as I step into its few humble square metres, my solitary private space in Timor and epicentre of my reporting and writing, the place of my deepest fears – I haven't aged either.

I walk further into the room, lower my suitcase, and cross to the win­dow. I pull back the curtains and, through iron bars, gaze onto the front car park, the Avenida dos Direitos Humanos, the banyan trees, a wheezy old dog, and the sea. Were the iron bars here before? I can't remember, though I should. 'Iron bars' and 'tropical paradise' don't normally go together. I guess they've been installed to keep thieves out, but maybe over the troubled decades they were also meant to protect those on the inside – Indonesian officers, foreign correspondents – from attackers. Or worse, have the bars been installed to prevent those inside from escaping?

Beside the window is an alcove into which is built a wooden bench, a table for snacks and a desk to write at. I run my hand along its edge. I spilled more than a few glasses of wine here and it's where I pounded at my trusty Olivetti portable in an age before laptops. It was at this desk that I typed my daily dispatches on East Timor's looming fate, and it was here that I wrote the darkest chapter in the saga: the first story to the world that the border town of Balibo had been overrun, that five of my television news colleagues were missing, feared dead, and that a pall of uncertainty had fallen over the colony. I place my palm on the wooden surface, hoping for vibrations. Nothing. Room Eleven is filled with deep memories and omens, to be extracted slowly.

I stand back so I can take in the room and shape it against my mem­ory. Yes, no doubt whatsoever, this is the room I stayed in. I'm holding the proof in my hand: a letter I pulled out of storage a few days ago, sent to my girlfriend in 1975. In the top right-hand corner is written, 'Room 11, Turismo Hotel'. The space seems smaller than I recall, but perhaps I've expanded it over the years, merged it into other hotel rooms and bedrooms I've slept in, loved in, argued in, recovered in, had all manner of disasters in. I grab the keys and head to the courtyard, the beer garden we called 'Casablanca' in the old days, to connect once more with the cast and crew of Balibo.

The day before, in Sydney, my wife had asked if she could see me off. 'Better you're there when I return,' I'd said.

'I've been thinking a lot about that very moment,' she had replied, obscurely. She'd suffered a brain hemorrhage months earlier. Everything she said was conditioned by that; our emotional register had been torn, not so badly, but angled away from where we were before the hemorrhage. I smiled weakly, not understanding what she meant or even my reaction to it. We were still emotionally linked, in ways stronger than ever, but not as things were before her brain snapped. Maybe that would never come back. In boarding the lengthy flight for Darwin, and then Dili, I was also escaping a confusing and messy present.

Cinema is clarity, they say. Maybe, I think, as I emerge into the blaz­ing sunshine of Dili, being around actors will help me handle my wife.

Rob walks in circles, straight lines, circles. He gazes at me and walks across the springy lawn. He's about to identify the bee swarm that's attacking his brain. He sighs and places a hand on my shoulder. 'What is it about actors?'

I shrug. 'You're the director.'

'They want to ride motorbikes – in the middle of the night!'

John is reassuring. 'They're taking the bikes back. If there's an accident out of insurance, we can't complete the film. They're going snorkeling today – that's fine, but they can't scuba. And they'll all need T-shirts and make sure they've got plenty of sunscreen.' He sounds like a harried par­ent trying to round up teenage boys.

Rob surrenders with a laugh. 'I just had a chat to Jane.' His wife, the film's casting agent. 'She says, 'You wanted me to find guys the same age as the Balibo Five with the same sense of invincibility. And guess what – looks like you've got it!'.'

By now the courtyard is coming to life. Damon Gameau, who's play­ing Greg Shackleton, ambles over and greets me warmly. We'd had a full day together in Sydney trying to come to grips with his character, the most complex of the Five, and Damon had been relentlessly shaping a repository of everything known about the man. 'I've written down fifty words that describe him,' he tells me. 'Self-determined, fastidious, perfec­tionist, thorough, driven, ambitious . . .'

'They're all positives, of course,' I say.

'They were. But there were also negatives.'

'Like what?'

'Things to do with competition or vanity, frustration, anger. He had a short fuse when things weren't going his way. And how he had to get control of events. What happens when someone desperately wants this thing and it's being pulled away from them . . .'

We're interrupted. 'Shit, man,' says Tom Wright, who plays camera­man Brian Peters, putting his thick Bristol accent on display. 'You know who else stayed there before you?' The coincidence about Room Eleven has navigated its way across the tables and picked up a bonus element along the way.

'I'm frightened to ask.'

'Simon Stone, that's fucking who.' Simon is the actor playing me. 'Except he stayed there and didn't know . . .'

Rob shakes his head. 'You're kidding me.'

'Bizarre,' I say. It's starting to trouble me. The Balibo production has taken over the hotel, and John suggests that Rob set the whole thing up.

 'Come on,' says Rob, 'there's fifty-something rooms here. Besides, I'm too busy making a movie.' He rubs his eyes, which are red-rimmed, and watches the producer of his film walk away, reading glasses dangling off his neck like a crusty Cambridge professor.

John has around fifteen films to his credit. Between them, he and Rob and John know the tricks. Their production company, Arenafilm, has achieved, in its modest way, what most creative teams aspire to and rarely accomplish in a hostile market: the ability to turn out a movie, one that they're not ashamed of, every few years, to cover their costs and move on to the next. Industry accolades, great reviews, film festivals and awards are just one dimension; grinding work, the endless scramble for finance, keeping the machine afloat is the other, the one that nobody else sees. Their cramped offices are filled with the flotsam of previous efforts: the posters, the screenplays, the soundtracks, the DVDs. To the world beyond, Rob and John are successful partners living in a creative paradise; their relationship, in reality, is as complicated and messy as any marriage that's lasted fifteen years.

'After my father,' Rob says, 'he's the most influential man in my life.'

The negotiations in London came to nil and Neil went freelance, headed back to Phnom Penh and sat out the war in Indochina. I returned to Australia to script international news for the ABC at a cluttered desk in Sydney, overlooking the night lights of busy William Street. The pros­titutes clicked their heels up and down as I attempted to pump drama into the ageing Watergate scandal, and wrote about the intriguing tale of Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier in the Second World War who'd just surrendered in the Philippines. (He had not given up the fight earlier, he explained, because nobody had ordered him to.) In far­away Portugal, meanwhile, a group of left-wing Portuguese army officers had overthrown the fascist regime that had ruled the country since the 1920s. Red carnations had littered the streets of Lisbon, I wrote, and democracy had triumphed.

A tumultuous year later, Neil Davis re-emerged with the last and great­est scoop of the Vietnam War: filming North Vietnamese tanks crashing

through the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon, the symbolic end to the conflict he'd covered longer than any other correspondent. He had kept filming even as a North Vietnamese soldier ran towards him with a gun, poked him in the stomach and shouted, 'Hands up!' Only someone as confident and cheeky as Davis could have lowered his camera, smiled and uttered politely in Vietnamese, 'Welcome to Saigon, comrade. I'm an Australian and I've been waiting for you.'

By then I was between assignments. I'd just left the ABC's newest broadcasting venture, Radio 2JJ, a youth music station designed to stop audiences under twenty-five from drifting to the emerging commercial FM networks. Radical left meets the Velvet Underground was the pitch, with swirly eyeballs and spaced-out announcers thrown in. Radio 2JJ kicked off with a song banned by the commercial stations, Skyhooks' 'You Just Like Me 'Cos I'm Good in Bed' then launched into the Stones' 'Sympathy for the Devil'. The tone was set for a tumultuous year. A col­league from my Brisbane days, John Arden, and I had been sent from the 'adult' ABC to start and supervise the 2JJ news service, in the vain hope that it might remain closer to Establishment than Alternative. After six months, our eardrums almost ruptured, John headed for Latin America and I left 2JJ too, Leica in hand, aiming to become a photojournalist. In the interim, I returned to the 4.30a.m. shift on the cigarette-scarred subs' desk. I had a girlfriend, a Volkswagen and a plan. Unknown to me, the plan was already shot.

Just to Australia's north, the effects of Portugal's 'Carnation Revolu­tion' were being played out on a minor scale, on the once-sleepy streets of Dili, the capital of East Timor. The creaking Portuguese colony had begun to embrace political life, and parties formed rapidly. Three sig­nificant forces emerged: the Associagao Social Democrata de Timor, ASDT, an anti-colonial group that morphed into Fretilin – the Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente or Revolutionary Front for East Timor, leftist and calling for full independence; the Timorese Democratic Union, or UDT, on the right and gathering its strength from middle-class traders and equally supporting independence; and the Timorese Popular Democratic Association, better known as Apo­deti, which saw the colony's best hope in integration with Indonesia. A brief and bloody struggle – a coup staged by UDT, followed by a Fretilin takeover – had left the poverty-stricken territory in turmoil. Its hopes of survival as a stand-alone nation seemed unlikely to be realised and its impoverished souls, barely half a million of them, were of little con­sequence in the geopolitical vortex resulting from America's defeat in Vietnam. The Portuguese governor and his entourage, receiving no clear directions from chaotic Lisbon, where political upheaval continued, had fled to an offshore island. Almost by default, and sooner than anyone expected, Fretilin had become the inheritor of East Timor, and imme­diately set about 'the liberation of the people under colonial domain'. The fear in Western military eyes was that a 'Little Cuba' might emerge, driven by Fretilin's revolutionary agenda.

All this passed through my keyboard as routinely as the global weather reports. East Timor did not register in my world, nor in our audience's demands; after the long and draining debacle of Vietnam, most Aus­tralians were in no mood to hear about what they saw as a minor spat in South-East Asia. One morning our cantankerous chief of staff freely vented his anger about 'some bloke from East Timor who's been pestering us for a week', and dispatched me with a crew to interview him. We drove to Hyde Park, hoping to connect with someone answering to 'a shortish guy with a Jimi Hendrix frizzy haircut and Ray-Ban glasses'. I didn't take long to find him: under a Moreton Bay fig, near the windswept mists of the Archibald Fountain, stood José Ramos-Horta.

I have no detailed memory of the interview and no trace of it survives. But it was aired on ABC News that night, a plea to Australians by Fre­tilin's energetic and self-proclaimed foreign affairs spokesman to avert a looming disaster: the possible takeover of his tiny country by neighbour­ing Indonesia. The switchboard did not light up with concerned callers; the impact was imperceptible. José went home to East Timor and I went home to East Balmain. He was twenty-five and I was twenty-six. On the short drive to Balmain I turned on the Beetle's cassette player and bounced along to Rod Stewart's latest album, Atlantic Crossing.

Two days later, I staggered into work bleary-eyed: too much wine, too much late-night talk, too much sex probably (recovery then took ten or fifteen minutes). After polishing a few pars on another IRA attack in

Belfast, I wandered by my pigeon hole. In it was a folded note. I took it out. Ten words.

Will you go to East Timor? Come and see me.

'I've organised a television crew. You'll need Portuguese visas and sup­plies. A charter flight from Darwin – you'll need to arrange that from here. Don't spend too much, either. Fly in and get a few good stories and get out. A week's enough.'

Best known for his tweedy suits and imperious airs, Fred Miles was the ABC's Federal News Editor, a grand title he paraded around the eternally busy and rather shabby newsroom at 164William Street, headquarters of the biggest newsgathering operation in Australia. He had acquired his graces from postwar stints in the ABC's prestigious London bureau and had never come to terms with the young brigade of journalists now infect­ing the Commission and its values. I was borderline: with luck Maniaty might be saved, but he had displayed unfortunate tendencies in crossing William Street to work with radical Radio 2JJ. Timor, I knew, was to be Fred's test.

In the few hours since receiving his note, I had scurried about trying to find out more about the colony six hundred and twenty kilometres north-west of Australia, over the Timor Sea and abutting West Timor, Indonesia's southernmost province. I'd studied the history of South-East Asia at university, and had written an essay about 'Bung' Sukarno, scoring a Distinction. But Indonesia, I naively believed, had little to do with Por­tuguese East Timor. The interview down the street with Horta a few days earlier had been my entrée into a subject that would soon engulf my life.

I rang my mother in Brisbane and told her I was going to East Timor. She was an extreme worrywart, but neither she nor my father, like most Australians, had ever heard of the place and they were less concerned than they should have been. The recent civil war in East Timor had been so under-reported that it had totally escaped their attention. In any event, my parents were suburban people and grubby wars in small places rated almost zero on their interest scale. They enjoyed watching quiz shows. I promised to send regular postcards, the email of the 1970s. I wonder now if I didn't go to Timor deliberately to put my mother in her place, to say, in effect, 'Mum, I'm twenty-six years old and I really have to conduct my life on my terms'. Heading into a conflict zone is a forceful set of terms to offer your parents, so, if pressed, I would explain the trip away in terms of duty to my illustrious employer and to my chosen career: just as firemen ran into burning buildings, journalists covered wars. She said, 'You be careful, won't you?' but she said that even when I drove to the supermarket.

The rest of the morning shift was spent frantically making calls and connecting with my crew. We hoped to leave the following day and be in Dili the day after. It was as ambitious as trying to launch a space mission in a week. Alex Henderson, I was told, would be my cameraman, and Roger Doyle my soundman. I knew neither of them, but that wasn't unu­sual working in news; teams were regularly formed for 'same day' stories. You assumed someone higher up had made intelligent decisions about the best people for the job. It was like the military: frontline solders were thrown together, as often strangers as friends, and quickly had to form tight working bonds to help each other in the stress of battle. Alex and Roger were strangers to me for now; within a week, we would be desper­ately close and fighting for our lives.

One last encounter with Fred Miles, ever the ABC executive at his desk. 'Good luck,' he said, 'and make contact when you can.' Timor was just another foreign assignment. Fred and his fellow ABC News managers had two dozen reporters posted around the planet, some in extreme trouble spots. Probably the last thing he realised was that he was sending us into a full-scale, life-threatening catastrophe. We flew that morning to Darwin, and a day later we were over the Timor Sea, approaching our target.