PUBLIC RIGHT TO KNOW

MarcusReviews O’Donnell is journalism co-ordinator in the School of Journalism and Creative Writing, University of Wollongong. Following the Balibo massacre’s whale

Shooting Balibo: Blood and Memory in by Tony Maniaty. Sydney: Viking, 2009, 320 pp. ISBN 9780670073580 But in retrospect it also tells us how large the 1975 events at Balibo ARLY on in Tony Maniaty’s have figured in Maniaty’s life.Shoot - EShooting Balibo we come across ing Balibo narrates his recent return Herman Melville, Michelangelo An- to Timor, as an advisor to Robert tonioni and John Dos Passos. We Connolly’s filmBalibo and marks the quickly get the message that this is first time he has returned to the tiny as much a journey of the imagina- island nation since he fled just before tion as it is a travelogue, memoir or the Indonesian invasion in 1975. In a investigation. Maniaty tells us that sense, the book is still about him fol- when he went to East Timor as an lowing the whale. ABC reporter in 1975, just before the Over the years Maniaty has ill-fated journalists, his travel read- worked as a journalist, a novelist and ing was Melville’s Moby Dick. Here a filmmaker and is now an academic. we get a sense of the young journal- In many ways this book seems like ist’s ambition, his questing commit- the one that he was destined to write: ment to follow the story, just as Ahab a memoir with a journalistic eye, follows his whale.

210 PACIFIC JOURNALISM REVIEW 15 (2) 2009 PUBLIC RIGHT TO KNOW journalism with cinematic vision, been clear that some key events in history uninhibited by very personal the film—including East and José speculations. Ramos-Horta’s central journey to Lee Gutkind (2009), the guru of Balibo—were invented devices, the creative non-fiction movement created to give the film an engaging (what many journalists would call narrative skeleton. But La Paglia was literary journalism) has recently also clear on the ABC’s Q&A (2009): written: ‘Creative nonfiction’s roots ‘At the end of the day, there is one are in journalism but the genre also truth that’s really glaring and stands allows writers to become intimately out, and that is that six Australian involved in their stories. Often this [based, including a New Zealander] interplay between the personal and nationals were murdered, and that is the political provides deeper cover- official now, and in 34 years nothing age, and a stronger connection to the has been done about it.’ This is the reader, than traditional journalism truth with which he wanted to keep allows.’ It is precisely this personal faith. engagement—and a rare honesty— The film was based on Jill that allows Maniaty to take us beyond Jolliffe’s book originally published as a chronological history of the events Cover-up, now re-released as Balibo. toward a deeper coverage of what Jolliffe was thrown into the job of they might mean. Reuter’s correspondent as one of the Not surprisingly, the release of few remaining journalists in Timor in Connolly’s film has prompted new the weeks leading up to the invasion. discussion about the fate of the Balibo Jolliffe’s subsequent investigation and journalists. But interestingly, the book represents passionate decades film’s release has also raised ques- of work. She attempts to answer in tions in the media (on the ABCs exhaustive detail who did what when, Q&A [2009], in The Sydney Morn- and who knew what when and all this ing Herald and in the journal Eureka is based on many interviews with East Street), about what kind of obligation Timorese witnesses. For those who to history such films have and about want the hard-headed history there is how we tell stories that are engaging no better place to start. and true to history. Maniaty’s book is an investiga- Both Connolly and Anthony La tion of a very different kind. Jolliffe Paglia (who plays Roger East and begins with a chapter introducing the was also the film’s producer) have key characters one by one. Maniaty

PACIFIC JOURNALISM REVIEW 15 (2) 2009 211 PUBLIC RIGHT TO KNOW wanders backwards and forwards tors, Maniaty tells them that for baby between the 1970s and 2008 with boomer journalists like himself, jour- broad brush strokes, personal asides nalism still had ‘a mystery, an aura’ and literary references. Jolliffe doesn’t (p. 9). He says he hopes the film will hide her own involvement in the be a paean to that now lost notion of events but in straight journalistic fash- journalism as ‘a wild adventure at ion she references herself only matter- once carefree and committed’ (p. 10); of-factly. But Maniaty’s investigation a generation of young journalists who is as much a writerly investigation of thought they were ‘bullet proof and… his younger self as it is of the events brilliant’. of 1975. We gradually get closer to both In a sense, the heart of Shoot- the author, his young alter ego and the ing Balibo is Maniaty’s attempt to dead journalists, notably Shackleton. understand not just what happened We gradually get to know the facts to Greg Shackleton—the leader of leading up to the events in Balibo in the Channel Seven news crew—but October 1975. All unwinds skillfully more importantly, who he was. This as Maniaty dances across the genera- is paralleled by his discussions with tions, talking with the actors, dining Damon Gameau, the actor who plays with José Ramos-Horta, slowly al- Shackleton in the film. How does an lowing the fact of being back in East actor research his role? How does a Timor, back in Balibo, back on those journalist investigate history? The dusty roads that he traveled in 1975, journalist wants to know the facts. back in the dining room of the Hotel The actor wants to find that emotional Turismo (the 1975 haunt of both core from which a performance might Australians and the Fretilin leaders) to emerge. prompt both memory and reflection. In this instance the two approach- A series of strange coincidences es coincide. Maniaty is interested in show the past impinging on the more than simple facts, because the present. There are moments of simple other question at the emotional heart insight and pleasure but this is not a of this search is of course a personal book that culminates in a stagger- one: why did Maniaty leave and why ing revelation or a sudden epiphany. did Shackleton stay? What strange A slow emotional accumulation of mixture of caution and recklessness detail, of memory, which somehow does a journalist require to do their unlocks the events for both Maniaty job and survive? Talking to the ac- and his readers.

212 PACIFIC JOURNALISM REVIEW 15 (2) 2009 PUBLIC RIGHT TO KNOW Shooting Balibo is a carefully crafted story despite its meandering East Timor - the Balibo form. This journey back to Balibo incident in perspective is nowhere near as eventful as the by James Dunn (1995) invented journey of East Timor and ACIJ, ISBN: 1 86365 192 6, $5.95 Ramos-Horta that forms the central trope of Connolly’s film. But Tony Written 20years after the invasion Maniaty’s attention to simple detail, of East Timor by , James his commitment to the imaginative Dunn’s book provides an excellent summary of the international setting power of the ordinary and his ability at the time of the invasion by to layer history with the force of hon- Indonesia, the media involvement est emotion is what makes this narra- and the aftermath of the killing of tive just as engaging and an important five Western journalists at Balibo. and original achievement. Sacred Waters: The Story of References the Blue Mountains Balibo interview (2009, August 20). Gully Traditional Owners ABC Q&A. by Dianne Johnson Gutkind, L. (2009). Introduction. In Gut- ACIJ, ISBN: 1 920831 37 1, $45 kind, L. (Ed.), The best creative non- fiction 3. New York: W. W. Norton. Winner of a 2008 NSW Premier’s History Award Sacred Waters is the story of the Aboriginal people in a unique and beautiful part of - the Burragorang Valley, now profoundly changed by the flooding of the valley in the 1950s by Warragamba Dam, which provides Sydney’s water supply. It is a history of the valley’s Gundungurra people, and the Darug people of the lower Hawkesbury. Their story - a Sydney story - celebrates the Upper Blue Mountains Gully people’s survival in a changing world and their ongoing struggle to protect their sacred lands and waters.

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