Category: Timor-Leste

In collaboration with Paige Taylor for The Australian One of Australia’s last World War II commandos, who escaped the Japanese after being shot and garrotted through the neck and then spent the rest of his life repaying the kindness of the Timorese people who saved him, has been laid to rest in Perth. Keith Hayes’s…

The Australian When Australian commandos landed in the colony of Portuguese Timor in 1941, they immediately noticed that the gum trees, rocks and ochre-coloured earth were strikingly similar to home. As novelist Nevil Shute observed after the war, the commandos found that much of the Timor landscape consisted of “stony hills covered in thin forest…

The Australian As Australia and East Timor met overnight at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, the Britain-Norway settlement of the 1960s provides an instructive case study of how to resolve the dispute over oil and gas fields in the Timor Sea. When Britain and Norway negotiated to divide up the oil-rich North…

The Australian From the time that Keith Hayes’s seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren have been able to speak, they have asked him about the large photo of a Timorese woman on solemn display in his living room. The littlest ones call her “the lady with the long face”.  The woman, Berta Martins, risked her life…

The Australian The lives and hopes of two 17-year-old Timorese entrepreneurs, Jacinto Alves and Caetano Francolene, say so much about the great potential of the young nation of East Timor, and the daunting challenges facing the country’s new Prime Minister. Born during the final years of Indonesian occupation, the boys started school in 2002, the…

Sydney Morning Herald