Critical Times

Presented by Australia-East Timor Association (NSW)

at GLEEBOOKS, Glebe, SYDNEY, FRIDAY 12TH FEBRUARY 2010…FROM 6PM

Friday February 12, 6 for 6.30 pm

Donations at the door for AETA

Dr Andrew McNaughtan Lecture to be given by Jude Conway

Introduction by Nigel Stewart from the Dr McNaughtan East Timor Education Foundation

Every year AETA, (the Australia-East Timor Association NSW) remembers Dr Andrew McNaughtan with a memorial lecture in his honour. Andrew was a medical practitioner from Mosman in Sydney who died in late 2003. Andrew was the Convener of AETA as well as a Board Member of both the leading emergency aid group TIMOR AID and of ETISC, a leading human rights advocacy and NGO-Aid body. Through the Annual Memorial Lecture and the raising of funds for the Dr. Andrew McNaughtan East Timor (Education) Foundation the name of this remarkable man is honoured.

Book Launches

Jude Conway (ed.)
Step by Step: Women of East Timor, Stories of Resistance and Survival
Charles Darwin University Press

To be launched by Kerry Nettle

Step by Step provides the opportunity for thirteen outspoken East Timorese women to tell their life stories: what it was like living in a Portuguese colony; how they were affected by the Indonesian invasion; what day to day life was like under the occupation or in the diaspora; how they contributed to the resistance; what they experienced in the mayhem after the referendum and how they have adapted to the stark contrast of independence. The Timorese women included in the book are, among others, Micato Alves, Lucia Lobato, Dulce Vitor, Maria Dias and Céu Lopes Federer.

Jude Conway: After the Santa Cruz massacre in 1991, Jude Conway became a member of Australians for a Free East Timor in Darwin. Years of activism and her first trip to Timor-Leste in 1995 followed. The editor’s other publications include: Indonesia’s Death Squads, Getting Away with Murder: A Chronology of Indonesian Military sponsored Paramilitary and Militia atrocities in East Timor from November 1998 to May 1999; contributor to Buibere: Voices of East Timorese Women, 1999; and an ironic anecdote about her mother, ‘The Bloody Japanese’ in People of the Valley, 2009.

Kerry Nettle: A former Greens Party Senator for New South Wales who spent nearly 12 months in Timor Leste 2008-2009 organizing an international woman’s conference in Dili and working for the Alola Foundation. She was a close friend of Dr McNaughtan who in turn was a consultant to the Greens Party over the Timor Oil and Gas issue.

Sara Niner
Xanana: Leader of the Struggle for Independent Timor-Leste
Australian Scholarly Publishing

To be launched by Robert Domm

This is the political biography of Xanana Gusmão, leader of the East Timorese struggle for self-determination and first President of the new nation of Timor-Leste. Twenty-four years of warfare with Indonesia transformed Xanana from an apolitical outsider into a tough guerrilla commander and, ultimately, the central unifying figure of East Timorese nationalism. In 1999, upon his bittersweet homecoming after years of imprisonment in Indonesia, Xanana faced the unenviable task of leading a traumatized people out of the terrifying violence and destruction that ended the Indonesian occupation.

Today, the politics of East Timor remain volatile and complex, and many challenges still exist for this tiny new nation.

This is the story of a remarkable man and gifted leader.

Dr. Sara Niner is a writer, research consultant and Honorary Research Associate at Monash University where she has recently finished a Post-Doctoral Fellowship focussing on women, handcrafts and development in Timor-Leste. She is the editor of ‘To Resist is to Win: the Autobiography of Xanana Gusmão with selected letters and speeches’ (2000).

Robert Domm is co-author with Mark Aarons of Timor: A Western-Made Tragedy He was the only Australian journalist from Australia to interview Xanana Gusmao when he was a guerilla leader in the liberated zone of Timor Leste.Domm also visited Timor Leste during the Independence celebrations in 2002 as General Manager of the City of Sydney Council.

Irena Cristalis
East Timor: A Nation’s Bitter Dawn
Palgrave Macmillan

To be launched by Emily Werlemann

Few new nations have endured a birth as traumatic as that endured by Asia’s youngest country, East Timor. Emerging from the flames, pillage and mayhem that surrounded Indonesia ’s reluctant withdrawal in 1999, it has been struggling for years to rebuild itself from the ashes. The author is one of a handful of journalists who refused to be evacuated during the nightmarish Indonesian withdrawal, and who has stayed on to report East Timor to the world, and to keep faith with the East Timorese whose story she wanted to tell. Her book is a vivid first-hand account of the lives of individual Timorese during the long decades of Indonesia ’s repressive occupation, their often heroic struggle for freedom, and their efforts to cope with the dramatic historic shifts engulfing them and their endeavours to rebuild their homeland. Based on years of research, and lengthy interviews with East Timor ’s leaders, priests, nuns, students and guerrilla fighters, this moving and extremely readable book is at the same time also an exploration of the complexities of the country’s internal politics.

Irena Cristalis, who also writes and broadcasts under the byline, Irene Slegt, is a Dutch journalist and photographer, who since 1990 has been based in Asia, including at various times Hong Kong, Beijing, Bangkok, New Delhi and East Timor. She understands three Asian languages—Chinese, Indonesian and Tetum, the indigenous language of the East Timorese.

Emily Werlemann has a Dutch-Indonesian background currently works as a journalist hosting the Dutch program on SBS Radio on Saturday mornings in Sydney, Australia and has worked for Radio Netherlands in both Holland and Australia..

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Dinner after Lecture/Launches?.... Friday 12/2/10 Sydney in a nearby Glebe restaurant between 8pm-10pm

RSVP re dinner following Lecture and book launches to

jefferson.lee@bigpond.com or “Alix Mandelson” amandelson@unwired.com.au or text Jefferson Lee on (+61) 408-162 013