Published 13 June 2009 · Main Posts Balibo Rjurik Davidson I went to a media screening of the new film Balibo yesterday, which covers the murder of the five Australian journalists in East Timor in 1975, prior to the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. The film also follows Australian journalist Roger East, who is invited to Timor by Jose Ramos Horta and tries to discover what happened to the journalists. I’m not allowed to say much about it, but I will say that the film is in the tradition of Australian political movies such The Year of Living Dangerously, or perhaps foreign films like The Quiet American. I highly recommend it when it comes out. During the film I couldn’t help thinking: this could not have been made fifteen years ago. At that time, the Australian government was still pretty much supporting the Indonesian Occupation of East Timor. In the East Timorese solidarity movement, the final reports of Greg Shackleton were often played (John Pilger showed them in his various films about East Timor). The remarkable thing about those reports, was their partisanship. Here were journalists for commercial television channels making reports which are clearly pro-Timorese. I couldn’t find the footage on youtube, but there’s a ten minute video on youtube here, which has that footage. (Sorry, it wouldn’t let me embed it). There’s also some shots from the film in the following promotion of a book, which notes again the partisanship of the journalists: Rjurik Davidson Rjurik Davidson is a writer, editor and speaker. Rjurik’s novel, The Stars Askew was released in 2016. Rjurik is a former associate editor of Overland magazine. He can be found at rjurik.com and tweets as @rjurikdavidson. More by Rjurik Davidson › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 28 March 20249 April 2024 · Main Posts Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise Sukhmani Khorana In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on 'lived expertise' and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body. 5 March 2024 · Main Posts Andrew Charlton’s school assignment Alex McKinnon Australia's Pivot to India exists for three reasons: so that when Andrew Charlton is interviewed on the radio or introduced on Q+A, his bio includes the phrase "he has written a book about Indian-Australian relations"; to fend off accusations that he is another Kristina Keneally engaging in electoral colonialism in western Sydney; and to help the Albanese government strengthen economic and military ties with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.