Word: timorous
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...Fairweather's most fragile assemblage was of three old World War II aircraft fuel tanks and a silk parachute he found while living on a Darwin beach in the early '50s. These formed the basis of a 3-m raft and sail he later attempted to navigate across the Timor Sea, with the vague intention of returning to Europe. Instead, 16 days later, he washed ashore on the western Timorese island of Roti, where, in exchange for pieces of his sailing vessel, Fairweather was offered food and shelter. What nearly killed him in effect became his life raft...
...Tied together with hemp rope and bamboo, The Gift, as the sculpture is called, forms the oddly beautiful center of an exhibition around which the artist has placed other "relics" from the voyage, including maps meticulously hand-painted by Stevenson. Starting off in Sydney last May, "Argonauts of the Timor Sea" traveled to the U.K. in November, where the artist recruited a band of local Sea Scouts to (unsuccessfully) sail the vessel off the coast of Kent. From Aug. 27, the raft completes its unlikely journey at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein (NAK), an art space in northwest Germany...
...lacks in depth or context, it makes up for in sensitivity and humility. This is a book less about Indonesia than about Lloyd Parry himself, how the carnage he witnesses burrows into his soul, leaving him sickeningly vulnerable when the time of madness reaches its horrifying climax in East Timor. There, in the face of violence aimed specifically at him, Lloyd Parry escapes on a military flight out of the devastated capital Dili, which militias against independence for East Timor have put to the torch. "I ran away," he writes, "and afterward, I was ashamed...
...greatest horror comes later, in the twinned crises of Suharto's fall and East Timor. In May 1998, Lloyd Parry reports from a burning Jakarta, "a capital city looted by its own people," as a mix of demonstrators and marauders run wild in the streets. The structure of Lloyd Parry's book, which seems to lack much new research, leans too heavily on a chronological, riot-by-riot retelling of his experience. But his elegant, understated prose preserves a bubble of sanity amid the madness; he's particularly adept at capturing the moments when history is about to be made...
...That borrowed courage can vanish when one changes from witness to participant, as Lloyd Parry learns during his reckoning in East Timor, the book's most gripping section. After the embattled province votes for its independence from Jakarta in 1999, Lloyd Parry watches as anti-independence militias, seemingly with the tacit approval of the Indonesian army, wreak havoc. But this time he's more than a spectator?the militias violently turn on journalists, forcing them to hole up in the United Nations' overcrowded compound. Inside, terrified, he listens to machine guns firing, grenades exploding and refugees wailing. He imagines rockets...