Word: timorously
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...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...
...together. There were so many people coming to us from everywhere. And you don't just look after the patients in those situations, you get to know their families too. You hear their stories, and you form a very close connection with them. And in Aceh, as in East Timor, there was overwhelming support for the Australians. We don't have any airs and graces, we just get in and do the job, and the Acehnese were so grateful. When we arrived, there was nothing there, and by the time we left there were functioning wards. There were tears when...