WWII in East Timor: An Australian Army Site and Travel Guide (2/2 Commando Association of Australia, 2024) is an overdue addition to the history of a campaign that remains surprisingly little known in Australia, despite its significance to Australia’s part in the war. Working district by district – from Dili south to Aileu, Ainaro and Manufahi, west to Liquiçá, Ermera, Bobonaro, Cova Lima and Oecusse, and east to Manatuto, Baucau, Viqueque and Lautem – this book offers a fresh, site-based perspective on the Second World War in East Timor (Timor-Leste).

The book’s starting point is the “Gazetteer of Towns and Villages in Portuguese Timor”, compiled in 1943 by the Allied Geographical Section. With meticulous precision, Willis revisits these sites and adds GPS coordinates, maps, wartime photographs by Sergeant Keith Davis, contemporary photographs taken at the same locations, and paintings by Australian war artist Charles Bush. These are supplemented with accounts from the Australian War Memorial and National Archives, Trove, unit and campaign histories, Timorese testimony, and new material from sources in Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese and Tetum. In doing so, it brings together diverse sources – archival, oral and site-based – that have not previously been assembled in one place.

Following these sites, the book traces the arrival of Sparrow Force on the island of Timor in December 1941 and the landing five days later of a combined Australian and Dutch detachment in neutral Portuguese territory at Dili, through to the Japanese assault of 20 February 1942 and the guerrilla campaign that followed. It also covers sites relevant to the two and a half years of occupation after the January 1943 Allied withdrawal, including the extensive Japanese defensive infrastructure built using Timorese forced labour, famine, executions, Allied bombing of towns and villages, and the role of the covert Services Reconnaissance Department operations.

The book is targeted toward Australian defence and diplomatic personnel posted to Timor-Leste, professional military education and staff, and veterans, descendants and travellers who want to locate the places where battles were fought and ambushes laid. It makes an important contribution to Timor-Leste’s potential as a heritage tourism destination, with the economic benefits such a sector brings. Above all, it serves to acknowledge the Timorese people whose support made the Australian campaign possible, and the landscapes on which this shared history is written.

The book can be purchased from the 2/2 Commando Association of Australia.

Edward Willis is a committee member of the 2/2 Commando Association of Australia and a former Deputy University Librarian at Curtin University. His father, William Edward (Bill) Willis, served with the Signals Section of the No. 2 Australian Independent Company on Portuguese Timor in 1942. He has been travelling to Timor-Leste to survey wartime sites since 2008, and prepared this guide with the support of a grant from the Australian Army History Unit.

This episode is hosted by Dr Natali Pearson.

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Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan’s Unfree Workers: Insubordination and Resistance in Convict Australia, 1788–1860 (draws on considerable Australian legal, archival and statistical sources to ensure that we not only see the management of unfree labour regimes deployed in settler colonies, but also to identify all the strategies that victims of the early imperial prison-industrial complex used to resist the regime.

The first half of Unfree Workers provides a brilliant account of the diversity of coercive labour practices that were demanded under colonial and settler-colonial expansions. Their labour regime was incredibly violent:

A sentence to penal transportation was no trivial thing. The convicts sent to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land were regimented, disciplined and accounted for in ways that pre-empted later social controls. They were also subjected to high levels of state sanctioned violence. The punishments and conditions of work they experienced continued to shape their lives long after they became free, impacting on colonial family formation and life expectancy.

Maxwell-Stewart and Quinlan show the material links between violence and colonial economic necessity. Unfree workers whose skills did not match those in demand were more likely to be accused of work refusal, which put them at risk of demotion to harder labour and increased violence.

Maxwell-Stewart and Quinlan’s Unfree Workers, reminding us that while colonial capitalism is a system of exploitation, it necessarily depends upon class conflict.

The process of transportation was a site for resistance. The convict ship, like the slave ship, was a factory that produced commodified labour for the colonies, ‘converting the idle poor into docile labourers.’ Mutiny offered convicts the opportunity to steal their prison and use it for emancipatory means. Though many conspired, few succeeded, but on-ship radicalisation nevertheless prepared convicts for resistance on land. This included making deals for improved working conditions (including sometimes wages) in exchange for industrious and non-violent work. To this end, imprisoned workers came together in common cause, conducting strikes and go-slows and withholding effort. Just as Caribbean plantations were sites of frequent slave uprising, Maxwell-Stewart and Quinlan show, so too were convict workers also legitimately feared for their capacity for violent rebellion, sometimes with potential support from settlers with wider political goals.

Van Diemen’s Land’s extraordinary record-keeping—itself an instrument of the punitive surveillance characteristic of the prison-industrial complex—means that Maxwell-Stewart and Quinlan have recounted in meticulous, often mapped, detail the size, activity and consequences of collective action among unfree workers. 

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Agnes Bodis talks to Hannah Madin and Catherine White. Hannah is a Teaching and Learning Officer at the Department of Education in the Northern Territory (Australia), and Catherine White is a Teaching and Learning Coach in secondary education.

We are zooming in on learning English as an additional language or dialect in remote communities in Australia’s Northern Territory (NT). There are numerous Aboriginal languages spoken there as well as dialects of English. However, the language of schooling remains Standard Australian English.

We discuss this mismatch between first or home languages, language of education, and teacher preparedness. Hannah and Catherine outline a collaborative project by the NT Department of Education to remove these barriers to learning in the school context. The project is called “Roadmap to Stage 1 Essential English and Mathematics” and includes not only the creation of teaching support materials, but the creation of an online Community of Practice, a professional learning program and school visits.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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