Gerard Henderson, Balibo, Piers Akerman, and left wing alienation at work

Remarkably this week in Gerard Henderson's column for the Sydney Morning Herald, under the header Hindsight has not cleared the vision of an atrocity, there's not one mention of John Howard.

Burnishing the legend will have to wait another week, but what brought this on? Well Henderson spends his time demolishing the Australian feature film Balibo, and John Howard wasn't around at the time six Australian journalists were killed in East Timor by Indonesian forces.

That duty fell to Gough Whitlam as PM, and remarkably Henderson finds it in his heart to get upset about the portrait of Whitlam within the film:

Balibo presents Gough Whitlam's Labor government in the darkest possible light. The film's message is that Whitlam was complicit in Indonesia's invasion of East Timor and callously indifferent to the fate of the six deceased journalists. In one scene, Jose Ramos-Horta, the leader of the Fretilin resistance movement in East Timor, views a photo of Whitlam with Indonesia's President Soeharto and declares: "Two pieces of shit in matching shirts." No alternative view is heard.

Well I guess it was worth making Balibo just to see the redemption of Gough by Gerard.

And whose fault is it that the Indonesian army happened to find itself in East Timor, and managed to shoot five Australian journalists in Balibo, and then dispose of another journalist (Roger East) in Dili as he investigated the deaths of the five?

The ones that pulled the triggers? No silly, the Portuguese:

This view lets Portugal off the hook. The Portuguese were one of the worst of the European colonial powers. They did next to nothing to build an infrastructure in East Timor or educate the local population. Then, in 1975, they suddenly junked the dependent colony, leaving behind a nascent civil war between the pro-communist Fretilin and the non-communist UDT.

Well let me not defend the Portuguese, though whether they came up to quite the high standard of Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo Free State is a pretty tough call. We'll leave that to others who like to defend the record of colonialism and mourn the tragedy of post colonial events (come on down Hal G. P. Colebatch).

But it's vaguely amusing to find Henderson getting so agitated when fellow commentariat columnist Piers Akerman thinks the show's a bit of a whitewash - see Ghosts of the Balibo Five return to haunt Labor.

According to Akker Dakker:

As one would expect from the Australian film industry, Balibo is made from a soft-Left perspective. There is a nod to reality in one of the opening scenes when former Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam is shown with the late corrupt Indonesian president Suharto but the film glosses over the Whitlam government’s foreign policy, which permitted the invasion of East Timor.

And he's furious that the film fails to mention (in the show or in its pretentious bonus footnotes) that it was right wing US politicians who pushed Timor as an issue during George W. Bush's presidential campaign in 1999, and thanks to William P. Clark and fellow Republicans, and the Catholic church, the pressure on Bill Clinton was so great that he promised John Howard there'd be "over the horizon" US support for the Australian led Interfet operation when Indonesian troops withdrew from East Timor.

That's better - John Howard fixing up the derelict legacy of the wayward Whitlam. And of course Akker Dakker can't resist paying out on Chairman Rudd in the process:

Labor was in power in 1975 when the Indonesians conducted the Balibo massacre. A week before the 2007 election, now PM Kevin Rudd responded to the Balibo coronial inquest: “This is a very disturbing conclusion by the coroner concerning the fate of the Balibo Five back in 1975. I believe this has to be taken to its logical conclusion. I believe those responsible should be held to account.”

He also said: “My attitude is dead set hard line. I’ve read a bit about what happened in Balibo. I’ve been to Balibo. I’ve seen the fort, I’ve seen where these blokes lost their lives. You can’t just sweep this to one side. I know it’s a long time ago.”

True, Balibo did take place a long time ago but during the Indonesian occupation 183,000 East Timorese were slaughtered and we now have in Australia a man who collaborated with the Indonesians, Guy Campos, who is accused of being complicit in those murders.

For over a year now Campos, who entered Australia on a pilgrim’s visa during the Papal visit, has been investigated by the AFP.

In that time we have had Utegate and the OzCar giveaways but Campos is still on our streets terrifying East Timorese residents who have testified to his activities.

My question: When does Rudd think Campos will be held to account?

But back to Gerard Henderson, who mainly seems traumatized not by the Balibo five, but by government funding of the Australian film industry and the Indonesians suffering from hurt feelings. Remember it was not so long ago that SBS published a vile three part documentary series on the Howard years, requiring extreme re-polishing of the record by Henderson. Now there's more of the same:

It's an irony that much of the alienation evident in the public debate in Australia is funded by taxpayers and finds expression on the public broadcasters ABC and SBS, within universities and on stage and screen. The latest example of this genre is Robert Connolly's film Balibo, with a screenplay by David Williamson and Connolly. The film is loosely based on Jill Jolliffe's book Cover-Up, recently reissued under the title Balibo...

...Balibo received financial backing from a number of public sources, including Screen Australia, Film Victoria, the Melbourne International Film Festival Premier Fund and the Northern Territory Government. This would not matter much if Connolly presented his story as it is - namely, a fictional account of the fate that befell the journalists. But at the beginning of Balibo, viewers are informed that this is a "true story".

Well yes but the Coen brothers famously start the totally fictitious Fargo with this outrageous title:

This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.

The point being that claiming a film is a true story is the first refuge of a marketing strategy seeking to trade off on real events, when any sensible moviegoer will understand that they are likely to see reconstructions which might be called either factoid or fictoid. No one thinks of Hamlet as a true story, but Henderson is worried that others will be deceived. As if he's the conscience of the audience and the guardian of their incapacity to see the real truthiness:

It isn't, but many who view it will regard it as a compressed, but authentic, account. As such, Balibo is likely to tarnish Indonesia's reputation in Australia and to encourage Australians to think ill of their institutions.

So instead of wondering why Indonesia hasn't done anything about the murders in such a very long time, Henderson spends the rest of his column berating Fretilin for calling itself communist and quoting Ramos-Horta having a bout of guilt about the many senseless killings in the civil war of August 1975.

Henderson then quotes the findings of coroner Dorelle Pinch, in the context of Tony Maniaty quoting Ramos-Horta as calling the civil war and Fretilin's unilateral declaration of independence "errors". As was the decision of the five journalists to go into Balibo:

In 2007, Dorelle Pinch, deputy NSW coroner, found the Balibo Five had been deliberately killed by Indonesian Special Forces - a finding welcomed by their relatives. Maniaty quotes from Pinch's findings where she held "the journalists themselves bear the responsibility for being alone in Balibo at the time the Indonesian … military forced entered".

Henderson's view?

There is no doubt that six Australian journalists were brutally killed.

No doubt they were killed. But by whom? Presumably by a person or persons unnamed and unknown. Whew, there you go Indonesia. A whitewash.

For the last few pars, Henderson spends his time defending Richard Woolcott before wrapping it all up:

Yet, there is a lot of blame to go around for the tragic events in that country over recent decades. Balibo implies the entire fault for this tragedy of East Timor lies with an aggressive Indonesia and a weak Australia during Whitlam's time. This is misleading. It is yet another example of left-wing alienation at work. Balibo runs a clever argument. But it does not proclaim a truth.

Left wing alienation about the Whitlam government? Oh well I guess it makes a change from reading in the commentariat about left wing alienation which fondly cultivates soft core memories of the last days of the lunatic Whitlam government.

Let's just say why Henderson is running a desperately clever argument in service of Indonesia and Whitlam must remain a mystery, and that after reading his column, proclaiming the truth remains as mysterious and remote as the chance of the Indonesian government taking action against the Indonesian soldiers who killed the Balibo five, plus one.

How much more honest of Henderson if he could at least have acknowledged that power politics were in play, that the five were killed by Indonesian soldiers, that shit happens in war and that nothing is ever likely to happen to bring the killers to justice, while journalists and story tellers will always return to scratch over an event which involved five Australians.

How many Timorese were killed during the same period? Never you mind ... (here).

And don't you worry about any deaths in Irian Jaya. You'd only be showing do gooder left wing alienation, and worse still, offending the delicate sensibilities of the Indonesian government.

Hmm, I've never liked director Robert Connolly as a film-maker. The Bank and Three Dollars were both extremely dire and wretched pieces of soft fuzzy thinking (of a lefty kind), which attempted to disguise themselves as entertainment, doing neither entertainment nor lefty thinking any good at all.

While the government funding of films has led us into a deep morass where they can even fund a re-make of a show like The Long Weekend - with Jamie Blanks' version showing such bankruptcy of talent that you'd swear it was designed to wreck Australian tourism, if it hadn't disappeared without trace.

But if a film such as Balibo can make Gerard Henderson totally forget about John Howard for an entire column, it can't be all bad ...

(Below: want a real crime of a film? Try The Long Weekend 11 aka Nature's Grave. Or not).