Full Transcript for Paul Toohey

so little in common with Timor. The first people of Timor and the first people of Australia had no shared experience, no contact at all. Even though the Macassans had come down to the top of Australia... And they had shared sort of common words with the Aborigines of North Australia. But there was no contact. And that's in the old times. But in the modern times, there wasn't any either. And, you know, it became part of our consciousness when the Balobo Five. 00:03:34 Speaker 1: Were killed as. 00:03:36 Speaker 2: Indonesia prepared to invade East Timor. But even then, during that time when the world was locked out of East Timor, it sort of went even more quiet until... you know, the 1999 liberation. So we knew so little of it. And arguably, we still know so little of it. 00:03:55 Speaker 1: Well, that's the thing about reading your book is, I mean, I'm thinking, well, you talk about, you still talk about witches and, you know, black magic and the like. And there were, I mean, we should know, you go back to 2008 when President José Ramos Orta was shot. And the way you describe his wounds and his treatment The miracle of his recovery is incredible. But I don't know whether you're all that complimentary to him, Jose Ramos-Horta, or Gennaro Guzmao, the Prime Minister. I don't think you particularly like those guys. 00:04:32 Speaker 2: Look, President Ramos-Horta, Prime Minister Guzmao, Guzmao was without doubt a genuine freedom fighter, a genuine guerrilla fighting for his country, and no one could ever take that away from him at all. As for President José Ramos Horta, he seemed to believe that he could fix everything. Any problem in his country, he could fix it. And he gave permission to these rebels to wander about armed and dangerous in order to try and get a political outcome for himself and for Guzmão. And it ended up costing him very dearly. 00:05:10 Speaker 1: When you say rebels, was this before the liberation or was it? 00:05:16 Speaker 2: No, this is post-liberation. Post-liberation, I guess, which was 99 and leading to elections and things like that. You know, we sort of thought, well, Timor, you know, you're right now, off you go and be the world's newest nation. And we weren't watching particularly closely, but old grievances and grudges from before the Indonesian invasion, pre-1975, they reignited. And people turned on each other. And out of this, a group of so-called petitioners, these were people who were soldiers who claimed they were being overlooked for promotions in the military and things like this. And 600 of them walked out, causing a... And, you know, in the army, there was only 1,200 people, so effectively half of them abandoned the job on the claim that, those from the west of the country, close to the East Timor, the Indonesian border, were more likely to be affiliated with Indonesia than those heroes from the east in the army, who were more likely to have been fought against the Indonesians. So this schism sort of appeared

between the east and west of East Timor, and that went through the whole security forces, the army, the police, and The country divided. Rebels jumped up and claimed that they were being overlooked for promotion in the army, and therefore they became rebels, I should say. And they were led by a very opportunistic and smart young guy named Major Alfredo Renato, who was a guy who had escaped to Australia, had known Australia, lived here for a while, and then returned, as a lot of East Timorese did, after liberation. But he soon became very dissatisfied with Gusmao, the leadership, the way the country was going, and ended up leading insurrection, which brought the country close to its knees several times. 00:07:29 Speaker 1: Well, he's one of the... He gets killed at the start, but he's one of the principal characters of your book. And he sounds charismatic, am I... Am I right there? 00:07:41 Speaker 2: Yeah, no, you're right. He was a charming, charismatic guy and he was a guy that we could call and, you know, just to think about you. 00:07:51 Speaker 1: When you say we, you mean we as journalists? 00:07:53 Speaker 2: We as journalists could call and, you know, on our doorstep in Darwin, you know, we had a real-life rebel with an M16 and, you know, a guy had talked to us and have us up to his place and, you know, and brag and talk a very big game which, None of us really, I think, didn't... Because he was charismatic and he had a certain charm, so you kind of didn't think it was going to go the way it was going to go. You sort of thought, well, he's a reasonable guy deep down, he'll get talked down, but as it turned out, he got himself shot dead. 00:08:29 Speaker 1: The book opens with the... I mean, there's some really interesting characters in your book, there's no doubt about that, but it opens with an assassination attempt on... the President and the Prime Minister, and in graphic form you describe the wounds, but on the same night Renato gets killed. So what happened then? Was he attacking the Prime Minister? Or you say he was going for a meeting. He thought he was going for a meeting. 00:08:57 Speaker 2: Renato had, for two years, he'd actually shot and killed members of the armed forces. He'd become a major problem. And they couldn't resolve, he was stubborn and he just, he wouldn't listen. He wanted the right to carry arms around the place and protect himself and protect the Westerners of the country, form a battalion and do all these things. He'd become a stone in the nation's shoe. 00:09:24 Speaker 1: Paul, we might just leave it there and explain his character in a bit more depth when we come back. Paul Tuohy is my guest, folks. It's an amazing book. because we don't know what happened so close to Australia. It's called the Fatal Island, back after the break. Welcome back to Conversations, everybody. I'm chatting with Paul Toohey, eminent journalist, now author, and he's written a book about the goings-on in 2008 when the assassination attempts were attempted on the president of East Timor. You don't call it East Timor anymore, do we? 00:09:56 Speaker 2: We call it Timor-Leste. When I was there, it was East Timor. so I've sort of stuck with that. 00:10:03 Speaker 1: Again, we talked about the assassination attempts on President José Ramos-Horta and the Prime Minister, Renato Guzmão, and this character Major Renato is involved. Ned, you were saying he thought he was going to a meeting. He wasn't going to. attempted an assassination. So how did the president get. 00:10:22 Speaker 2: He was set up. They'd negotiated, negotiated, and Renato was just being completely stubborn. He was not playing along. He wouldn't surrender his weapons. He'd been in a shootout with the Australian SAS and commandos up in the hills. The Australians, he felt, were moving in on him, and he was told that he had a meeting with President José Ramos Huerta early that morning of February 11, 2008, And he and his band of, say, 27, 28 guys, they split into two. Two vehicles went into the hills and hid above President Guzman's place, about, say, 12, 13 guys. And the same number went down to President Ramos-Horta's place and arrived openly, bearing arms as they were entitled to do, because Ramos-Horta had given permission to travel with arms, and said, we're here for our meeting. And they said, we've got no meeting. What meeting? The president's gone off for his morning walk. He's not here. So they hung around for a while. Things got a bit heated between Renato's men and the presidential guard, which, by the way, had mostly fled when they saw Renato's band turned up. And then two shots rang out. Renato and his off-sider Leopoldino Exposto were both executed at close range. 00:11:48 Speaker 1: By the guard? By the presidential guard? 00:11:50 Speaker 2: By someone who did claim to have done it, but the evidence would come out that the guy had just simply not done it. They were shot by two different weapons. It wasn't him. It was someone else. The whole thing became very confounding and confusing. But at that point, with Renato down and Exposto down, a message went up to the rebels waiting above President Guzman's place, and Guzmao had already got word of this and was travelling down in a convoy, and they attacked his convoy, riddled it with bullets, but Guzmao was able to emerge unscathed, which many thought was evidence that Guzmao had orchestrated the whole thing. 00:12:37 Speaker 1: What did you think about that? 00:12:38 Speaker 2: Well, I think there are a lot of things that could have happened that day, and that's potentially one of them, but... As for the hard evidence of that, it's not there. 00:12:50 Speaker 1: So how did Ramos Horta get so severely wounded? At what stage was he shot? 00:12:57 Speaker 2: So he was coming home from his morning walk and he'd been told by people he'd seen on his walk that there were armed men around the place and, you know, there was something strange going on. And he was

walking with a close protection guard, as he did every morning. They came... close to his villa, which is a few hundred metres up from the beach, a walled compound. By then, Renato and Exposto were dead. They were down and out. The rebels, who believed that they'd come to attend the meeting, I suppose assumed that Ramos Horta had set them up. And so one of the rebels raised his weapon. Ramos Horta spun. He was shot twice in the back and went down and went very, very close to death. 00:13:45 Speaker 1: Well, that's one of the most amazing things in the book as you write it. I mean, you're talking about you got shot twice, but there were three exit wounds. 00:13:53 Speaker 2: Yeah. One of the higher bullets following a strange tangent sort of entered and then came out. Timor's magic bullet, you might think. 00:14:03 Speaker 1: But the way you describe his wounds and how close he was to death and the treatment that he received was quite remarkable. He was flown to Darwin. And can you just... Do you delve into that a little? I know you want people to read the book, but can you. 00:14:19 Speaker 2: No, that's okay. That's okay. 00:14:20 Speaker 1: Can you delve into that a little bit? 00:14:22 Speaker 2: So I suppose he was flown to Darwin and there would have been heavy anxiety from the Australian side of things that was this the right place to take him? Should we airlift him straight south? But, you know, they thought about it. He'd been stabilised quite well in Dili. They'd controlled the bleeding, but he was still bleeding It had heavy, heavy wounding to his lungs. And so they flew him to Darwin and it was decided not to shift him on. And the basic logic to that was they had some extremely good trauma surgeons in Darwin who, you know, dealt with the worst of the worst, like any hospital would, I guess. And I spoke to them and they took me through the operation blow by blow. And I think the thing they just had to remember was just treat this as a patient, not as a president, and just do what you've got to do. Just do it. And that meant, in this case, was to try and control the bleeding, not to close the wound over, but to leave it open in a sterile environment because there was a lot of repairs that needed to be done to the lung. And they found he wasn't actually sucking air, which was a good sign. you know that they could keep him open and he was ventilated by the way you know he was out of it he couldn't he wasn't breathing by himself. 00:15:50 Speaker 1: As you describe it there's no way knowing the guy could have survived because you talked about a lot of bullet fragments and the mess that was caused inside but just trying to find bullet fragments and get them. 00:16:00 Speaker 2: Out yeah i think they called it a ragged lung it was you know it was you know full of full of fragments and They used the term debrided, you know, they just scraped and cleaned and scraped and cleaned and got it back to its rawest possible survivable form and just closed him over with those suction bandages rather than packing in the wound itself and just let him sleep basically and try and recover. 00:16:31 Speaker 1: It must have been tough because he woke up and, you know, seemed to be cogent. 00:16:36 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he woke up and essentially the operation was a huge success. There was some follow-up work that needed to be done with skin grafts and stuff that didn't take, but basically they got it right. 00:16:51 Speaker 1: And did they get the guy who did it? 00:16:56 Speaker 2: Well, the guy who shot him, this is, I guess, part of the whole complexity of the story. They didn't want to get him. They didn't want him. They got him, but he was never actually singled out. Just as the bloke who shot Renato and Exposto, he took responsibility for it because it was a supposedly heroic act to kill the rebels, but it wasn't him. So this whole mess of a cloud, the whole thing was deliberately clouded with intrigue because East Timor had been through a lot. It had been through 400 years of occupation or whatever it was by Portugal where they actually did nothing for the country at all, except sort of treat it as a far-flung outpost. It had been through two decades of occupation by the Indonesians who actually did, you know, build stadiums and roads and schools and things, but they also demanded loyalty at gunpoint. And, you know, prior to that, it had been through its own civil war, I should add, these Timorese versus Timorese. And then it came out of all this, supposedly the newest nation on Earth with great hope, and instead it turned on itself. 00:18:17 Speaker 1: We're going to take a break because we have to introduce two new characters into the narrative, Angelita Perez and this QC, then QC, now KC, John Tippett, who had a different interest to the story. 00:18:35 Speaker 2: Paul. 00:18:36 Speaker 1: Tuohy is my guest, folks. His book is called The Fatal Island, Bullets, Magic and Power in Timor. Back shortly. Welcome back, everybody. If you just tuned in, I'm chatting with Paul Tuohy, eminent journalist, award-winning journalist and an expert of things that happen north of Australia. He's based in Darwin and covered a lot of the insurrection and the intrigue that was East Timor, Timor-Leste. In 2008, President Ramos-Horta was shot seriously. the Prime Minister Guzma was attacked. So now it comes to who's responsible. And in your book, you introduce two really interesting characters, Angelita Perez, who was the girlfriend of Major Renato, and this Australian QC then, now Casey, John Tippett. So let's talk about Angelita Perez first. 00:19:29 Speaker 2: Okay, well, Angelita's parents... Her family escaped Timor during the civil strife of the mid-70s, came to Darwin, and she was an Australian-born. She was the youngest child of the family, and she was Australian born. And she grew up as an Australian kid. But like Renato did, and they didn't know each other at the time, when she saw liberation coming

to East Timor, she felt she'd been working in casinos and working in bars and things like this. She felt she'd never done anything for anybody. anyone else, and she wanted to go back there and be part of the new Timor. And so she did that, and with mixed success, I suppose, in business and all sorts of things. I mean, the country was starting anew, right? And she had a boyfriend there who was with the Portuguese sort of special forces, I guess. That ended up falling apart, and she was getting herself a degree in law in the very early stages. She was fluent in Portuguese, English and Tetum. And she was working for a lawyer as a translator, basically, as he was working for Renato as they were trying to negotiate with Renato to come down to face trial for murder. He'd shot an army guy. And so she got to meet him and she fell in love with him. And according to her story, She had become pregnant at the age of about 42 and they were going to have a kid together and they were going to get married, even though Renato was already married. 00:21:16 Speaker 1: Was she married? Had she been married? 00:21:19 Speaker 2: Not married. Okay. 00:21:21 Speaker 1: Anyway, so the boyfriend, they're having an affair. 00:21:24 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. And so she and Renato, who's now in a fairly intense stage of his rebellion, like he's living with rebels up in the hills now, all heavily armed and all very paranoid about how all this was going to end. She gets into a relationship with him. When Renato dies, there is naturally focus on the rebels who accompanied him down to Dili from his mountaintop Erie, but the rebels quickly turn on Angelita and say, she was sleeping with him, she was pillow-talking him, she was telling him to come down and seize control of the nation. And the prosecutors and the legal fraternity jumped on this, seized this, and certainly turned on her. And she became, even though she wasn't present, she became the lead person in the conspiracy. And she was charged with both, you know, attempting, leading the assassination attempt on both the prime minister and the president, which is, you know, a pretty um substantial uh pair of allegations if you like in um to have. 00:22:39 Speaker 1: Against you so she needs she needs a defensive counsel she. 00:22:44 Speaker 2: Needs a lawyer a lawyer she needs a good one and i was talking to her at this time i actually was present when she was first arrested and taken away she was on a planning she was coming to a meeting with me and i actually saw her being taken away and um we spoke after that and said, look, you know, and she was talking about getting someone famous like Jeffrey Robinson to, you know, the British, the famous Australian British lawyer to come and represent her. And I was, I said to her, look, you know, you can get, you can treat it as a human rights case if you like, but, you know, what you really need is a defence. You need a good lawyer to go through the facts forensically to make a case from you. You know, you need a defence, not a performance. And, I know John Tippett QC in Darwin. He's 50 minutes away. He can be back and forth. And he's, in my opinion, one of Australia's best barristers. I've seen him in court. He's quite brilliant. 00:23:46 Speaker 1: You make the point, which is a really interesting point, that the Australian government will pay for the defence then of Australian citizens who are incarcerated and charged overseas. It's a slightly different one now, but That was a really interesting observation and not many of us would know that. Yeah. 00:24:07 Speaker 2: The Federal Attorney General had the Serious Crimes Abroad Scheme, it was called. And if you were Australian, and Pires fitted this because she was Australian Timorese, the fund would pay for your legal representative to go to wherever you were in the world and represent you. And the Bali Nine had used this fund. Chappelle Corby had used this fund. And Angelita Pires used this fund. And so when I flew back to Darwin, I found Tippett was already well aware of this fund and thought, well, and he was making plans to go and meet Angelita. They'd talked. And, you know, it was a fantastic thing. You know, it's changed since. It's now because of, I think, concerns that some cases, including this one, may have caused the taxpayers a bit more money than they expected. It now only applies to death penalty cases abroad. 00:25:08 Speaker 1: So John Tibbett, I mean, you describe him adequately in the book. There's no doubt about it. But give us your impression of John Tibbett. How do I perceive him from your description? He's a bit of a lair, I would think. Sails close to the wind. 00:25:27 Speaker 2: Sails very close to the wind, a highly, highly competent lawyer, despised around town by many, including the cops and newspaper readers who just think he's, you know, too brash, too loud, too muscled, perhaps. He was known for his powerlifting, weightlifting sort of stuff. But... Interestingly, those people who didn't like Tippett would tend to be the first ones who would turn to him if they got into trouble. 00:26:06 Speaker 1: But he actually, the puzzling thing is that he actually got people off who'd committed quite heinous crimes. 00:26:14 Speaker 2: His lawyer. 00:26:16 Speaker 1: I know, but it just didn't, I wanted to like the guy, but there's a couple of really serious crimes from which he had the people exonerated. 00:26:28 Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, that's, I guess, what some lawyers do. I mean, criminal lawyers, they raise the doubt. They raise the doubt and they keep raising the doubt. 00:26:40 Speaker 1: Anyway, let's get him in team. We're meeting Angelita Perez. 00:26:47 Speaker 2: So I gave Tippett a warning. I said, look, she's a beautiful woman. She's a stunning woman. Just watch yourself. Not that she was necessarily, you know, going to fall for him, but I knew that he would. And he said, I was being completely ridiculous. Don't be so stupid. 00:27:09

Speaker 1: And what happened? 00:27:13 Speaker 2: The next thing, I suppose they're in a difficult fight, trying to prove her innocence. They're... living and working together in hotel rooms and there's the amplified vulnerability of being in a high-stakes fight like that and they fell in love. 00:27:32 Speaker 1: Which a defence lawyer is not supposed to do. My guest is Paul Toohey. His book is called The Fatal Island and we'll explore this relationship and the outcome when we come back shortly. My guest on Conversations is Paul Toohey, eminent journalist, author and His latest book is called The Fatal Island about assassination attempts on the President and the Prime Minister of East Timor, Timor-Leste. Is that the correct pronunciation? And the girlfriend of the rebel leader who was killed in the exchange is on trial and she retains an Australian barrister, John Tippett, and they fall in love. Did that impact on the outcome of her trial? 00:28:22 Speaker 2: No, it impacted on John Tippett's every waking moment during the trial because he thought if she doesn't get acquitted and she could turn on me, which was possible because they'd had some, I think, fairly furious disputes. I mean, they were in a relationship, but it was a tempestuous one. And he went to the day of the verdict, feeling that if this goes badly for her, my career is completely over. If she said, he didn't represent me properly because we were in a relationship, that was an argument which was probably correct. 00:29:07 Speaker 1: So she's charged with engineering this assassination attempt and he's defending her on that basis. Yeah. what's the outcome or do we have to read the book. 00:29:22 Speaker 2: Well not really because it's no news look Tippett was successful in upending the prosecution narrative that this guy called Marçal had shot Renato and Exposto. It just didn't happen the way it's... And then everything started falling apart. Nothing happened the way it's said. All the evidence, they produced evidence which showed the bullets didn't match certain people being shot and it was just the guns weren't right. The people who shot them weren't right. And the thing essentially collapsed. And they couldn't very well just say, well, Angelita, this is all your fault, after the whole story collapsed. And remember something else. The rebels had decided not to testify, exercise their right to silence, because they realised that if they got up and took the stand and said, Angelita is all to blame, she caused us to do that, that would lead to a greater sense of premeditation from them for participating in the attacks. So it wasn't worth their while to say that. They were just best to shut up and say, actually, they'd been accusing Angie left, right and centre, but now when it got to trial, they just shut up. Because Ramos Horta, again, one of the things he'd done, which he should never have done, was he was already saying, well, once the trial's over, I'm going to pardon all the rebels, which... But he didn't say that about Angie. He wasn't going to pardon her. So it was like this woman had to take the blame for everything. And that doesn't sit very well in a society like Timor where, you know, men like to say that they're in charge. How could they say that it was a woman? It was her that did all this. 00:31:19 Speaker 1: Okay. So she's exonerated? 00:31:23 Speaker 2: She's acquitted, yes. 00:31:24 Speaker 1: Acquitted. 00:31:25 Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah. 00:31:27 Speaker 1: So then what happened to the relationship between her and John Tippett? 00:31:31 Speaker 2: Well, they ended up getting married. 00:31:34 Speaker 1: Did they really? 00:31:35 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:31:36 Speaker 1: I didn't read that part. 00:31:38 Speaker 2: It's towards the end. But the marriage, I don't know, it wasn't a great marriage. It never recovered from certain things that happened. And it didn't last that long. Well, let's say they're no longer married. 00:31:55 Speaker 1: She went back to East Timor and there was a... I read an article where she said she was destitute. 00:32:03 Speaker 2: I didn't read that article, but I'm not sure where she draws an income from. With Tippett, she ran for the presidency, I think in 2012, but of the field of candidates, she came last. And so I think that was the end of her political ambitions. 00:32:23 Speaker 1: And John Tibber, did his reputation spiral or soar? 00:32:29 Speaker 2: John's reputation is always strong among people who need him, who need a good lawyer. 00:32:41 Speaker 1: Has he read the book? 00:32:43 Speaker 2: Yes. Yes, he has. 00:32:45 Speaker 1: Did he want any changes to it? 00:32:48 Speaker 2: No, he wasn't given that right, but he was. 00:32:52 Speaker 2: Look, I think he enjoys it. I mean, he was a participant in this whole narrative, like a strong participant who, you know, really, I mean, the thing is, Graeme, like we were talking about this at the start, East Timor is something that I think Australians have a bit of a blind spot to or the subject makes people's eyes glaze over and it's just like Timor. So I wanted a narrative that would, get people in, you know, and it was not just like about Australia's treated it badly and they're all just misunderstood people and blah, blah, blah. I wanted, you know, and Tippett gave me that. 00:33:35 Speaker 1: You'd make a movie out of it, really, with all these charismatic people in it, couldn't you? 00:33:40 Speaker 2: I hope so. 00:33:43 Speaker 1: You did some other, you've done some amazing things. I mean, you reported on the Peter Falconeo case with the When you look back over this career, even though you're freelancing now, what springs to mind immediately when you sort of contemplate the things you've done and the things you've seen? 00:34:02 Speaker 2: Oh, I don't know. I suppose one thing that always springs to mind is like the Sandy Hook massacre when I was a US correspondent. Oh, no. You know, all those children were killed in that

school. And I just remember... being in the snow, watching these parents, you know, standing at a long way apart, watching these parents burying this kid in the freezing, freezing hard ground and just thinking how terrible it was. But, you know, as a journalist, you see these things and that's not a particularly graphic, that's not as graphic as what I've seen, but it's just like terrible. You know, you're a witness, you're not going through what, people are going through and I suppose that's what I always think is that I'm luckier than them. 00:34:54 Speaker 1: Can you detach your feelings from having to report on it objectively? 00:35:01 Speaker 2: I think so. 00:35:03 Speaker 1: It's probably a silly question really. 00:35:06 Speaker 2: I think I mean I say unfortunately I think you have to. 00:35:12 Speaker 1: How long were you in Darwin for? 00:35:14 Speaker 2: Many many years since I was 14 and I started my career there. But I was, you know, in Sydney for a time, in Melbourne for a time, in New York for a time. So I've been around. 00:35:26 Speaker 1: So with the Peter Falconeo murder, do you have any doubt that Murdoch was the perpetrator? 00:35:36 Speaker 2: Absolutely none. I mean, his DNA was all over the combi. He was the guy on the truck stop. You know, he, it was him. He fit it. I know, look, You see the face of that guy who did the Salt Creek thing. You think, oh, hang on. He doesn't look bad for it either. But all the facts, when you put them together, it was Bradley Murdoch. His DNA was all over that combi van. He had the gun. He had the cable ties. He'd raped a mother and daughter in South Australia prior to going on trial. for the Falconio thing, but he was acquitted. But he was acquitted because, I guess, the mother and daughter weren't believed, but, you know, when you look back at it, he shouldn't have been acquitted. 00:36:27 Speaker 1: So you've moved from Darwin now, you've settled in. 00:36:30 Speaker 2: Country Victoria. 00:36:30 Speaker 1: Country Victoria. Is that home? 00:36:33 Speaker 2: It's home for now, yeah. 00:36:36 Speaker 1: When you said you were in Darwin for 14, did your folks move up there? 00:36:42 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:36:44 Speaker 1: Tell us about the early years. Tell us about the formative years where the inspiration to write came from. 00:36:51 Speaker 2: Look, I think it was because I hated school so much and I just started reading and reading because I still needed something and I just wanted to be a writer and I just pursued that and pursued that and it eventually happened. I got a job. in the NT News, in the library there. That didn't last too long. But then I started working for Little Opposition Papers in Darwin and it was, you know, just a great opportunity because, you know, to see a newspaper created and to write it, you know, see it written out, having a darkroom there and a small building, you know, a printing press, it was a fantastic experience. 00:37:41 Speaker 1: The newspapers in Darwin were a bit different, weren't they? They had an edge to them. 00:37:47 Speaker 2: Yeah. There was two newspapers called the Sunday Territorian. Two? Two. Opposing. One owned by Murdoch and one owned by a guy called Peter Isaacson. They went to court and the judge said, oh, you can both have the name. 00:38:03 Speaker 1: I remember going up there with the footy team. We played a trial game up there and I was coach and the journalists were so aggressive. I just thought, what on earth is, what have I walked into? Tell me, what did I walk into? 00:38:16 Speaker 2: A very proud group of St. Mary's, Buffalo's, guys who probably weren't going to let you get away with it. But you did. I think you won, didn't you? 00:38:32 Speaker 1: That wasn't about the game. It was about how aggressive the journalist was. And why did he need to be that way? Anyway, that's just an experience. What do you hope for the. 00:38:44 Speaker 2: Book, Paul? Sales. Sales. And I hope people can read about Timor and find a story that engages them. And it's not all about Australians being the bad guys at a political level. It's not all... Hopefully they'll find it a ripping yarn that could take place anywhere, but shine a light on East Timor, which is not a place that is doing too well for itself. The oil's run out. The population's not too healthy. Kids are still stunted. It's right next to us and it's... um back in the hands of its old leaders you know guzmao and ramas hoda and i don't know i don't think the country's being served too well politically. 00:39:41 Speaker 1: And we don't know what's happened to angelita perez. 00:39:44 Speaker 2: I'm not sure what's happened to angelita perez i'd I worked with her on stories at the time, but I haven't followed up. 00:39:52 Speaker 1: There you go. There's another book. 00:39:54 Speaker 2: No, I'll stay away from that one. I'll leave this one right here. 00:40:00 Speaker 1: Thanks for the chat, Paul. Good luck with it, mate. I appreciate having had the opportunity to talk to you about it. All the best. 00:40:07 Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you very much for having me. That's really good. It's great to, I don't know, have some interest in it, I guess. 00:40:14 Speaker 1: Paul Tuohy was my guest, folks. His book is called The Fatal Island, Bullets, Magic and the Power in Timor. Thank you so much for joining us.