Despite the single focus, the essays avoid any suggestion of uniformity by diversifying their styles and tone as well as their locations. In form they range from reportage to history to quasi-fiction, and are neatly bookended by Lawson’s recollections of two related events at the Sydney Writers’ Festivals of 2006 and 2007. The former recreates a lively, passionate talk given by the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya – ‘a beautiful woman, broad-browed and open-eyed, very youthful at forty-eight’. The latter is a tribute to this courageous dissident who, between these two Sydney events (specifically on 7 October 2006), was gunned down by an unknown assassin. The urgency and vividness of the 2006 talk lend an impression of immediacy to the first piece, but both are in fact retrospectives composed in the light of Politkovskaya’s death. That brief but luminous visit, and her subsequent murder in a Moscow stairwell, following which the authorities blatantly failed to locate the killers, are framed within an overview of Russia’s two wars (1994–96 and 1999–2009) against the breakaway Chechen Republic (now forcibly reincorporated in the Russian Federation and placed under the control of a puppet–tyrant).

In Sydney, Politkovskaya made it her mission to explain why the Chechen resisters – inevitable underdogs in any fight against Russia, even though far from toothless on their opposition – felt driven to perpetrate against innocent victims acts of violence that the world condemned as deplorable. The three-day siege of the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow in 2002 led to the death of thirty-nine Chechens and 129 hostages; Politkovskaya was among those who tried to ferry food and drink to all those in the theatre. In 2004, in Beslan, separatists seized a school, causing the deaths of nearly four hundred children and adults; Politkovskaya was given a cup of poisoned tea just as she was setting out to report the events there. She constantly negotiated the difficult line of understanding, indeed sympathising with, the need to draw attention to a cause while not condoning extremist behaviour. When she warned her Australian audience that Russia was ‘hurtling back into a Soviet abyss’, many of her audience must have gone home with conflicting emotions.

Lawson vividly conveys what a privilege it was to hear Politkovskaya draw these fine and aching distinctions. Yet what is their impact now for those of us who were not present or for whom the stories are blunted by familiarity, distance, and the passage of time? One might say that they at least add some perspective to the recent elections in Russia (in 1999 the Federal Security Service was in the charge of the ‘new’ President, Vladimir Putin). But Lawson wants to do more than merely broaden our knowledge. Her goal is affect – feeling associated with action. These essays are intended to catalyse her readers into some kind of involvement in the wider implications of particular situations: the questions a Russian martyr raises about the limits of protest may also have applications in other countries.

On this criterion, affect, some of the pieces succeed better than others. ‘From the Verandah’, which is set in Alice Springs, seems diffuse, wandering from one sad subject to another. It reinforces a general picture, but lacks direction. (Perhaps it is intended to symbolise government policy.) The next, on David Hicks, begins at a demonstration attended by three older women whom Lawson somewhat archly dubs Friends One, Two, and Three. There is gentle self-mockery (‘cotton hat, straw hat, baseball cap; grey hair, straw hair, synthetic ginger’), but fondness softens acerbity and the trope falls a little flat. Moreover, now that Hicks has been repatriated, is the cause not passé? In one sense, of course, the very use of the word begs the question: injustice is never ‘over’, vigilance and protest are ever necessary; but when the Friends bicker aimlessly about the film The Road to Guantánamo (‘We made the effort, and that’s resistance’ […] ‘No, it’s not, it cost us nothing’) a change of topic seems necessary. On then to West Papua. One of the Friends buys books on this subject and takes notes from them – without, as Lawson admits, any idea of what to do with them. Her honesty is admirable.

If this review is to follow suit, however, it must be stated that sometimes ‘admirable’ is not quite enough. The sentiment ‘We are all collaborators’ rang like a clarion call from the throats of Simone de Beauvoir and Lucie Abrac, but has now become commonplace, the reminiscences of the convaincus struggling these days to ignite a spark. Sadly, the battle cries of warriors do not necessarily incite the next generation to bear arms.

What a pleasure, then, to move from another ‘admirable’ essay on the languages, achievements, and problems of Ernabella, the sheep station that became a Presbyterian mission, to Lawson’s graphic account of the events staining the recent history of East Timor. The suddenly pacey writing owes its energy to a potent mix of several ingredients: the crushing self-interest of a powerful neighbour called Indonesia; Australia’s complicity in appeasing that same neighbour; the valour, glamour, and determination of revolutionary leaders such as José Ramos-Horta and Xanana Gusmão; the crusading persistence of Fretilin, the resistance movement; the recklessness with which five Australian journalists rushed to report the battle at Balibo, only to be murdered by the Indonesion invaders; and the self-serving cover-up of their deaths so long maintained by nearly everyone except a couple of splendid women: the widow of one of the victims, Shirley Shackleton; and Portuguese-speaking Australian journalist Jill Jolliffe. There were of course other contributors to the story, and its subsequent retellings – diplomats, politicians, historians, even film-makers – but the standout characters in Lawson’s twenty-page essay chisel themselves into your memory, where you know they will not lie quiet.

That the impact of this essay, titled ‘East Timor: Questions of Intelligence’, overshadows the other six raises interesting questions. It goes without saying that the issues it discusses are no more, and no less, demanding of consideration than are any of the rest. Is it fair, then, for one essay to demand and receive more of our attention? Fair or not, it is the inevitable result of Lawson’s decision to mix the essay mode with storytelling; readers will naturally discriminate on grounds not only of moral worth, but also of aesthetic pleasure and personal taste. While the collection is consistently well written and diligently researched, the East Timor essay stands out, firstly by reason of the profoundly disturbing happenings before, at, and after Balibo, and also because of its ability to arouse sweeping emotions of distress, outrage, and collective guilt. Lawson's play with both meanings of the word ‘intelligence’ (not simply basic information, but something more profoundly human) makes for prose that stirs, moves, and persuades.