Earlier this year came lawyer Bernard Collaery’s Oil Under Troubled Water (MUP, 2020), an exhaustively researched diplomatic history of Australia–Timor relations. Collaery currently awaits trial in the ACT for revealing, together with a whistleblower, that Australia bugged Timor’s cabinet during high-stakes oil and gas negotiations. Now, adding to this growing library comes Too Close to Ignore, a collection edited by academics Mark Moran and Jodie Curth-Bibb, and The Road: Uprising in West Papua by Walkley-nominated reporter John Martinkus.

These books are distinct in subject, method, and style. But they find considerable common ground in their policy prescriptions: Australia urgently needs to pay more attention to its near abroad, including through diplomatic engagement and development aid. Southern PNG, write Moran and Curth-Bibb, ‘is too close for Australia to ignore the poverty and increasing frustration and consequent tensions prevalent in the region’. Martinkus, meanwhile, ends The Road with a desperate plea: ‘if the Indonesians and the Australians and the UN continue their current policies in [West] Papua, there will never be peace’.

What distinguishes the end product of this collaboration is its empirical basis. Almost every chapter in Too Close to Ignore draws on fieldwork, qualitative interviews, and data collected by the authors. ‘Simply put,’ Moran writes in a preface, ‘we set out to understand a little-known part of the world … to raise awareness of a poorly understood but strategically important borderland’.Too Close to Ignore is the result of a collaborative research project funded by an Australian Research Council grant. Its eight substantive chapters draw together nine contributors from the academy, consultancies, and the public sector. The result is an impressively interdisciplinary collection, cogently synthesising perspectives across law, governance, health, anthropology, development, and environmental and marine-resource management.

The central problem highlighted by Too Close to Ignore is underdevelopment. South Fly, the part of PNG closest to Australia, endures poverty comparable to war-torn rural Afghanistan. This would be alarming in the abstract, but its negative consequences are reinforced by South Fly’s proximity to Australia and the fluidity of movement permitted under the Torres Strait Treaty (Papuans from certain areas have special rights to enter Australia for ‘traditional activities’). Several graphics in the collection underscore the severe disparity between South Fly and the Torres Strait: one compares average monthly household income ($199 in South Fly; $2,840 in the Torres Strait); another highlights stark infrastructure inequalities.

The envy and resentment are palpable – one Papuan is quoted as observing ‘in Australia, they have everything there’. These feelings are fuelled by a sense that Australia has failed its nearest neighbour, which only gained independence from Australian administration in 1975. Predictably, Australia’s response has been greater border securitisation. This has had a heartbreaking personal impact; one eye-opening passage highlights the barriers faced by cross-border couples.

While Too Close to Ignore is well written and accessible, a generalist reader might nonetheless approach the collection with trepidation. Four pages of acronyms in the glossary are an early signal that the book is aimed at academics and policymakers. The only other minor quibble is the slightly optimistic subtitle, Australia’s Borderland with Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, when, in reality, the collection is overwhelmingly focused on PNG.

The Road, on the other hand, is concerned solely with West Papua, the other half of New Guinea. This short book – just over one hundred pages – derives its name from the Trans-Papua Highway currently under construction from one end of Indonesian Papua to the other. The road has been just the latest flashpoint in tense relations between West Papuans and their Indonesian rulers since the region was effectively annexed in the 1960s.

Self-determination is at the heart of the dispute: West Papuans want independence and believe they were promised it by their Dutch colonisers and the United Nations. Instead, they were violently incorporated into Indonesia, under the cover of a democratic façade. The Act of Free Choice in 1969 saw a hand-picked group of one thousand West Papuans vote, under duress, to endorse the annexation. It is known locally as the Act of No Choice.

In the decades of repression that have followed, hundreds of thousands of West Papuans have been killed. The push for independence persists. In 2017, 1.8 million West Papuans – more than seventy per cent of the population – demanded a referendum on independence in a petition handed to the United Nations. The hand-signed document weighed more than forty kilograms and was smuggled between villages – Indonesia threatened jail time for anyone caught signing it. Papuan militias and Indonesian troops are clashing on an increasingly frequent basis.

The Road is a brief summary of the history and contemporary developments in West Papua. Martinkus reported from the region in the 1990s and 2000s, ‘despite regular casual death threats and constant surveillance’, and he draws on this first-hand insight. Martinkus was subsequently banned, and much of the book therefore relies on second-hand reporting (albeit some of the lengthy extracts feel unnecessary). Since 2010, foreign journalists have been restricted from reporting in West Papua, while, more recently, NGOs, international organisations, religious groups, and even foreign diplomats have been prohibited from travelling there.

Martinkus, full of fury, rightly damns Australia’s indifference to the Papuan suffering. He recalls newspapers refusing to run his stories; one editor asked him, ‘So what are your plucky brown fellows up to today?’ While Pacific nations including Vanuatu and Tuvalu have taken up the Papuan cause on the international stage, Australia – with all our diplomatic clout – remains silent. Martinkus worries about the endgame; the West Papuans are not going anywhere. ‘The local people have never forgotten or forgiven that take-over,’ he writes. ‘To my mind they never will.’

Both of these books make for grim reading. Not all is well in Australia’s near abroad. For too long, we have looked the other way. One contributor in Too Close to Ignore diagnoses ‘out of sight and out of mind’; a diplomat in The Road suggests ‘hear no evil, see no evil’. Given our proximity, history, and prosperity, Australia has a moral responsibility to do more.

The most harrowing passage in The Road comes in the epilogue. Martinkus is a renowned war correspondent – he has covered gruesome conflicts in Timor-Leste, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Afghanistan. ‘But never,’ he insists, ‘have I seen a people more systematically oppressed and isolated than the West Papuans, by the Indonesian military and intelligence services.’ Australians cannot say that we did not know.