Adept at dissecting the full spectrum of Australian views of Timor, the author has a less firm grasp of Indonesia. In explaining, for example, the Holt government’s early support for Suharto, Job refers to earlier Western alarm at President Sukarno’s ‘Cold War neutralism and toleration of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI)’. Yet, as Sukarno’s Guided Democracy evolved in the early 1960s, Indonesia abandoned any Cold War ‘neutralism’ and aligned itself increasingly with China, as did the PKI. In 1963, Sukarno adopted a policy of ‘Confrontation’ with Malaysia to prevent the British from bringing their Borneo territories into the proposed new federation. Australian troops fought Indonesian soldiers infiltrating from Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan) into Sarawak and conducted cross-border operations themselves. This background makes understandable the Holt government’s relief at Suharto’s rise to power in 1966, despite the appalling massacres that accompanied it.

Job’s book is the history of an Australian policy that mixed appeasement with collusion. Whatever other readers it may find, young Foreign Affairs and Trade officers should read it. There was, overall, little to distinguish the actions and attitudes of the two governments that Job considers, but it was Whitlam who was the architect of the bipartisan policy. He had a crucial role in initially encouraging the Indonesians to move on East Timor. Quoting Jusuf Wanandi, an assistant to Suharto’s chief political fixer, General Ali Murtopo, Job writes that it was indeed Whitlam who had planted the idea of a takeover of Timor in Indonesian minds.

The military coup in Portugal in April 1974 lent urgency to the question of Timor’s future. Whitlam sent Peter Wilenski, his principal private secretary, to hold talks in Indonesia less than two months later. Conveying Whitlam’s views, Wilenski told his interlocutor, Harry Tjan, another Murtopo associate, that if Indonesia did not acquire Timor, the territory might come under the influence of another, ‘potentially unfriendly’ power. This power, which clearly exerted great influence over both Australian and Indonesian imaginations, was never identified and even today has yet to show its hand.

Whitlam gave the same message to Suharto himself on 6 September 1974 at their meeting in a sacred cave (Gua Semar) in Central Java. Suharto, who had not invited any other foreign leader to such a place, was thereby initiating his guest to an extent into some of the profound if arcane content of Javanese beliefs. This probably had an enduring impact in cementing the Australian’s uncritical devotion to Suharto.

Among the arguments that Whitlam, an ASEAN enthusiast, tried out on Suharto was that Timor was too small to become independent, overlooking the fact that it was more than twice as large as Brunei, ASEAN’s smallest member-state, which had avoided being absorbed into Malaysia. In October, Job reports, Murtopo told Australia’s ambassador in Lisbon that Whitlam’s visit had helped the Indonesians ‘crystallise’ their own thinking.

Job argues that Whitlam had a ‘two-tier policy’ towards Timor. Ambassador Richard Woolcott, the Foreign Affairs official whose outlook was seemingly closest to Whitlam’s, foreshadowed this in a cable on 24 September. He quoted Whitlam as saying: ‘I am in favour of incorporation but obeisance has to be made to self-determination. I want it incorporated but I do not want this done in a way … which would make people more critical of Indonesia.’

Indonesia nevertheless chose methods that were predictable, given the Suharto government’s previous record, and that, if honestly reported, could not fail to make Australians more critical. Then what Job dubs the ‘narrative of denial’ – the denial or understating of killings, mass detentions, and other human rights abuses, growing impoverishment and famine – came into full play as a leading component of Australian policy.

Fraser took office barely a month before Indonesia’s invasion of Timor on 7 December 1975. While maintaining Whitlam’s stance on Timor, he seemed to escape the fateful, personal fascination with Indonesia’s authoritarian leader that must surely have warped Whitlam’s judgement. Among his successors, only Paul Keating inherited this delusion.

Job suggests that Fraser also had a two-tier policy on Timor, similar to Whitlam’s. But he added a new element to the approach. This was simply to blame his predecessor for, in one Liberal MP’s words, giving assurances to Suharto that Australia ‘will not make any trouble if you take over Timor’. Whitlam had, the MP went on, refused to mediate between the Indonesians and the Timorese. This was why the Fraser government had inherited an ‘unfortunate situation’. It was obviously too late to do anything.

Fraser’s tenure (1975–83) overlapped with the period of the worst suffering endured by the Timorese under Indonesia’s twenty-four-year rule. Government spokespersons, therefore, had to resort to claiming that various unseemly allegations were ‘unverified’, ‘generalised’, ‘exaggerated’, or the product of ‘insubstantial information’ (Foreign Minister Tony Street). A neutral observer might have concluded from such statements that Australia was shockingly ill-informed about grave events occurring near its shores and that its intelligence agencies were performing way below par.

An interesting point that emerges from Job’s story is that Indonesian ministers and officials had a much better grip on what lines of argument would embarrass Australians, rather than the other way round. These can be summed up by the assertion that it was not Indonesian behaviour in and towards Timor that was putting the bilateral relationship in ‘peril’, but rather how Australia reacted to that behaviour. Foreign Minister Mochtar, for instance, warned Ambassador Woolcott in January 1978 that some officials believed Australia secretly wanted a weak and divided Indonesia and gave moral support to Fretilin to that end. General Benny Moerdani told another Australian diplomat some months later that no progress in the relationship would be possible unless Australia tackled domestic criticism of Indonesia. Australian officials, pre-empted no doubt by Whitlam, seem never to have issued friendly warnings to their Indonesian counterparts that Indonesia’s Timor ambitions and brutal actions there could harm its international reputation.

Indonesian officials found ready echoes in the Australian academic world. Some eminent figures, such as Heinz Arndt, the doyen of Indonesia economists in Australia, expressed as much indignation about the Timor protests of some of his fellow-citizens as any patriotic Indonesian. Another ANU economist, Peter McCawley, told ABC Radio in January 1982 that ‘we are relatively unimportant in Indonesia’s eyes’, pointing out that Australia only contributed two per cent of Indonesia’s aid receipts, that it was not a large investor and did not carry ‘a big stick’. Yet a great deal of diplomatic energy had been spent in convincing Indonesia that this relatively unimportant country, which was assumed by the outside world to know a lot about Timor, understood how to do right by Indonesia. As for the big stick, it must have been left behind in Borneo.