Shooting Balibo: Blood and Memory in East Timor, by Tony Maniaty

Sydney: Viking, 2009. Reviewed by MARCUS O’DONNELL

EARLY on in Tony Maniaty’s Shooting Balibo we come across Herman Melville, Michelangelo Antonioni and John Dos Passos. We quickly get the message that this is as much a journey of the imagination as it is a travelogue, memoir or investigation. Maniaty tells us that when he went to East Timor as an ABC reporter in 1975, just before the ill-fated journalists, his travel reading was Melville’s Moby Dick. Here we get a sense of the young journalist’s ambition, his questing commitment to follow the story, just as Ahab follows his whale.

But in retrospect it also tells us how large the 1975 events at Balibo have figured in Maniaty’s life. Shooting Balibo narrates his recent return to Timor, as an advisor to Robert Connolly’s film Balibo and marks the first time he has returned to the tiny island nation since he fled just before the Indonesian invasion in 1975. In a sense, the book is still about him following the whale.

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Banquo’s Son by T K Roxborogh

Penguin, $37.Reviewed by SARAH GUMBLEY

Four hundred years later, Shakespeare’s works remain not only relevant, but also enjoyable, and here one of his plays is the subject of the latest piece in New Zealand writing. Banquo’s Son is a fresh and original take on Macbeth. For fans of the Scottish play, the book attempts to answer some of the many questions left lingering in their minds at the end: What happened next? Did the witches other prophecies come true? What happened to Banquo’s son?

Banquo’s Son, the first tale in a planned young-adult trilogy, takes up where Shakespeare’s play left off: Duncan is King, and leading a peaceful rule after years of Macbeth’s evil antics. The story follows young Fleance, known as ‘Flea’, son of the murdered Banquo. Flea is discovered wandering in the woods alone, having just witnessed his father’s murder and barely escaping with his own life. The humble pair, Miri and Magness, who discover him, take him in, and raise him as one of their own.

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The Guardian has reported that a poetry installation of Sue Hubbard’s “Eurydice” in the Waterloo underpass has been painted over.

Eurydice

I am not afraid as I descend,
step by step, leaving behind the salt wind
blowing up the corrugated river,
the damp city streets, their sodium glare
of rush-hour headlights pitted with pearls of rain;
for my eyes still reflect the half remembered moon.

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by SIMON NATHAN

MICHAEL KING is remembered for his writing of New Zealand history as well as for his generous support of other writers. After his tragic death in 2004, a group of friends and associates set up the Michael King Writers’ Centre. During Labour weekend 2009 the Centre organised a three-day residential workshop at Vaughan Park Retreat Centre on the North Shore with the theme, Shifting Sands: changing perceptions in history and biography. I was delighted to be one of twenty writers selected to attend. All of us had some writing experience, and were involved in different aspects of researching and writing New Zealand history and biography.

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Rebel Journalism: The Writings of Wilfred Burchett, edited by George Burchett and Nick Shimmin; foreword by John Pilger.

Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 2007, 314 pp. Reviewed by DAVID ROBIE

WILFRED BURCHETT’S legendary ‘warning to the world’ eyewitness account in the Daily Express, exposing the horror of the United States nuclear genocide in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, made global headlines on 5 September 1945. Almost four decades later, in his final book, Shadows of Hiroshima, he returned to this nuclear nightmare and reflected on this racist experiment against an already defeated enemy and a history of cover-ups over the ‘atomic plague’.

A few weeks after typing the last footnotes for the book in Sofia, Bulgaria, he suffered a stroke and died aged 72 on 26 September 1983. This last of 31 books in an extraordinary journalism career was written at a gloomy time for the Left globally. The Soviet Union was bogged down in its own ‘Vietnam’ in Afghanistan, victorious Vietnam had become isolated as a totalitarian Stalinist regime, and Western countries were supporting the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

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