Failing to Meet in the Middle: East Timor and Gail Jones's "Other Places"

REVlSmNG ELEMENTS OF THE PAST OF A NATION AND THE CALIbration of appropriate modulations of regret and pride that should be felt are often notoriously irresoluble. In Australian context, these issues have, understandably, come to be dominated by one above all others: how to feel, express, admit, make official and learn from relation between nation's First Peoples and settlers and their descendants. Jones has participated in debate through her novel Sorry (2007), but this is not only area of regret in Australian history or in Jones's work. Concerns about processing history have occurred in various guises throughout her from its earliest appearance in short stories in House of Breathing (1992). The story I would like to examine here concerns an event that has also activated Australian shame and guilt, but one in which Australians were not principal participants: Indonesian invasion of Timor on Australia's borders in 1975, and succeeding ruthless oppression that lasted until Timorese people voted in a surprisinglygranted referendum in 1999 for independence.Among national stories in Australia, that concerning Timor possesses unique characteristics. Official actions and explanations with respect to need for nation to accept Indonesia's invasion and subsequent oppression of Timor after Portugal's attempts at decolonization had been hindered by both Australia and Indonesia were never widely accepted (see Dunn, Scott, Pires, Fernandes), so that a sense of national uneasiness courses through most non-official discourses from date of invasion in 1975. East Timor's a little bit different. For Australians anyway, asserts David Wenham's character in Australian-Canadian television mini-series co-production set in Timor, Answered by Fire (2006), summing up thirty years of Australian guilt over its country's official acquiescence in Indonesia's brutal and neo-colonial actions. Given sense that with respect to Timor Australia had failed to support justice and a fair go, despite eloquent and penetrating opposition to official positions on situation, there are aspects of history that needs to be written that may require other resources than those available to arguments and strategies of non-fiction. In this endeavor, writers of conventionally have resources through which they may approach catachreses of historical events in ways that may supplement non-fictional exposes of official doublespeak. Fiction can offer other satisfactions to readers' ethical priorities and their desire to see guilt and shame processed from multiple angles, without need to establish hierarchies in areas of either narrative pleasure or verisimilitude. Jacques Ranciere goes so far as to suggest that [t]he artistic work of memory is that which accords everyone dignity of fiction (9), and it is this imbrication of constructed nature of memory with dignity of that Jones's story Other Places both opens up and enacts, but it does so in ways that cast doubt on ability of some memories ever to attain the dignity of fiction in any uncomplicated fashion.Robert Dixon points out that Gail Jones's first three novels deal with Australians who travel or live abroad and engage with aspects of modern global culture (121), and although Other Places (the longest story in The House of Breathing) also deals with an Australian who is traveling abroad, it is to a country that is both very near Australia and until recently very far from globalizing flows of late modernity. The attempt to close down and control Timorese cultures that Indonesian colonial project entailed summons up Jones's abiding interest in what Diana Brydon terms, generalizing centrality of story's title to Jones's work as a whole: the ambivalences of western encounters with self in 'other places' (249). …

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