Launch of DVD Timor Leste We Forget

The Mary MacKillop East Timor Mission has had a DVD “Timor Leste We Forget” made about the history of East Timor and about our work there as one Australian response to the situation of the Timorese people.   

On Saturday December 17, 2011 it was launched as that day was the 70th anniversary of the landing of a few hundred men of the Australian 2/2 Independent Company in Portuguese Timor, now Timor-Leste, joined later by some of the 2/4th. Mutual friendship between the Timorese and the Australians developed.  Of all the Australians fighting in South East Asia only the men in Portuguese Timor remained a cohesive fighting force, due to the loyalty and care of the Timorese.

The most conservative estimate of Timorese deaths during the remaining four years of the war is 40,000.   December 17th is then a special anniversary.  It brought the East Timorese people into a war in which they had no part as their colonial overlord, Portugal, was neutral.  It caused them untold destruction, death and sorrow.

They befriended Australia, and we owe them.

The DVD was made by Albert Street Productions of Melbourne, being commissioned by the Mary MacKillop East Timor Mission and the Sisters of St Joseph as a teaching tool to promote a wider appreciation of the intricate historical links between Australia and Timor-Leste.

The role of the Timorese people in World War II is often overshadowed by conflicts involving greater numbers of Australians.   However, the Timorese/Australian partnership which began on 17  December 1941 was unique and its toll on the Timorese people was inestimable. It is essential that the story be told.