Jill Jolliffe sought the truth of the Balibo Five

Writer Jill Jolliffe’s early life was cruel and, deprived of love, shaped an unusual woman who pursued the truth at any cost.

Jill Jolliffe’s enduring campaign led in 2007 to a royal commission into the Balibo murders.

OBITUARY

Jill Jolliffe. Journalist, author and human rights campaigner.
Born Melbourne, February 7, 1945; died December 2, aged 77.

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Jill Jolliffe was born to an unmarried mother who was forced to give her up to a cruel woman chosen by the nuns who ran a home in Melbourne for pregnant single girls. Against the odds, they had about 10 days to bond. Sometimes mothers would be drugged and might never see their babies.

The violent tyranny of her adoptive life helped form a risk-taking, sometimes isolated woman disinclined to form long-term relationships but dedicated to seeking justice and fairness where there was none. She believed in the truth being told, no matter how painful it might be.

We first met in the early 1980s and she abruptly told me that my brother Tony and his colleagues killed at Balibo in East Timor in 1975 had been “very naive”. The Balibo Five, murdered by Indonesian special forces, included Tony, 21, a sound recordist; reporters Greg Shackleton and Malcolm Rennie, both 29; and cameramen Gary Cunningham, 27, and Brian Peters, 24.

Jolliffe explained: “I had lunch with them at the Hotel Turismo in Dili just before they left and told them, ‘It’s bush warfare up there and you had better keep your heads down.’ They didn’t listen to me.” I came to appreciate her honesty, especially as the Balibo family members were told lies for years.

Senior figures in the Whitlam government knew they were dead long before the information was passed on to us. Jolliffe made it her life’s goal that what happened at Balibo would never be forgotten.

One of our first female war correspondents, the Monash University-educated Jolliffe was in East Timor with a student delegation in 1975 and witnessed first-hand the Indonesian troops’ invasion. She reported on the Balibo Five murders that October.

This was followed by her groundbreaking book East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism. Jolliffe lived in Portugal from 1978 to 1999, reporting on Portugal and its colonial territories.

She helped many East Timorese refugee families flee the war and settle into life in Portugal. The family of Gil Santos, my bandmate from the Dili Allstars, was one and will never forget Jolliffe’s support.

Other projects while in Europe included directing a television documentary, The Pandora Trail, in 1992, which exposed European prostitution rackets and the enslavement of Third World women.

In 1994 she entered occupied East Timor, travelling over rugged mountains from Indonesia to meet guerrilla leader Nino Konis Santana. She was captured by the Indonesians but managed to escape and was subsequently banned from the territory.

Her 2001 book Cover-Up: The Inside Story of the Balibo Five was about the capture and killing of my brother and his mates and the manner in which both the Indonesian and Australian governments evaded the issue.

Jolliffe and her book on the Balibo Five.

In 2004 the Victorian government, at the urging of Premier Steve Bracks, purchased the house where the journalists were murdered, then refurbished it for use by the local community thanks to help from what is now known as the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union.

Jolliffe accompanied the Balibo families on the emotional trip to see the house and took time out to talk with my mother, mostly alone, about her lost son. This was a sharp contrast to the way in which for many years the Australian government treated our family.

Thanks to Jolliffe’s enduring campaign, in 2007 a royal commission into the Balibo murders finally revealed that the Indonesian military had ordered their deaths. In 2009, leading Australian filmmaker Robert Connolly used Cover-Up as a central source for his film Balibo, which starred Anthony LaPaglia.

Jolliffe returned to Australia and lived in the Northern Territory, from where she reported for the BBC, Nation Review, Reuters, The Sunday Times, The Age, The Guardian and The Sydney Morning Herald. She was a finalist for Senior Australian of the Year in 2010.

As powerful as anything she wrote about was her memoir, Run for Your Life, which told of her adoption and brutal family home life until she escaped it with a scholarship to university.

One of the greatest moments in her life was when, aged 67, she tracked down her 83-year-old birth mother and learned of her loving young father who also had fought her adoption.

Jolliffe and her mother had many traits in common, including a quick intelligence, fierce independence and a passion for politics. Jolliffe found their meeting “profoundly moving”.

In recent years she had battled Alzheimer’s disease, during which she was looked after and protected by her guardian, journalist Fiona Gruber, Gruber’s husband Mark Williams and Ann Brady, all devoted carers.

Additional reporting: Alan Howe