Jose Ramos Horta on the Darwin waterfront at the time of the arrival of a vessel with refugees from East Timor, media far right . - Photograph from Peter Simon Collection .
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New evidence about the cover up over the Indonesian invasion of East Timor and the murder of the Balibo Five media team has emerged in an article by Clinton Fernandes, headed WHAT WE REALLY KNEW ABOUT EAST TIMOR ,in New Matilda online publication of April 14 . It says Fernandes,Senior Lecturer in Strategic Studies at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy, fought for five years to get access to documents which definitively show for the first time what Australia knew about the killing of the Balibo Five .
In April 2007 he applied to National Archives of Australia for access to the Defence Intelligence Organisation documents relating to Indonesia and East Timor for the period October 1 to December 31, 1975.
A former major in the Australian military intelligence , Fernandes was consulting historian to the film Balibo , based on the book of the same name by Jill Jolliffe, starring Anthony LaPaglia as Roger East, another veteran newsman murdered by the Indonesians at Dili, who worked in Darwin after Cyclone Tracy . Little Darwin recommends the New Matilda article to the Darwin media for follow up interviews
