PADDY Kenneally is a veteran of a once 200 strong Australian commando force that fought the Japanese in East Timor during the second World War.
The post war story of the 2/2nd Commando Squadron is one of an impressive determination to turn swords into plough shares. A whole 30 years before Indonesia invaded the Portuguese colony, he and his comrades formed the 2/2nd Commando Association to provide development aid to the Timorese, up to 60,000 of whom fell helping them against "the Japs".
Paddy is damning in his criticism of how Australia repaid this sacrifice by blessing the Indonesian occupation, in which an estimated 200,000 Timorese have been killed, and by conspiring with the illegal occupiers in stealing the Timorese oil wealth under the terms of the 1990 Timor Gap Treaty.
"Australia waded through a river of blood and mountains of bodies to get it. Every Australian government has betrayed the Timorese," he says. "The 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor was the greatest act of aggression since the second World War - and we were the worst.
He thinks too that a fear of being overrun by Indonesia - with nearly 200 million people - compared to a mere 17 million in Australia - is not far below the surface in an Australian policy of appeasement.
Emigrated in 1927
Paddy, who emigrated from Youghal at the age of 11 and arrived by steamer in Sydney on St Patrick's Day, 1927, is now a muscular 80 year old with a stunning memory and lots of fire in the belly. Another piece of Irish serendipity had him born in 1916.
In 1952 he married Nora Kelly a Youghal woman he met in London. Back in Youghal for the past few months, he has had a look at his old borne which he remembers being raided by the British.
His knock about working life has been spent as a docker - in Sydney, Fremantle, Port Adelaide, and Wellington, New Zealand - timber feller, seaman, jack of all trades in a newspaper, and as a one man road making gang. There's an Ancient Mariner quality about his tales of the 20th century.
Ancient Mariner
He recalls the 156 day Wellington dockers' strike of 1952 which was broken, and the waterside union with it by troops. The newspaper in Sydney was the organ of the Social Credit Party, an international movement popular in the late 1930s. It challenged "the bust and boom" approach to economics. Paddy describes it as a more egalitarian system, somewhere between communism and capitalism, which valued people rather than money as assets.
"It is essential that governments run something," he says, going on to give out yards about privatisation of assets that "millions of taxpayers' money went into ... Look at the water in Britain. In three years the cost has gone up 12 per cent, far in excess of inflation.
Churchill is an obsession with Paddy but, because of his manipulation of Australian troops during the war, he's certainly no hero. Paddy's Cork family was intensely nationalist and he remembers the Black and Tans coming to Youghal. So as a young man in Sydney he had no intention of fighting in any Pommie war - "no fighting for England was my credo" - until Pearl Harbour. Japan's attack made the war Australia's business too, Paddy figured.
After a mere week's training, "if you leave out that saluting and marching stuff", he found himself in the mountains of Portuguese Timer. He got in some bother using gelignite to gather firewood, but that's another story. "I like explosives actually."
East Timor revisited
Paddy's idea of revisiting East Timer, which he has done several times in recent years, is to walk all over it like a mountain goat to meet old comrades and get a sense of how the people have fared under the Indonesians. If it weren't for the gammy leg he's nursing he would have visited Timor on this trip.
So far the 2/2nd veterans have raised and spent A$40,000 on aid, which has included sending experts to teach carpentry/joinery, machine maintenance and progressive agricultural ideas. The Timorese are "very quick learners", he says, even if they do have "a problem about time".
Before the 1975 invasion the 2/2nd veterans built a memorial to the 60,000 Timorese, which took the practical form of a resting place at Dare about nine kilometres outside Dili, the capital, for people on their way to market. It has a rest room and a bathing pool. They recently raised $5,000 each from the federal government and the turned servicemen's organisation to refurbish it.
On his last visit to Timor two years ago he recalls, "as the sun came up in the east over the mountains, a group of Timorese were preparing to jump into pits to shovel river gravel up on to mattresses above them. They worked from dawn to dusk and got about £5 a week.
"Dili is practically an Indonesian city with `transmigrants' from Java, Bali, Sulawesi, Ambon - and then the Chinese, he says. Army officers own the coffee plantations and rice paddies. All the good jobs - in the banks, telecommunications, transport, farming, or construction - are for Indonesians. All the Timorese do is the work." He has praise for the Balinese as farmers. "Only trouble is it's Timorese land they're working.
And he attacks the Indonesian claim that it has invested heavily in development, saying "they build beautiful buildings - schools and hospitals - with nothing inside them."
Nor does Paddy find anything to be proud of in Australia's treatment of its own aborigine people. The one intention of the Irish of his day in going to Australia was to get a better life. "But when you look at the product it is no different from the oppressor they left."
This human trait of visiting past ill treatment on others he finds "completely wrong". The Indonesian peoples "merely swapped the Dutch colonialists for the Japanese" with "independence" in 1949, he says.
And thinking of the Plantation of Ulster, he adds: "Timer is the Ireland of the Indonesian archipelago."