It was a strange experience reading The Idealist, Nick Jose's novel on East Timor, as Australians voted No to Voice and the bombs rain down on Gaza. I couldn't separate the fiction from the real.
It begins with Anne walking through an exotic 'lush garden' of Frangipani, spiky plants and Rhododendron, visiting a lawyer friend, needing answers on why husband Jake, a Defence Analyst returned from a spying mission in East Timor, committed suicide shortly after sending off a damning report on Australia. Disorientated by a tropical landscape, I was already seeing parallels with an old 1950s crime novel, Beat not the Bones by fellow Adelaidian Charlotte Jay, set in Papua the pacific neighbour we ruthlessly colonised, about another wife turned detective, uncovering our very own Heart of Darkness. Turns out I was wrong. Anne isn't the hero. We're actually in Bondi with its crashing waves and lazy European sunbathers. A bit embarrassing not to recognise Australia as a Pacific island, but I had the jitters.
I suppose you could call The Idealist a spy thriller, which draws closely on the real. It's about a spy, a prequel really, set before Timor-Leste accuses Australia of spying on it, gathering information illegally to leverage trade deals. Before the Australian Government bizarrely counter charged Bernard Collaery, the lawyer who represented Timor-Leste, and the whistle-blower, a senior intelligence officer known only as X, for conspiring to communicate our corruption to Timor-Leste. It's the mysterious X, identity and rationale made unknowable by our secret State, who interests Jose. What makes a spy turn whistle-blower? Jose's answer lies in the ambiguities of idealism. His confounding idealist seen from different angles to be another dispossessed, a follower of orders who cracks, a romantic and a fool, the plot cleverly revealing the tragedy of Jake our flawed hero, our X.
I read The Idealist in short bursts slowly, unusual for me, hooked on the current news cycle which fed back into the text. Thank god for its further reading list. In the real world of 1999 I wasn't paying attention when John Howard reluctantly sent in peace keepers to protect the referendum and I suppose the actual Timorese people terrorised by the Indonesian militia, our eyes on their oil and gas reserves. Doubt I gave these extraordinary occupied people with the guts to vote Yes for Independence a second glance. Late I know, but The Idealist makes them real as it does our culpability, which I also shied away from at the time. Never could hold the contradictions of our two faced servile/bully State floating somewhere in the southern seas together in my head. Didn't even recognise our black-suited Prime Minister last week, thought he was John Howard, small beside the American President, diminished, 'so steeped in blood at this point that one sin must follow the other', as Jake watching the play hears Richard III say.
We are a negative, peculiar lot, clinging tightly to a tattered pamphlet we call a Constitution, all reason why we voted No forgotten, swept away by monstrous war. Another odd referendum running behind Timor's in 1999 comes to mind, when we voted to stay an eternal outpost of Empire. I was then an idealist of sorts, sitting alone at a folk music festival in an empty tent, set up by the organisers in case anyone was interested. Stunned, watching a young Anthony Green on a tiny portable telly chattering away, cocking his head to one side, the result thundering home.
– J.G.