Book Review - Born of Fire and Ash: Australian Operations in Response to the East Timor Crisis, 1999–2000

Written by Craig Stockings

University of New South Wales Press, 2022, 976 pp

Hardback ISBN: 9781742236230

eBook ISBN: 9781742239354
 

Reviewed by: Jean Bou

Australia has a unique tradition of official histories of its military commitments. In most countries, official histories reflect the tradition of the ‘staff history’. Produced by the military services themselves, the emphasis is on military matters and how those services went about things with the resources at their disposal. One consequence is that they tend to minimise contextual events to derive ‘lessons learned’. Another is that, prepared for a specialist military audience, they tend to be rather dry. Australia’s tradition was, conversely, spawned after the First World War to chronicle the nation’s effort, started by journalists cum historians, and sponsored at the highest levels of government rather than by a service headquarters. The result, while still focused on military action, tends to take a wider view of government’s role and general context, and makes for more satisfying history.

Born of Fire and Ash is the latest book to appear in this tradition and is the first of the two-volume Official History of Australian Peacekeeping Operations in East Timor. The same team is also producing a four-volume series on this century’s Australian commitments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Craig Stockings, a professor of history at the University of New South Wales–Australian Defence Force Academy, is the official historian appointed to oversee these volumes. Once a junior infantry officer in the International Force for East Timor (INTERFET), he is well suited to the task.

The book Stockings has produced has six parts and numerous appendices. It begins its examination of INTERFET’s operations by outlining the history of Australia and Portuguese/East Timor going back to the 1940s and earlier. It finds its feet going into the 1960s and 1970s, when revolution in Portugal emboldened an East Timorese independence movement, leading to Indonesian anxiety about a potentially small, weak and maybe communist-aligned state in the archipelago. Indonesia soon invaded, precipitating a decades-long resistance. Jakarta’s conquest broadly suited Canberra, where governments of all colours were driven by the urge to keep relations with Indonesia positive and by their concerns about a ‘mendicant’ East Timorese state. Australian policy can certainly be criticised for its callousness in this regard, but subordinating East Timor’s independence aspirations suited successive Australian governments—as Stockings repeatedly points out, realpolitik prevailed. Inconveniently for Jakarta and Canberra, many East Timorese refused to acquiesce, and the matter became a recurring irritant in the relationship as East Timorese sympathisers in Australia and elsewhere, ensured the issue never died away. Then in the late 1990s Indonesia, reeling from an economic crisis and amid an uneasy transition to democracy, unexpectedly agreed to an Australian proposal to remove the ceaseless irritation by allowing the East Timorese a vote on their future. 

This process soon led to violence when they voted for independence. Rival groups in East Timor clashed and an affronted Indonesian military proved reluctant to give up what it had bled for. It was not what John Howard’s government had counted on with its proposal, but the events had to be addressed. The result was the creation of an international force, with Australia at its head, which deployed in September 1999 to restore stability and ease the path to independence—INTERFET. The Australian Defence Force (ADF) and other government agencies had already been involved in efforts to supervise and conduct the vote, and then carry out evacuations as things deteriorated. Stockings outlines and analyses these developments with clarity, before moving on to his examination of the ADF and INTERFET, which makes up the remaining four sections of the book. 

In reading these sections it is necessary to periodically remind oneself, and Stockings is careful to do so from time to time, that the ADF did in fact manage to carry out its mission, and that INTERFET was a success. Without that reminder it might be easy to wonder, because the book makes for often discomforting reading about an ADF that, undertaking—and indeed leading—its first large joint operation since its creation in the mid-1970s, creaked into action after decades of no or relatively minor commitments, and various defence retrenchments. What shines through is individuals and units striving to make things work through sheer determination, good will and hard work. This successful extemporisation is laudable in one sense, being testimony to the skills and temperament of the ADF’s personnel. Inescapably, however, it is also clear that in doing this they were too often papering over significant institutional cracks, particularly regarding planning and logistics. In regard to the former, Stockings frankly concludes that, in planning the deployment, the ADF was more or less out of its depth. While this situation can be blamed in part on circumstance and government cost-cutting, the reality was that ‘jointness’ was only skin deep, and the command and control arrangements either poor or insufficiently robust. These difficulties were most apparent in relation to the ADF’s logistics, to which little more than lip service had ever been paid, and which seems to have been held together only by the barest of threads. 

These problems might be thought excusable, or at least understandable, as this was the ADF’s first major foray since Vietnam, but similar problems had been shown up by smaller deployments earlier in the decade. The general similarities with, for example, the deployment to Rwanda, are striking, but this time the problems were writ large.

This is a huge book, totalling nearly 1,000 pages, and many important themes run through it—the importance of American support and how vital the coalition partners were, even if they sometimes caused headaches, being but two of the issues addressed. Though it generally reads well, at times the book’s weightiness is exacerbated by its being longwinded or too ‘down in the weeds’. Like all such books, it is destined to be more often dipped into than read in its entirety. Nevertheless, UNSW Press has priced it keenly and I would urge investing in one of its formats to read an excellent history of a vital and successful, but often very imperfect, Australian-led joint coalition operation. Aside from its quality as history, it contains plenty to provoke individual and, hopefully, institutional reflection.