Arts & Culture
launch of The Good Sea: The Journey of The Tasi Diak and the Politics of Refugee Protection in Austr
Mon 6 July 5pm
Dr Jude Conway will launch The Good Sea, a new book by Associate Professor Vannessa Hearman. The book tells the story of the only successful crossing between East Timor and Australia during the 24years of Indonesian rule, which was undertaken by a refugee boat called the Tasi Diak. Drawing on archives, government records, media reports and interviews with the asylum seekers, The Good Sea traces the lives of young East Timorese activists on board and the powerful impact of the boat’s arrival on Australia’s relationship with Indonesia in the last years of the Suharto regime.
Associate Professor Vannessa Hearman from Curtin University is an historian of Southeast Asia specialising in Indonesia and Timor-Leste.Her first book, Unmarked Graves: Death and Survival in the Anti-Communist Violence in East Java, Indonesia, won the Asian Studies Association of Australia’s inaugural Early Career Book Prize in 2020.Her research deals with the effects of the Cold War in Asia,Australia’s engagements with Asia and the Pacific, and struggles for historical justice and human rights.
Dr Jude Conway, editor of Step by Step: Women of East Timor, Storiesof Resistance and Survival (2010), was an activist with Australians for a Free East Timor in Darwin in the 1990s. In 1995, she and other Darwin-based activists and members of the East Timorese community kept a watch for the Tasi Diak, to reach Darwin. Jude became friends and fellow activists with a number of the Timorese from the boat and lobbied the Australian government over its refusal to grant them permanent residence.
Joining them is Jose da Costa, an East Timorese writer and actor who came to Australia aboard the Tasi Diak.
