Around 1978/79 I used to catch the 343 bus to work in the southern suburbs of Sydney. At that time I was working for a company that had the double distinction of (then) being both the world’s 9th biggest multinational corporation and the world’s 1st biggest industrial environmental vandal. On this particular day I was sitting on the bus thoughtfully reading a book by Australian journalist Jill Jolliff on Timor-Leste called East Timor: nationalism and colonialism. In the course of the bus journey I became aware of an Asian (Chinese-looking) guy next to me trying his hardest to read, over my shoulder as it were, the book I was engrossed in.
Suddenly, uninvited, he said to me, “why are you reading a book on East Timor mate?” Having invited himself into my personal space, he went on to voice his (popularly held view) that East Timor didn’t matter, it was too small, unimportant, no one cared about it. I asked him if he was Indonesian, to which he, shaking his head, quickly demurred. “No one cares”, he repeated and looked away.
At that period it did look to all the world that the cause of Timor-Leste was a lost one. Realpolitik prevailed. Australia (at government level at least) had happily washed its hands of this troublesome issue, with Whitlam giving Suharto the green light for a takeover in their hushed up Yogyakarta meeting in 1974, and his successor Fraser, rubber-stamping it with his Government’s formal recognition in 1976 of Jakarta’s Act of Incorporation of East Timor.
No one, or so it seemed, cared about the micro “half-island”. The neighbours in the region, the great nations of the world, all denied the Timorese the right to self-determination. In circa 1980 the chances of Timor-Leste ever gaining independence appeared to be zero! And yet that is exactly what was achieved by the Timorese in 2002 when East Timor attained nationhood whilst still sharing an island border with Indonesian Timor-Barat (West Timor).
As amazing, even miraculous, as this transformation was, advocates of a similar sovereignty for West Papua, a territory with much more economic viability and substance than Timor-Leste could ever have, cannot be as sanguine about its chances of achieving sovereignty and separation from the Republic of Indonesia.
When the Dutch former colonial masters of West New Guinea tried to counter Indonesia’s takeover of West Irian in 1962, President Kennedy, in seeking to curry favour with the Indonesians as part of the US’s anti-communist Cold War strategy, notoriously dismissed the Papuans’ right to self-determination with the words, (they are) “living, as it were, in the Stone Age” … a self-damning perspective of the indigenous Irianese as being too ‘primitive’ to matter to anyone [D Rutherford in M Slama & J Munro (Eds), From ‘Stone Age’ to ‘Real Time’, (2015)]
Even Jose Ramos Horta, East Timor’s former president and the man who led the decades-long diplomatic fight to turn international opinion in favour of an independent Timor-Leste, has not given his support to the notion of independence for West Papua [‘East Timor’s former president Jose Ramos Horta says West Papua “Part of Indonesia” ‘, (23-07-15), www.mobile.abc.net.au].
Morning StarThe justness of the West Papua’s case for self-determination, a genuine self-determination, not the travesty of one that took place in 1969 (the so-called “Act of Free Will”), has never seemed to grab people, especially in Australia the third party with the greatest self-interest in the large island immediately to its north, in the same way as East Timor did. Its lack of ‘sexiness’ has seen the issue limp along under the radar, never really exciting the passion of progressive elements in Australia, New Zealand, or elsewhere in the West. Of course the media has played a key part in this, not getting the message out of Papua, in large part not being allowed to get the message out – such has been the persistently tight control of Indonesia over press freedoms in the province [‘Press Freedom in Papua?’ (R Tapsell), New Mandala, 11-05-15, www.asiapacific.anu.edu.au].
Notwithstanding the overwhelmingly slim prospects of a sovereign West Papua happening in the foreseeable future, and the sense of fatalism this engenders, it would be instructive to look in some detail at how developments during the period of Indonesian rule over the province reached such a grim outcome.
Not long after the news spread about the momentous event at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903, the significance of what the Wrights’ had done found itself under challenge, especially as time went on from the European aviation community. French newspapers after 1903 described the celebrated American brothers as bluffeurs (bluffers). Doubts were raised about their achievements when the Wrights failed to release the photo of the Wright Flyer in flight at Kitty Hawk until nearly five years after the groundbreaking 1903 flight … newspapers acerbically asked: “Were they fliers or liars?”, Paris edition of the New York Herald (10 Feb 1906); ‘Wright Brothers: European skepticism’, www.spiritus-temporis.com.
As well, in the 30 years preceding Kitty Hawk, there was a host of aviation pioneers experimenting with monoplanes, biplanes, box-kites and gliders including, 1874: Félix du Temple; 1894: Hiram Maxim; 1894: Lawrence Hargrave; 1898: Augustus Moore Herring [B Kampmark, ‘Wright Brothers: Right or Wrong?’, Montréal Review (April 2013]. These flights however were either pre-power ones, or if motorised, they have been largely discredited as having been either unsustained, uncontrolled or as at the least not sufficiently controlled [P Scott, The Shoulders of Giants: A History of Human Flight to 1919].
G A Whitehead was a German migrant (born Gustave Weisskopf) living in Connecticut who started experimenting with gliders (variations on the glider prototype design developed by aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal) in the mid-1890s, at a time when Wilbur and Orville were still making and repairing bicycles in Dayton, Ohio. The case in support of the flight made by Whitehead on 14 August 1901 in what must be noted was an improbable-looking, bat-shaped, engine-propelled glider at Fairfield near Bridgeport, was first taken up in 1935 (in an article in an industry magazine, Popular Aviation, entitled ‘Did Whitehead Precede Wright In World’s First Powered Flight?’)回. Whitehead’s claim lay dormant until the 1960s when army reservist William O’Dwyer, took up the German-American engine-maker’s cause and did his upmost to promote his “flying machine”.
Critics of the Institute believe that the Smithsonian’s indebtedness to the Wrights’ legacy (the fear of losing the historic Flyer to the estate executors) prevents it from recognising the merits of Whitehead’s pioneering achievement irrespective of the weight of evidence put forward [J Liotta, ‘Wright Brothers Flight Legacy Hits New Turbulence’, www.news.nationalgeographic.com]. Clearly this is a powerful disincentive to the Smithsonian objectively assessing the merits and new evidence for any rival claims to the Wrights (not just Whitehead’s) which may be unearthed.
The credence given to the Wright brothers’ claim to be the first successful flyers should perhaps come with an asterisk, signifying it as heavily qualified, as in David Schneider’s all-inclusive, tongue-in-cheek description: “First in Sustained, Piloted, Controlled, Powered, Heavier-than-air Flight of Lasting Technological Significance” [ibid].
Did any of the documented early flights per se achieve “sustained and controlled flight”? Human conquest of the sky didn’t happen in one quantum leap, surely it came about in a series of small, measured steps, each building on the one before. It is more meaningful to see the development of viable flying machines as something that happened incrementally, an aerodynamic puzzle put together piece-by-piece. It was an international effort, the culmination of the accumulated efforts of gifted pioneering aeronautical designers such as George Cayley, Octave Chanute, Samuel Langley, Lawrence Hargrave and Otto Lilienthal whose experiments made it possible for the Wrights and others to experiment with flight, coming closer and closer to the realisation of successful manned, powered flight.
Commune leader Förster, in heavy debt, facing the spectre of bankruptcy and in despair at the utopian disaster, committed suicide in 1889. Nueva Germania struggled on without its main spearhead, now led by Elizabeth Nietzsche who made an attempt to recruit more members from the Fatherland – with little return for her efforts. However in 1893 Frau Förster-Nietzsche abandoned the Aryan Paraíso and it’s settlers, returning to Germany to take charge of her famous brother’s affairs and care for him (Nietzsche had fallen into a state of insanity probably as a result of contracting syphilis). In the years after the philosopher’s death in 1900 the warped Elizabeth proceeded to convert him into a kind of intellectual “pin-up boy” on behalf of the emerging Fascist and Nazi movements of Italy and Germany. Significant to note that Nietzsche, when still in full control of his faculties, had been on record as expressing his complete disapproval of anti-Semitism and of the Försters’ plans for establishing an Aryan colony. Elizabeth, who later became a wholehearted supporter of Hitler, criminally and comprehensively traduced her brother’s reputation by falsely resurrecting Nietzsche as a prophet of the German “master race” to come. [J. Golumb & RS Wistrich (Eds), Nietzsche, Godfather of Nazism? On the Uses & Abuses of a Philosophy.]
The Association looked initially in Argentina for land to settle, but when this proved fruitless, Lane turned to neighbouring Paraguay where they found a government much more amenable. Lane’s scheme to export Australian workers suited the Paraguayan Government which was desperate to replenish the loss of manpower in the 1860s suffered in a disastrous war against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Paraguay, hopelessly outmatched, by war’s end, lost its territorial access to the sea and somewhere between 60 and 70 per cent of its male population during the war, leaving the country with an estimated total of only 28,000 adult males [Thomas Whigham, “The Paraguayan Rosetta Stone”, Latin American Research Review (1999)].
