Jill Jolliffe was one of only two reporters in Dili on 16 October 1975, the day the Australian-based newsmen, soon to be known as the Balibo Five, went missing after an Indonesian attack on the small East Timorese border town of Balibo. Jolliffe filed for AAP Reuters the first reports of the attack that killed them, and monitored the ominous broadcasts from Indonesian-controlled West Timor that referred to the missing newsmen as Australian communists who were supporting Fretilin forces. Jolliffe interviewed the Portuguese journalists who had left Balibo the day before the attack and the Fretilin troops themselves who defended the town. Finally, eleven days after the attack on Balibo, she spoke to an eyewitness, a stretcher-bearer from the Fretilin side, who confirmed that the journalists had been killed in the attack.