Shirley Shackleton is well known to those acquainted with the story of the fight for justice by the families of the Balibo Five, the five reporters who were slaughtered in 1975 in a border town of what was then Portuguese Timor. Her husband, Greg Shackleton, and his colleagues, Gary Cunningham, Tony Stewart, Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie – all in their twenties – were killed by Indonesian soldiers at dawn on 16 October, shortly after filming a major infantry, naval and air attack on the town of Balibo.

In tune with its unpopular policy of appeasement towards President Suharto’s dictatorship, Gough Whitlam’s Labor government had denied that the invasion was occurring. Had they lived and brought home the incriminating footage, the Five might well have changed the course of history and the East Timorese might have been spared a twenty-four-year military occupation which left around 183,000 dead and thousands of others traumatised by war and their experiences in Indonesian-installed torture chambers.