Remembering Pat Walsh
I first met Pat Walsh in August 1995. People might be curious about how I met him.
That year, a group of us, in our late teens and mid-twenties, risked our lives sailing between Dili, Timor Leste and Australia. We were seeking freedom and spreading the message about our struggle in Australia. It took us a week in our leaky boat, the Tasi Diak, to sail across the Timor Sea. We thought we had no friends in Australia, except for the East Timorese community. One of our clandestine leaders, Father Domingos Maubere, had informed the community that a crocodile was on its way across the Timor Sea, a code for our refugee boat.
After our arrival, when we were detained at the Curtin Base in a remote area of Western Australia, we found out through our interpreters that we had many Australian friends who had been working very hard to pressure the Australian government to free us from the Detention Centre. At the detention centre, we first heard the name Pat Walsh. He was one of the Australians who had strongly advocated for our release.
In late July 1995, the Australian government finally freed us from the Curtin Base Detention Centre. Five of the group went to Darwin, two went to Sydney, and eleven went to Melbourne. I met Pat Walsh at the ACFOA office at 124 Napier Street in Fitzroy, with members of the Tasi Diak group and East Timorese comrades, including Joaquim Santos, Abel Guterres, Salustiano Freitas, and others. Pat was welcoming of us and told us that he would fight for us to get permanent protection in Australia. Later that day, we moved to the next room, which was the office of the East Timor Human Rights Centre, where my Tasi diak group first met with our Frente Diplomatiku leader, José Ramos Horta.
I was to come into contact with Pat a lot as I became very involved in East Timor campaigning in Victoria from 1995 to the time I returned to Timor-Leste in 2004. In 2008, I was privileged to act with him in the film Balibo, directed by Robert Connolly. I began calling Pat ‘padre’ after seeing him play a priest in the film. Throughout the time I have known Pat, he has somehow always remembered my name. He always said, ‘Jose, how are you?’ I don’t know how he managed this feat. I had great respect for him, and he was a great advocate and hero for my country, Timor-Leste and its liberation.
Jose da Costa is a teacher, writer, actor and filmmaker. He arrived in Australia aboard a refugee boat called the Tasi Diak and campaigned to raise awareness of East Timor.
