ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Birmingham’s books include the cult memoir He Died with a Felafel in His HandLeviathan: The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney and the fiction series Weapons of Choice. He is the author of two Quarterly Essays, Appeasing Jakarta – Australia’s Complicity in the East Timor Tragedy and A Time for War – Australia as a Military Power. He is a regular contributor to the Monthly.

READ AN EXTRACT

John Birmingham takes apart the folly of twenty-five years of Australian policy on East Timor.
Read An Extract
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Appeasing Jakarta is an analysis of what happened in 1975 when we condoned Indonesia's intervention and what happened in 1999 when we stood against it ... John Birmingham is deadly in his disdain for the way a defunct paradigm ... was clung to like a dogma ... but [this] is also an essay about the human cost ... written in flowing colours with a strong narrative streak and a swashbuckling power of dispatch ...

Peter Craven

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