2026 Australia Studies Institute Reese Lecture: Vannessa Hearman, "In the hands of ordinary people: Australia’s changing relationship with Indonesia and Timor-Leste"
The Australia Studies Institute is hosting Associate Professor Vannessa Hearman to deliver the 2026 Reese Memorial Lecture on her new book 'The Good Sea.'
The Reese Memorial Lecture is given in honour of Dr Trevor Reese, a distinguished historian of the British Commonwealth and Australia and Reader at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, the Institute’s home from 1982 to 1999. The lecture is given by an emerging scholar in the disciplines of history or political science.
About the event
Throughout 24 years of Indonesian rule over East Timor, from 1975 to 1999, Australia was the centre of debate and contestation over the former Portuguese colony’s political status. Pro-independence East Timorese activists criticised the Australian government’s recognition of the Indonesian annexation. The thousands of East Timorese who settled in Australia, arriving as evacuees, humanitarian entrants and asylum seekers from 1975 on, also reminded the government of the problems of the Indonesian annexation. Attention was drawn to the issue again by the dramatic arrival in 1995 of a small fishing boat from East Timor called the Tasi Diak(Good Sea), carrying 18 asylum seekers. What led to this boat’s arrival, and would more boats follow? This talk examines the East Timorese resistance’s shift in tactics in the 1990s to increase pressure on both the Australian and Indonesian governments and the effects of the boat arrival on Australia-Indonesia relations in the last years of the Suharto New Order regime.
In what became a long, drawn-out saga, the East Timorese asylum seeker issue held important lessons on the intricate balancing act that successive Australian governments performed to protect their relationship with Indonesia while seeking to comply with domestic and international laws. Meanwhile, Timor-Leste is one of Australia’s most important allies today, following the end of Indonesian rule in East Timor in 1999. This paper argues that the East Timorese diaspora, including those aboard the Tasi Diak boat, and ordinary Australians have played a vital role in shaping Australia’s engagement with both Indonesia and Timor-Leste, addressing the legacies of a troubled past.
About the author
Associate Professor Vannessa Hearman
Vannessa Hearman is an Associate Professor of History at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. Her research deals with the impact of political violence and decolonisation on Indonesia and Timor-Leste, and Australia’s engagement with both countries. She is the author of The Good Sea: The Voyage of the Tasi Diak and the Politics of Refugee Protection in Australia (2026), which examines the only boatload of East Timorese refugees to reach Australia during the Indonesian annexation of the territory. Her first book, Unmarked Graves: Death and Survival in the Anti-Communist Violence in East Java, Indonesia (2018), won the inaugural Asian Studies Association of Australia’s Early Career Book Prize in 2020. She is a co-editor of Art After War and Genocide: Curating, Reconstructing and Imagining (forthcoming, Bloomsbury) with Kit Messham-Muir and Loretta Tolnai. Her research on East Timorese migration to Australia and contemporary art in Timor-Leste is supported by the Australian Research Council.
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