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Jose: My
name is Jose da Costa. I'm an East Timorese asylum seeker who came
to Australia in 1995, and am now a student at the Catholic University
in Ballarat. |
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Jose: I have been dreaming for a long time, you know. The East Timorese
all moved into the bush to hide from the Indonesians invasion. I was
born 1976, one year after the Indonesian invasion. As a baby, you
don't understand anything. But what I hear is the sound of the trees
and the leaves and things like that. In 1979, when I was three years
old, my parents surrendered because they didn't have medicine or food
to feed us, or cure our sick and wounded, so we came back and my dad
was interrogated about his |
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involvement in the struggle and things like that. In 1985 my dad just died, like mysteriously, you know. We were all playing together in the night. He was very happy with the kids, and suddenly in the morning we just couldn't find him. Maybe he already went to the farm, we thought. Then everyone was running: 'Oh, we found someone dead under the trees' they said. So we went to the trees and we find his body. We have no idea what happened to him. Since then, you know, I understood what sort of a dream I have. I left home. I went to Dili to try to find out what is happening to us East Timorese. We young people, we would all talk and discuss what happened to our brothers and sisters and our parents and things like that. So I recogniz that, ok, this is what my dream is about. Why my father died. And after that I listened to a story from my mum about how my uncles were killed and my aunty removed to the island of Auterroo* which is like a very small island where members of families who are running with the resistance have been removed so that they cannot make contact with their husbands or wives. I recogniz then that a lot of Timorese also dreamed this dream. Soon after I left East Timor and came to Australia. What sort of dream do I have about my own identity and my own culture? What does this culture mean to me? In East Timor, if you talked about culture, it was Indonesian culture. Our culture was not significant. But when I come here I was able to recognize that it was my own culture and my identity that I had been dreaming about. I also read in the Xananaís book that the words of a dream are always repeated over and over again. Ok, we young people have the dreams. These dreams are going to come true. I recogniz that last year, in 1999, that these dreams are going to come true. We have had elections and a referendum, and we have won the struggle. I also recogniz that these dreams haven't come true yet, because our people are still being killed and the whole of our town, the whole of our country has been burnt down. So my new dreams are bout the real freedom that I'm going to have. I'm still studying. I don't know what I'm going to do to help my people, whether I am going to teach them about their culture that is unique or whether I am going to do something else. My dream hasn't come true yet, but we are getting there, you know. |
