timor memória de uma fuga

Admin

15tmucoe

May be an image of 3 people
The only Royal Australian Air Force plane ever hijacked landed in Darwin on 4 September 1975. On board were three RAAF pilots and 44 East Timorese asylum seekers who had hijacked the plane in a tense standoff in Bacau.
The civil war between pro-independence Freitlin and pro-Portuguese UDT forces was raging at the time in East Timor. On the day that the RAAF Caribou A4-140 landed in Bacau on a mission for the International Red Cross, a number of UDT (Timorese Democratic Union) soldiers and supporters had decided to surrender. They feared for their lives and were desperate to get out.
The plane was significantly overloaded, but the fact that the refugees made it to Darwin was only the beginning of their luck. In an emergency meeting on the night the Caribou touched down in Darwin, Prime Minister Whitlam had decided that the Timorese asylum seekers should be welcomed by Australia.
Rather than being ‘turned back’, probably to their deaths, the women and children were taken to Carpentaria College and given clothes and make-up. After a night in the cells at Fannie Bay Gaol, the men were asked in which state in Australia they wished to make their new lives. The families of the Caribou arrivals are still in Darwin, Sydney and Melbourne today. One teenager who worked at the Bacau airport and jumped on the plane at the last minute has worked on the Melbourne trams for forty years.
Today, Australia still has the opportunity to open our doors to those in need.
​Luke Henriques-Gomes, ‘Abilio Henriques, José Cruz and Feliciano Da Costa worked on the Melbourne tramways together after coming to Australian on a hijacked Caribou in 1975’, 2021. Courtesy of Luke Henriques-Gomes and The Guardian
Like

Comment