Submission to the Australian War Memorial

As a veteran of the Bougainville and INTERFET deployments, I fully support the idea of increasing space to tell the story of our overseas actions post-Vietnam. In particular, I've always been somewhat disappointed with the current East Timor/Bougainville displays, since those operations were an opportunity for us as a nation to show that we can do more than fight. I was proud to be part of relief convoys in Timor Lorosae, bringing food and shelter to people who'd been hiding in the bush from their Indonesian and militia tormentors. My fondest memory is of the time when we were unloading rice sacks from a UN helicopter. One of the sacks was broken, and the UN officer wanted to throw it away. We'd seen the locals looking at us from the edge of the airstrip, so we talked the officer into letting us have the broken rice sack. We used signs to encourage the people to come to us, and gave them the rice. I'll never forget the joy on the kids' faces as they literally danced around that 50 kg sack - for them that was literally manna from heaven. So if the AWM can tells stories like that, more power to them.