11 February 2008
With this morning's attack on East Timorese President Jose Ramos-Horta and reports that rebel leader Alfredo Reinado has been shot dead, Victoria University advises that Dr Helen Hill is available for expert comment on a very broad range of Timorese issues.
Dr Helen Hill is Senior Lecturer in Sociology (Asia-Pacific) In the Department of Social Inquiry and Community Studies, Victoria University.
Helen first visited East Timor in 1975 to do research for a Masters at Monash in Politics on the decolonization of Portuguese Timor. The Indonesian invasion of December 1975 interrupted her research and in 1976 she went to New York to assist Jose Ramos Horta with lobbying at the UN General Assembly along with other Australians, making a living giving lectures on Timor at US Universities and Colleges and writing for European Publications.
Dr Hill returned to East Timor in August 2000 to begin writing a new book on East Timor's transition to independence. In August 2001 she led a delegation from Victoria University to observe the elections for the Timorese Constituent Assembly.
Dr Hill was employed by Victoria University in 1991 and pioneered the unique course in Asia-Pacific Community Development, which is taught at VU. Among her early students were Timorese refugees. After the downfall of Suharto in Indonesia, Dr Hill, together with these students and other Timorese became active in setting up an East Timor Development Studies Group and organizing conferences on policy-making in Health, Education and other areas necessary to convince donors that the Timorese could make a go of running their own country.
Her Master's thesis has been published as Stirrings of Nationalism in East Timor by Oxford Press.
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