how good is this sunchoke?

Comrades,

It must have been very exciting for the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, to be given a State Dinner at the White House in his honour. Extremely exciting. And such a rare honour too, with only the Kid President of France being granted one by the Trumpotus, whose self-proclaimed idea of a hoedown is to slap some burgers in boxes down on a conference table with trays of Diet Cokes all round while everyone listens rapturously to The Donald's stream-of-consciousness poetry for hours in end. You would have thought that such a prestigious, glittering event would be worthy of banner headlines around the world, and while the show was front and centre in the Washington Post and Vanity Fair, as far as can be gathered, it didn't rate a single mention in the New York Times, which probably mistook it for fake news.

It made sense to have an official knees-up, as Don and Scotty both have a lot in common - chiefly being winning unwinnable elections - both were never ever expected to and had no right to triumph, suddenly finding themselves in power when the pundits all tipped them to be banished to the political wilderness. They are both the Miracle of Democracy incarnate. Apart from the first shindig for the King of Hawaii back in 1874, the State Dinner only began with Hoover in the 30's, and then became the real deal with Kennedy, the consumate entertainer. Australia was brushed by Obama, and snubbed by both LBJ and Clinton. Ol' Johnnie Gorton was the first Australian PM to get the White House jolly jape treatment from Tricky Dicky, and of course George W Bush famously hosted Honest John Howard. The Great Bob Hawke, oddly, got a guernsey from the Bush Snr, George WH, but Malcolm Fraser was by far and away the most popular Australian PM in DC, getting no less than three State Dinners - Reagan, Carter, and Ford. And as Malcolm would be quick to tell you, there is no shortage of nooks and crannies in the White House where you can lose your trousers during the after dinner frivolities.

It was a stroke of genius on the part of the First Lady to stage the gala al fresco in the Rose Garden, in the shadows of the executive mansion. She knew that it would remind Scomo of that time when he took to the long table for a touch of luxury fine dining under the stars at Ayres Rock. Same same, only different. It was also a clever way to hide the sad and sorry state of the White House crockery in candlelight. They could only cobble together bits and pieces from the Bush and Clinton china, as they don't have a full unbroken service of any vintage. Obama didn't give a blue root fancy dinners, having hosted only 13 in his eight years in the job, so it will be up to the next President to order in some fine new plates and flatware. Currently, it's a disgraceful state of affairs.

The menu, however, was a special, given the White House Kitchen is seriously under-utilised these days, kicking off with a very tricky sunchoke ravioli. Sunchoke? WTF you may well ask. If you believe the screed from the folks in Protocol, it's an "earth apple" native to the Mid-West, but it's actually a Jerusalem artichoke in a thinly-veiled disguise. The starter may well have been a little sly joke by Melania [never mind her evening gown being generally described by social commentators as "a bedspread"], given that the Jerusalem artichoke is best known for giving most people a bad attack of foul-smelling flatulence. Scomo has form in the department, we know that, so Our Great and Glorious Leader probably pushed his ravioli around his plate for fear of ingesting some and sharting himself. And even without intestinal issues, you know what they say in the classics: 'every fart after 50 is problematical'. In my book, your Jerusalem artichoke is a failure as a vegetable. Even the Reggiano cheese cream sauce and the shaved summer vegetables would not have been enough to save it, or rid the vile sickly-sweet taste and gloopy texture of that particular tuber from your mouth. You would have had to hammer the Spring Mountain Savignon Blanc "Napa" 2017 pretty hard to achieve that.

Onto the main...and the dreaded Dover Sole is probably the closest thing they could come to an Australian flathead, which is only appropriate, as they are both like the Trumptous and ScoMo - bottom-feeders. The sole is an ordinary fish for mine, but when the inevitable food fights start happening after a few too many drinkie-poos, they would have been ideal for tossing fish skeletons around with gay abandon. The kitchen had no other choice than to trick up that bit of seafood up in the manner mousseline, with lashings of butter, a hint of fennel, and garnished with parsnip crisps and zucchini squash blossoms. You would have been tempted to go for an aged Riesling with that one, but no, the cellar could only extend to the Argyle Pinot Noir "Reserve" 2016. Any gourmand worth their salt would have turned up their nose and tooted their snoot at a fish and red pairing, for crying out loud. The sommelier is quite obviously hopeless.

DJ! would have really really wanted his favourite chocolate cake from the Cheesecake Shop for desert, but he was over-ridden on that one, with the First Lady opting for the cheeky Lady Apple Tart instead - again a most appropriate choice - finished with Calvados ice cream [Adults only. The teetotalling Trumpotus would have missed out there. Shame], washed down with a perky sparkler, the 3 Vineyards Demi-Sec NV.

And could the entertainment get any better? ScoMo, as we all know, is a huge fan of the big band, so he could not fail to have been mightily impressed by the “The President’s Own” United States Marine Chamber Orchestra, United States Army Chorus, United States Army Herald Trumpets, United States Army Strings, United States Navy Band Sea Chanters, United States Air Force Strings, and the United States Air Force Singing Sergeants. The Singing Sergeants put on a doozy of a turn as a double barbershop quartet act, and there's nothing quite like a good ol' sea shanty from The Chanters to get the rollicking going late into the evening. How good is that?

The B and C-listers from the regular Washington Swamp were on the "third rate" guest list, as well as some Australian outliers like...Lachlan Murdoch, standing in for Old Mate Rupes who just wasn't up to a night on the tiles in DC, with Kerry Stokes in for some media balance. The Shark had to be there - he's a regular golf partner of DJ! and he'll tell you how he never choked in a Major if you've got half a day, so that would have made for some sparkling after dinner conversation. Gina Reinhardt showed up her finest Argyle diamonds, but only Twiggy Forrest and Mrs Twiggy know what they were doing there. The Chief Fat Controller of the Australian Gravy Train in DC, Joe Hockey, would no doubt have been leaning heavily on the free gratis hospitality and chugging on the White House stock of Cubans over brandy having the time of his life. Even Henry Kissinger got off his chaise lounge at home and somehow managed the effort to turn up on a cane at the age of 96, so he would have been guaranteed to come up with most entertaining Cold War stories from back in the day. Also in attendance at the personal invite of the President was Daniel Cathy, chief executive of Chick-fil-A. Now that's all class. The "Home of the Original Chicken Sandwich" is now the biggest fast food seller in the US of A, trousering double the profit that McDonald's can scrape together in a year. That's business time.

The old Aussie astronaut Andy Thomas was in the house - had to be - as the only deal done over dinner was ScoMo chipping in a paltry $150M worth of free money from the long-suffering taxpayer for a couple of computer components to keep the US out in front in the Race to Mars, which of course lends itself to that hoary old joke about ScoMo and The Donald on the first rocketship together heading towards the red planet, from which there is no return...only thing is, forgot what that was...

a people betrayed

Comrades,

When you go into the world class Archives & Museum of East Timorese Resistance in Dili you will find a small ante-chamber with a black curtain drawn half across the entrance. There is a sign, in Tetum, Portuguese and English, warning you that the exhibit is not suitable for patrons under the age of 18. Inside is a 1990's era vintage television set embedded in the wall. On the small screen is very raw footage of the aftermath of the 1999 independence referendum. It has not been filtered, it's seen no editor's touch, it is as the camera found it. Although it lasts less than eight minutes and plays on a continuous loop, it is utter terror writ large. You can sit, but I stood, and watched the screen aghast, transfixed by the horror. You see civil war at its most ghastly extreme. Watching seemingly innocent civilians being shot at point blank range and murdered by machete in the streets is not easy, not even for a hardened ol' journo who has seen death and destruction first hand and up close. I came away, not shocked - no, it was the strange feeling of being deeply disturbed that shocked me - and told my Good Lady Wife not to go in there. She saw my ashen face, and took my advice. Somehow, it felt personal, and I couldn't detach myself from it. Still can't.

2012 seemed the right time to fulfill my ambition of finally visiting East Timor - as a tourist, nothing more - and taking a look for myself at a country which had fascinated me for the previous 37 years. The disappearance of television news crews covering the then un-declared Indonesian invasion in 1975, which became known as the Balibo Five and went on to be an enduring enigma with a hagiography all it's own, made me sit up and take notice. I was 18 years old. It had been overshadowed by the Fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam war five months earlier, but being a Pinko from a very early age, I had a natural empathy with The Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor [FRETILIN] and independence movements world wide for that matter [please, don't get me started on West Papua]. It was one impetus that eventually pushed me into an accidental career in journalism that miraculously lasted a quarter of a century. In every newsroom I worked in I became the in-house de-facto "East Timor expert' only because I was the only one who'd paid it any attention and people thought I was a smart-arse. [and I've written more than enough about it since], but, jeez, it was a hard story to sell. For the most part, the care factor just wasn't there. While Xanana Gusmão, Jose Ramos-Horta and Mari Alkatiri over time joined the ranks of my heroes, I played all my coverage of the joint with an entirely straight bat, never ever allowing my bias to slip into the reportage. I'd been out of the pro journo game for three years by the time I turned up in Dili in '12, and it was the "edgiest" place I have ever been; the UN had almost finished pulling out, there was still the odd Australian soldier looking out of place and a few AFP cops lurking about, but there were no local police to speak of, and there was this unsettling feeling of being constantly watched, knowing you were doubtless among faceless killers and murderers. Everybody knew. A decade on and the tensions were still palpable. A driver looked aghast at me when I asked to be taken to the Santa Cruz cemetery - the site of 1991 Dili Massacre - where the dead are densely packed, in some places buried on top of each other, in elaborately decorated meticulously maintained graves. He clearly thought I was mad. I paid another driver $US100 for the arduous 4WD journey into the rugged, mountainous 'rebel country' behind Dili; he took me to his childhood home and proudly showed me photographs of his father with Gusmão in their battle fatigues. He showed me the route of the 14km walk he took every day from his village to school and back. He took me to the shabbily incongruous tumble-down Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in the poverty-stricken town of Emera, which had been a key strategic centre of the armed resistance. He showed me places marked by a simple cross, where Indonesian troops had herded old men, women and children into houses and burnt them alive as a warning to others. We saw places where his sister tended her coffee trees. My wife introduced me to a Timorese man who was an old work colleague of hers in Sydney. One day he showed me his office desk, in which he kept a large machete, a small but deadly crossbow and a replica pistol "just in case, you know, because..." We all drank, alot.

People forget that the result of the Miracle of Democracy that was the 1999 referendum, while very conclusive, was not overwhelming. Even so, after a sustained campaign of threats and intimidation by Indonesian operatives against those who supported independence, it was truly remarkable that 78% voted yes, while 22% voted no. But, the Indonesians and their heavily armed militia's of sympathisers were never going to go quietly, and they never intended to leave anything behind. The East Timorese were clearly warned of the scorched earth withdrawal to come, and that a Yes vote would visit wide scale death & destruction on them, and that is exactly what they got. The rest of the world was sleepwalking.

When General Sir Peter Cosgrove and his advance party of SAS troops rolled into town, they were three weeks too late. It was no fault of his. Indonesia professed not to care, Portugal cared less, the UN prevaricated, the USA prevaricated, Australia prevaricated and dithered, as East Timor burned. Cosgrove dropped into a full-on death-fight with no orders beyond stopping the violence. Nobody knows exactly how many people had been killed in the interim, but the best estimates put the number of dead at more than 1500. Dili was in ruins; 80% of the buildings had been torched. It was too late - mate. The arrival of Australian troops [most people mistakenly think they were peacekeepers - they were most definitely not, this was war - that came later] in effect did nothing more than scatter the pro-Indonesian militias, who promptly fled across the border to the safety of West Timor which had been Dutch country for centuries, taking nigh on half of the population with them, many of whom never returned. After de-populating and destroying the place, it took a full 18 months for Indonesia to finally, begrudgingly, formally recognise East Timor's independence, but the immediate aftermath of the referendum was a wholesale tragedy from which the country will never fully recover.

Enough of the li'l history lesson. ScoMo had a hide turning up in Dili for the 20th anniversary. He'd been invited, as a matter of course, of course, but it was the last place in the world that he wanted to be, having just returned from gay Paris via some sea-side spa town and the former French colony of Vietnam. He was given a hand woven personal sash as a traditional mark of honourable intentions, but it was galling to see him badly pop a Champagne cork with that stoopid grin on his ugly dial. What had he got to celebrate? Less than nothing. He surely knows, we all know, that Australia fucked-over East Timor time and time and time again, ever since Sparrow Force was driven into the Timor Sea by the Japanese in late '42. Scomo knew that many knowing eyes were upon him, and they were withering in their gaze. ScoMo signed the third and final Timor Gap Treaty, effectively repeating what Australian governments from both sides had been saying from the outset: "it's the best you lot can expect". The people of East Timor are a people betrayed, and while they may forgive in time, they will never forget.