Transcript
Evacuated, abandoned, initially a lot of people, I don't know, moved to or went to West Timor and then they obviously wanted to come home because we were telling them, "We've got a border protection now. So your country, new country is safe. Come back to your homes, your villages. We'll help police and patrol and secure the place for you".
So we wanted to reintegrate the East Timorese back to their place, those that wanted to come back and certainly, as I said, you know, we'd get 1100 maybe through a day, to come through and there'd be two or three times we'd open that border checkpoint during the day … and especially with, you know, you've got four, you know, between 14 people opening that border and letting those up, you know, and there was cattle, there was small trucks, kids, you know, you just open it up so they could come home … some of them had been through some pretty traumatic incidences prior to us obviously securing East Timor.
So, yeah, there's that factor in potentially being a bit nervous obviously because, you know, we're Australian soldiers in East Timor which, they're used to the Indonesians controlling it. So they were a bit apprehensive and that. But we certainly operate in a different way and wanted to secure their home and try and assist them. Our engineers started to come in and assist in road building, bridge building, to help them, so, to try and establish sort of normalcy in the country.
