Every bean counts at Wild Timor Coffee House in Melbourne’s north where former UN peacekeepers are selling coffee grown in a village they defended from Indonesian militia.
For Elsa Pinto (pictured) the burgeoning coffee trade twenty years on from independence is one development through which her new country’s freedom rings loud.
Twenty years on from Timor-Leste's independence, I speak to former peacekeeper come cafe owner Shannon French, Timorese student and activist Elsa Pinto and Professor in International Relations at Swinburne University, Michael Leach.
Radio story produced for Monash University
Melbourne - In 1999, Australia led an international force into Timor-Leste with more than five thousand Australian soldiers. When they arrived on Dili’s shore on September 20th, they found a city in ashes.
Just two weeks before, the people of Timor-Leste had come out to vote on their country’s independence after 25 years of Indonesian occupation. Militia backed by the Indonesian military began terrorising locals to keep supporters away from the polls.
Still, the Timorese showed up to vote, overwhelmingly in support of independence.
Digger Shannon French landed among Australian troops in Timor in early 2000, when the chaos and slaughter had begun to die down. He was deployed to the border with Indonesian West Timor to patrol the jungle for militia and rogue Indonesian soldiers.
It took a while for Shannon and his battalion to realise that it was wild coffee, not lantana that they were battling through. When he was finally offered a cup by a thankful family, Shannon thought he’d come across a miracle bean.
Shannon was on to something: Timor’s coffee which was planted during Portuguese colonisation is a hybrid bean with the strength of robuster and the taste of arabica.
Shannon did fourteen more years in the army before he decided to leave behind his battalion and return to the Timorese village where he’d first tried the coffee.
Today, the community is employed by Wild Timor Coffee who support the villagers from the fields, to the factory and on to their Australian roaster.
The project keeps alive the connection formed between Australian diggers and the Timorese during what was a difficult period in their lives.
"It's trade not aid," said French.
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