Jim Landman, 2/4th Independent Company
I don’t know of any love relationships, but we were only there five months and moving around a lot. Timorese certainly found Australians more human; we didn’t need the sort of obeisance some Portuguese and Japanese did. We didn’t act superior. But maybe a lot of the relationships between Australian soldiers and Timorese were seen in a more sentimental light afterwards. At the time we had to use the Timorese and we did. When they misbehaved, we killed them, and when we wanted a girl we bought one.
(Michelle Turner, Telling East Timor, Personal Testimonies 1942 - 1992, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 1992, page 35)