Dimensions
155 x 235 x 25mm
A Story of Love and the Birth of a New Nation.
As a young student visiting East Timor in the early 1990s, Kirsty Sword found herself deeply moved by the people she met and the stories she heard, and before long she found herself a passionate advocate of Timorese independence. Yet little did she know that her fervour for the cause would become intertwined with a very different sort of passion.
Over the next decade, working as an undercover activist in Jakarta, Kirsty became an increasingly valuable operative within the East Timorese independence movement. In 1994 her work brought her into contact with the jailed leader of the resistance movement, the charismatic Xanana Gusmao.
Through their letters, smuggled in and out his prison, they fell in love. This unlikely but remarkable romance, no less passionate for their being so forcibly separated, was further tested when Kirsty was forced to flee Indonesia one step ahead of its feared intelligence service - the lovers had only once been able to meet face-to-face.
It was not until the fall of President Suharto and Xanana's subsequent release from prison that Kirsty was finally reunited with the revered independence leader.
Working beside Xanana, Kirsty found herself at the very centre of the epic events that saw East Timor freed from Indonesian occupation: the vote for independence, the militia groups' murderous rampage that followed, the intervention of Australian and international peacekeeping forces, and the slow and painful rebuilding of a devastated country.
She was beside him as he became the president of the world's newest nation, just as Xanana was beside her as she gave birth to their child, Alexandre, in Dili, one of the first citizens to be born in a country now released from its shackles. Today, the former guerrilla commander and the undercover resistance operative live together as president and first lady, with their two children, in a country where fear has been replaced by hope.
'A Woman Of Independence' is the compulsively readable story of an incredible love affair, and the passion and courage it takes to free a nation.
