In one, she gazes out from dark almond eyes, dancing with a younger boy, a brother perhaps. In another, she poses, face full of mischief and hair pulled back, a dancing couple smiling at her from behind.
Are they her parents? Is that a baby brother's bootie tossed among the rubble that was once her home in Balibo, and which is now sealed for forensic examination of suspected atrocities committed within? Where is she now?
Where, for that matter, are Flora Martin, Maria Mau, Flexius Odja and Coriano Purificacao, whose pictures lie among the pile of ID cards at the rear of the house across the road, acrid with the stench of bodily fluids and blotched by dark stains.
Every noon, Australian Army padre Glynn Murray climbs the steps to the yellow Church of St Antonius, where 500 people in deeply Catholic Balibo used to worship, and rings the Angelus bell to entice the girl and her people to worship in safety.
Every day, so far, he walks back alone. No one comes, not even for the power of the Church.
Only one person lives in Balibo now, an ancient woman the soldiers call Mary for no reason other than that it is at least a name.
Mary is deaf, and speaks no known language or dialect.
For the first few days of the Australian occupation, she cowered in the dark of one of the few bamboo shacks to have escaped the terror, afraid even to take the food soldiers left at her door. Now she accepts the food, but nothing more.
Apart from Mary, St Antonius and the stout walls of the Portuguese fort on the highest hill, there is nothing left of Balibo, which used to run north-south along the road from coastal Batugade to Maliana.
The little girl's white house sits stripped of its roof, stripped of its doors, windows and contents, save what the militia chose to smash rather than loot. A plastic baby's bath lies upturned, a school time-table is pinned to a wall.
The house was burned at the back: two pots still sit on the blackened remnants of the outdoor cooking area.
Above the white house are the remains of the house that bore the brunt of the Indonesian invasion in 1975, its walls pockmarked by the bullets of guns later turned on five journalists - one a New Zealander - caught in its path.
A trail of new blood runs up the steps to the ruins, flees through a rear room and vanishes in the volcanic dust and stones outside. It ends at a crumpled pamphlet, chanting the mantra of Pancisila - the Indonesian way.
Below the ruins, stretching in each direction, Balibo is empty and desolate: not a dog, a cat, a chicken.
Bamboo houses have been burned, one by one, leaving only exact squares of ash. The brick walls left standing are hollow shells, their insides shredded, smashed or burned.
In one ruin, a Portuguese Bible is open at Matthew 10:1: "Jesus summoned the 12 apostles and gave them all power over unclean spirits in order to expel these ..." In Balibo the evil came, but was not expelled.
It spread out, east and south, killing, raping, pillaging.
This was no spontaneous uprising: this was planned, systematic, a bamboo Kristallnacht that destroyed utterly, house by house, street by street, town by town, from one end of the province to the other.
Those not slaughtered by gun or machete were herded west, across the border to the camps around Atambua and other towns where the militias still rule, or were driven into hills devoid of food or water.
Corrugated iron was stripped from roofs, countless tonnes of it, loaded on to trucks in a mammoth looting-spree of military precision and driven out - west, according to the people of Maliana, southeast of Balibo.
Some houses and villages on the highest ridges of the Ramelau Mountains have escaped, a handful of others inexplicably spared on the road winding along the coast from Dili to Batugade.
Some flying the Indonesian flag are unscathed, like an obscene Passover.
But this is an empty land.
Somewhere there are 500,000 missing people: the families who until a few weeks ago played with their children and grew old together in modest concrete brick houses and thatched bamboo huts.
Life has started to return to Dili, spilling westwards along the northern coast in a diminishing trickle to the town to Liquica, where Indonesian police pumped teargas into the church to drive those seeking sanctuary into the machetes of the militias.
Fifty-eight died.
Below Liquica, the road is deserted, kilometre after kilometre, the surviving houses empty of their owners in an eerie desolation broken only by the puff of dust as a goat trips into the shrub, or by oxen and cattle grazing untended paddies that should be under the plough now.
In one intact but deserted village, Australian soldiers found the tables laid for dinner, food on the tables, washing on the line, wood stacked for fires. "It was like the Mary Celeste," says Lieutenant-Colonel Mick Slater, commander of the Royal Australian Regiment 2nd battalion, now moving south along the border.
There are people at Batugade, 2km from the border, about 20 or so scavenging in the ruins of a town that looks, as one soldier says, like ground zero. A bomb could not have done more damage.
Trooper Shaky Mashayeckh hands out chocolate and muesli bars as more deaths are reported: three bodies washed ashore to be buried in temporary graves above high-water mark.
From Batugade, through Balibo to Maliana, there are no more Timorese.
But at Maliana, where the first armoured column has passed through only hours before, ragged cheers break out from a group of about 100 people at a church, others along the ridge passing through the town, and from a cluster of 50 or so trying to make shelter from the ruins.
Whatever lies ahead, the country that has been left with less than nothing - not even the hope of feeding itself for the year ahead - is one of joy, tears and a heart-clutching succession of hand-shaking and touching.
Vicente Centa looks at Major Dan Skinner and asks: "No more militia?" Skinner slaps his Steyr rifle: "No more militia, no more Indonesia."
Morning after grisly day before
Port Arthur, Tasmania: April 30, 1996
Greg Ansley's work for the Herald encompassed regional wars, tragedy at home, political affairs and everything in between.
The morning sun rose pink yesterday behind the Isle of the Dead, where more than 1600 convicts lie buried, and deepened to an angry orange as the day broke across the carnage.
Strewn in a bloody strip running from a cafe above the lawns sweeping to the ruins of the Port Arthur penitentiary, along a bush-lined road to the smouldering ashes of a guest house, were the bodies of at least 34 men, women and children, slaughtered by a blond, pony-tailed killer armed with a high-powered arsenal. Nineteen survivors were in the Royal Hobart Hospital, four of them critically injured.
This was a monstrous crime, its evil marked by the red cone placed against a tree where a 6-year-old girl's desperate flight for life ended in the cafe where yesterday afternoon the dead still sat at their last meal; and in the pyre concealing the remains of an elderly couple and an unknown hostage.
These are the images that have gripped a nation numbed by grief and outrage. There is no disguising contempt for a paucity of gun controls in this island state, and the impotence of national leaders to reach agreement on a plague of massacres.
At the police command post at the Tasmanian Devil Park, 4km from where heavily armed special police in their blue fatigues besieged the 29- year-old Hobart gunman throughout the night, a silver-haired resident, Alan Gillie, trembled as he shook his head: "I just can't explain, I can't explain."
A slow trickle of witnesses, leaving Port Arthur as police released them from the scene, sat alternately stony-faced or weeping as their cars crawled through the cordon. Even the professionals were shaken. Said Superintendent Jack Johnson after visiting the cafe where 20 died: "It was horrific ... I think carnage is the simple way to describe it."
While his victims remained where they died, the alleged killer was in Royal Hobart Hospital, his back being treated for burns suffered when he staggered, ablaze, through the smoke and fire of the guesthouse as it burned at the climax of the siege. He is understood to be a mentally disturbed man from the Hobart suburb of New Town whose father committed suicide several years ago.
The man whose massacre killed more than any single gunman outside of war, chose well for his slaughter. Port Arthur was the most forbidding of England's penal colonies, a grim fortress surrounded by country so harsh -- despite its beauty -- that incarceration was preferable to escape. Beatings and cruelty were the norm; when the lash was banned, it was replaced by a crude solitary confinement that many convicts found harder to bear.
Its stark stone buildings, now mostly hollow shells, provided the perfect killing ground. The 40ha site is one of Australia's most popular tourist attractions, and even the cusp of the tourist season was busy when the gunman drove his yellow Volvo 244GL saloon, surfboard on top and suncream on its felt clad dash, to the Broad Arrow cafe and souvenir shop. Inside were a newly expatriate New Zealander, Malaysians, Canadians, Americans, and mainlanders from at least four states.
He turned first to a blue and white Trans Otway tourist coach parked outside the cafe. He shot the driver and three passengers before walking into the cafe and reportedly saying in the calm, lucid tones later noted by police negotiators during the siege: "There are a lot of Wasps [White Anglo-Saxon Protestants] around today. There aren't many Japs, are there?" Then he opened fire, killing 20 and injuring many more in their terrified attempts to break for safety. This was no random burst of bullets, but methodical -- if indiscriminate -- murder. To Mr Johnson, the carnage had a surreal quality: "Some of them were sitting there as if they were still enjoying their meal." From the cafe the killer drove slowly up the tree-lined road leading to the toll gates at the entrance to the historical site.
Halfway between the ruins of the 160-year-old church and the gates, he saw a mother carrying her 3-year-old infant beside her 6-year-old daughter. He shot mother and babe, then the sister. Yesterday, green blankets covered the blood of mother and child. The 6-year-old reached the first of three ramrod straight gum trees before she, too, died.
At the toll gates the killer's Volvo sat with its passenger and rear windows shattered by bullets. In front of the car are two more green blankets and -- beyond them again -- another two. Here, four men were forced from their BMW and executed where they stood.
The killer drove the BMW several hundred metres down the road to a service station where a swinging yellow sign advertises "friendly driveaway service". It is a comfortable, 1960s-style station, with a small general store beside it. Just down from the sign sits a white Toyota Corolla with its "Tasmania -- Holiday Isle" number plates, left where its owner paused to give way to the BMW approaching from the convict ruins.
The young woman driver died. The killer stopped, took careful aim, and shot her through the passenger side window. Her black leather purse with her Fly Buys incentive pamphlet sits, still open, on the dash; the woollen seat cover is stained red, and a searing gash in the rear passenger door marks the exit of a high-powered bullet. Conflicting and confused reports make accuracy difficult, but witnesses say a man was also forced into the boot of the BMW and taken north.
One kilometre or so down the road a turquoise Holden Frontera Sport four-wheel-drive stands with one door open and windows shot out. Two tourists on their way to Port Arthur are now fighting for their lives in Hobart.
In sight of the Frontera the killer turned into the autumn lane drive leading to the three cottages that made up the Seascape holiday complex. Above it is the Tasman Highway to Hobart and heavy gum forest, to its side a small paddock with grazing sheep, and behind it the gentle waters of Stewarts Bay.
This was the killer's last stand. The first two police cars to respond to the emergency calls are slewed across the road, bullet-scarred and with doors left open by policemen as they fled for cover.
Shots fired at helicopters ferrying the injured to hospital prompted a 5km air, land and sea exclusion zone. Officers kept cover as the killer ran between two cottages, firing volleys that lasted throughout the night. The elderly owners and a third person -- possibly the man seen forced into the BMW's boot -- were held as hostages.
At 9.30pm negotiators failed to reach the killer and police settled in for a long night. At 8am smoke drifted from the upper storey of one of the cottages. By 8.30am the alleged killer had staggered from the blaze, dropping two rifles and beating at his flaming clothing.
But the end of the siege was the beginning of Australia's nightmare. With at least two added to the toll the nation is agonising: how could this happen?
Parched nation craves a drink Comment
Canberra: September 6, 2004
What election? I'm far more concerned about the huge bull kangaroo on my front lawn.
It first appeared late one night several weeks ago, scaring the pants off my oldest daughter, who looked out the window and saw the silhouette of a demonic Arnold Schwarzenegger staring back at her.
It's hard to say who got the bigger fright.
Now it's a regular part of our lives, growing visibly fatter and becoming bolder by the day, emerging from the nature reserve across the street to graze even during daylight hours while cars zip by and people stroll past with their dogs.
While the whole street loves to wander out and watch our friend mow and fertilise my lawn, accompanied as he frequently is by crimson rosellas and king parrots, we are all more than a little worried on several counts.
First is the danger the roo runs in crossing a busy road. After the fires of 2003 another bull roo was hit by a car outside our house. The wildlife rescue people listened to a description of its injuries and called in the police. Sometime near midnight, a distressed young officer put a gun to its head.
There has been altogether too much of that in Canberra recently.
Driven in from surrounding bush and hills by a third year of the worst drought on record, our roo population has soared beyond the ability of the city's parks and lawns to sustain them.
Local television and newspapers were full of stories of aggressive and violent kangaroos fighting for a tiny patch of territory -- in one terrible case attacking and drowning a dog in a lake.
Worse was in store. The number of kangaroos seeking asylum from the drought became so great they were not only endangering their own survival, but threatening Canberra's fragile water supplies. In an emotional and much-protested decision, 800 were shot.
Even so, our streets have become markedly more dangerous. Panelbeaters told the Canberra Times that the volume of their business had risen up to 20 per cent from accidents involving kangaroos.
Driving in the country outside the city, especially at dawn and dusk, is plain scary: my brother-in-law, who is trying to keep a vineyard alive half an hour's drive outside Canberra, almost wrote off his car when a roo smashed up across the bonnet.
But the invasion of roos means more to us even than this. Canberra may be the wealthiest and probably the most comfortable city in Australia, but even in its manicured suburbs the drought affects the way we live day to day, and our decisions for the future.
Like every other major city in the country, we are having to finally come to terms with the fact that while this big dry will eventually end, the reality of living on a desert continent will not. The competing demands for a tightly limited amount of water mean everyone is having to rethink how we live.
Canberra, at the beginning of spring, is already at stage three water restrictions, not normally introduced until summer and even then only in bad years. Other cities are making similar decisions -- and most, like Canberra, are considering tough, permanent controls that inevitably will mean paying more for water.
In our household it means routinely filling buckets to catch water as showers warm and using buckets in the sink instead of letting water run down the drain, later using it to water plants. Showers are kept short.
Where possible, and in many new houses, people are installing systems to recycle waste water, or running hoses from their washing machines to gardens. Interest has surged in domestic rainwater tanks, including bladders that can be installed beneath floors.
This week a tiler comes to rip up our small, dead, back lawn and replace it with paving. We cannot keep the lawn alive and even when normal seasons arrive the cost of summer watering will be scary.
Some years ago, swayed by arguments of water efficiency and cost, we installed an automated sprinkler system. They have been banned for most of the drought, and even if they were not, costs are again going through the roof.
That means we are having to let our lawn, an inherited expanse of a fine-leafed English variety, die. It is now a mix of windblown grass and weeds. When the drought ends, we will probably look at an underground drip system, and new, hardy, Australian grasses.
Were we planting a garden now, we would follow the increasing move to tough, drought-resistant and far less thirsty natives.
In the meantime, we watch our roo graze and pray for rain.
