Halfway through 2009 I was talking to some of the first-year communications students I teach at the University of Western Sydney about Balibo, the Robert Connolly film starring Anthony LaPaglia. They wanted to know what it was about, and whether it was a documentary. I told them briefly about the 1975 murder of five Australian journalists by Indonesian soldiers in East Timor and explained that, although the film was closely based on actual events, my understanding was that it was also a drama, a political thriller.

Seeing a potential opportunity in an environment of textroverts whose preferred communication method requires keystrokes, I scurried off to the movies. I thought I'd take advantage of the students' seeming interest in the film to fuel talk about the material practice of journalism, not to mention cultural imperialism and the balance between the historical and the personal. I was also hoping to coax them to draw parallels between Timor and, say, Rwanda or Darfur in the context of mainstream media coverage.

Having asked the students to do a little research for themselves, I arrived for the next class with some information about Connolly's aims. Needless to say, I had underestimated who I was dealing with. I had barely finished delivering my ad-hoc review when one student raised the historical context of the news of the Balibo Five – the end of the Vietnam War and the soon-to-be-dismissed Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.