JILL JOLLIFFE Run for Your Life: A memoir. Reviewed by Kylie Mason
The author of Balibó turns her focus on herself with this gripping examination of how a traumatic childhood shapes an entire life.
How long does it take to see your own story? For Jill Jolliffe, it was only after a lifetime of reporting the experiences of people in danger, particularly young women, that she realised she was still trying to escape her own brutal upbringing as an adopted child in the 1940s and 50s. Abused and terrorised by her adoptive mother, Gwendolyn Jolliffe – and later Gwendolyn’s second husband, Heinrich Jantzen – she and her three siblings, Thais, David and Tony, lived in constant fear of beatings and molestation. Jolliffe attempted to run away for the first time when she was five years old. It took 17 years, but she finally found an escape through a Commonwealth scholarship and a place at Monash University.
Jolliffe’s childhood experiences and the new world she discovered on campus encouraged her radical leanings; she joined her contemporaries in protesting Australia’s participation in the Vietnam War, became involved with the Communist Party, and was a founding member of various movements, including the Socialist Youth Alliance. But even among the radicals, Jolliffe was restless:
My penchant for being expelled from movements as a dissident had started with the Barwon Heads Girl Guides and extended to both secondary schools I attended. In my political years I continued this tradition by founding revolutionary organisations which flourished and grew, before its members inevitably turned on me as a subversive. I was thus not surprised when the Bakery Maoists treated me as a renegade.
In 1975, her history of political participation and a move to the Australian National University led to an offer to visit Timor as part of an Australian delegation intended to bring world attention to the small nation’s future after the withdrawal of the Portuguese colonial government. Jolliffe established relationships with José Ramos-Horta and Fretilin, and a lifelong passion for Timor and its people began. After receiving accreditation as a journalist through contacts at the Australian Union of Students and the Nation Review, Jolliffe returned to Timor and became perhaps the best chronicler of the Indonesian invasion and the country’s fight for independence. In order to dig deeper into events, she later travelled to Portugal to interview Timorese refugees, and remained there as a foreign correspondent for 20 years, writing for the Canberra Times, The Guardian and a number of other publications:
My inside knowledge of the Timor story was put to good use by The Guardian, which was keen to publicise the Timorese tragedy, and here I could see my work making a difference – it had entered the media mainstream.
My links with the Timorese community in Lisbon were important to my writing: as they were anxious for their story to be heard, they fed key documents to me when their families in Dili managed to smuggle them out.
In Run for Your Life, Jill Jolliffe offers an unflinching look at her shocking childhood at the hands of the cruel and vicious adults who were supposed to take care of her. Her clear-eyed presentation of the distressing incidents she and her siblings endured and her endless efforts to escape build a portrait of a home populated by monsters and a society willing to turn a blind eye to the mistreatment of children. Jolliffe applies this same astute treatment to her experiences as a journalist, bringing her deep understanding of suffering to her dealings with people in war zones and held in captivity – communities and individuals fighting for their lives. She details the lengths to which she would go to get the story, among them travelling incognito to avoid being tailed by secret police and posing as a travel writer in order to interview Portuguese women kidnapped and sold into sex slavery in Spain.
There is little sentimentality in this memoir, a testament to the author’s talent as a journalist: Jolliffe presents the events and facts of her life without embellishment or concealment, inviting readers to make up their own minds about her and her story. Run for Your Life offers unique insight into the political atmosphere of Timor since the 1970s and Portugal at the end of the 20th century as well as the author’s dedication to human rights and her determination to help those who cannot find their own way out of danger. The book is also a message of hope to those who have suffered as Jolliffe has, showing that every life is worthwhile, and how one’s life begins does not always determine how it will end.
Jill Jolliffe Run for Your Life. A memoir Affirm Press 2014 PB 320pp $29.99
Kylie Mason is a freelance book editor based in Sydney: www.kyliemmason.com
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