Watch 'Return to Timor-Leste,' on Dateline
The 500km, 21-day trek was designed for “maximum adventure” and for it to be “absolutely as hard as possible,” says Whiley.
“The most amazing part was connecting with the Timorese people. Seeing their amazing spirit.”
Next year he hopes others will join him.
Called the 'Debt of Honour Trek', Whiley is paving the way for a new experience, one that he hopes will rival PNG’s famous Kokoda track.
Timor’s military significance to Australia is just as important as anywhere else the ANZACs have fought, Whiley says, but the story is relatively unknown.
Australian commandos fought alongside the Timorese against the Japanese in WWII. But when the Australians were withdrawn, the Japanese went on to slaughter huge numbers of Timorese as punishment for supporting the Diggers. The commandos were left haunted by guilt.
The debt extends to the shame Whiley feels over Australia’s abandoning of the country again, when Canberra looked the other way when Indonesia invaded in 1975.
The revelations that Australia allegedly spied on 2004 Timorese cabinet negotiations to gain a trade advantage in resources negotiations, is another blemish on the relationship between the two countries he loves.
Who are INTERFET?
Whiley was one of 5,500 Australian Army soldiers in the multinational INTERFET force in September 1999. Their mission was to stabilise the post-independence vote violence.
Whiley landed in the capital, Dili after the Indonesian military and their local militia proxies had decimated the place in a “scorched earth” campaign of death and destruction.
It was “absolutely carnage, buildings demolished, roofs caved in things still burning,” he says. “the smell is just -- I remember it like it was yesterday.”
A dark place
Whiley returned from Timor with “moral injury”, a guilt and helplessness he says he feels for not being there earlier and not saving more people.
That, combined with the stress from working in a hostile environment, PTSD was “there in the background as soon as I came home from Timor, I was a different person,” he says, but he didn’t let it show.
“You’re a soldier, you’re invincible. Show no weakness. I hid it. Soldiered on for years.”
Eventually, the PTSD became too much to hide and he was medically discharged from the Army.
“My body had enough and shut down. I could barely string a few words together. I couldn’t pick up a cup and drink without spilling it,” he says.
Support from other veterans and finding a passion in adventure “helped pull me out of that dark place,” he says.
“Passion is the opposite of depression. I worked out what I was passionate about.”
Trekking for Timor
Planning the Debt of Honour Trek gave Whiley purpose.
He’s raised $5,000, so far, for two Timor based education funds.
One is a scholarship set up by his friend, Michael Stone, for the children of veteran freedom fighter, that provides vocational training in hospitality and tourism.
The other is an English Language School connected to the Riak Veterans’ Retreat in Same, on the country’s south coast.
“Doing the trek and sharing the story, I don’t really feel that it’s finished yet. It’s something that I want to continue doing, telling the story of the Debt of Honour,” Whiley says.
Next year he’s planning two more treks: the same again and another, shorter, south to north trek.
He already has an interest in people keen to join the treks.
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