July. August 95but are also reminders of a frightening past, one that Ego is all
too familiar with. He pushes his hands deep into his pockets
and picks his way through the mud, anxious to complete his
rounds in the dying light.
Ego was aged three when his family ran to the mountains
to hide when Indonesian occupation began in 1975. They stayed
in a bare-earth hideout for four years, during which time Ego
lost three siblings to malnutrition and his father to the war. His
parents were both musicians – his father played violin, his mother
played harmonica. Music sustained them while in hiding and
later, when Ego and his mother returned to their life in Dili.
“Although I was very young, I loved the Timorese music
they played, with its beats echoing our past, where we came
from,” Ego says. “But when we came back to Dili, the music I
heard on the radio was all Indonesian. Our music was banned,
in case there were resistance messages in the lyrics. But Timorese
people are very smart, and soon our musicians learnt how to
write a simple love song, with a coded message that only we
could understand.”
In early high school, Ego wrote and recorded a love song to
Timor’s farmers who were struggling to survive the scorched-
earth policies of the occupation forces. That was when his twin
loves of growing food and making music first intersected. He
forged a distinguished career in permaculture, becoming one
of the country’s leading authorities on the sustainable farming
and gardening practice and was, in February, inducted into the
Earth Hall of Fame Kyoto, which honours global conservation
efforts. Ego is also one of Timor-Leste’s most internationally
successful musicians. He’s played at festivals worldwide, toured
with the late Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, and composed
and performed the title track of the 2009 Australian film Balibo.
By 1997 Indonesia had relaxed its ban on local music in
Timor-Leste and Ego had put a band together. One day an
older musician named Toto came to hear the band practise and
suggested they call themselves Cinco do Oriente, in honour of
a popular Timor-Leste band from the early 1970s. “We didn’t
know much about the earlier band, but we liked the name so
we took it,” Ego says “We became the new Cinco do Oriente.
After our first gig in Dili, some older people came up to us andtold us to be very, very careful because of the history of the
band. We didn’t really know what they meant, but we were
soon to find out. You see, in Timor-Leste everyone knows
about the three famous fronts in the struggle for independence- the resistance front, diplomatic front and clandestine front –
but no-one knows about the cultural front, and yet music and
art has played such an important part in keeping our people
united. It is the secret weapon.”
O
UR LAST INTERVIEW SUBJECT in Timor-Leste has just
driven a rough 10 hours from his home in Kupang,
West Timor, and is sweating in a singlet in his mother’s
courtyard in Dili. Word has spread that Toto Lebre is back, and
fellow musicians have gathered. Everyone wants a cold beer
and Toto sends out for some, but first he will tell his story, with
props. He disappears inside and returns with a CD and a battered
piano accordion. He sits down to talk through an interpreter.
When Toto was barely 15, he was one of the best keyboard
players in Dili. He was invited to join the original Cinco do
Oriente band, whose music combined riffs like those of Jimi
Hendrix and Eric Clapton with politicised lyrics reminiscent
of those of Bob Dylan. For the next three years the band was
offered more gigs than there were nights in the week. They
were bold and upfront, and they made their thoughts about the
Portuguese colonists and their incompetent government clear.
The people loved them. When the Indonesians invaded, Cinco
do Oriente was immediately targeted as a disruptive element.
Their gigs were closed down, their homes were raided, and
their instruments were destroyed. They ran for the hills.
Toto’s 61-year-old face creases and his eyes fill with tears as
he reaches the end of his story. “We hid in the mountains and
went our separate ways to avoid capture,” he says. “Two of us
survived but the three senior members of the band were taken
away by the militia and ‘disappeared’. Our music was banned
for 20 years. The other survivor moved to Australia, but he died
recently, so now it’s only me, and this.”
Toto reaches for his squeezebox and plays an old folk song
on its yellow keys, smiling through his tears. After all these
years, music is still his secret weapon. AGLegendary musician Toto Lebre plays the original accordion
he used when he joined the groundbreaking Timorese rock band
Cinco do Oriente in 1973. He is the only survivor.A so-called Prado protest in Dili, 2017, references expensive car
models bought for and driven by government ocials while much of the
country ekes out an existence below the poverty line.PHOTO CREDITS, FROM LEFT: SHAUN CAIRNS; PHIL JARRATT