Did ASIS (Australian Secret Intelligence Service) supply the bullets that killed the Balibo five? Brian Woodley investigates.
Leafing through the old man's passport with the Indonesian visas and clangingly pertinent dates, it dawned on Matthew Coffey that he was at last looking at evidence supporting his father's tales of clandestine involvement in Timor.
Particularly the yarn about taking 30,000 rounds of ammunition to Kupang six days before the October 16, 1975, raid on Balibo, where five Australian-based journalists were gunned down by Indonesian forces from West Timor.
So last month, Mr Coffey, 37, took his father's passport to a committee room in the Northern Territory Parliament, where a federal forum on East Timor policy was being overwhelmed by events outside.
The fiery destruction of East Timor left reporters no time to check what was going on in the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee. Mr Coffey waited two days to get himself squeezed in and then had just seven minutes to tell his story.
"My father, Lawrence Henry Coffey, was a sergeant in the Australian Army in the Engineers Corps," a Hansard proof records the Darwin building estimator saying.
"He retired and then worked in the marine industry here on the coast of the Northern Territory. From 1945, when he was released from the Defence Force, right up until his passing away two years ago, he had extensive knowledge of, and travel in, the whole Asian area.
"One of his voyages – I have his passport here – was on a vessel he built in Ballina in NSW, a landing barge called the MV Glenda Lee.
"On October 10, 1975, it arrived in Kupang. That vessel was loaded here in Darwin with 30,000 rounds of Australian ammunition by ASIS [Australian Secret Intelligence Service] officers."
Senators didn't have the time to question Mr Coffey. That is not to say they took no interest in his story. The chairman, Labor's John Hogg, told The Weekend Australian it was not in his terms of reference to pursue events of so long ago.
"But when we have the Department [of Defence] back we can seek a response. Obviously, if it's classified information they will not confirm or deny. That won't stop us seeking it."
Senator Hogg added that the Senate might be interested in making a fresh pursuit of the "Balibo Five" issue, including Mr Coffey's story, through a separate term of reference.
Mr Coffey's childhood adventures on the Darwin wharves seemed to fit his father's stories 20 years later of spies, shootings and voyages to Timor. Yet who, until now, could say that Lawrence – soldier, boatbuilder, engineer, sailor – was not merely exerting an overactive imagination on an impressionable son?
The 175ft green and white Glenda Lee and its sister barge, Alana Faye, were named after the daughters of John Grice, owner of a haulage company called Barge Express, who died last year.
Four years ago, Barge Express became part of Perkins, the Territory's biggest shipping company. Glenda Lee, whose later years were on the coastal run serving Aboriginal communities, was renamed Hyland Bay and repainted a bright red.
Last month, shortly after Mr Coffey appeared before the Senate committee, Hyland Bay was chartered by AusAID to ferry the first load of humanitarian supplies to Dili.
Grice's daughter, Glenda, said her father was "a very private man, certainly to do with the business". She said the family had "found a lot of surprises after his death – we're still delving into a lot of things", but nothing that had been found so far in her father's effects was relevant to any allegations of his doing clandestine work for security agencies.
Lawrence Coffey worked for Grice as chief engineer on coastal and overseas runs, usually on the Glenda Lee. According to what he told his son years later, Lawrence also did odd jobs for certain other parties.
Late in 1975, Matthew Coffey, back in Darwin from boarding school in NSW, began hearing gossip from his dad's crew about voyages across the Timor Sea over the previous year.
One made it into the Darwin newspaper after the ship rescued a man swept out to sea while escaping from Timor. This may have been the same trip for aid agencies in November 1975 to deliver rice to a hungry Dili, with a return cargo of coffee.
Lawrence Coffey's passport is silent about that trip – there are no Customs and Immigration stamps. In the previous month, however, the passport identifies him and the Glenda Lee arriving in Kupang on October 10 and leaving on October 13.
From the fragmented accounts picked up by Matthew Coffey in the course of several conversations with his father, triggered by news reports flowing out of the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre, this was the most intriguing trip of all.
"They were told this cargo was on there – 30,000 bullets stacked in the base of a container with a rudimentary false bottom. The container was at the rear of the cargo hold, with the doorway facing the port side," Matthew Coffey said .
"When they got to Kupang the container was left there. That hardly ever happened – those containers were worth about $2000."
Mr Coffey said loading in Darwin was arranged by an "Aussie" in his mid-30s. Two officers from the federal police protective services unit were stationed on the wharf as the barge was loaded. The crew for the voyage to Kupang consisted of a skipper, mate, two deckhands and Lawrence Coffey, then aged 54, as engineer. Except for a few nicknames, Matthew Coffey has not been able to precisely identify the crew.
On October 10, they arrived in Kupang. Lawrence Coffey didn't know to whom the ammunition was delivered. "But it was obvious what was going on," his son said. "When the barge docked there were Brimob [Indonesian police] and ABRI [Indonesian military] all over the place."
Glenda Lee put out from Kupang on October 13. Indonesian military units with pro-integration Timorese auxiliaries crossed the border and swept through Balibo on October 16, killing the five journalists. On December 7, Indonesia launched its full-scale invasion of East Timor.