Arriving in Dili on a domestic flight from Bali, an "immigration" officer calls me aside to fill in forms. This does little to enhance the argument that East Timor is fully integrated into the country as the 27th province of Indonesia. So begins a few weeks of continual questioning by the authorities - often I was not sure which authority - on my reasons for being in East Timor.

Within hours of arriving I am hit with a sense of the oppression, of the quiet desperation of the people. As I walk down a street, a voice calls out the freedom slogan "Viva Timor L'este!" just loud enough for me to hear. People insist that I photograph them, even demand it. Before the moment of exposure they flash two fingers in the victory sign, small acts of defiance to ensure that I take home some evidence, however intangible, of ongoing resistance to Indonesian authority.

I am frequently questioned about my background. My questioners seem determined to find out whether or not I am a journalist - even to trick me into saying that I am - and what exactly my profession is.

One man present is later introduced as a "captain in the intelligence". On learning I am from Sydney, he asks me if I know José Ramos Horta:

"No."

"Do you know who he is?"

"Yes."

"How do you know?"

"Well, he has just won the Nobel Peace Prize; he's in the news a fair bit."

"Oh. Do you know..." and so on.

Knowledge arouses suspicion for such people. So does any interest in local economic or social conditions. Implicit in the rules, and the general attitude of the Indonesian authorities, is an idea that tourists are not interested in politics or human rights. Anyone with such interests cannot be a genuine tourist.

I meet some people said to be from the resistance. I am shown photographs of young Timorese who have been tortured and murdered by the military. Their bodies are beaten and bloody, and the Timorese flag has been draped over them for some pictures. I ask in amazement how they were able to get such pictures, and I am told that the torturers, who made the photos and also appear in the pictures, sold the pictures to them. As I leave, I am urged to take photos of military cemeteries:

"Why?" I ask.

"Because we want the world to see that the fight is still going on, and that Indonesian soldiers are still being killed."

Each grave of an Indonesian soldier is a symbol of the success of the resistance - like a trophy staking a claim to the vigour of their struggle.

I am amazed that the students will risk so much for the sake of seeing a few photographs reach the outside world. Again and again, I have similar experiences. People beg me, implore me, even demand that I make defiant photographs of them to show the world that the resistance is still alive and strong in East Timor.

On the streets I hear rumours of demonstrations that may or may not happen. I am approached a number of times by young men: "Do you want to see a demo. Tomorrow at ten o'clock. Just follow the people and you will find it."

On Palm Sunday I am the only foreigner amongst hundreds gathered in the church grounds, for the church cannot contain such a crowd. After it is over, some young men urge me to follow them. I sense that something has happened. I am hurried behind an outbuilding where a makeshift clinic has been established and some nuns are tending to four injured men. They have been beaten by the military in an early morning demonstration to mark the arrival of Jamsheed Marker, UN Special Envoy to East Timor. One man has been shot, but it seems he will survive. They do not seek treatment at a hospital as they say they would be arrested there and face possible detention and torture. I am told to take photographs, and then a four-page manifesto is thrust into my hands as I leave.

A rumour says that forty people have been arrested; another says that four people have died. Later I hear six. I want to leave the church, but police or troops in riot gear have blocked off the roads. I find a Timorese taxi driver and ask him to get me out of there. This he does via back streets and I return to my guest house rather shaken. It is time to leave Dili.

Some Timorese say that this demonstration, and many others, has been arranged by the Indonesian Intelligence. Others say that the demo was to have taken place at 10am, but the Indonesians spread false rumours that it had been changed to 6am. It is a strategy designed to confuse the people and undermine the protest, so that the visiting media would miss the show.

The use of informers and stooges causes great resentment, splitting the Timorese people and placing them in awful dilemmas. People who have or want government jobs are under particular pressure. The cost of a job can be betrayal of your people.

On minibuses known as microlets, I travel to regional towns - Ermera, Venilale, Viqueque, Maubisse, Los Palos, Suai. The names are exotic, so un-Asian with their Portuguese spelling. Not much of the Portuguese architecture remains - a few churches, houses and schools with graceful arches and terracotta tiles. The language is still widely spoken by people of about 40 and older. My rusty Portuguese is called into urgent service and I manage, at least, to forge some kind of communication with the Timorese. They love to talk, but any mention of politics provokes a barrier which may terminate the encounter.

Microlets are brightly coloured, with names such as Phoebe, Adelaide, Travolta, Traque de Victoria, Quo Vadis, Shirley and Amanda. Along winding roads, overworked tape players pump out Timorese pop. We stop every few minutes to pick up or drop off passengers. An oversized westerner with an oversized backpack, I am crushed into the back with the friendly Timorese. Mostly we manage to exchange words and gestures; occasionally someone speaks some English or we battle on in Portuguese. My dictionary is always close at hand.

I am high in the hills and mist is wafting through the town. It is late afternoon, and getting cold. As I amble past a market with women selling their meagre produce - a neat pile of chillis, lemons stacked like marbles on a ragged mat - a policeman calls me to the station. My arrival and lack of Indonesian language causes concern. Soldiers radio to headquarters awaiting instructions for dealing with the tourist. An hour later I am free to go, but I must also report to the military police.

They ask me trivial questions. I feel they want to delay me, to waste my time. I try to be friendly; a soldier talks of East Timor as a hardship posting. A policeman from Kalimantan says he wants to go home, but transfers are not easily arranged. He could resign from the force, but he fears he could not support his wife and children.

There is no accommodation in the town. I am offered the concrete floor of the station, but this option does not appeal and I decide to try the church. I go looking for the priest and find myself at the nuns’ house:

"Good afternoon, Madré..."

"I can't speak to you about the situation. If you are looking for the women, they are not here."

"Which women?"

"They are not here."

"I'm actually looking for the priest."

"Oh, you'll find him in that house over there."

The priest puts me up in a room kept for seminarians; we eat the best meal I've had in East Timor. I ask about "the women" and what is going on. In a hushed voice he tells me that there has been an incident in which two young women were arrested by soldiers who claimed that the women were trying to make contact with guerillas. They were repeatedly raped and beaten. A church delegation from Dili has just secured their release and they are now being cared for by the nuns. No charges have been laid against the soldiers.

Next day I travel on. Whole hillsides are eroding, denuded of trees. Large rivers have silted up, their beds littered with trunks of washed away trees. The once plentiful sandalwood is gone - exploited by the Portuguese and finished off by the new colonists in Jakarta. It is the poorest province of Indonesia by any measure, and one of the poorest places I have seen. There is little evidence of industry. There are few private cars. Almost all shops appear to be owned and run by Indonesian immigrants, gradually moving in from the islands to the west - Java, Bali, Flores or Sumatra. The Timorese are mainly subsistence farmers, increasingly marginalised in their own land.

Many of the educated elite fled to Portugal and Australia in the years following the invasion. A nun tells me how at the age of one she fled to the mountains with her family to escape the war in the towns. At the age of two she learned how to keep quiet and still, already understanding that her life depended on it. She endured bombing raids and once was separated from her parents for three weeks, surviving with other children on roots and berries. Incredibly, all her immediate family survived the three years in the mountains, but she saw her pregnant aunt die when her child was cut from her belly by an Indonesian soldier.

Such stories are common in East Timor. Well over a hundred thousand Timorese died in the war, many of starvation. No one knows how many, but it may have been a quarter of the entire population. I ask another nun about the psychological trauma accompanying such a legacy. "No-one ever asks about that," she says, and goes on to tell me about cases in the village where she works.

She is a foreigner and thought nothing of playing a prank with the children she was minding in an orphanage. Another nun was returning from town and as she heard the car pull up outside, she said "Quick, let's hide so Sister will think we're not here!" A girl broke into hysterical sobbing and shaking and could not be consoled. The child’s terror of hiding from the soldiers has been reawakened. Others she spoke of wandered aimlessly round the village, lost in their tortuous worlds. One woman regularly wakes her in the night, hysterically screaming that the soldiers have killed her family; this is true but the killings occurred years before.

In Maubisse I get stuck, having missed the day's last bus to Ainaro. A man approaches me in the market and says "come with me". He is not in uniform, but claims to be a policeman. At the police station we go through the usual questions and filling in of forms. Some police are playing soccer on a lawn and I ask if I can take a photograph. They are happy, but the commander shouts "No, no!" Across the road is a cemetery, and I am not to photograph that. In fact, he indicates that I am not even to visit the cemetery. Later, I discover that the cemetery contains mass graves - entire families who all died on the same day. It is telling evidence of the atrocities against civilians, including women and children.

The restriction annoys me and I walk back along the road to the guest house which sits atop a small hill. I watch rain clouds receding across the valley and the mountains; the sun breaks through and a soft light falls onto the cemetery, little crosses on a green rise on the edge of town. I feel a strange and unspecific anger rise up inside me. I think of the waste of life, the suffering, and the injustice of twenty-two years of occupation. I think of the faces I have seen, worn down by years of hardship, the desperation in the eyes of the many people I have met. I think of Linda, a student I met in another town. We talked and joked in her house - her mother correcting my rudimentary Portuguese, feeding me biscuits and coffee, asking me about Australia. She avoids my attempts to turn the talk to the "situation" in East Timor, then through her silence I detect an awful fear that my visit will bring trouble to her family.

I think of her and how I did not visit again for fear of bringing trouble to her family; I was being watched and questioned by intelligence officers. In an idle aside I said that I did not trust politicians - they were all crooks - Suharto included. The room fell silent and I thought "This is it - I'm going to be charged with something. Insulting the president. Maybe I'll just be deported". Nothing happened, but I was too concerned to drop in again. I wish I had her address, or her surname, but what could I write anyway?

In my room the lights do not work, so I lie in my sleeping bag, thinking that travels in East Timor cannot leave a thinking person unchanged. There are so few tourists (I have seen only two in as many weeks); every tourist must get some sense of the Timorese people's reaching out to them, at the same time as noticing their deep fear of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. There is an atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion. Anyone could be an informer, a spy.

My last stop is Ocussi where I watch from the bus as we pass a dozen or more burnt out buildings, the only remaining indication of Timorese anger and resentment of Indonesian traders in a riot a few months earlier. I climb a hill to see some statues of Christ with animals at his feet. The sun glints sharply off the Sawu Sea. It is hot and quiet. I try to reconcile what I have seen in the weeks gone by, but I cannot digest it yet. Perhaps later it will fall into place. Leaving feels like walking out on a people in need of friends. Perhaps I should not have gone to look, but I think of what one Timorese said to me:

"People must come. We want tourists. We want them to see what is going on, how we must live."

The presence of tourists offers the Timorese a small degree of protection. If something terrible happens, then someone may find out. It is not a fun place to travel; the accommodation and the food are poor. In many towns you cannot find a cold drink. But East Timor will stay on my mind for years to come. It pricks your conscience. They are probably right in saying that the more people who go, the sooner the world will stand up to Indonesia and say "Enough is enough".