Unlikely Destinies

As part of a small Australian military group three sisters of immigrant parents participate in secret missions to counteract People’s Republic of China coercion and planned terrorist attacks in the Indo-Pacific. The sisters enjoyed a happy but meagre childhood in a remote West Australian township from where they emerged as the fortuitous beneficiaries of a private school education in South Australia. They displayed exceptional talents in standard and elective subjects. As young adults they excelled in tertiary education and gained degrees in linguistics, admiralty and Pacific constitutional law, pure mathematics, and computer science before coming to the attention of Australian intelligence agencies and the military. They were recruited by the military group for clandestine assignments that ranged from the outer boundaries of the South China Sea to Papua New Guinea and in between. The main parts of the story are about these assignments.

Ian Ingleby is retired after a varied career in perception management in Australasia. For nearly two decades, he was attached to a US-Australian public relations group, servicing foreign governments and strategic commercial interests of the governments of the US, the UK, USA and Indonesia, as well as non-strategic commercial interests of these and others, including Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Denmark, the Netherlands and Finland. He was a resident in Hong Kong during the British administration and in Singapore before being seconded to the Suharto administration in Indonesia in the 1980s. In Jakarta, he was senior government adviser and speechwriter for several Indonesian Cabinet Ministers and others. While in Australia, he undertook several assignments throughout Indonesia. In subsequent years, he introduced government and private sector people to Indonesian military and corporate entities for business purposes. Earlier, he was with the Commonwealth in Papua New Guinea, prior to selfgovernment, for two years. He was responsible for press news and information, acted as press secretary to two Australian administrators, reported on House of Assembly sessions and other significant events of the time, and assisted in monitoring local political developments. Prior to this, he was with a Sydney metropolitan newspaper as a journalist. Honorary positions held included chairman of the Australian Institute of Export, foundation fellow of the Institute of Company Directors NSW, governor of the American Business Council in Singapore and executive member of the Australia-Indonesia Business Cooperation Committee. Names of some of these organisations have changed over the years. His only current membership (as an ordinary member) is with the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies NSW Inc. to which he was introduced in 1990 after assisting the then president and friend in writing profiles of Indonesian political and military leaders. He is married, with three daughters, the youngest born in Hong Kong in the 1960s (at the then Matilda hospital on the Peak run by an Australian matron). He has eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. His schooling was at St Ignatius’ College, Riverview, Sydney. His largely unfulfilled hobby is coastal fishing.