2009 APRA Screen Music Award winner for "Best Original Song Composed for the Screen" - Balibo

For over ten years, musician, songwriter, permaculturalist, and community development worker Ego Lemos has been charming audiences around the world with his inspiring enthusiasm for environmental and social revitalisation in his home country, East Timor, and across the Globe.

Read the Media Release from The Secretary of State for the Council of Ministers and
Official Spokesperson for the Government of Timor-Leste Ágio Pereira  "Government of Timor-Leste congratulates Ego Lemos on Songwriters Award".

Balibo - Ego Lemos

Ego Lemos - "Tebe Hamutuk" live at the 12 Bar Club London
ego lemos on myspace

Ego Lemos is a remarkable man, with a remarkable voice in more ways than one. Regarded as a significant East Timorese community member, Ego has lived through three tumultuous periods of his nation's history.  He has interpreted and modernised some of the most beautiful and heart-wrenching traditional melodies from his nation's history, and produced a wreath of original songs in the Nation's lingua-franca, Tetum. He sings about issues such as the centrality of water to life, praises the nation's peasant farmers in their unceasing toil, and urges his people to remain positive and strive for unity.

Ego Lemos' poignant, subliminally strong debut solo album 'O Hele Le' gradually penetrates the psyche where his voice remains for some time after.

Ego Lemos demonstrates a great intimacy and connection with songwriting and his album highlights the tremendous talent he has to offer Indigenous music in Australia, and indeed, the world.

Spoke persons for East Timor’s most popular contemporary band, Cinco do Oriente, Ego had interpreted and modernised some of the most beautiful and heart-wrenching traditional melodies from his nation’s history, and produced a wreath of original songs in the Nation’s lingua-franca, Tetum. He sings about issues such as the centrality of water to life, praises the nation’s peasant farmers in their unceasing toil, and urges his people to unify in the face of violence and unrest.

Ego has lived through three tumultuous periods of his nation’s history – from the Portuguese colonial rule that lasted almost 500 years, through the brutal Indonesian occupation, and into UN transition and Independence early this century.

He was born in 1972, in the dying days of the Portuguese colonial administration, and as a baby fled the civil unrest following Portugal’s withdrawal, Fretilin’s declaration of Independence, and Indonesia’s brutal invasion. Ego was taken with his mother and relatives to the rural forests of East Timor, where he survived with other families for three years without basic infrastructure. During this time, and the immediate period thereafter, when they were able to move back to the Capital, Dili, Ego lost his three siblings to disease and malnutrition, and his father to the confusion of war.


For twenty-four years, Indonesia instigated a brutal occupation of the Territory, during which an estimated third of the Timorese population died. The colonial language Portuguese and native languages were replaced by Bahasa Indonesian. Always smiling, always polite, Ego excelled at his studies, and at Scouts, which allowed him to be in the fields and forests which he loved, and learn the survival skills he felt he needed as the only male child of his widowed mother.

Ego’s mum Madalena, a self-taught harmonica player, had reportedly met Ego’s father at a festa, where the young man had been playing violin in a European-influenced dance band, and Madalena had stood to accompany them, dancing and swaying with her blues harp singing in harmony. At night, in the middle of a terrible, silent war, husband and father dead, Madalena would play harmonica, and her son would sit and accompany her on guitar.

As Indonesia’s regime came under more and more scrutiny, both inside and outside the country, Ego’s political consciousness, and his audacity grew. As an undergraduate student he involved in the Student Political Movement, immediately liked because of his diplomatic manner, fairness, and political eloquence. He began working for the nation’s few non-governmental organisations, including its Human Rights Observance organisation, Hak, which attracted unrelenting hostility from the Indonesian regime.

Unlike so many young men his age, when East Timor gained its Independence after a bloody referendum in 1999, Ego was lucky to be alive. His activities had brought him close to death so many times. Foreign helpers flooded into the country, and one of these, a permaculture trainer from Australia, would become Ego’s close friend and mentor. Having taught himself English from dictionaries, Ego became Steve’s translator, traveling the country with him to give workshops, train farmers and instigate projects all over the country in home gardening, nurseries and the concepts of sustainable agriculture. Soon, the work that Ego was doing with Steve outgrew his position as a simple translator, and he founded the country’s first Permaculture centre, Permatil, which he co-ordinated for five years. He also founded a highly successful sustainable agriculture network, HASATIL, both of which still flourish today.

Soon, Ego was being invited to international conferences to speak of his experiences, and share his thoughts on permaculture-based revitalisation in communities all over the world. From India and Brazil, to England and Scotland, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, throughout South-East Asia and into the Pacific, Ego carried his guitar and continued to sing his songs, in his native language. In 2005 he was asked to address the UK parliament, and in 2006 performed at Australia’s national Indigenous Festival – the Dreaming Festival, in Queensland.

His work has seen him fill many capacities – as translator, trainer, speaker, actor, performer, and representative of his people. He continues to play with his band, Cinco do Oriente, with whom he recorded two albums – Sincustic Vol 1 and Sincustic Vol 2. The first album takes an equal mix of original songs and traditional songs such as “Funu Nain” – the tear-jerking lament for a son lost in revolutionary war. The second album is made up much more of originals, and allows the band to express their rock and roll ambitions on some tracks – it is much more up-beat than the first. Ego’s songwriting gem is the song “Ai Laran Lakon” – “lost forests”, which recounts the almost complete loss of the giant coastal rainforests around the area where Ego was born, within his lifetime. All the songs continuously hark back to the land of Timor, whether is be in an environmental plea, or in odes of nationalism.

Ego’s third album "O Hele Le" shows with greater intimacy the songwriting and poetic maturity of this musician-ambassador, as well as the musical finesse he is able to bring together and orchestrate.