CLIVE OF INDONESIA KEEPS MUM
First a confession: I’d heard of Australian Clive Williams the late President Soeharto’s enigmatic intermediary and started searching. But the tale was too hard to unearth - it was also unbelievable.
Fortunately Australian academic Dr Shannon Smith had more time, tenacity and certitude. So now we have tidbits of the remarkable secret story and its significance to Indonesian relations with the West for three critical decades last century.
‘Occidental Preacher, Accidental Teacher’ is a little of the life and much of the times of Williams who remains elusive despite solid research. It’s academically bomb-proof with 68 pages of notes, an index and references for every assertion, but the target remains largely untouched.
There's a lot about Jehovah's Witnesses, the 1965 Jakarta coup and Javanese culture, entertaining but padding because Smith had problems finding facts to write up a man who left few paper trails.
Born in 1921 into a struggling Geelong family, Williams became a Witness missionary and eventually ended up in Indonesia. He quit the church when aged 34 - or maybe was forced out because he was gay.
He settled in Semarang in Central Java, where he “emerged with a new identity” as a chiropractor and English teacher with “a number of rich eccentricities” according to one Australian diplomat - presumably a euphemism for his sexual preferences.
Williams' pupils included the wife and children of an army colonel stationed nearby, a man little known to Western intelligence. That soon changed: The soldier was Soeharto, destined to become the authoritarian kleptocrat second President of Indonesia, a job he held for 32 years.
President Suharto and his wife Siti Hartinah (Tien) with their children in 1967. Front row: Hutomo Mandala Putra (born 12 August 1962), President Suharto, Siti Hutami Endang Adiningsih (born 23 August 1964), Siti Hartinah, and Siti Hediati Hariyadi (born 14 April 1959). Back row: Bambang Trihatmodjo (born 23 July 1953), Siti Hardiyanti Hastuti (born 23 January 1949), and Sigit Harjojudanto (born 1 May 1951) / National Library of Indonesia
Away from preaching and into business Williams did well, bought a house and car but was rarely noticed by visitors. An exception was journalist Frank Palmos who remembered a “clever, confident Australian” who dodged questions about his past.
Others remember his size (fat) and “plastic teeth”, so not an inviting character - except for who and what he knew.
Because a most unusual friendship had developed between Williams and Soeharto; one was a well-travelled homosexual with relationships, a former Christian tub-thumper from an individualistic Western culture. The other was an unsophisticated, ambitious and corrupt career officer with (eventually) six kids, born in a Central Javanese village and suspicious of foreigners.
Alongside for much of that time was Williams, a conduit for Soeharto's messages to the fact and gossip-hungry Americans who found the President inaccessible. To them, the guy from Geelong was a "straight shooter and reliable interpreter of Soeharto's thinking."
Though not to the Australians. Ambassador Max Loveday ("a pompous little prick," said one journo) only wanted news through approved diplomatic lines, and that excluded Williams.
Loveday’s successors were more astute and keen to get wisdoms from a normally closed palace. For the few journalists aware of Williams’ role he was scoop central helping make sense of the intrigues and villainy.
How much did Williams know of the 1965-66 genocide when militias and the army killed maybe half a million real or imagined Communists in a nationwide purge after the coup that brought Soeharto to power?
Williams also hated the Reds and war, but it seems he said nothing as the blood flowed making him morally complicit. Comments Smith: "Did he help rescue individuals from death or incarceration? We will probably never know."
In Jakarta Williams lived in a home adjacent to the President’s compound with side-gate access, often dining with the family. The two men were almost the same age.
In politics trust is rare, but Soeharto had total faith in ‘Om Clive’ to broker business deals, fix problems that foxed diplomats, interpret foreign news and be a high-level messenger.
Smith concluded Williams kept Soeharto “grounded” and was “a source of unfettered common sense.” But not a moral compass.
The outsider mastered Indonesian and Javanese, absorbing the culture to become inscrutable and enigmatic. Author Blanche D'Alpuget who worked in the Embassy recalled that Williams shunned parties and seemed to have adopted “a kind of Javanese ingratiating submissiveness.”
Unlike Soeharto's official advisers, the Australian was not in it for money or fame. His and Soeharto’s interests were mysticism - explored with ABC journalist Tim Bowden in 1966 - the only time Williams talked on radio.
Few photos exist. The cropped pic used on the book cover shows a seemingly indifferent bystander in batik having a smoke, hardly a puppeteer. There’s no sense of importance or authority.
Smith has given too much space to Witness history and speculation about why Williams joined the controversial sect that believed in Armageddon; he never spoke of his religious past, yet had been a powerful orator and an “energetic adherent and proselytiser”.
Soeharto passed away in 2008 and was grandly entombed in Solo after a state funeral.
His “Australian whisperer” had already died seven years earlier aged 80 but apparently we don’t know where he rests. Fitting - much of his past still stays buried.
The next volume of Smith’s scholarship due later this year will need to be more revealing of the Australian - if that’s possible.
First published in Inside Indonesia, 5 April 2024:
https://www.insideindonesia.org/archive/articles/book-review-clive-of-indonesia##
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