BREAK UP IMPOSSIBLE - GEOGRAPHY HAS FIXED THAT

                                Divorce impossible – so tolerate

Many  button lips for fear of arousing wrath, but here’s the truth: The neighbours aren’t part of the Anglosphere.  They  don’t understand or trust us nor we them.  This must change as our  great and powerful friend turns insular. As the plague retreats comes the chance to address anxieties and reboot the relationship.  As the PM says.about flattening Covid-19’s curves – we’re all in this  together.

The Lowy Institute’s 2019  survey shames still:  Almost 60 per cent of Australians polled didn’t know Indonesia is the world’s third largest democracy – its status for two decades.

Before Covid-19  more than a million Aussies lazed on Bali beaches every year. Few have been James Cooks exploring  the country they’d invaded and navigating its mysteries.

Lowy’s long-term polling demonstrates ‘the wariness with which Australians and Indonesians regard each other.’  Only one per cent thinks of Indonesia as Australia’s best friend.   That place belongs to NZ.

This year the Singapore-based Institute of Southeast Asian Studies ran another survey.   Get ready to squirm:  Fewer than four per cent of Indonesians feel confident that  Australian leadership could ‘maintain the rules-based order and uphold international law’. 

Only ten per cent would choose Australia as a strategic partner to replace the US.  Almost a third would prefer the European Union and another third Japan – the country that brutally plundered the archipelago and starved its people during World War II.

How can ve be on the nose when we know we’re nice?  Our biggest Embassy in the world in Jakarta is full of busy bureaucrats running arts and grants galore showcasing our goodness.  Sadly few reach into the villages and kampong where most Indonesians live.  

When Covid-19 starts fading there’ll be opportunities to offer testing and tracing services, particularly in the Eastern islands where most aren’t celebrating Ramadan.  In the meantime we can stocktake the hangups and dump those past their use-by date.

 

The differences between us are wide, long and deep on every register from religion to rights, but as Hamlet told his old mate Rosencrantz: ‘There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’

Thinking the best has been frustrated by many small stupidities  on all sides and three big events: The 1999 East Timor referendum which ousted Indonesian control, the 2002 Bali bombings and the 2015 executions of drug runners Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.  

These wounds still weep; they need dressing and addressing, but can’t be allowed to fester, poisoning our joint future.

Decades ago Murdoch Uni’s Professor David Hill helped start the non-profit Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies.  It still puts Australian students into Indonesian unis where they savour the country and its quirks first hand.  It’s been a splendid though small success, a great model of an achievement by visionaries.

For much of this century Hill and other academics have been baying at the moon-minds  in Canberra, telling them a 40 per cent plunge in Indonesian studies enrolments is bad on every measure, including national security. Six universities closed their Indonesian programs.  The rot continues.  Maybe time for the unis and schools to DIT – do it themselves.

Hill wants Indonesian language and culture teaching restored to its 20th century level. Then we were more curious and less suspicious, encouraged by Paul Keating’s urgings to ‘live in the region ... and find our security in Asia.

‘No country is more important to Australia than Indonesia. If we fail to get this relationship right, and nurture and develop it, the whole web of our foreign relations is incomplete.’  

The credibility of the then PM’s convictions was corroded by his closeness to the despot president General Soeharto.  Yet Keating’s mantra is still chanted by his successors, though with little enthusiasm.  Here’s a product needing the marketing skills of a ScoMo.

With education and social issues too complex to handle, governments on both sides have turned to the STDs – security, trade and defence.  All valuable and necessary but not getting through to the pubs in Sydney and warung (roadside foodstalls) in Surabaya where attitudes harden.

This coming 17 August marks the 75th anniversary of founding president Soekarno’s proclamation of independence from the Netherlands.  If Covid-19 hadn’t barged into the tent the celebrations would be wild, heartfelt and prolonged.  The archipelago’s 270 million do ra-ra patriotism almost as well as the Americans.

The Embassy planned to join the cheer and remind that we (and particularly the trade unions) did much to frustrate the Dutch demanding return of their colony after WWII.  It’s a fine story; if better known on both sides of the Arafura Sea it could build a bridge.

This August’s flag-waving will enthuse them and bemuse us.   We know little of the Merdeka!  (freedom) ideology and the emotions that power policies in Jakarta.  Among them is a determination to maintain the ‘unitary state’ and a suspicion of foreigners’ intentions with aid and trade.

Indonesia must also cop blame for the distrusts that foul confidence.  Soeharto could have created another Singapore after he ripped power from the Reds’ friend Soekarno.  He had the chance to be a statesman and nation-builder.  Instead he turned kleptocrat, allegedly stealing an estimated US$35 billion.  

If that was OK for the first family, which still enjoys the fruits of his plunder, then why not the rest?  For the 32-years of Soeharto’s rule KKN – (Korupsi, Kolusi, Nepotisme) thrived and does so today, negating the positives.  

As Australia-Indonesia Business Council President Phil Turtle told a Parliamentary inquiry, the deterrent for Australian investors is “corruption, corruption, corruption.”  Some NGOs argue graft undermines human rights.  They need support.  .

Trade still follows the flag. Turtle’s lobby group has been cheering the completion – after ten years of G-to-G negotiations - of the Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement.

Corporates saw the agreement providing profit from an expanding middle class and little else. This free trade deal includes visas for Indonesians similar to those given to European backpackers. Now there’s a chance to try altruism.

Like David Hill, historian Dr Frank Palmos a former foreign correspondent in Jakarta, believes that along with education the best way to stamp out xenophobia is through personal contacts. 

He wants Javanese farmers on work permits to show us how to get the best from our northern waters and soils.  “The naysayers will ultimately admit Indonesians are wonderful workers and accept the merger of humour and hard work for which they’re famous,” he said.

Before the pandemic which has so far killed 720 and probably hundreds more as there’s minimal testing, Indonesia – like the US - had the opportunity to boost its health services. It dropped the ball.

Stand back from Covid-19 stats for a moment and glance here: WHO figures show every day about 180 Indonesians die from TB – a preventable disease – and a further 300 from diabetes which can be controlled.  Sicknesses linked to smoking reportedly kill more than a thousand a day.

In these public health areas Australia has an excess of expertise to share.  Some projects are already underway.  There’s room for hundreds more.

When the borders are eventually opened we need floods of Indonesians coming to Australia as visitors, students and backpackers, unconstrained by onerous visa rules not imposed on Malaysians and Singaporeans.  This discrimination  has been attacked long and hard  by Perth’s Indonesia Instutute and its president, Ross Taylor.

And when Australians start flying into Denpasar‘s Ngurah Rai airport again we can use that hub to explore far beyond Bali, discovering strikingly different worlds where we can spread our swags of mateship.  

First published in Pearls 7 Irritations 29 April 2020: 
https://johnmenadue.com/australia-and-indonesia-relationship-by-duncan-graham/

FRANK PALMOS - JOURNO ISTIMEWA

Siap! (Ready!) The battle cry of the 1945 pemuda. Dr Frank Palmos (centre) with East Java Governor H Soekarwo and Western Australian Trade Officer Martin Newbery at the thesis handover.

FROM RAGAMUFFINS TO REVOLUTIONARIES

Historian Dr Frank Palmos’ claim that the 1945 Battle of Surabaya was ‘Indonesia’s Gallipoli’ might leave many Indonesians puzzled.

But his apt description resonates with his fellow Australians. They’ll immediately understand even though the ragged, ill-armed Indonesian independence fighters lost. They started as ragamuffins, but they graduated as Revolutionaries

The 1915 invasion of Turkey on the beaches of Gallipoli Peninsula by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps was a debacle – but it led to the two countries’ soldiers creating their own ANZAC image and history, independent from Britain.

Likewise the prolonged stand by an untrained force in East Java was doomed when thrown against the war-hardened British and Gurkha troops equipped with tanks, planes and ships, fighting on behalf of the Dutch, desperate to retrieve their East Indies treasure.

The bamboo spear boys were determined not to let their loathed masters back when the Japanese occupation forces surrendered. They fought furiously in deadly street battles, mightily impressing their opponents.

The Allies had been misled into expecting a pushover by the Canute colonisers who couldn’t read the changing tides. The world took note. International support for a Dutch return began to ebb.

“The people of Surabaya were the first to be fully free Indonesian citizens,” said Dr Palmos. “They seized their city from the Japanese, defending it while extending the Republic’s first independent territory.

“They created a functioning civil service that went deep into East Java when Jakarta and the rest of the country was controlled by foreigners, even though Independence had been proclaimed in August.

“They had freedom for 99 days. About 100,000 eventually died, and when the Dutch took over the city was maybe 70 per cent empty.

“Until recently these important events haven’t been adequately addressed by local or international scholars for a number of understandable reasons.

“Most relate to the versions of history imposed by the first two presidents, Soekarno and Soeharto. They used Indonesia’s revolutionary history to portray themselves in pivotal roles and to buttress their administrations. Neither man fought in Surabaya.”

Dr Palmos will present Surabaya 1945; Sacred Territory to Soekarwo, the Governor of East Java to mark Heroes Day. It’s an academic work but Dr Palmos is no sequestered scholar.

After mastering Indonesian in villages and kampong, in 1964 he opened the first Australian news bureau in Jakarta. Few foreigners understood the language so the young reporter became an honorary simultaneous interpreter for diplomats and journalists covering President Soekarno’s speeches.

Later he reported on the Vietnam War. During the 1968 Tet Offensive he was the sole survivor of a Viet Cong ambush that killed four journalists. His book of the tragedy, Ridding the Devils, explores his post-war return, seeking the man who shot his colleagues when it was clear they were unarmed reporters. It’s also a scarifying account of post-stress trauma.

After working in Paris and the US Dr Palmos became an award-winning TV reporter. He also translated The Sorrow of War, the story of a Vietnamese soldier by novelist Bao Ninh. The work has been judged by the Society of Authors in London as one of the best 50 translations of the 20^th century.

Work on his thesis, which may be published as a series of school-level books next year, began in 1996 when Dr Palmos retired from journalism, successfully challenged a near fatal rare disease and returned to study.

He ransacked archives in Indonesia and Britain, translated more than 1,500 pages from Indonesian into English, and videotaped interviews with scores of veterans and historians, like Retnowati Abdulgani-Knapp.

Her father, Roeslan Abdulgani who died in 2005, was a Revolutionary who later became UN ambassador. He bequeathed his papers to Dr Palmos, and these became his research starting point. The author ranks the diplomat’s account of the battle – 100 Days that shook Indonesia - as the best local history.

Other sources included Suhario Padmodiwiryo (Memoirs of a Student Soldier), and Irna Hadi Soewito, author of the memoirs of Brigadier-General Sungkono, the Inspector general in the army during Soekarno's presidency.

These writers and some veterans are expected to be at today’s ceremony, but the restless Australian still wants to meet others who may have escaped his net.

“I’m hoping to draw out of Surabaya, Malang, Mojokerto, Kediri, Sidoarjo and elsewhere memoirs that are probably lying about in family drawers and boxes left by departed veterans, or with luck, by living veterans,” he said.

“My work will bring about massive changes to the Internet ‘histories’ of Surabaya of the time. Almost all the current stories on the Battle of Surabaya have to be rewritten and replaced with genuine, original research. Most of the foreign literature on the Battle is based on counterfeit or flimsy reports.”

Frank Palmos life is a template for a do-it-yourself career in journalism. He was born in rural Victoria in 1940, the son of a Greek shopkeeper. He started work at 14 as a newspaper messenger boy knowing exactly what he wanted – to be a war correspondent. But the stairs were steep in an industry dominated by Anglo-Saxons.

Fortunately he was gifted with compensations; tenacity, curiosity, and the secret of migrant families’ success – a gluttony to learn. His knack of picking racecourse winners raised cash for books and travel.

Australian columnist and broadcaster Peter Russo, who was forever badgering his Eurocentric audience to understand their Asian neighbors, pushed the young journalist to focus on Indonesia.

When his newspaper opened a Jakarta office fresh Frank elbowed aside seasoned correspondents for the job because he’d single-mindedly seized the language and grappled the culture.

He was rewarded by witnessing the great jolts of history, like the coup that felled Soekarno and raised Soeharto, and to be in Vietnam before governments learned how to turn reporters into puppets.

“I’ve long held to the belief that we should add something to the worth of the world,” Dr Palmos said. “We should add knowledge, and it should be lasting.”

Does he think he’s achieved his goals?

“Yes, I do, I’m confident of that.”

(First published by The Jakarta Post 10 November 2011)