Liz Drysdale, a Nitpicker in Southeast Asian Studies

Liz Drysdale, A nitpicker in Southeast Asian studies

What Australian language student in 1964 would not choose to study an Asian language if a good scholarship was available? In an era when people needed encouragement to do this, the ANU offered a version of the prestigious National Undergraduate Scholarship (NUS) to entice students to study the languages of China, Japan and Indonesia.

The Oriental Studies Scholarships (OSS) offered the same benefits as the NUS scheme – relief from the paltry ancillary fees charged at that time; a valuable stipend; a book allowance; and free campus accommodation. The pool of OSS applicants was smaller than for the NUS. My Indonesian studies cohort included some who went on to become fine scholars and practitioners — Virginia Hooker; Chris Manning; John Monfries; Ian Proudfoot; Geoff Forrester; and Helen James. Our ‘sempai’ (elders) included Heather Sutherland, Ann Kumar and Barbara Hatley (all to become professors in Indonesian studies); and Graham Alliband and Trish Hamilton (diplomats).

The OSS scholarships are no longer offered, but the Department of Indonesian Languages and Literatures in the Faculty of Oriental Studies continued to turn out scholars to populate the programs that grew up around the country. Among them were my students Pam Allen (who joined Barbara Hatley at the University of Tasmania); Helen Creese (University of Queensland); Jan Lingard (who went on to teach at Sydney after succeeding me as Senior Tutor at ANU in 1976); and David Hill (Professor at Murdoch University in WA, and founder of ACICIS (Australian Consortium for ‘In-Country’ Indonesian Studies), the highly effective body that supports Australian students who build a period of study in Indonesia into their undergraduate program).

But I am getting ahead of myself. In my first year of university I lived at home. Dad thought I might find it difficult to deal with importunate lads beating down the door of my dormitory room. So I commuted from Campbell, where our kitchen window looked out over the new lake.

In 1965 I applied to live at Bruce Hall but was invited instead to become a foundation member of Burton Hall. For the first year that meant sharing a room – in my case with English literature student Maria Wong from Sabah, who became a lifelong friend – while they built the men’s block behind us. That year we had our meals in the Students’ Union, a brisk walk across campus from the Hall. At mealtimes I sat at the ‘overseas students table’. There I made many good friends and became newsletter editor for the Overseas Students Association. Some of these friends later became prominent in the Nauruan, Papua New Guinean and Malaysian governments. A taciturn chap at our table was playwright Alex Buzo. Avuncular Neil Murray, taking a break from teaching in PNG to do an Indonesian studies degree, was there too.

In the summer vacation of 1965, I and some classmates were hired to help with the English– Malay Dictionary Project, led by D.J. (Jack) Prentice, and famously employing Bettina Gorton, Australia’s first lady and a fellow student of Indonesian.

But what of my studies? The Indonesian honours program was designed largely to produce philologists (who would analyse ancient texts to illuminate the history of the region), or students of modern Indonesian literature. So our study of modern language and literature, and

of ‘oriental (later Asian) civilisations’, was supplemented by Old Javanese and Arabic or Sanskrit, the latter two being the languages of the Islamic and Hindu–Buddhist cultures that had influenced pre-colonial Indonesia – and short service courses in Dutch and linguistics.

There was no room in the honours program for a major in history, political science or economics. When a fellow student wanted to do an honours sub-thesis on Indonesian politics, he was advised to move to the political science department, whose honours requirements he could not meet while fulfilling those of the Oriental Studies Faculty. These rules were some years later changed to allow students to major in a discipline in the Arts Faculty as part of an Asian studies honours program.

At the end of my third year I was a classic case of what was wrong with the honours program of my time – I was not qualified in any discipline. I didn't feel able to write about history or literature, much as we loved Pak Achdiat, a living part of Indonesian literary history and a fine novelist. I didn't want to be a philologist. So I wrote about an Indonesian language textbook for English speakers, drawing on what I had learnt in the one-semester compulsory honours linguistics seminar. My passion for linguistics was feeble at best.

But back to 1964–67. The Indonesian professor, Anthony H. (Tony) Johns, a scholar of Islam and of Indonesian literature, had recruited a team of Indonesians to teach Indonesian language and literature and Old Javanese. For some of them, their scholarly and teaching lives meshed well. Pak Soewito taught what he loved week in and week out, and a happy smile rarely left his face. One of his colleagues, who received a blank exam paper from his brightest student, was not so happy. In the department of Asian Civilizations, an eminent scholar of mainland Southeast Asian archaeology was obliged to teach everything Southeast Asia from the history of Angkor Wat to 20th century Philippines politics. His heart was in the former, but he strove cheerfully to interest himself and us in the latter. The high point of my undergraduate studies was a term in first year in Otto van der Sprenkel’s Chinese philosophy course, which formed part of Oriental Civilizations I. It was like being at Oxford.

Whatever the flaws in my undergraduate education, now that we have seen the vandalisation of all but a few scraps of the once great Faculty of Asian Studies, and the departure of our luminaries to help Melbourne and other universities to compete with ANU, I am even more grateful that I was once part of it.

I then began a Masters in 1968. This thesis too would be about Indonesian language. I made my first trip to Indonesia in the middle of that year (there being no ACICIS or study abroad programs in those days). This was how I met Joan Hardjono, Molly Bondan, Soe Hok Gie (who took me book shopping), Stephen Grenville and Harold Crouch. My old classmate Chris Manning and his wife Liz McNamara, a childhood friend, met me at the airport and drove me to their Bogor village. I sat with their Indonesian Chinese friend Bwee in the car, and my Indonesian conversation started flowing. Chris was a Volunteer Graduate working at the Bogor Agricultural Institute (IPB) and Liz, newly graduated in English and with a Diploma of Education and a year of high school teaching under her belt, was teaching functional agricultural and forestry English at IPB and English literature at the Bogor Institute of Teaching and Education (IKIP). I spent about six weeks in Indonesia on that visit, talking to linguists to clarify some ideas for my Masters.

A few months after my return to ANU the Masters was stalled. I took eight months off in 1969 and returned to Bandung. Joan Hardjono introduced me to her colleague Dra Sally

Panggabean, who took me under her wing, gave me accommodation and bequeathed some of her English students to me (allowing me to pay her some rent!). I also had a conversation class at Padjadjaran University. The Panggabeans are my Bandung family.

When I returned to Canberra in early 1970, I took a part-time job at Daramalan College, a Catholic boys school not far from the ANU. I taught Indonesian and social studies to year 7 and 8 students, and the school arranged my classes so I had good chunks of free time to work on the MA. My supervisor, Darrell Tryon, was on sabbatical, so Jack Prentice took over. This was a better fit: Jack knew Indonesian so I needn’t spend precious supervision time explaining meaning. Jack proved a wonderful friend and mentor, and with his remarkable help I completed the MA and graduated.

Next I enrolled in a Diploma of Education. It didn’t matter where I did it, so I moved to the city of my birth, and my favourite bit of it – the University of Melbourne in Carlton. Early in 1971 I and two friends rented a cottage in Station St, Carlton. My room was very small, so my uncle, George Legge, a solicitor and former diplomat, built a desk and a bed to fit in the tiny space.

The Dip Ed didn’t have much to do with Southeast Asia. Language teaching was one of my method subjects, and social sciences the other. But I imbibed some of the riches of Melbourne’s Indonesian studies world. Uncle John Legge was at the centre of all that, so I attended some seminars at Monash.

I had done the Dip Ed on a Victorian Education Department scholarship, so I expected to be sent to a Victorian school and was bonded to the Department for three years. I was to be sent to Mildura High School. In a sliding door moment, I was contacted by Jean Reid, a former colleague at Daramalan College, mother of Bob Hawke’s women’s adviser, Elizabeth Reid, and sister of the Deputy Principal of what was then Goulburn Teachers College in NSW. The College’s Indonesian lecturer, Vernon Turner, was moving on, and she wondered whether I would be interested in replacing him. I had expected to be a high school teacher, and here was the offer of a tertiary lectureship.

The only trouble was the Victorian Education Department bond. I started paying it back every month. Goulburn was cold. One day I decided it was either a proper overcoat or my monthly bond payment. So I asked Tony Johns at ANU to help me make the case that I was fulfilling my bond obligations at the national rather than the state level. It worked. I didn’t get any money back, but I didn’t have to pay any more. And I could afford a coat.

While I was at Goulburn I taught Indonesian language, history and culture. My students were training to be primary school teachers. I would spend weekends in Canberra when I could, so I kept in touch with ANU and friends there. And I travelled to Tumut, Talbingo and the NSW south coast to supervise students doing teaching practice.

From 1973 until 1975 I was a Senior Tutor in the ANU Indonesian department. During this time I taught several of those who became the next generation of Australian university teachers and scholars of Indonesian studies. I also worked with Yohanni Johns on her Indonesian language textbook and accompanying tapes.

In 1975 Tony Johns encouraged me to apply for a lectureship in Indonesian at Flinders University in South Australia. I was appointed to work alongside Subagio Sastrowardojo, a

leading Indonesian poet, in teaching Indonesian within the Discipline of Asian Studies in the School of Social Sciences. This was a new program, and the brief was to teach both modern Indonesian language and the history and culture of Indonesia.

Getting as far as this had postponed my reckoning with the dilemma of what I was becoming – a university language teacher who was not a scholar, and had no passion for or grounding in a research area. That reckoning was now to come. (Only much later still, in my early forties, married, with a small child, and working a bit lower down the food chain as a research assistant, would I at last find what I really loved to do.)

At Flinders the horrible realisation dawned that I neither was nor wished to be a scholar. I was teaching Indonesian at university level without doing research. The head of Asian Studies, Dr Hin Leng, had made a case for my receiving tenure without a publications record. But next, at his urging, I applied for an ARC grant to work with Jack Prentice on a reference grammar of Indonesian. (Jack would probably have published one if health had not shortened his life; his other disciple, Jim Sneddon, later did so.) Leng said that we could not afford to keep our excellent research assistant (and my good friend), Chris McKenna, unless we got Flinders research funding. And we could only get that if we had applied unsuccessfully for ARC funds. I was confident my application would be rejected, but to my shock it was not. I couldn’t possibly accept it. Jack could not be co–chief investigator because he was employed in The Netherlands, and I believed I could not do the project alone.

So I summoned my friend Keith Foulcher, the only person I could rely on not to talk me out of declining the offer of a grant and resigning my job as lecturer in Indonesian. The decision was made, but it became much easier to explain to the world, when Peter and I a few months later decided to get married, which meant my returning to Canberra. (At that point a wrong was righted. Keith, a true scholar of Indonesian literature, moved from his Salisbury College of Advanced Education job to replace me at Flinders.)

I arrived back in Canberra in early 1979 to a request from Jamie Mackie, head of the Department of Political and Social Change in the Research School of Pacific Studies (RSPacS), to attend a job interview the day after our wedding. The Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) had established a committee under Dr Stephen FitzGerald to examine the state of Asian studies in Australia. They needed a research assistant, though they didn’t altogether know what skills would be required. They were interested in hiring me because I knew the Asian studies field fairly well, and had worked in secondary and tertiary education. I wasn’t a survey expert. I spent the first year of my marriage unable to sleep because I lacked the skills for the job I had taken on. Eventually I realized that we could outsource the work requiring those skills. The Survey Research Centre helped with the survey design, and Terry Hull recommended Gour Dasvarma to analyse the data. Then I got some sleep, and when the job proved larger than first thought, we applied successfully to the project’s funders, the Myer Foundation, to put up more money. We produced a three-volume report, Asia in Australian Education. My part in the project got me elected to the ASAA Council.

Next was a job that had nothing to do with Southeast Asia. Ross Hohnen, former ANU Registrar, was appointed in 1981 to explore the establishment of a fund-raising arm for the university. He asked me to help, and I had a delightful time with the 21st Century Foundation until a short while before our son Ben was born. But in 1982 the new Vice Chancellor, Peter Karmel, closed the project down. Thirty-seven years later, in December 2018 the ANU

Council established the ANU Foundation. I don’t know what happened in between, but google found no record of the 1981 proposal to establish an ANU 21st Century Foundation.

Ben was born in January 1982, and I did not rejoin the workforce until late the following year. By that time, he was in childcare on campus because of his gregarious nature, and I was spending a lot of money on childcare fees without bringing any money in.

Tony Reid had been asked to write a study of resource allocation in AAUCS and AUIDP (the International Development Program of Australian Universities and Colleges) between 1969 and 1983. Another job for a floating research assistant. AUIDP (later IDP) published the report, AAUCS and AUIDP: A Survey of Resource Allocation 1969–1983, in 1986.

Soon after this job ended in 1984, there was an opening at the National Clearinghouse for Youth Studies in the Research School of Social Sciences at ANU. The task was to edit abstracts of research reports on youth studies, and my boss was educational researcher Cath Blakers. This was my first editing job, and Cath was a fine and encouraging mentor. The Clearinghouse moved to the University of Tasmania in 1985 after a national bidding process.

In 1986, Marian May and I, old friends with pre-school aged children, and with similar backgrounds in Indonesian studies, were appointed as a job-sharing team for a research assistant position with the two-year Industrialisation in Southeast Asia Project, based in the Human Geography Department of RSPacS. Several scholars, including Harold Brookfield, Howard Dick, James Fox and Jamie Mackie, shared our services.

Alongside the usual research assistant tasks, my boss Harold Brookfield handed me the unedited proceedings of a conference held as part of the project. The result was Industrialisation and Labour Force Processes: A Case Study of Peninsular Malaysia (eds) T.G. McGee, H. Brookfield and B. Higgins, RSPacS, ANU, 1988 (Research papers on development in East Java and West Malaysia; no. 1). In its preparation I discovered the work that would occupy me happily for the rest of my working life.

In late 1987 Hal Hill, Editor of the Indonesia Project’s Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies (BIES), asked Harold Brookfield if he knew of a good editor. Anna Weidemann, the journal’s Assistant Editor, had transferred to the ANU Administration. Hal invited me to apply for her position. I retired from the Indonesia Project 25 years later, aged 65.

Before I took up the post I did my last bit of Indonesian language teaching, helping my former colleague and mentor Yohanni Johns conduct a 4-week summer intensive course.

From February 1988 until the end of 2012 I was Assistant Editor (later Associate Editor) of BIES. In the early years I, like Anna before me, had other responsibilities within the Project: looking after its library; helping to organize its annual Indonesia Update conference; and assorted other tasks. Lynn Moir, the BIES subscription manager, often joined me in these tasks.

After a few years Lynn and I made the case that the Project needed a dedicated part-time administrator; the first of these was appointed in 1992. Some time later, Trish van der Hoek became Indonesia Project librarian and later editor of the Project newsletter. Lynn and I continued to help the Project administrator, Trish and Allison Ley, research assistant in the School’s Department of Political and Social Change, to organize the Update conferences.

The Indonesia Update proceedings were published in book form, initially in-house, and from 1994 through the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. These books were until recently edited by Beth Thomson, who had begun doing relief editing for BIES when I contracted pneumonia in 1992. (I had asked Peter whether he knew of a good editor, and Beth had just gone off his Australia–Japan Research Centre payroll to begin freelance editing with her family company, Japan Online. Thus began a long professional collaboration and personal friendship.)

Beth’s contribution to the Project’s work has been quietly delivered and incalculable. It has also given me a lifelong friend, from whom I have learned most of what I know about editing; making charts from data; and doing page layout – and about tact, generosity and empathy. I wish to pay tribute to Beth here, having discovered to my shock and shame (as research assistant to the author) that she does not appear in the index of Colin Brown, Australia’s Indonesia Project: 50 Years of Engagement, Bobby Graham Publishers, Canberra, 2015. Beth single-handedly edited, typeset and managed the publication of 26 Indonesia Update books (1994–2019). (Beth and Tracy Harwood produced the 2020 book, and Tracy is working on the 2021 book.)

In retirement I’ve retained close links with the Indonesia Project. Former head Budy Resosudarmo hired me to compile reports for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, documenting how the four-year grants were spent in 2008–12 and 2013–16. This gave me a huge sense of the Project’s contribution to the Australia–Indonesia relationship. I then helped historian Colin Brown with the Project history mentioned above, published to mark its 50th anniversary in 2015 – my first taste of archival research.

Under Budy and current head Blane Lewis I’ve done editing for Project staff and students, and have enjoyed close links with my successors as BIES Associate Editor, Ben Wilson and Sean Muir.

The BIES job combined my Indonesian studies background, my inherited nitpicking tendencies and my love of language to form a hugely enjoyable way of earning an income. It also satisfied a need to contribute to an enterprise of social and international value. I still thoroughly enjoy being part of the Project from retirement.