Birth of the ANU and the Baby Boomer Indonesianists Virginia Matheson Hooker (Née Lee)

1946: Birth of the ANU and the Baby Boomer Indonesianists Virginia Matheson Hooker (née Lee)

The Australian National University and I were born in 1946. While the new university symbolised a new national higher education and research future, my father’s future was less certain and far less bright. Demobilised in Sydney after distinguished service in the Royal Australian Navy in the Pacific campaign and the Borneo landings of World War II, Max Lee had medals, a wife and new-born daughter, but irregular employment. In 1947, he decided that returning to the Navy would provide a career and support his family. His subsequent tours of duty to north Asia – Hong Kong, Japan and the waters of Korea as part of the UN peace-keeping force – and the presents and post-cards he sent back to his two young daughters, introduced them to an exciting world of ‘oriental’ cultures. This taste of the exotic was to give each of his daughters the desire to know more about the countries to Australia’s north. And we were not the only ones.

The events of the Pacific War and the experiences of Australians like my parents created a new awareness of geographical realities. This was reflected in the terms of the Bill passed in Federal Parliament on 1 August 1946 to establish The Australian National University (ANU) and provide ‘facilities for study and research into subjects of national importance to Australia.’ It was acknowledged that the Pacific and ‘the Orient’ were subjects of national importance and in 1952 a ‘School of Oriental Languages’ was established as part of the new university. In 1961 it blossomed into a Faculty of Oriental Studies, changing its name in 1970 to the Faculty of Asian Studies (FAS).1

The longer-term future of Australia lay with ‘the baby boomers’, a term coined to describe children born to parents who were re-united at the end of WWII. After schooling during the 1950s, the baby boomers started tertiary education in the 1960s, many supported by the Commonwealth Scholarships created by the Menzies government. At that time, the ANU was the only Australian university to offer a named degree in the study of Asia. Twenty specially designated scholarships were set

1 S.G. Foster & Margaret M. Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University, Allen & Unwin, 1996, pp. .

1 up to attract the cream of Australian students to enrol in the new ‘Oriental Studies’ degree. As a result, small cohorts of intelligent, talented and highly motivated students enrolled at the ANU to study Japan, China, India, and Indonesia.

Newly independent nations like Indonesia faced a range of internally divisive issues and President Sukarno diverted attention from his nation’s domestic crises by (among other things) aggressive behaviour towards the newly declared Malaysian territories. Australian forces were briefly involved and Indonesia was headline news. As domestic politics and then violence unfolded in Indonesia, Australians became more familiar with the names of its leaders and the plight of its peoples. Although the account that follows is written from a personal perspective, it mirrors the experiences of many of the other baby boomers, my classmates at ANU, who went to school in the 1950s and were influenced by the same world events and Australian domestic policies.

As I have written elsewhere, the post-WW II histories of Indonesia and Australia share broad similarities based on their status as new nations. 2 After 1945, each was developing a sense of their own nationalism, distinct from their colonial pasts. Between 1950 to about 1966, under an extended period of leadership by one strong personality (Sukarno and Menzies), each was consolidating their nationhood, on the world stage as well as domestically. Between about 1970 to the late 1980s, Indonesia under its ‘New Order’ and Australia under a new government were fuelled by similar needs to modernise industries and develop natural resources. During the 1990s, bilateral partnerships of all kinds were being established, including partnerships between Indonesian and Australian higher education institutions. The new millennium is a work in progress, but humanitarian crises caused by terrorism, natural disasters, extreme weather events, and, most recently a pandemic, have strengthened bilateral links and enhanced opportunities for joint projects and exchanges. It is against this background that the baby boomers and their successors at the ANU have been learning and researching and teaching.

2 Virginia Hooker, ‘Friendship, Partnership, Action: Women and the Bilateral Relationship,’ in Strangers Next Door? Indonesian and Australia in the Asian Century, ed. Tim Lindsey and Dave McRae, Hart Publishing, 2018, pp.369-408.

1. The momentum of the new: 1963 - 68 In 1963, Dr A.H. (Tony) Johns was appointed Foundation Professor of Indonesian Languages and Literatures in the Faculty of Oriental Studies. Professor Johns graduated from University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies in 1954 with a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of the great Malay Sufi scholars of 16th and 17th centuries. Before arriving in Australia in 1958, he had spent four years teaching and researching in Indonesia.

When Professor Johns met his first-year class of 1964, there were 70 students waiting for him. Their ages ranged from new school leavers (the baby boomers) to public servants who were permitted to follow courses at the ANU as part-timers. We were the first class of this size that Prof Johns had taught and the materials he distributed were roneoed copies of Indonesian short stories of the 1950s, or earlier. Very few of us had the money to buy the newly published (1960) Echols and Shadily Indonesian- English Dictionary, revised in 1962. I remember the lecture materials as laden with challenging amounts of vocabulary.

Grammar was reinforced and drills were conducted in tutorials given by two dedicated native speakers -- Mrs Yohanni Johns, wife of Professor Johns and Mrs Elly Soebardi, wife of lecturer Dr Soebardi. We gradually became aware that our lecturers and teachers were feeling their way almost as much as we were, that their standards were high, and that they emphasised ‘correct’ grammar and pronunciation. When we made our first visits to Indonesia in the late 1960s, we discovered that our spoken language was stilted and formal but our grammar was textbook-accurate and earned us respect from most Indonesians we met.

As well as Indonesian language, the second first year unit from our own Faculty was an extremely wide-ranging introduction to the ancient histories of India (taught by Professor Basham), China (taught by Dr Otto van der Sprenkel) and Japan and Korea taught by Dr Richard Mason. This panoramic unit was compulsory for all students enrolled in the Oriental Studies degree and provided a sense of the contrasts and commonalities across the region we called ‘Asia’.

The structure of our ‘Oriental Studies’ degree, majoring in Indonesian, encompassed four first year units, two in the Faculty of Oriental Studies and two from elsewhere. I chose English Literature and ‘General Linguistics.’ First year English was a rambling course in which A.D. Hope devoted all of first term to a philosophical exposition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Second and third terms were devoted to the ‘English Novel’ with Bob Brissendon, and ‘Drama’ with Dorothy Green. Linguistics was taught in the Childers Street ‘huts’ by John Harris and postgraduate students who had done fieldwork in Africa or in Papua New Guinea with the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Memorable from those lectures was the steam that rose from our coats when they dragged on the hot-water pipes alongside our chairs during the frosty months of a Canberra winter. Other baby boomers chose units in French, history, politics or economics.

In the second year of an Indonesian major in the Faculty of Oriental Studies, we focussed exclusively on Indonesia and Southeast Asia: intermediate Indonesian taught by the dedicated and ferociously correct Dr Soebardi; modern Javanese, also taught by Dr Soebardi, and Old Javanese taught by Dr Soewito-Santoso. His teaching method continued the one he had experienced as a student in Java -- slow reading of phrases of the romanised form of an Old Javanese text (all roneoed materials) followed by explanations of the component parts of each word with a rough English translation. This method was strong on detail but lacked a general overview of the text we were studying or of ‘Old Javanese’ as a concept. ‘Southeast Asian History and Civilisations’ was taught by Dr Helmut Loofs (later Loofs-Wissowa), a former student of the influential French archaeologist, Professor Georges Coedès. The unit was strong on archaeological detail and the influence of Indic cultures, but very weak on theory and I had to wait until my honours year to be taught ‘historiography’ by Australia’s Professor Manning Clark. We were introduced to ‘modern’ Indonesian literature by Mr Achdiat Karta Mihardja, himself a well-known Indonesian author, who explained to us the nationalistic poetry and prose of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, written by men (no women were included) who were legends in Indonesia then and now.

4 The third and final year of the undergraduate degree was more of the same but with Dr Loofs bringing the war-ravaged history of mainland Southeast Asia up to the late 19th century. I do not remember formally studying any 20th century Indonesian history. When reading excerpts from modern Indonesian literature with Professor Johns and Mr Achdiat, we did discuss the historical context of the works and the specific historical incidents they described.

The class of 1964 who had enrolled to study for a basic degree in Indonesian completed their degrees in 1966, the year that Sukarno was replaced as president by General Suharto. Some of those baby boomer graduates went straight to government positions where they helped monitor the events unfolding in Indonesia. It was slowly revealed that at least half a million Indonesians were killed or detained in the mass violence that followed the cryptic events of 30 September/1 October 1965.3 Although we were acutely aware of the violence occurring in Vietnam during this period, especially because compulsory ballot for military service applied to all male baby boomers, none of us realised that army-sanctioned atrocities and violence on a massive scale were happening in Indonesia.4

In 1967, six of us stayed on in the Faculty for an extra year of more advanced study and the substantial sub-thesis that would lead to an honours degree. Our ‘baby boomer’ year of Indonesian Honours 1967 produced the largest number of Honours degrees in Indonesian of any year before the 1990s. In 1967, the honours program for Indonesianists was probably the most rigorous and intensive of any of ANU’s honours degrees. There were examinable units in Indonesian language; beginners Arabic or Sanskrit; Minangkabau language; an introduction to Sundanese; a discipline unit (in my case Historiography in the Arts Faculty); and a 20,000 word sub-thesis based on primary sources in Indonesian or Malay, as well as an oral examination. At

3 Full documentation is still not available for this period but for a careful and considered assessment, see The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965-68, ed Douglas Kammen and Katharine McGregor, ASAA Southeast Asia Publication Series, 2012. 4 For a view of this period as experienced by a history student in the Faculty of Arts, on the other side of the campus, see the excellent account of Caroline Turner. She notes also that many history students at that time were aware they were ‘pioneering new ways of thinking about Australia and Australian history, including Australia’s history and place in the Asia-Pacific region.’ Caroline Turner, ‘Memories of the ANU Historical Journal’, in ANU Historical Journal II (1), 2019, pp.25-30.

5 the end of the course there were two first class honours and four 2As, an exceptional result for our lecturers and ourselves.

Ian Proudfoot, whose sub-thesis examined part of a traditional Malay manuscript (in Arabic script) and analysed its Sanskrit resonances, was awarded first class Honours and a University medal for his stellar academic record. My honours thesis analysed part of a different traditional Malay manuscript, also in Arabic script, and identified its historical background. I too was awarded a first and the Federation of University Women’s Prize for best female graduate in Asian Studies. The name of the prize, awarded in the previous year to Ann Kumar, reflects the conviction of ANU’s chapter of the Federation of University Women that not only women, but also the study of Asia should be encouraged. Both Ian and I continued straight to our doctoral degrees and eventually became academics in our home Faculty at ANU.

Looking back, the bumper crop of baby boomer Indonesianists who learned from the learner lecturers of the 1960s, was given the priceless gifts of respect for primary sources and the desire to interrogate them (though we did not use that language then). Each of our lecturers imparted to us their delight in and intimate understanding of Indonesia and its cultures. Among other things, Professor Johns inspired us with his enthusiasm for the moving and delicate poetry of the tragically murdered young aristocrat Amir Hamzah (1911-1946); Mrs Yohanni Johns enlivened her classes with memorable examples of key phrases and traditional sayings and customs; Mr Achdiat reminded us that when mentioned in a poem, the frangipani tree was a symbol of grace and beauty but, because it was planted in cemeteries, also symbolised death; Dr Soewito Santoso explained the image of an uncurling fern frond used to decorate the hilt of a kris; and Dr Loofs-Wissowa taught us how to identify Khmer sculptures by their wide ‘Khmer smiles.’ With our detailed introduction to formal Indonesian, the opportunity to learn Javanese and read one ethnic language, as well as devote part of our Honours year to learning basic Arabic or Sanskrit, we were being equipped to read and respond to the richness of primary sources rather than being restricted to secondary sources. Certainly within Australia, this ‘ANU approach’ was pioneering.

6 2. Monash Interlude: 1968-1972 In January 1968 (soon after the disappearance of Prime Minister Holt off the Victorian coast) I married a young geneticist and, after he was awarded a PhD scholarship to LaTrobe University in Melbourne, it was obvious I should accept my Commonwealth Postgraduate Scholarship offer to Monash University.5 I withdrew my application for a scholarship to Edinburgh University where I had planned to study Arabic and Islam under Professor Montgomery Watt. I have never regretted staying in Australia for my PhD.

Monash University, established in the early 1960s, set up a cross-disciplinary Centre of Southeast Asian Studies led by Jamie Mackie. He encouraged any staff or graduate student at Monash with interests in Southeast Asia to become affiliated with the Centre, share its weekly seminars and learn about Southeast Asia in the broadest sense. In a way that ANU has been unable to achieve, the Monash Centre succeeded in bringing together staff and graduate students researching any region in Southeast Asia, regardless of discipline or time period. The weekly seminars were compulsory, given by staff or student, and were lively and supportive. When I suggested that my doctoral topic, an analysis of a 19th century indigenous Malay history, held little interest for my peers who worked on contemporary Indonesian politics or economics, Mackie replied that it would ‘do them good’ to learn about my topic.

I found the size and rawness of the Monash campus in those early years daunting after ANU’s more intimate bush style. But I benefitted greatly from the encyclopaedic knowledge of Professor Cyril Skinner, a graduate of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (like A.H. Johns) and the much younger Dutch scholar, Lode Brakel. Like me, Lode had just joined Monash. He had graduated from Leiden University in The Netherlands, the premier European institution for the study of ‘classical’ Southeast Asian cultures and was preparing his own doctoral dissertation supervised by the well-known Dutch scholar Prof A. Teeuw.

Skinner and Brakel were exceptional linguists and had devoted years to mastering Arabic and, in Brakel’s case, also Persian. Their publications on classical Malay texts

5 Note that there were two forms of government-funded Commonwealth Scholarships available during this period, for undergraduate and also for postgraduate study. How things have changed.

7 remain models of erudition. Guided and urged on by Brakel, I plunged into preparing an edition of a 400 page, 19th century Malay history, using microfilms of manuscripts (written in Arabic script) ordered from Dutch libraries. At the same time, I attended Brakel’s innovative classes (of only two students) on 16th century Acehnese history from manuscript sources as well as the weekly seminars on contemporary Indonesia delivered by members of the Southeast Asia Centre.

This was the beginning of a golden time for the study of Indonesia at Monash. Professor John Legge had recently published his history of Indonesia and was attracting young Indonesians an Australians as graduate students; Dr Herb Feith whose tome on the decline of constitutional democracy in Indonesia was already influential; and path-breaking work on contemporary Indonesia was being published by Monash economists, geographers, anthropologists and musicologists, as well as Mackie’s own research on the Chinese in Indonesia. The young Harry Aveling was already well known as an extraordinary translator of both Indonesian and Malay. It was his English translations of now famous writers such as Shahnon Ahmad and Rendra, that introduced these writers to English-speaking readers.

Most members of the Southeast Asia Centre researching Indonesia had either worked there (Feith and Mackie) or visited for periods of extensive fieldwork. Mackie encouraged me to visit Indonesia at the end of my first year, December 1968 to February 1969. I planned to see some of the nation I had been studying since 1964 and spend time in Indonesia’s national museum (Museum Pusat) reading any copies of Malay historical manuscripts I could find. Herb Feith, as was his custom with other travellers to Indonesia, gave me an envelope of money to deliver to Molly Bondan whom he urged me to meet in Jakarta.6

I was unprepared for the poverty and disrepair evident everywhere I went in Java and Bali.7 The aftermath of Sukarno’s years of turmoil was still visible and the sense of

6 I delivered the money but Molly was away at that time. I met her in Canberra in the 1990s and wrote about her in Strangers Next Door? pp. 371-4. 7 The contrast between the Indonesia I observed in 1968 and in my many later visits is testimony to the determination of its leaders to transform the nation. The ways in which that has been achieved, the costs versus benefits, have become the subject of intense research by my academic colleagues in Australia and elsewhere and the basis for many lecture courses.

8 tension and suspicion was palpable. After using local transport to travel from Jakarta to Bali and back, I spent three weeks in the museum transcribing numerous Malay manuscripts by hand (no photocopiers of course).8 I was later able to show that many of those texts were used as sources for the indigenous history I was studying for my dissertation. I was also able to visit, by small boat from Singapore, the Riau archipelago – in Indonesian territory – whose 18th and 19th century history was described in the Malay texts I was reading. The photographs taken during that very brief visit were included in my thesis and now provide a rare record of that time and place.

The preparation of my dissertation, an edited text with historical annotations and an analysis of its authorship and historiographical methods, took five years.9 My doctoral scholarship ended in 1971 and my husband and I returned to Canberra early in 1972, my incomplete thesis in boxes, a baby due to be born six weeks after our arrival, and my husband newly employed as a geneticist at CSIRO. My thesis was completed during my daughter’s first year and my doctorate awarded in 1973. My classmate, Ian Proudfoot, who was lecturing in Southeast Asian history at ANU as well as writing his own doctorate, kindly arranged for me to be a casual tutor in his course for one night a week, thus restoring my links with my old Faculty.

3. Return to ANU: 1972 - 1982 During the early 1970s, my part-time tutoring in Southeast Asian history and the occasional lecture on Malay philology were all I could manage as the mother of two young children. In 1977 I was contacted by Dr Barbara Watson Andaya, who had recently gained her PhD from Cornell University on the pre-colonial history of a Malay sultanate, to say she and her husband were in Canberra. Barbara, an

8 I also briefly visited Chris Manning who was working as a volunteer graduate in a small village outside Bogor. My Indonesian friends were shocked by his living conditions and the state of his health. Chris explained that he had joined the local farmers in their period of Ramadan fasting, but unlike them he did not rise before dawn and have a meal before sunrise. Few baby boomers immersed themselves as completely in Indonesian village life and none, I would estimate, have Chris’s first-hand knowledge of rural poverty. 9 During that time I made life-long friends at Monash all of whom were part of the solid Indonesian community in Melbourne: Susan Blackburn (Abeyasekere), Margaret Kartomi and Dris, David Mitchell and Tuti, Charles Coppel, Lyn and Din Diradji, Hugh O’Neill, ‘Tommy’ Zainuddin and Din, librarian ‘Bob’ Muskens, and my special friends Lien and Han Koen Lee. Two graduate students, Lily Manus and Boediono (later Wapres and granted an Honorary ANU degree) returned to Indonesia after graduating. I also met Howard Dick when he was still at school.

9 exceptionally generous scholar, suggested we co-write a paper to present at an international conference being organised by Dr Tony Reid, Dept of Pacific and Asian History.10

Following this, Barbara suggested we again combine forces to translate my edited Malay text of ‘The Precious Gift’ (Tuhfat al-Nafis) which, as she pointed out, would take one person a very long-time to complete. As it was, we took several years to complete an annotated translation which was published in 1982. It became the standard English version of this great Malay history and was nominated as one of the works to be included in the American Council of Learned Societies Humanities eBook project.

During the 1980s I continued to work on the extant Malay manuscripts in the Riau- Lingga area, filming a collection of them during a period of fieldwork that anthropologist Dr Vivienne Wee and I undertook in late 1983- early 84. Two further manuscripts of the Tuhfat were ‘discovered’ during the 1980s prompting me to prepare a new Malay edition of the Tuhfat that was published as part of a deluxe series of ‘Great Malay Works’ funded by Malaysia’s then Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. In 2008 I was commissioned by the Malaysian Government’s Institute of Books and Translation (Institut Terjemahan & Buku Malaysia Berhad) to provide a new English translation of the Tuhfat based on my revised and extended Malay text. The translation appeared in a prestige edition in 2012 and was launched by Malaysia’s Minister of Culture and Communications at the Australian High Commission in Kuala Lumpur. During the 1980s and 1990s Raja Ali Haji and his scholarship became more widely known and he is now celebrated in both Malaysia and Indonesia as an innovative thinker and scholar of modernist Islam. My materials, photos, and notes on Raja Ali Haji and the Riau-Lingga Archipelago have been deposited in the Music Archives at Monash University which has an ongoing interest in that region.

10 See also Reid, http://seasiainstitute.anu.edu.au/southeast-asia-archives-project. Our paper was later revised and published as ‘Islamic Thought and Malay Tradition: the Writings of Raja Ali Haji of Riau’ in Anthony Reid and David Marr (eds) Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia, Heinemann and the ASAA, 1979.

10 During the late 1970s while Barbara and I were working on our translation of the Tuhfat, Jamie Mackie was appointed to the inaugural chair of the Department of Political and Social Change in the ANU’s Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. He invited me to work part-time as his research assistant with the particular project of compiling a bibliography of the Indonesian government’s official regional publications that were sent monthly to the National Library of Australia.11 My two years in Jamie’s department with its talented academic staff who included Ron May, Harold Crouch, Bill O’Malley and, for a period, ex-PM Gough Whitlam, kept me up to date with the latest theories on economic, social and political change through lively Coombs Building seminars attended by the economists of the Economics Department, who later formed the Indonesia Project.12

3.1 Department of Pacific and Southeast Asian History In 1980 Professor Tony Reid supported my application for a two-year research fellowship in the Dept of Pacific and Asian History. This was my first full-time position since graduating with my PhD and it was a luxury to be paid to do research. I planned to write a history of the island of Borneo, a fool’s errand, because the complexity of its peoples, their environments and their interactions with each other and the worlds beyond their shores, demanded more skills than I had. I did write an analysis of the prolonged late-19th century Islam-inspired uprising against the Dutch in the regions around Banjarmasin using Dutch sources in the National Archives of Indonesia and an indigenous Malay account. I was fortunate to spend a week in Banjarmasin, South Kalimantan in 1981, and meet local scholars there notably the talented and wise historian the late Dr Idwar Salleh. I also published an annotated bibliography of existing research materials on Borneo.13

When my fellowship ended there was no prospect of another position at the ANU but I was immensely grateful to have had the opportunity to learn more about the research

11 For a detailed account of library collections of Indonesian material, see W.G. Miller, ‘Collecting Publications for Southeast Asian Teaching and Research in Canberra, 1968-1997’ http://seasiainstitute.anu.edu.au/southeast-asia-archives-project. 12 For further details see Peter McCawley, ‘ANU and Asia: A Life between Town and Gown’, http://seasiainstitute.anu.edu.au/southeast-asia-archives-project . Later appointments to this group were my old ANU classmates and fellow baby boomers, Chris Manning and Liz Drysdale, all three of us from Professor Johns’s 1964 Indonesian class. 13 V. Matheson, ‘Studies on Borneo: an Overview and Bibliography’, Kabar Seberang, 16, March 1985.

11 topics and methodologies of colleagues from Indonesia, the US (especially those from Cornell University), the Philippines, Japan, and Europe and Australians like Hank Nelson who was then working on Papua New Guinea.

4. Combining the ‘classical’ and the contemporary: the Department of Indonesian and Malay in the Southeast Asia Centre, Faculty of Asian Studies, 1983-2007 Sadly it was the forced early retirement due to ill-health of my former teacher, Dr Soebardi, that created a vacancy in the Department of Indonesian and Malay, still led by Professor Tony Johns. I applied and was appointed in time to start the academic year in 1983 with the brief to assist Mrs Yohanni Johns and Dr Supomo with the teaching of Indonesian language, and to design new units in traditional and modern literature. It was also a privilege to begin supervising international post-graduate students.

President Suharto’s New Order policies of modernisation in Indonesia had transformed the nation and its style of government with the military and civil administrators sharing power. Increased bilateral contact resulted in renewed community interest in Indonesian language and supporting subjects. Yohanni Johns had published two textbooks for beginner and intermediate students that became best sellers and were (and still are) sold at airport bookshops in Indonesia and Singapore. For over 12 years, she also taught an intensive summer course in Indonesian that always attracted members of the public service, journalists, teachers and Indonesiaphiles. Yohanni’s service to the teaching of Indonesian put the ANU on the map as the centre of serious language study. This status was further enhanced when she prepared a text for third year students based on the differences in usage between formal and informal Indonesia, the latter being used almost exclusively among close friends, students and young people.

Under the Labor government of E.G. Whitlam in the early 1970s, university education became free and student numbers soared. Enrolments in the Faculty of Asian Studies increased markedly with the numbers of students studying Indonesian exceeding

12 those who were learning French.14 Mrs Jan Lingard, a former teacher, decided to enrol in Indonesian in 1974. She was an exceptional student and when she had completed her degree, she was appointed tutor for first year Indonesian. Between 1978 and 1990, she provided a language-learning experience for students that they still treasure. I taught one of her first year groups in 1989 and learned a great deal from the experience. Jan moved to Sydney in 1990 where she continued to teach Indonesian at Sydney University. She also developed her skills as a translator and was awarded a prize for her translation of an Indonesian writer whose short stories detailed the intense suffering of the East Timorese people under Indonesian rule. A second book was based on interviews with Indonesians who had spent the war years as prisoners in Australia, recording accounts that were being told publicly for the first time.15 While teaching at ANU, Jan was part of a team of tutors each of whom was a gifted, dedicated and essential member of the Indonesian language teaching team. Among them were Dr Ira Armstrong, Prapti McLeod, Emmy Quinn, and Tri Manning.

After 1975, Professor John’s research had ‘shifted back to the field of his PhD thesis, the mystical and scriptural dimensions of Islam.’ Although he retired late in 1993, he has continued to publish and lecture on Islam and on Muslim-Christian relations. In 2015, he was one of three foreigners whose contribution to the study of Indonesian culture was officially recognised by the Minister of Education and Culture.16

In 1995, Dr George Quinn, another highly respected teacher of Indonesian, expert in modern Javanese, and established researcher, was appointed as a senior member of staff. Like Yohanni Johns, he created teaching texts and added another dimension to the language program with a first year course based solely on spoken communication. His text ‘The Indonesian Way’ was refined over several years and is now available for free on the internet, where it is widely used. Supporting his text is an encyclopaedic beginner’s dictionary, The Learner’s Dictionary of Indonesian (2001). It explains not only meanings but also appropriate usage, pitfalls for beginners, and

14 Foster & Varghese, The Making of the ANU, p.303. 15 See Jan Lingard, (trans) Eyewitness/Seno Gumira Adjidarma, EET Imprint, 1995 and Jan Lingard, Refugees and Rebels: Indonesian Exiles in Wartime Australia, Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd, 2008 and 2010. 16 See Mochtar Lubis, A Road with No End, translated and with an introduction by Anthony H. Johns, The Lontar Foundation, 2018, pp.128-9.

13 includes a section of core words in topic lists. Together, Yohanni Johns and George Quinn have transformed the concept and practice of learning to speak and write contemporary Indonesian.

George has been recognised by a range of Indonesian institutions for his contributions to the teaching of Indonesian. Among them are the Satya Abdi Budaya award for a lifetime of service teaching Indonesian from the Indonesian Association for the Teaching of Bahasa Indonesia to Foreign Learners (APBIPA) in 2015 and in 2018 the Indonesian State University Eleventh of March recognised his service to the teaching of Javanese language and literature with an Adikarya Anugraha Dharma Krida Budhaya award. It is also important to note George’s contribution to the long process of negotiating a peace for what was Indonesian Timor and is now Timor-Leste. Early in 1999, Bishop Belo contacted George to assist his Commission for Justice and Peace when they had their meetings with Indonesian politicians and officials. George participated in a total of four such meetings and describes them in his own reminiscences of his time in FAS.

In 1998, Amrih Widodo an Indonesian cultural anthropologist with extensive language teaching experience and an expert on the non-conformist Javanese Samin movement, was appointed from Cornell University. He extended the innovative teaching capacity of the Indonesian language program, particularly at the third year level, as well as complementing George Quinn’s modern Javanese skills. Together they designed a program in contemporary spoken Javanese that attracted a wide range of students. Amrih’s knowledge of traditional Javanese gamelan music, dance and shadow puppetry was welcomed by the ANU’s School of Music which combined with the Faculty to offer two new courses: ‘Introduction to Asian Performing Arts: Performance, Genres and Intercultural Translation’ and ‘Authenticity, Identity and Technology: The Poetics and Politics of Arts as performance in Asia.’17 As a bonus, Amrih’s specialisation in anthropology enhanced the Department’s capacity to supervise Honours and graduate theses in this area.

17 Using a special grant awarded jointly to the School of Music and FAS, Amrih arranged the commission, in Central Java, of a specially designed set of bronze gamelan instruments. The gamelan is now part of the School of Music’s permanent instrument collection.

14 In 1999, Dr Tim Hassall, a specialist in Indonesian applied linguistics, was appointed to support the language program, strengthen links with the Department of Linguistics, and supervise honours and graduate students with linguistics majors. His specific teaching responsibility was to present the grammatical systems of Indonesian to second year students and extend the communicative skills established in first year. Tim designed a ‘grammar in action’ text specifically for his students thus extending the core sets of textbooks for Indonesian language teaching developed by our staff.

Dr Supomo developed units in advanced Indonesian, focussing particularly on contemporary political and social events, to extend the skills of the increasing numbers of students who came to ANU with prior knowledge of Indonesian. The units were popular with members of government departments and the defence forces who wanted to follow an advanced language course as well as with students doing combined degrees. In the Law Faculty Professor MB Hooker taught ‘Law and Society in Southeast Asia’ for some years from the mid-1990s.18 This combination of staffing and flexible degree arrangements resulted in a number of exceptional Honours theses in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

After Dr Soewito Santoso returned to Indonesia in the early 1980s, Dr Supomo was the only Indonesian specialist in pre-modern Javanese in Australia. He supervised Helen Creese’s doctoral dissertation in that subject and she subsequently developed her own distinguished career in that field. Dr Supomo also collaborated with Professor Peter Worsley (University of Sydney) to translate and annotate key Old Javanese texts.

Ian Proudfoot and I developed units in pre-modern (classical) Malay and taught students how to read and write its Arabic-based script. I also offered a unit in modern Malay and several of our students were invited to participate in an international Malay speech contest for non-Malaysians in Kuala Lumpur. Three of the students in three successive years (1994-6) were awarded first or second place in the Malaysian

18 M.B. (Barry) Hooker and I married in 1989. In 1991 he resigned from his chair at the University of Kent to live on and run our property ‘Kuala Pilah’, in southeastern NSW. He resumed his research into systems of sharia in Southeast Asia and continued to publish. See further, Veronica Taylor et al, ‘M.B. Hooker and Southeast Asian Law: Path-breaking Passions,’ in Pluralism, Transnationalism and Culture in Asian Law ed. Gary F. Bell, ISEAS, 2017, pp.1-30.

15 competitions. In 2000, my study of the emergence of the novel in Malaya and its significance as an agent of social change, entitled Writing a New Society: Social Change through the Novel in Malay, was finally published and was followed in 2003 by A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West. The latter formed part of the prison reading of Anwar Ibrahim who sent me a note about it, written from his cell.

Under George Quinn’s leadership, the Department developed links with Indonesian universities that offered intensive Indonesian language programs so that students could accelerate the pace of completion of their language units. Amrih Widodo initiated a program of three-month internships for advanced students to work with NGOs in Indonesia. Our highest achieving students of Indonesian were also able to participate in ACICIS (Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies, the brainchild of ANU alumnus Professor David Hill and inspiration for the New Colombo Plan). Under ACICIS Australian students spent a year enrolled at a university in Indonesia studying approved courses on the same terms as local students. Successful completion of that program earned our students the special ANU four-year ‘Year in Indonesia’ degree.

The depth and diversity of the units offered in the Indonesian program during the 1990s and into the new millennium – ranging from spoken Indonesian, advanced Indonesian, in-country courses and internships, to Javanese, Javanese music and dance, Malay in both its traditional and contemporary forms, with the linked units of Indonesian law, Indonesian history, anthropology, art, and politics offered by other centres in the Faculty or outside it, positioned the ANU as the university with the strongest undergraduate offerings on Indonesia outside of Indonesia itself.19 Our students went on to careers in government, aid agencies, law firms, international organisations, defence, security and intelligence, business, academia and teaching. Several established their own very successful consultancies.

4.1 Contributions to ‘Asia Literacy’ Inquiries Tony Reid has described the foundation of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) in 1975 (see http://seasiainstitute.anu.edu.au/southeast-asia-archives-

19 In some cases we were teaching courses not offered in Indonesia, for example reading and analyzing traditional Malay manuscripts and Old Javanese texts and history.

16 project.) The ASAA took seriously its mission to promote the study of Asia and lobby government, business, and industry to improve and extend bilateral relationships with the nations to our north. To strengthen their case, the ASAA initiated or contributed to several enquiries into what government and business and employers needed to know to initiate or strengthen links with ‘Asia.’ One of the obvious findings was the need for the ability to communicate with ‘Asians’ in their own language and to act appropriately in Asian contexts. How to achieve this was the issue and, in the 1980s and 1990s, under the Hawke and then Keating governments who encouraged the internationalisation of Australian affairs with a particular focus on Asia, there was financial and policy support for increased teaching of Asian languages and cultures in schools, universities and TAFEs. In 1987 the ASAA was awarded funding by the federal Department of Education essentially to make policy suggestions and prepare an ‘audit’ of Asia in Australian tertiary institutions, including in teacher’s colleges/Colleges of Advanced Education.

In 1988, I was seconded for the whole year to work as Senior Researcher with Professor John Ingleson, for this ‘Inquiry into the Teaching of Asian Studies and Languages in Higher Education.’ Our findings were published as Asia in Australian Higher Education aka ‘the Ingleson Report’ which became the benchmark for the condition of Asian Studies at the tertiary level in 1988. One of my contributions to the report was the chapter analysing the preparation of school teachers to teach about ‘Asia’ and/or one of Asia’s languages. At that time the emphasis was on Japanese, Chinese and Indonesian. Further details are in section 4.2 below.

In 1997, the Faculty of Asian Studies won a Department of Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (DEETYA) tender to review the Commonwealth Schools Languages Program, called the National Asian Languages and Studies of Asia Strategy (NALSAS), which contributed to the formulation of Commonwealth funding for community and school Asian language programs. I was asked to coordinate the evaluation prepared by the Faculty and, as a result, renewed my contacts with teachers of Indonesian in the ACT and in other states.

17 4.2 Supporting school-teachers and community outreach My work on the Ingleson Inquiry and later with the Asia Education Foundation (based in Melbourne and charged with furthering ‘Asia Literacy’ among Australians) strengthened my conviction that excellence in education begins with respect and support for our school-teachers. My own minor contribution to this support has been through my contact with the ACT Indonesian School Teachers Association and participation in professional development sessions with them and with the Asia Education Foundation.

These connections were maintained and extended by other staff of the Indonesian program, George Quinn, Amrih Widodo and Tim Hassall. In 2011, in conjunction with the Culture Attaché of the Indonesian Embassy, George Quinn inaugurated the Balai Bahasa Indonesia (ACT) (Indonesian Language Pavilion) in Canberra, opened by the Indonesian Minister of Education. This is a centre to support and honour the work of Indonesian language teachers in the ACT as well as to host Indonesian films, book discussions and visits by popular Indonesian celebrities.

4.3 Briefings for Government, Business and the Community During my period at the ANU, one of the regular columnists of The Canberra Times delighted in referring to the university as an ivory tower engaged in irrelevant pursuits. He must have been completely unaware of the activities of the FAS which was actively engaged with government departments, teachers, the defence force and, after 9/11 and then the Bali bombings, with briefings for the Australian Federal Police. Besides George Quinn’s Balai Bahasa Indonesia, I list just some examples below.

During the 1990s, FAS was awarded a tender by the Australian Defence Forces to deliver briefings on five Asian nations. I coordinated and together with my colleagues spoke at the day-long sessions on Indonesia that were presented eight times between 1994 and 1996.

In 1996, FAS and RSPAS were invited by the Asia-Australia Institute, led by Professor Stephen FitzGerald and affiliated with the University of New South Wales, to participate in its briefings for senior business executives. During 1997, I designed

18 and delivered seven three- to four-hour long sessions on the topics ‘Indonesia: A Country Briefing and Orientation’ and ‘Indonesia: Living and Working in Unfamiliar Cultures.’

During this same period, George Quinn regularly contributed opinion pieces on Indonesia and on Timor to The Canberra Times and other newspapers. I spoke on ABC Radio National about Islam in Indonesia for programs on religion as well as current affairs. As Dean of FAS, Professor Anthony Milner initiated and led the Asia Education Foundation’s ‘Dunlop Asia Leadership Program’ at which members of the Faculty, including myself, presented segments over many years.

5. Legacies The baby boomer Indonesianists were shaped by their lecturers and, in turn, contributed to the shaping of their own students and postgraduates. Their legacies live on in tangible ways -- through their publications, as well as through the careers and contributions of their students. This final section selects just three examples of their research that reflects their collaborative as well as their individual work.

The digitised Malay Concordance of Ian Proudfoot (1946-2011) Ian’s name appears throughout this overview.20 His premature death greatly saddened all who knew him and his contribution to Malay philology and the significance of the Malay publishing industry are pioneering. Besides his published works, he left a lemmatized digitised concordance containing nearly six million words taken from texts of classical Malay that he had scanned with computer software he had designed. The concordance is used by researchers across the world and is forever associated with him.21 It is freely accessible at the website mcp.anu.edu.au.

20 For further details about Ian see Virginia Hooker, ‘In Memoriam’ in Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, Vol. 45 (1 & 2) 2011, pp.1-8; For a complete listing of his publications see http://mcp.anu.edu.au/proudfoot/

21 See Annabel Gallop, ‘The Language of Malay Manuscript Art: A tribute to Ian Proudfoot and the Malay Concordance Project’, in International Journal of the Malay World and Civilization (Iman), 1 (3), 2013, pp.11-27

19 Illuminations: The Writing Traditions of Indonesia. Featuring Manuscripts from the National Library of Indonesia, editors A. Kumar and John McGlynn, Lontar Foundation, Weatherhill Inc, 1996, 297pp. This is a spectacularly illustrated, 300 page, prestige volume that Professor Ann Kumar contributed to, coordinated and edited with Dr John McGlynn, Chair of Indonesia’s cultural organisation, the Lontar Foundation. Ann’s name has appeared in the early sections of this overview, and after her First Class Honours in FAS, she completed her PhD at the ANU, in the field of pre-modern Javanese history.

Like other enterprises in the FAS, wherever possible staff collaborate with their colleagues in Southeast Asia. The Illuminations volume marks 50 years of Indonesia’s independence and the 50th anniversary of the National Library of Indonesia. To celebrate this, Ann and John brought together scholars from Indonesia and seven other nations, to write specialist chapters on the writing traditions, materials, and other forms of records that bear witness to the diversity and richness of Indonesia’s recorded past. Out of a total of 16 contributors, six were from the FAS: Ann Kumar, AH Johns, Supomo Suryohudoyo, Ian Proudfoot, Virginia Hooker and T.E Behrend.

Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia: A Contemporary Sourcebook, Greg Fealy and Virginia Hooker, compilers and editors, ISEAS, 2006, 540pp.

The study of Islam in Southeast Asia, in Indonesia and Malaysia in particular, was initiated in the FAS by Professor Johns. It was continued by members of his staff, chiefly Dr Soebardi and Dr Supomo, by Dr Ann Kumar, and by his students like Peter Riddell, Michael Laffan, Sally White, myself and others. Professor Anthony Milner added to this strength when he was appointed Dean. Close by, in RSPAS, there was further expertise with Professor James Fox and later Professor Kathryn Robinson, both in Anthropology. In the Dept of Pacific and Southeast Asian History, Professor Tony Reid published widely and supervised graduate students on Islam. In the Dept of Political and Social Change, Prof Harold Crouch, A/Prof Greg Fealy and Dr John Funston added their expertise on Islam in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam and Southern Thailand. They each wrote for national and international media as well as contributing to major journals and think-tanks. When Professor Merle Ricklefs

20 moved from Monash to be Director of RSPAS he made his own contributions to research on Islam in Java. In the Law School, Professor MB Hooker was publishing on legal history in Southeast Asia and sharia law in Indonesia. In the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Anthropology, Prof Campbell Macknight and Dr Margo Lyon were teaching and publishing on Islam in Sulawesi and Java respectively.

Drawing on this reservoir of experience and expertise, in the early 2000s the project ‘Islam in Southeast Asia: State, Society and Governance’ was initiated at the ANU. A generous grant was provided by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) through the Australian committee for security Cooperation in the Asia- Pacific at the ANU, co-chaired by Professor Tony Milner and the late Professor Desmond Ball. The project took the form of a book that approached Islam from the perspective of its over 200 million followers in Southeast Asia. It presents their views in selected excerpts from their own writings (or art and music). As compilers and editors of the book, Greg Fealy and I consulted our ANU colleagues who worked on Islam in Southeast Asia and together with our Southeast Asian Muslim colleagues and contacts, selected six themes that would encapsulate the diversity and concerns of Muslims in the region.

The book is in two parts. The first presents country overviews of each Southeast Asian nation to provide a context for the materials presented in the second part. The six themes in Part Two describe different ‘facets’ of Islam (such as personal expressions of Islam as a religion; sharia; Islam, state and governance; jihad; gender and the family.) As Greg and I explain, the extracts from primary indigenous sources ‘are the heart of the sourcebook. They represent the opinions and reflections of Southeast Asian Muslims, expressed in their own words.’22

Most of the primary sources used in the sourcebook are in the local or national languages of Southeast Asia. This meant that each extract had to be translated accurately and with an appreciation of its subtleties and context. To do this, Greg and I asked our FAS and RSPAS colleagues to recommend their most able postgraduate and honours students to assist with translations. They were, of course, acknowledged

22 Sourcebook, p.8.

21 and paid for their work. To ensure that the translations accurately reflected the intention of their authors, two translators worked on each extract, cross-checking with the original. To assist users to appraise and appreciate the context and main arguments of the writers, each extract is preceded by a brief introduction describing its author and its significance.

The published Sourcebook was listed as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice. Among the responses to the completed book, is that of the late, highly respected Indonesian Muslim leader Dr Lily Zakiah Munir, Director of the Centre for Pesantren and Democracy Studies. She wrote, ‘This book is a truly representative selection of contemporary views of Islam and related questions in Southeast Asia. You will find both conservative and progressive Islamic views well represented. Its major contribution is its success in portraying Islamic issues, including disagreements, neutrally and in a balanced manner.’ It is a tribute to the conception of the project and its implementation by the ANU’s team of emerging, as well as experienced, scholars of Islam in Southeast Asia.

6. The Future: 2020 onwards Professor Johns and his staff, teachers of the baby boomers and their successors, inculcated us/them with a sensitivity to language as the key to connecting with Indonesia, its peoples, cultures, religions and ways of thinking. An essential aspect of that sensitivity was the recognition that context is an essential aspect of any language, but especially in Indonesia. This is perhaps even more obvious in the new millennium when social media plays a crucial role in communication, and Indonesians are among the world’s highest users of internet technology.

Since my time there, the FAS has been transformed into a new administrative unit to respond more flexibly to the contexts and challenges of the new millennium. May the new generations of staff and students be as enriched by their ANU experiences as we, the fortunate baby boomer Indonesianists, were. Virginia Matheson Hooker August 2020