ANU and the study of Southeast Asia Andrew MacIntyre Coming to ANU Language, I suspect, was the first step in developing a life-long interest in Indonesia and in finding my way to ANU. It began in 1973 in my first year at Cronulla High School where, along with more traditional European languages, we were given the exciting option of learning Indonesian. Thanks to an outstanding teacher, we were given a fascinating introduction to Indonesia’s history and cultures together with a solid start on language. This spurred me to travel to Sumatra, Java and Bali in 1976 and again in 1977, and then on towards ANU for tertiary studies. Arriving at ANU in 1979, I started with Southeast Asian Studies and Political Science. Within Southeast Asian Studies, language training stood out. I have often thought that insufficient regard was given to the foundational importance of first rate language training to the overall Asia enterprise at ANU. Perhaps things did not start out this way, but over the years the teaching and learning of language seems to have declined in status and quietly grown as a vulnerability for the University. When I arrived, the likes of Jan Linggard, Robin Stokes, Yohani Johns, Supomo Surjohudojo and Soewito Santoso afforded students an outstanding head-start in linguistic capability. Within the Southeast Asian Studies history and culture stream, Anne Kumar stood out. And yet, overall, it was the more structured approach of Political Science and the questions it addressed that captured more of my imagination. Sadly there was little Southeast Asia content in the Political Science course list. As I would later discover, the problem was broader; students at ANU have long faced high administrative barriers to the full array of Asia expertise in combination with humanities, arts and social science disciplinary expertise. A few years later Jamie Mackie offered an undergraduate politics course dealing with revolution and reform in Southeast Asia. I recall Hal Hill doing something similar in economics. But these were the precious exceptions rather than the norm. After completing Honours, with the encouragement of Bob O’Neil in Strategic & Defence Studies and Jamie Mackie, I went on to a Masters in International Relations and a doctorate in the then RSPacS. My undergraduate training had given me an interest in understanding different political systems, international politics and political theory. Moving around the second floor of the Coombs building, I was able to build my empirical interest in Indonesia and Southeast Asia while developing my analytic approach, drawing on the expertise of a marvellous range of scholars. International Relations students in 1983 were terribly fortunate to have the gifted British theorist John Vincent in residence. Des Ball, Bob O’Neill, Coral Bell and Tom Millar were, in their different ways valuable guides to thinking about how Australia approached national security and its position in the region. John Girling was quietly spoken but deeply insightful on Thai politics, political development and Southeast 1 Asia generally. (In hindsight, John was one of a number of gems in the ANU Southeast Asia treasure chest whose true worth was not as widely appreciated as it might have been.) Bruce Miller and also Jamie Mackie provided IR students with gateways into the politics of economic development and the global economy. Amid all this stimulation, along with getting married, I was thinking seriously about PhD possibilities. Indonesia was by now central to my thinking, and the pull towards exploring its internal political dynamics was greater than going further in trying to locate Indonesia within the wider regional and global political systems. The Department of Political & Social Change was an obvious target, but at Bill O’Malley’s and Jamie’s encouragement I also applied to Cornell. When both came through, the more favourable economic terms tilted the decision towards ANU. We all wonder at times about paths not taken in our lives; in this case it is a choice I’ve never regretted. It only became fully apparent to me later in life, but the totality of the intellectual resources on Southeast Asia were quite exceptional. The range of these resources — across the social sciences, arts and humanities (and today one would add earth and biological sciences) — was so broad and deep, that most of us only ever really knew parts of it. The segments that captivated me were politics, history and economics, with demography and anthropology being the next segments out. To be a PhD student interested in Indonesia in RSPacS in the mid-1980s was to be in a very privileged position. There was a delightfully informal quality to the Department of Political & Social Change under Jamie’s leadership. Ideas swirled through place, albeit in a slightly chaotic way. A man whose life had been shaped by war — both hot and cold — Jamie was a committed reformer on issues of race and poverty. His Oxford PPE background meant that politics, economics and major social ideas were all around us and, like much of RSPacS at the time, the implicit methodological disposition was of British empiricism. Outside ANU the department was sometimes portrayed as being conservative, but I don’t think people inside the department would have seen it that way. As a young PhD student, I was able to bounce between Jamie, Harold Crouch, Ken Young, Kevin Hewison and Bill O’Malley. And then there were the visitors, people like Dodong Nemenzo, Ruth McVey and Jim Scott. That said, the special magic of RSPacS was never just what was available in a single department; no one department was nearly big enough to have the range and diversity for a self-sustaining intellectual community. The magic lay in the combination of one’s home department and all else that was on offer around the corridors. As a PhD student, I started expanding beyond the kindred units of Political & Social Change, Strategic & Defence Studies and International Relations to Economics. Heinz Arndt was a source of early assistance and encouragement, but it was Hal Hill and later Ross McLeod who had the greatest impact on my work. At various stages Peter McCawley, Anne Booth and Chris Manning all helped me along as well. Terry Hull from Demography also took time to assist me and open new windows. And then there was Jim Fox from Anthropology, at that time seemingly often away, but somehow always there at major events, energetically connecting people and 2 encouraging young researchers. It’s hard to specify exactly how Jim did this, but my sense is he was key in building the overall human capital of the Southeast Asia research community at ANU. This great reservoir of expertise helped open doors and establish early links with people in Indonesia who would make a great difference in my development as a young researcher. The totality of the academic networks across Indonesia (and Southeast Asia more broadly) built up by the early generation of researchers that worked to the benefit of those who followed is probably beyond mapping. If I were to list just a handful of those made a real difference to me, the list would include people like Hadi Soesastro, Djisman Simandjuntak, Mari Pangestu, Goenawan Mohamad, Boediono, Aswab Mahasin and Juwono Sudarsono. One final window on RSPacS around the mid 1980s comes from serving on the School’s Strategy Committee as a student representative. Gerry Ward was Director at the time and the purpose of the committee was to assist the Director with charting a course for the School and thinking about broad resourcing issues. I recall few of the details now, but I do remember a sense of stability, a sense of optimistic planning for the future, certainly a need for choices, but not a sense that the choices would bring distress and loss whichever way they went. Away from ANU Leaving ANU was both difficult and empowering. I initially went on a one-year post-doc in 1989 to the Centre for the Study of Australia-Asia Relations that Nancy Viviani had so successfully built up at Griffith University. I suspect I came with a quiet sense of superiority and a plan for a short provincial visit while I published my dissertation and then moved on. How wrong I was. A combination of established historians, economists and political scientists in the Division of Asian & International Studies (Bob Elson, John Butcher, Colin Brown, David Lim, Nancy and in the neighbouring Commerce and Administration Division (Tom Nguyen, Margaret Gardner, Pat Weller, Glyn Davis and John Wanna), plus fresh recruits (such as Kanishka Jayasuriya) hired on the back of rising student numbers made it such an exciting environment, I quickly wanted to stay longer. Academically, this was a very fertile and productive time for me. One contrast with RSPacS I quickly sensed was that of discipline before region. Another was size. The population of researchers was much smaller, but what it lacked in scale it made up for with energy and ambition. In a different way, another fine example of what could be achieved with limited resources if used in a focused way was flourishing on the other side of the country. The group of Southeast Asia-oriented political economists at Murdoch University built around Dick Robison, Gary Rodan and Kevin Hewison was achieving sustained and significant scholarly impact both nationally and internationally. 3 The contrasts I had felt at Griffith were experienced even more strongly when in 1994 I moved to the University of California in San Diego. The (then) Graduate School of International Relations & Pacific Studies, had only recently been established by the University of California to help position the state of California for the ‘Pacific Century’.