Indonesia: My Part in Its Beginning

Warning! This article is based on no serious scholarship or research. It rests wholly on my memory of events three-quarters of a century ago—flimsy foundations indeed. Experts (and pedants) may well find a howler in every paragraph, and will measure out the medicine of their rebukes by the tablespoon. These I shall just have to swallow.

But I don’t apologise for setting down my recall of that important phase of our relations with Indonesia which followed the end of the Second World War. First-hand memory of great events—despite all the lapses—can illuminate the past in ways which may escape even the most dedicated researcher in the archives.

In this, our so-emphatically post-colonial era, it seems extraordinary that, at the very end of the Pacific War, Australian troops should be fighting in Indonesia against Indonesians, but they were. The Dutch, for centuries the colonial masters, had long lost their empire to the new imperialists, the Japanese. Our men were fighting to restore Dutch rule over the Indonesians, who didn’t want them back at any price: a paradox indeed for our left-wing External Affairs Minister, Bert Evatt.

The futility of such a course was soon apparent, and world efforts became bent towards achieving (at one extreme) full independence for a nationalist Indonesia and (at the other) some form of government in which Dutch and Indonesians would co-operate and share. The Dutch lost out entirely, as they deserved.

Most Australians knew little of Indonesians, but against the Dutch there was an unfriendly background of public feeling. This distaste was felt by communists and far left-wingers, by broad liberals, and by many ordinary people of good will whose instinct was to “do the decent thing”.

The Dutch seemed to be almost perversely inspired to destroy their own position. A crass Dutch East Indies governor-general pronounced: “We have ruled here with the club and the whip for two hundred years, and we will still be doing so two hundred years from now.” This gained wide and shocked resonance in Australia. The Dutch officials one met in Canberra and Melbourne tended to be rude and overbearing. The most effective diplomats the Indonesians had working towards their goal of national independence seemed, indeed, to be the Dutch.

Perhaps the influence of J.B. Chifley was silently at work. One day, over a cup of tea in his private office, Chif told me of an experience not recorded in Fin Crisp’s fine biography of him. Some time in the 1930s, in the political wilderness, and out of parliament for several terms, Chifley at his own expense made an extensive tour of South-East Asia, “just to see for myself what was going on there”. He travelled incognito, perhaps as supernumerary crew on a cargo ship, roved at large, and kept his eyes and ears open. The following sentence, spoken in his rasping voice, I put with full confidence into quotation marks: “When I saw how those Indonesian workers were treated on the docks at Batavia, I made up my mind there and then that, if I ever got a chance to do a good turn for those poor buggers, I’d do it.” Surely his years as a caucus-table companion and fellow cabinet member with Bert Evatt became that chance?

In the late 1940s, after a new nation called Indonesia had generally been conceded to exist, world statesmen debated its exact territorial extent, powers, jurisdiction and general status. Its application for membership of the United Nations had not been decided, and an interim form of “recognition” was devised by the powers. Australia accepted a “special representative”, but not a full-blown ambassador.

The special representative was Radin Usman Sastroamijojo. He proved to be an easy-going, modern-minded cosmopolitan Javanese, university-educated in Holland, and no communist. Soon I was astonished to receive a somewhat informally worded request from someone in the External Affairs Department in Canberra. No amount of brain-cudgelling has come up with a name, but it was undoubtedly one of several friends I had made in the department during my service in Canberra with the eternally mysterious Colonel Alf Conlon’s Army Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs.

I was asked to meet Usman on his shortly impending visit to Melbourne, and to arrange, if I could, some public platform from which he could, with maximum publicity, announce that the Republic of Indonesia now stood incarnated officially among us. What a message for a poverty-stricken, twenty-five-year-old Melbourne University history student! I had just married my wife, Davey, whose job in an insurance company supplied the nearest thing we had to an economic existence. We lived in one large room in a grand but decayed 1880s terrace house at the top end of Flinders Street. It was little better than a flop-house for students, and for a few indigent journos from the Herald a few doors down the road. Davey’s cupboard-sized kitchen was far away, down three flights of stairs. Dinner arrived each night with a flourish worthy of Puffing Billy, as she rushed the (wedding present) pressure cooker, hissing and steaming, upstairs to our room.

It was a strange place to entertain a soon-to-be ambassador, but Usman was pleased to accept our invitations. With a few glasses of bulk red “plonk” from the old Eastern Market down the road, we had merry times. One night, arriving home a little late for dinner, I opened the door to find Indonesia’s special representative chasing Davey energetically around the dining table—both of them handy sprinters, I decided. His precise intentions I did not inquire, but he was totally unabashed and unembarrassed: “Ah! Peter! It is terrible for me! No girls! No girls at all! I have been fasting! Do you understand? For weeks!”

And we sat down to dinner.

Alas! That all illustrates how dangerous private memories can be; they can lead so easily to digression. We must return immediately to Usman’s smash-hit public meeting. 

I had served once as secretary and later once as president of the Melboune University Labour Club, and now asked the club if they would consider sponsoring a public meeting at which Usman could extol the virtues of the new republic, and the existence of his own status. I realised that an occasionally rambunctious student club was perhaps not exactly what External Affairs had in mind, but it was the best I could do. The club was keen as mustard to play a part, however tiny, on the international scene, and a date was quickly set for a lunchtime meeting in the Public Lecture Theatre.

Fearing possible disorders, the university authorities were reluctant to grant permission, but we went quietly ahead with our planning. So keen was interest that we felt the audience might well overflow the Public Lecture Theatre’s 700 seats, and arranged for a public address system to be available to relay proceedings to people sitting on the lawns outside. In the event, about 500 were able to listen from there.

On a bleak Melbourne morning I went down to the old Spencer Street station to collect Usman from the interstate train. There would be just time to whisk him in a taxi to his commitment at Melbourne University. I had never met him nor even seen a photograph, nor had we pre-arranged a sign for recognition. But as the platform cleared, one tiny, lonely figure remained, looking anxiously about. The man was shivering under a pulled-down soft, felt hat, and covered from chin to ankles in a truly enormous camel-hair overcoat.

“You must be Doctor Usman! Accept a warm welcome from a cold Melbourne.”

“Ah! You are Peter?”

There was not time even for an ice-breaking cup of coffee, and a few minutes in the back seat of a speeding taxi is no milieu for establishing an easy familiarity. If ever an important address were to be delivered “cold turkey”, this was it.

Yet he must have been cheered by the lively mass of faces that rose up before him in the steeply tiered lecture theatre, and by the students standing about in the aisle who darted forward to shake his hand or pat his shoulder. I installed him at the lectern, and said a few introductory words. Then Usman rose and began in a very high but clear voice. Very quickly, I fell into what was undoubtedly the worst attack of panic I ever suffered—anywhere. He was not speaking in English! On he went, whilst his audience turned from side to side to their neighbours in bewilderment. Then Usman paused for what seemed to be a reverential moment of silence. It was, I learned later, a prayer for eloquence and acceptance. Then, noteless, he began in English in his high voice the speech which all—including a numerous press contingent—were awaiting.

I judged his achievement to be a national duty nobly discharged—exactly right, well judged towards his youthful audience, and expressing the kernel of his message: that the tyranny of geography had set two new neighbours eternally beside each other, and that they must craft a sympathetic understanding. True then, and perhaps even truer today, in the setting of our overhyped and suspect “White Paper” on the “Asian Century”, just launched by our shifty prime minister.

Perhaps some readers will detect in this memoir faint echoes of Spike Milligan’s spoof big-noting in his Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall. It’s a bit like Milligan, they may be saying, “only not nearly so funny”.

So be it. But it’s still just exactly as I remember it.