50 Facets Of Indonesia
pp. 91-93 · Read in the full issue
The Month S New Reading
-And South-East Asia
In prefacing Indonesia Face to Face, his most important book yet, Australian author Ivan Southall, says that it does not contain the impressions of a goggle-eyed tourist. Nonethe less, it is what might be called the touristy bits—the contact between the Western observer and the completely different thinking, different-acting Indonesian—which save the book from being pretty heavy weather.
3HE author obviously didn’t intend his book as mere entertainment it, in so far as he appears to have me back to Australia and sub quently developed doubts as to the (plications Indonesia has for Aus dia, the rest of his book is some ing of a contradiction. He feels irmest about Indonesia and Indo sians when he is in Indonesia or th Indonesians, or people who are □-Indonesia. When he escapes into ! normal environment some doubts sail him.
In view of the fact that Indonesia such a controversial subject— to istralians, anyhow—his book some les has a naiveness about it that difficult to credit to a mature man his forties. Perhaps this quality largely the result of his having :en as his main theme the young ;n and women of the Australian dunteer Graduate Scheme; the ill wet behind the ears” Univer- Y products who, with a mixture missionary zeal, idealism and rit of adventure, work in the public at Indonesian rates of pay d living as Indonesians for a -iod usually of two years.
National Policy
For my money, Southall might ve done a better job for the aduates Scheme and for the Indo iians without the long political ild-up to his subject. He looks :k on the days immediately after )rld War 11, when Australian arfies were running national policy the extent of putting a black i on Dutch ships, as something of national achievement, and the ee hundred years of Dutch rule the Indies as a period of darkness wiated by not so much as one )d deed.
However, having once surmounted the hurdles of the Southall doubts and the Southall slant on ancient and contemporary history, the reader can get down to enjoying some quite delightful excursions into the Indo nesian countryside amongst people who are, to Western eyes, as un predictable, charming, irritating and as different as can be found any where.
Volunteer Graduates Sometimes these impacts are seen through the author’s own ex periences; more frequently through the Volunteer Graduates who, as he says, alone have attained anything approaching identification with the Indonesian way of life.
The Volunteer Graduate Scheme has been in operation, officially, for about a dozen years and in that time 50 graduates teachers, doctors, engineers, economists and many others—have spent terms there.
In a population of over 100 mil lion, 50 graduates are unlikely to have made much of an impact and their being there at all is regarded as nothing more than a symbolic gesture of racial equality and friend ship.
In the Australian winter of 1963, Southall went to Indonesia to meet some of the volunteers at their work and to look the country over. The major part of the rest of the narrative is based on the graduate’s individual
experiences funny, heart-warming frustrating, rewarding, but usually seen fondly through the eyes of adventurous and dedicated youth.
Nonetheless, some of the best passages in the book describe Sout hall’s own meeting with the in credible city of Djakarta or the beauties of the mountains of Java or the idealistic island of Bali.
Or of his encounters with the people whom he evidently expected to be victims of a police state and found delightful individualists with a whole some disregard for many of the things a Westerner finds important.
The Indonesians, he says, ir respective of class or station, revel in noise and the making of noise.
“They roar approval and disap proval. A political slogan raised at a rally may lift the roof. A slogan for Lux soap, I imagine, might well produce the same response. Their speakers shout, they rasp, they thunder, they cajole, they soothe and mock, perhaps all seeking to imitate the master of the spoken word, Soekarno. Many Indonesians, at less than a command, seem to be everyone’s friend, or, perhaps every one’s enemy. . . .
“Traffic in Djakarta is a scrim mage ... it may take the pedestrian half an hour to cross a street 30 ft
vide; a dozen times I gave up in :onsternation and walked away. To :ross a street, the locals may some imes hire a betjak for 40 rupiahs md travel round the block a mile...
“The infamous canals are not ravellers’ tales. They leave in the nouth a filthy taste, in the stomach file, and in the mind a sadness, a egret, an abhorrence. In the centre •f the city, in broad daylight, in full iew of passers by who ignore them, taked men squat in the stagnant and linking shallows [to relieve them elves]; women squat too, but cover heir breasts . . . Twenty yards down tream, a mother bathes a toddler, a oy washes his shorts, a laundryman crubs a hundred towels, a woman ips in two buckets and carries them rimming, away . .
But, he adds: “Indonesia is not Jakarta. It is not all dirt or stink r rags ... It is not malicious nor it wholy unreliable. Its ideals re admirable, it is only in the con ersion of theory to fact that things d awry, that the troubles begin.”
Southall attempts to define why us is so; to reconcile what many Westerners think is the irreconcilable.
The book is beautifully produced id contains many excellent photos. -IT.
(Indonesia Face To Face,
insdowne Press. 45/-.) ☆ ☆ ☆ >Y now, even the stupidest of the * literate communities in the South icific Islands must know that their iture security is menaced by the •uthwards thrust of Asian Com unism; and that events in South ast Asia are somehow mixed up it.
They must know, also, that ever ace the French were pushed out of do-China after World War 11. the ilf-dozen “independent” States which ok their place have been more or ss in political chaos, ranging from cal revolts to full-scale war. aily, the newspaper headlines scribe fighting in Vietnam, and aces round about, and the frantic imings and goings of American nerals and statesmen.
But what does it all mean? Why e the Western bloc and the rival ternational Communist bloc so eply concerned? Who is winning, lyway? The news commentaries •n’t help.
So a new book by Denis Warner, obably the world’s best-informed id most effective writer on the
South-East Asia-South Pacific situa tion, is very welcome. For the last 15 years, Warner has been a specialist writer and correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph and Mel bourne Herald. He has a singularly well-informed and logical mind, his writing is clarity itself and free of mumbo-jumbo, and he tells the truth as he sees it with a forcefulness that often is close to brutality.
Terrifying
Seen through Warner’s eyes, the situation in Vietnam, and in South- East Asia generally, is terrifying. The front set up in South-East Asia by the bumbling politicians of the West to protect the Pacific countries (the western coast of North America, and Australia and the South Pacific Islands, in the final analysis) against Red Asia is slowly and steadily crumbling before the calculated, in sidious advance of Communist infiltrators directed from China.
Warner concludes: “What we are up against in South-East Asia is a carefully pre pared and skilfully executed plan to destroy Western power and influence by tactics which begin with subversion in remote and neglected areas, and move into armed revolt and proceed, so the Communists hope, to the conference table.
“By settling for something short of total victory—both in the field of battle and in diplomatic negotiation —the Communists emphasise the spirit of compromise and reason ableness.
“They fool the gullible and those who have no right to be gullible.”
Warner sets out the facts. The conclusions are inescapeable. They provide for the non-Communist countries of South-East Asia and the South Pacific a prospect that is as ugly as anything in the world today.
They compel one to ask; In the
impending struggle between the in dividualistic West and the Communist East, are the countries of the South Pacific to be regarded as expendable?
Unless something now unforeseen takes place very soon—something far more effective than a move by SEATO—they will be regarded as expendable.
This is a valuable book, and should be in the hands of every person concerned with our future security —especially newspaper writers, and the University professors who, un happily, have been turned loose on our South Pacific world as radio
commentators..
Rwr.
(The Last Confucian. Angus And
Robertson Ltd. 37/6.)