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Indonesian Studies at ANU: Why So Late?

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 rim a
Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs

volume 43, number 1

2009

The Association for the Publication of Indonesian and

Malaysian Studies Inc. acknowledges
g"enerous support in many forms from
The Australian National Univensity and
The University of New South Walei;
at the Australian Defence Force Academy
 Review of Indonesian and Malayslan Affairs
volume 43, number 1, 2009

RIMA is published twice a year by rhe Association for the Publication Way• of latowing Indone•ia:
of Indonesian and Malaysian Studies Inc. It is a fully refereed journal perspectives from the Au•tralian academy
recognised by the AustXl!linn Research Council.
Iuuoductlon 1 Jemma Purtky

ISSN 0815-7251 Andu:opology of Indonesia in Australia:

the politics of knowledge 7 Kathom Robimo11

<Q 2009. The Association fr){ the Pubfu::ation of Indonesian ~nd M~laysm.11 Srudies Inc. Litera tute and the Aus !.talian study
of Indonesia 35 Harry Aveling
'fhc vie"M> ~od opinions expressed in signed a(ti<:les an<l .rcvicm. in this jo~1rnal ate the
responsibility of the inilividt1al authu.rs ~nd it is not to be ass\nned that they repr<:St.'nt
the views of either the editOI.'$ or the publi:sher:t Indonesian Studies at the
Ausualian National University: why so late? 51 Antho"Y &id
The publishecs will pei'tnit, without fee or fui:ther pctn~sion; single <.:opics to be taken
of artides or other section!! from this joul'nal only where the copy is for the private Strangers it1 the house:
use of an individu:d teSCflt'C'her or for library reserve or short-tcrn1 U.'iC in an Dutch historiography
educational institution. Without written permission frorn the publishen;, no part of
and Anglophone !<espassers 75 JoosI Coti
lhii; p1.1blication m~y othetwn;c be reproduc::ed, stored in ft n:tric'Vlll system, or
t.ra.oi;rn.itted, l:>y any tneans or in a11y foi'1'r'J, induding tt~n:!!lation, and ~:.i;.pccially for
t:csaJe in any fot1n or the ctfJ'ation of new i::olkctive wotk.~. Encountering Indonesia as a student,
then and now 95 Barbarrt Hatlry

ls geuder still off the agenda?

Involvement and visibility of women
This issue of RIMA has been edited by Jemma Purdey and Campbell at Indonesian sn.idies conferences in Auatralia 105 Helen Pa11saker
Mackttight.
!-las gender analysis bccll mai!lstreamed
in the study of Indonesian politics? 129 S11san Blackburn
Cover: Herb Feith (1930-2001) who, in his life and wotk, inspired Knowing Indonesia from afar:
many present members of the Australian academy t<> know Indonesian exiles and Australian academics 147 David T Hill
lndone;ia and its p~ople. Monash University Archives, IN266.
Reptoduced with kind permission: F.t:om. t:ht; rllmparts of Fo.rt Victoria;
knowing lndone~i.a through • dislllnt mirror 165 Richard Ch11111Jt/

•
 Aveling
50
1971, Wangbang Wi~ A Javanese Panji &manct, Nijhoff, The
Hague. . Australlan National University: why so late?
! 988, Principles ef Indonesian Phihlo!!J, Fons, Dordtccht.
2008, 'Indonesian al the University of Sydney in the eady 1960s',
&vie»' of Indonesian and Ma/qysia11 Affairs, vol. 42, no. 1, PP· 185-90.
Rogers, C, Jacobs, G and Watkins, A 2002, 'Requiem for French
Llterary Studies', AUi\1I.A, no. 98, November, PP· 1-27.
- 2005, 'Students and French Llterature', AUMLA, no. 103, May,
pp. 65-92. . . . .
Roskics, D 1993, Tc;.1/ Politic.i in So11tbcasl ,.foa, Oluo Umvers1ry Press,
Athens.
Rubenstein, R 2000, Beyond the 111alm of the smses: The Bali11m rif11al of
kekmvin composition, Kill.V Press, Leiden.
Santoso, Socwito 1975, ..f111t1soma: A S111rfy in Javanese Jf'l'£!irnJ1ana)
International Academy of Indian Culture, New Delhi.
Supomo, S 1977, Atj11nawfjaya: A kakawin of Mp11 Tantakir, Nijhof£, The
Hague. , , ..
Teeuw, A 1991, 'The text', in Ras,JJ and Robson, SO (eds.), vanatwn,
traniformation and meaning: studies on Indone.rian literal11rc1 in honour of A.
Tee11w, Nijhoff, The Hague, pp. 211-29. ..
Worsley, PJ 1972, Babad B11/elmg: a Balinese tfy11astic genealogy, N11hoff, The
Ha~ . .
-1976, 'F. H. van Nacrsscn', Reviewef l11d1mesiima11dMal'!Ja11Ajfam,
vol 10, no. 1, pp. 32-8.
Vickers, A 2005, Jo11r11rys of Desi111: a J1111fy of the Balinm text Ma/at,
J<l11,V Press, Leiden.
Indonesian Studies at the
Anthony Reid
Keywt)cds: Indonesian snidie~, Australian Nation.a) University, Research
School of Pacific Studies, JW Davidson, Heinz Arndt
Ahslmct: The A11Stralian National Uniwf'!ity "'"' fa11nded in 194,V to develop
'mijects of 11atio11al importance to A11i1ralia '. Its Rt.rearch School of Pacific
S1t1di;s was i11Te11dcd spedfi,•al!J lo mah good the (g11ora11ce ef the area.r to
A11slralia} north which had prowd toJ/(y d11ring the Pacific Jl7ar. In Mclho11rne
there wm afaw people like Hero Feith, mOJT(y st11dents of MacMahon Ball. who
immediare{y saw The challt11ge of Indonesia. The q11eslion that needs answering is
wl!Y the mandate of ANV did notproduct a school or antre of SoutheaJ/ Asian
Sllulie,r, or even much signifitant individi1t:1/ !cholarship on Indonesia, 11ntil the late
1960s. W~ did Australia not b11ild in the IJWnty years after the war a'!Jlhing
mnote!J compamble fQ the Centres the Americans eJ/ahlished al Cornell, 1"ale,
Michigan, 117isconsin and &rkilry? How, neV<rthrlm. did the ANU smdJ1al!J
find its IJI'!)' to beroming a centre without a Centre.
· Southeast Asian Studies is sometimes thought to have b<:en 'inve11ted'
for Cold Wax United States strategic purposes through the American
conccp! of area smilies, I find this view outrageously A.mccica-cent.ric
and unhelpful (sec for e:.ample .Reid 1994; 2003), but the reason for it
has something to do with the organisational consistency of SoutheaM
Asian Studies Centers in the United States. Because they need to bid
competitively for Federal Tide VI funds e:very three years on the basi.s
of certain criteria, they focus on the same basket of joint appointments
with discipline departments, gtaduate trailling, lang.iagc teaching,
publications and setnit1ats, all defined in terms of Southeast Asia and .
coordinated by a single Center. By comparisoll the res! of the world, .,:~
·-'--- . --·- --- . --···
&,,;.., ef 1"dontsian and Mal'!Ysia• Affairs, vol. 43, no. I (2009), pp. 51-74.
62 Reid
including Australia, shows a variegated pictute whlch can be seen as
incoherence. Monash University's Centre of Southeast Asian Studies
was virtually the only emulation of such a coherent plan on the
American model. The study of the region is manifestly strong in
Australia by any reckoning, but seemingly without coherent planning of
this or any kind. Government interventions to boost Indonesian
Stmlics in particular (sec bdow) had patchy results and were not
sustained enough to create a pattern. (Jver the last 30 years Australia in
general and the Australian National University (ANU) in particular has
been a global leader in the study of Southeast Asia, but it appears to
have happened through random appointments, never planned as
purposefully as the smaller United States Centers. It is difficult to think
of an example elsewhere of such apparently .random gtowth unless it
is the fruitful chaos of ·Paris, wlllch has a total strengtl1 of Southeast
Asian expertise (outside Southeast Asia) probably closest to that of
Canbei:ta. Does this e:xpetience of ci:eacing ~a cent.re without a Centre
have anything to say to the rest of the world? .
Opportunities Missed, 1948-60
The ANU was founded in 1948 to develop 'post-graduate research and
study, both generally and in telation to subjects of national importance
to Austtalia.' Its lkscarch School of Pacific Studies was intended
specifically to make good the ignorance of the areas to Australia's
north whlch had proved costly during the Pacific War. The earliest
recorded definition of the area of its concern was 'somewhere ranging
from the Amcdcas to India' (in Max Crawford's phrase) to include both
the Pacific Ocean and Asia.' The question that appears to need
answering is why this mandate did not produce a school or centre of
Southeast Asian Studies, or even. much significant individual
scholarship on Indonesia or adjacent parts of the region area until the
late 1960s. Why did Australia not build i11 the twenty years after the war
anything remotely comparable to the centres the Americans established
at Cornell, Yale, Michigan, Wl1!consin and Berkeley?
The fir:;t answer must be connected with the absence of any
Australian Asianist of sufficient stature to be recruited to join the other
1:hree \~r.i:-;e mt::n.~ who advh~ed the ANU foundc:t$ on th~ e$h1blishmc;nt
lndone$ian Studies at ANU
53
of its initial fou.t Research Schools. It is not clear to me why Macmahon
Ball, the closest Australia had to a <li<tinb'ttlshed scholar with regional
Ulterests,2 was not mvolvcd at all in the foundi.t1g of ANU l'•oc
B II . ' LCSSOt
a se~ved after .the war as British Co1nmonwealth .reptescnrattvc on
the Allied Council for Japan, and in tnid-1948 was senr ro Indonesia in
an attempt to organise a sc;holarshlp Sc;heme for Indonesians (Durling
.1996:169). He may be the . closest to a (;•"urge K'aI· · h avmg
llll ill
· '
influenced young people like Jamie Mackie, John Legge and Herb Feith
to~~u:ds, a S}'lllpathetic interest in Indonesia and its emergent
nationalism, Perhaps he Was seen by the Canberra planne.:s as less a
scholar d>an a P?licy-makcr (then); perhaps the foundi.t1g fathers were
fixated on the idea that the only good Australian scholars were in
Britain.
. . To advise on what became the Research School of Pacific
1
Studies (though Asian-Pacific was initially a starter), a New Zealander
was fou~d i.n Raymond Firth, Professor of Anthwpology ar the
Llndon School of Econorru.cs,3 who despite his p:i:e-war vennu-e into
Malay ethnography wos predominately a small-island Pacific man and
who t~ok a relatively narrow view of what 'Pacific Studies' should
mean. His anthropological perspective suggested that the major field
of research should be the Pacific Island territories for which AuHralia
was responsible' (Foster aud Varghese, 1996:40).
Firth's own ".'lations with Aus'."'lia were problematic, and by
early 1949 he ~ad _docu.led he ~nd his wife were too much 'Europeans'
to be able to liw u1 the colorucs. But he remained the ccitical voice in
the fast crncial a.ppointments in History and Anthr~pology:
respectively Jtm Davidson, with whom he had· worked closely in Naval
Intelligence duri.ng the war, and SF Nadel, an Austrian-bom British
anthwpologist who joined Firth's Department after the war. Davidson
was a colonial histodau specialising on Samoa, and beyond that the
other colonial admittlstrations in the Pacific Islands;• and Nadel a11
Afncan eth11ographer. The third professor in place by 1950, Australian
WR ~rocker, had colonial, military and (in 1945-8) United Nations
expcrien~c, and had written some books though not an academic. He
was nominated by fellow-Australian Kdth Ha11cock "' a time when it
was thought the P•cific and Social Science Schools m.ight combine, but
64 Reid
hit it off with Australian (though allio New Zealand born and bred)
economfat Doughis Copland, the ANU's first vice-chancellor. Crocker
was appointed as Professm of International Affairs in the hope of
bringing his African and United Nations experience to bear on
problems of international governance in the small Pacific colonies and
trusteeships (floster and Varghese, 1996:51-2).
Jim Davidson's appointment, in patticulat, would be crucial in
keeping d1e focus on small-lliland Pacific rather than Southeast Asia for
some titne. Davidson was en1phatic that there should not be a
Department of Political Science, since he believed his own Pacific
History Depamnent should be free to embrace the contemporary
(Foste< and Varghese, 1996:51-2).' Only after his death in 1973 were
moves successfully made towards forming something like a Political
Science Department, though named Political and Social Change to
avoid what was felt to be excessive engagement with theory. Regionally,
Davidson thought hi> mandate .should cover the whole area of the
Schoo~ which he came to 1>dicve should to some extent extend into
Asia, but he was tentative in moving beyond the Anglophone colonial
territories he fdt comfortable with ..1-!is initial appointments and PhD
recruitments all specialised on the Pacific Islands.
Sephardic Singaporean Emma ('Emily) Sadka was the first
Southeast Asian reci:uitcd as a PhD student~ con'ling from Oxford hi
1954. She got on well with Jim, and must have encouraged him to go
furthct. In 1955, following the Australian Government's initiative to
fund Indonesian Sn1dieo (see bel<>w) he began to pl•n his first visit to
Malaya and Indonesia. In the notes accompanying an advertisement at
this time he defined lli:l Department as concerned with 'problems of
W\:stern expansion and its impact on non-European peoples in the
Pacific & South-East Asian ai:cas' (Davidson 1955a). At the end of
1955 be responded warmly to an overture from John Bastin of the
University of Queenshind, Austl'lllia's fir.; t ti:ained (Oi1ford and Leiden)
Indonesianis t: 'I fully agree with your plea for the study of Indonesian
history in Australia.' (Davidson 1955b).
Davidson's visit to Indonesia and Malaya in January-February
1956 was a success,• lnduding a visit to Tony Johns in Bukittingf,>1,
whose appoi.t11ment to the Canberra College was being considered. On
lndonH111n Studies at ANU
his return be w~te again to.John Bastin to say that 'the time is ripe' to
develop Indoncs!lln hiotory 111 Australia, and that he was contemplati.t1g
~. appomunents - a· modern historian and someone with 'training
"' Oncotal languages' (Davidson 19.56). In May 1956 Davidson had
organised a (tenured) Fellowship for Bastin, who was in place at JI.NU
by ~e end of the year. The correspondence shows l1n end)u~iastic John
Bas~ Or~erit1g mount~ins of m.icrofiln1s, pioneering wotk in the Ar$ip
Nas10nal 1n.Jakarta and travelling all around );lva and Sumatra, genially
supp<>rted Ill all by Davidson. Up till the time in April 1959 when
Bast111 left to become the foundation professor of History io Kuala
Lwnpur there is no ttace of evidence of larer coolness.? -
. At any event Jun Davidson's enthusiasm for Indonesian
lust~ry faltered, and it would be a decade before he appointed another
specialist for it. Political scientist Herb Feith (1960-62), and his own
student In Malayan history, Emily Sadka, were appointed to Research
Fellowships_ in 1?59. I presume it was around this time that Ji.tu wa,
corr~spondmg with Harry Benda.about coming to fill the gap, but Jim
Davidson was too hesitant to cotnmit to so fotccfu.I an Indones.ianist.8
The tentativ-cness of Davidson's sorties into Southeast Asia
can be seen in the British colonial focus, which was true of virtually all
the early appointments in the Re•car.:h School of Pacific Studies.
People were availabk who had taught in the colonial univei:sities, and
the British colonial world was comfort•l>ly familiar to (hose who had
t~ught or studied it. A comparison with the Melbourne people with a
similar background who nevertheless took the plunge into Indonesia
nevertheless makes one wonder what might have happened if one of
these had been In ch~tge. Joh~ L:gge, i.t1 particufar, WaR a regionally-
oneutcd young hisconan who like Davidwn had done hi• thesio work
using Eoglish-language material 011 the British colonies, but who went
CO Cornell and Indonesia during hJs sabbatical leave of 1956 to take up
the difficult challenge of a new fidd.
Jim's first Southeast Asian student, Emily Sadka, hecamc a
research fellow in 1960, and got tenure as a fellow two years later. As
portrayed by Blanche d'Alpuget, she was Bob .Hawkc's moral m"se in
Univetsity I fousc - the one who kept hittt fu:>n1 goi.t1g off the rails
emotionally and ethically (d'Alpugct, 1982:70-1). Sadka was a solid co·
56
supervi•or with Jim Davidson for a number of good theses on Malaya
in the 1960s, by Chiang Hai Ding (1963), Chris Wake (1966), and most
successfully Bill Roff (1965). Roff was the first of the historians to
learn and use a Southeast Asian language, possibly more th.tough Tony
Johns' encouragement than his own Department's.
(hough the Malayan background had &>iven Sadka a Southeast
Asian dimension intellectually (she had taught me Southeast Asian
history in Wellington before the ANU appointment), she was certainly
not a fieldworker or an adventurer into indigenous hlstory. Her
appointment was closely followed by Paul van der Veur in 1961, who
was an lndone~ian.ist but was appointt:d only on condition tl1at he work
on Dutch New Guinea. Canberra boy Chris Penders.did use hls native
Dutch to do the first PhD in fue Department on Indonesia, in 1968. In
the same year, following the departure of van dcr Veur and the
tragically eady death of Emma Sadka, a Research Fellowship was
awarded to Christine Dobbin, a Sydney and Oxford-trained Indian
hlstorian whom Jim cxpect<d to do Malayan history, but who
evcnn1ally produced a great book on the Padi:i war in Swnatra (no
douht again with some influence from (ony Johns). These movrs
suggest to me that he had lost the early desire to get seriously into
Southeast Asia, beyond his main concern with the colonial impact on
small sodetie•, though acknowledging that there was a potential flow
of Malayan students who needed supervision. Up \ll1W his death the
depart:menes self. . dcfi.nitlon .remained strangely out of touch with the
changing reality, especially for someone purportedly interested h1
(autonomous history).
The Department of Pacific J·listory is coni:::eroed with thl';: l:itudy of
hi11>to:dcal :situatio1~s invohring contact between weste:i:n and non·
wt;~tc:rn cultutet'I, with a pa.tticular etllphasis on contacts of a colonial'
1
type in which Europt:ans have occupied positions of political and
t:conon'lic donili1ancc. 9
A Department of Geography was established in the Research
School with the appoh1tmcnt of Oskar Spate to a chair in 1951. The
only one of the founding fathers with experience in Southeast Asia
(having taught briefly in the pre-war Rangoon University), one might
have expected Spare to be the one professor who would move
Reid
lndon111111an Studies at ANU
57
confident!~ into the area. He .was more concemed, however, with the
undemow:ishcd state of Geography AS a whole in Australia, and
thetefo~e sought to cover all the tnajor sub-discipli11es more
energettcally than mvering all tl1e regions. Perhaps influenced by Jim
OaVldson he th.t:ew hlmself imo work on the British Pacific, 'but
showed no further interest in Southeast Asia hitnse1£ As he described
hia policy later, most of the department's work concentrated on
Australia for the ··opporrunistic' reasons th~t it was easy to attract
studcms (Foster and Varghese, 1996:107-8). Not until 1965 did Spate
appo111~ son1ebody to work on Southeast A~ia, going the u 8ual
Malaysian route by brinb>ing Bobby Ho in from the Universitv of
Malaya as Senior FeUow. Ho was another to die tragically ~arly,
whereupon he w.. replaced as Senior Fellow by Terry McGee, from
N cw Zealand and Malaya.
1960-70: Crawford and Johns initiatives: The 'Malayans'
These 1960s students 011 Malayan hlstory were parallelled by more
•~venturous students in Anthropology (Donald Tugby) and Donald
Hindley, who had also taken the plunge into Indonesia. With the work
of Tugby and hi~ ".'ife on Manda~g (1960; 1962),Jaspan on Rcjang
(1965) a~d Masn Su1garonbun on karo, together with tl1c early work
of David Penny (from 1965), Christine_ Dobbin (from 1968) and
myself (from 1970), one might i11deed have said that Sumatra wa• the
ANU's main research focus in Indonesia until the arrival of Jim Po
~witched t~e balance further to the East. Whether !ugby wa:
~flu~ntial 1l1 .bringit1~ J~span_ t~ Canberra I don't know; )•span
certainly was mfluenttal 1l1 bnngmg Masri. Por the most part the
rc•earch focus seemed thoroughly haphozard with Derek Frcem
h 1 . ' an
I e on y senior anthropologist with Southeast A•ian experience, ;,1
Sarawak.
. . Economics was the only department in the Research School
prior to the 1970s which had a real plan to focus on Southeast Asia,
an~ .to have done It rather successfully. Economics was not part of the
Orl~al plans for the School, but came in as a result of John Crawford'•
ag.reang to become th~ School's ft.t~t Dixt!<.::tor in 1960. Becau~e the
School had been for so long without a Dh:ector, and perhaps because
sa
in Crawford it had a leader who was not only Austxalian but a pre-
eminent Australian policy-maker, hil< tentttc marked a dlstinct lurch
into Southeast Asia. He brought the Department of International
Relations back to the School and encouraged a professorial
appointment to it in Bruce Miller (1962). He insisted that a
Department of Economics be created under hini, with the specific task
of studying 'underdeveloped and primitive economies, with emphasis
on the building up of a systematic empirical knowledge of the Pacific
and South East Asia'. Tom Sikock was immediately brought from the
University of Malaya (then in Singapore) as Visiting Fellow, and it was
therefore the saine comfortable l\1alaysian focus as with the historians
that began the entry into Southeast Asia. Fred Fisk arrived from the
University of Malaya in 1960 and Rick Shand in 1961.
Crawford did recruit Ken Thomas to go and work in South
Sumatra in 1963, but his bigger step was to ask Heinz Arndt to move
from the Canberra College in 1963 to take the Economics chair in the
Research School which Crawford himself no longer had time for.
Heinz convinced himself, notably during his first visit to Indonesia in
1964, that his Department should mount a major project on lndonesia,
as in effect its highest priority. He recruited agricultural economist
David Penny whom he met on that trip, and began his contacts with
the Universit-.1s Indooesia economists (the .Berkeley mafia) just hefore
thei.t ascent to power. He bravely began the B11/leli11 of lndone.rian
Ero11omic St11dies in June 1965, when Condit.ions in Indonesia were at
tho.ii: darkest, ••pedally from an economist's viewpoint. John Crawford
secured a major grant from the Ford Foundation to make the BIES
possible through the hiring of Ruth Darusman as editor, and for nine
years this sustained what was the ANU's first major externally-funded
project on Southeast Asia (An1d1, 1985:52-64). This also gave rise to
the Indonesia Study Group which David Penny and Ken Thomas
founded in the late 1960s, and which remains perhaps the iriost visible
sign of a cross-disciplinary comm.itment to Indonesia at the ANU.
Arndt calculated in 1985 that the eight Ph)) candidates he
trained in his fu:st fifteen years, including Hal Hill, Anne Booth and
Chris Manning, represented about balf of the total economic expertise
on Indonesia ootsidc lndoru:tiia. Since '1965 there wt".re alway::oi at least
lndonelll1111 Studin ~t ANU
59
two Indonesia specialists in the Department, Penny being replaced in
~e· 1970s ~y Peter McCawley and Anne Booth, and eventually Hal Hill.
his certainly repre•ents the most focussed research concentration
.'\NU has motllltcd in the Southeast Asian area. It had also cmb1.. ccd
Malaysta fi:om the Outset, though of course with less intensit~ and
eventually through the ASEAN project, various consultancies vi~itors
and so forth, COV"t.·red in some sense all the countries of South ' t A ·
A h b cas .Sta.
s t e. epar'.mc111 defined its area iu the Arndt era, it began with 'the
countnes of Southeast Asta (especially Indonesia), the Pacific falands
(espectally Papua New Guinea), and China', dearly in that order.
. The good news of this ernpit:ical concentration was that it
aducved something vei:y practical in raising the level of knowledge of
and deba~e o." the Indonesian economy, and represented perhaps the
most distJncttve thing the ANU did on Southeast Asia in global terms.
The vulnerable side o.f the concentration, like that ~f my own
depattment on the Pacific Islands (though in lesser degree), w.is of
course that the absence of competitors made it difficult to know how
to rate the department in the broader economics field. lhis is always
the trade-off, but to my mind it has beeo outstandii1gly worthwhile in
this case, if not always in others.
Demography, in the Research School of Social Sciences was
the oth~r department in the Research Schools, besides Anthrop~log
~nd Htstoi:y. in Pacific Studies, which grodu•lly expanded int~
Southeast Asta thtough Malaysia - or more properly Brirish Southeast
Asia. Jack ~ald:Wdl w~s the pioneer when in the late 1950s he decided
to .wnte ~ts d1s~er~at1on on the Malayan population, arid when he
fuushcd his thest~ in 1962 he pass~d the baton to tbe young Gavin
Jones, whose thests on Malayan labour was completed in 1966. Bvth of
th~se ,two demographers extended their interests to left and .right - in
Jones case throughou~ Southeast Asia, in Caldwell's brgely b~yond fr,
But a .more exti:aordtnary step than these predictable moves into
Malaysta was Mi~k· Borrie's d~cision to take on Masri Si:ngarimbun as a
Research Fellow tn 1966.
Masri w.is an exceptionally able and in110v..civc Karo Batak
who had beon lured to ANU by Mervyn Jaspan in 1961, and taken
under Derek Freeman's wing. When he finished his dissertation in 1966
GO Reid
Indonesia11 conditions did not entice him home, and he filled in some
time wodcing at the Embassy in Canberra and writing a couple of
pioneering manuals on contraception for his countrymen. This was
enough for Jaspan and Caldwell to convince Mkk Bortle that Masri
was a demographer, and a means for the depattment to get into a vast
.and challenging field. Not long after, in 1971, Terry and Valerie Hull
and Graeme H11go arrived to write theix dissertations on Indonesia,
and the Department became probably the most important centre
anywhere for the study of Southeast Asian population. When Jack
Caldwell became Head of Department in 1975 he encouraged the
trend, though never cixcumscribing Southeast Asia as such as a priority
area
By 1970, therefore, there was substantial work in the Coombs
Building, which housed the two ~search School• of Pacific Studies
and Social Sciences, on Malaysia: in Economics, Anthropology,
History, Geography and Demography. Economics had begun its major
assault on Indonesia, where a few othe< departments also dabbled
more tentatively. 'fhe appointment of Gehan Wijeyawardcnc to
Anthropology in 1964 and John Girling to International Relations in
1966 provided an accidental bridgehead to Thailand. Despite Crawfotd
and Arndt, there was still no School-wide strategy for work on the
region or part of it. The only real coherence of any sort in the School's
strategy was in rclatiot1 to New Guit1ea~ on which a Davidson~authoi:ed
report in 1958 decided to focus through the formation of a New
Guinea Unit. The synergy of a numbc.r of scholars with l\falaysiao
in{erests did produce one joint-authored book across the disciplines
(Silcock and Fisk 1963), while David Penny and Masri Singarimbun
formed a fruitful partnership fast in Sumatra and then Java. But with
the exception of the Economics push from 1960, the first twenty years
wete interesting chiefly for their failure to act decisively in an area thar
other Australians could sec to be of vital importance.
Language-based study In the Canberra College
The fact that the Research School of Pacific Studies had resolutely
opted for a research role rather thao a training one would always make
lani,'1.mge study e:tternal to it. It would also tend to remove the glue
lndone$ian Studies at ANU
61
which ~l'no~t parts ~f the world makes 'Sourheast Asian Studies' an
academ;c e11t1ty'. that is, t~e need for ."'.me structut"Al principle arouod
whic.h to orgaruse educauon and tra1nang. It is therefore no surprise
that •t took the external intervention of the Federal Govcmment in the
other, undergraduate, side of the campus to force the academics of
Canbeua to go out and !Ure some professional•.
Jn 1950, Prime Minister Men>,ies set up a11 in ttlry into
9
whether the Commonwealth Government should fund a School or
Deportment of Oriental Studies somewhere. In December 1950 it
reported that 'a School of Oriental Languages was a national necessity
· · · and that the School should be established in Canberra.' The
cotnnu~tee thought the big four Asian languages ro be studied were not
t:c C~1ese, Japanese, I~rea.n, aod Indonesian of modern parlance,
b t .Chinese, Japan~se, Hindi and Russian, 'with perhaps subsidiary
studies 111 Indonesian and Malayao hioguages' (Brewster and Re.id
1989). In 1952 Hans Bielcnstein WM appointed to a chair of Orient~
L:a~gu.agcs at tl1e Canberra University College, and a ,tart was niade on
Chinese,, Ja~anese ~nd Russian, but not on anything .Southeast Asian.
This .teqm.red a second govern1nent inte.rvcntion in 1955
wl~en. the Australian Comn1onweall:h Office of Education w~ute to th~
Prumpal of the Canberra College, and to the Universities of Sydney
and Melbourne, to offer spccilically to fund 'the teaching of
lndones1an and Malayan Studies'. The College had submitted a
proposal fot Indian Studies~ which it continued to prefel', but the
?ov~rnrnent responded that th.is should be switched to Indonesian
S~dies. B,ahasa In?~ncsia. was indicated as the 1n<tjor focus of study,
w•t~ possible ptovts1on 'for teaching something of the cttlture of the
rcgion', 11.i -
Biclenstcio then made a inajor ~ffort to infoi:m hi.rnself al)()Ut
Indonesian studies in the world, travelling to Cqrndl Berke!
C 1 1. • · ey,
o um >ta, the School of Oriental and African Studies Jn Lmid
r b 'd . . on,
-•m n ge, Le1den and the University of Indonesi• in search of
advice. Formnately he ignored the patronisi11g advice of DGE Hall in
London, that 'no foreign •cholar would stay in Australia for any
c~nstderable length of time\ ('10 that they shoutd send an Australian
with fi.r$t-cl:ass honou.t.'s in classicti off to London to learn his stuff.11
62 Reid
Tiie College quickly laid siege to Tony Johns, thm in Bukittinggi,
although he did not arrive until August 1958. Meanwhile teaching in
Indonesian had begun with the aid of the Indonesian embassy in 1956,
and twenty students enrolled in the initial coutSe compared with three
for Chinese and Japanese, Tony was not quite 30, with the advan mge of
not being intimidated by a stuffy orientalist tradition. He was a breath
of fresh air for Oriental Studies, abandoning the classical Malay
emphasis of Leiden and London in favow: of Bahasa Indonesia and its
modern literarure. Even more t:adical was hl5 deci$ion to recruit his
staff primarily in Indonesia: Soebardi and .Achdiat in 1961, Soewito
Santoso in 1964, Yohanni Johns in 1965, Supomo in 1970. Soebardi,
Soewito Santoso and Supon10 all wrote excellent dissertations in the
Faculty on Javanese literature (Reid 1997:xix-xxxiii). Distinguished
srudents like Heather Sutherland, Ann Kumar, Chris Manning and
Lenore MandetSon made their way through the undergraduate course,
There were over 100 students in the three years of Indonesian by 1966
and 158 in 1974, making this one of ANU's most successful language
Departinents. By hindsight, this strong language-training Department
was~ along with the Indonesia opei:ation in Economics, tl1e first world~
class success of ANU in Southeast Asian Studies. There may
sometimes have been bigge.r Indonesian language depai:tnlents
elsewhere in the world, but there was none better, and this was a fine
basis on whkh to build other things.
It was some time before the Department of Oriental
Ctvilizations tried to covci: the whole of A~iH, or at least 1nake an
appointment for Southeast Asia, When it did in 1961 hite someone to
teach in thi8' at~a~ it was not a handmaid to the strong Indonesian work
but the rather exotic (in Australian terms) Helmut Loofs, a European-
trained atthcologist with practical (Foreign Legiort) experience in Indo-
China. He began teaching Southeast Asian history, and ;,, 1967 was
joined by another recruit from Indonesia, Dr Sutjipto Wiryosuparto.
Sutjipto unfortunately died fow: years later, opening the way to one of
the first Aust.ralian-bo~n and Australian-trained Indonesianists in At111'
Kumar to take on the teaching of Indonesian history. Gradually other
ANU-ttained scholars were taken into the Department of A•ian
Civilizations, as it wa• in the 1970s - a••• Tcrwiel Oil Thailond and
lndoneslsn Studies at ANU
83
Ian Proudfo~t on th~ l\1alay world, What dcvdoped here was not yet
Southeast Asmn Studies 1tl the sense of an interdisciplinary attempt to
understand a region, but a gradual expansion from a language base,
concentrating on 'civilizations~, or following the 1978 review, ".t\s.ian
[cultural] History';
, Whe~ the Canberra University College joined ANU in 1960,
Onental Studies was still a School within the Paculty of Art• at ANU
but it became a separate faculty in 1962 and remained such through
subsequent reviews and testructurit1~ when a 1nergec with Arts was
threate~ed. The success of the Faculty in rcsfating this already makes
ANU different from n1ost other plac;:es where 'Sourheast .J\sian Stu.dies~
is established as a mean5 t~ c,oordinate teaching and research by people
scattered Jn different discipline departments. The Faculty of Oriental
(from 1970 Asian) Srudics had its own specialist departments organised
around the majo( language~~ as well as the Dcparanent of Asian
Civilizations (later History) as a handmaid to language srudy. Further
re&rional organisa tiou seemed unnecessary.
In the discipline departments of the Faculty of Arts there was
als? some teaching about Southeast Asia. I believe it was Rosemary
BnRSenden, Melbourne graduate and Indonesia volunteer in the
Mackie/Feith/McKay mould, who began oourses in Southeast Asian
(or was it I11donesian?) politi<S in the Polltical Science Department in
I 960, before being cut down by a stroke, Ian Wilson arrived "<>011 after
and taught a little Southeast Asian politics to go with his main China
focus until a stint at Nanyang University in 1972-4 provided • much
mongc~ co~mitment. Larry Stcrnstein completed a Geography PhD
<>n Thailand ln 1965 and subseq.,cncly taught Southe•st A,ian courses
111 the Deparl:lnent of Geography, where Ted Chapman in the 1970s
also became steadily more intc1·estcd in Thailand and La<>s. Like
Chapman, Geoffrey Faitbaim had essentially South Asian experic11ce
when hired into the Department of History;,, 1961, but as Viet11am
hot.led up he be.gan teaching hi• fumous cou1~e on cou11ter-i11suxge 11 cy
In Southeast Asia, where n1any srudents cut theit polemical teeth, Also
hi History, Campbell Macknight gradually shifted his focus in the 1970s
fron1 working on the "l\facass:aos) in no.rth Au$tralia to an i.ntetcst in
~~~ .
 Reid
64
Protesslonalisatlon: the Americans, 1970-85
What happened in the 1970s was a large influx of the fir~t
professionals, in the sense of· people ~a.tne~ a~ Southeast Asta
specialists in the United States. I can1~ot rests! b.e~g. this new phase
in 1970 which coincide• not only with the Onentalists Conference tn
Canber~a and the Faculty's change of name to Asian Studies,. but wit~
my own arrival. But it may have been a couple of years earlier that 1t
began to occur to people that, collectively, there was a chance for world
leadetship here. If there was coherent purpose behind this. ir was
pmbably Jack Crawford's, and if there was one spectacular hire as •
result of his efforts it was Wang Gungwu, In 1968. G11ngwu was
appointed explicitly in the China fid~ and d~est~'t believe J~~k
Crnwford's pursuit of him owed anything to his Southeast. Asian
credentials. I myself doubt this a little; I think a Malaysm~ app~munent
was attractive to many people, i11 • way that evc11 a China-born
appointee might not have been. He did not do anything in his o;-vn
Department to boost Southea.t Asia until the app~inunent of Jennifer
Cushman in 1975, but everybody knew him, especially 111 Mala~1a, and
his pwminence gave me a wondetful figurehead I<> opcraie behmd. An
example was the J 976 conference which pmduced one of the first
major successes of my time, and the first unportant ANU book
explicitly to cover all of Southeast. .r\sia, ])erteptionJ of the Pll.sl tn SoJ1lhtatl
~0~~ . .
I was appointed~ I presun1e, as a replac:c~cnt for,F..n1~·oa Sadka~
the tenured Southeast Asian historian who tragically died 111 1968. I
found in the ANU files the justification for my appointment which Jim
penned ir11969, which ended by stating that 'Since RSPS is giving.w;e~t
emphasis to South-east Asian studies~ an appointn1ent such ~s Reid sis
urgent.'" Prestimably this was with an eye to Crawford a11d Atn~t, and
now revealed his department as being pushed m the d1rect.1on. of
Southeast Asia rather than leading the charge as fifteen y~..i.n; earlicx.
Perhaps it did 00 harn1 that 01y backgro~nd was ~ellingron and
Canlhridge, like Jim's but twenty years later. Jt.m seemed 111dulgent, and
a good patron for a quiet operator like mysdf. He had arranged a year-
long Visiting Fellowship for Peter Burns 111 1971, who. was perhaps
then (but not later) identift•ble os the acceptable kind of «>kmtol
lndonesl•n Studies at ANU
Malaya scholat On the Indonesia fmnt he did not object to my pursuit
of Lance Castles, who arrived as a Research Fellow in October 1972,
or of John Smail ••.a year-long visittlr in 1972-3. Lance was only the
second A.tncrican-traincd Southeast Asiani<t to be hired by ANU, after
Herb Feith's brief stay, but he and Smail began what was to be a ceal
pipeline from Cornell, Yale, Berkeley and Michigan. Some North
Americans also arrived as graduate students in the form of Jim Warren
and Alfons van der I<raan. The 1970s, at least in History, thereby
marked a kind of professionalisation wil'h people who had been
through a graduate training specifically in Southeast Asfan Studies.
. 'fhese ead.iest appoinunents did not challenge the view of the
Pacific core of my deparunent that, if one were to go beyond a British-
colonial principle of coherence, it had· better be to an Austronesian
island principle. The first seven Southeast Asia history appointments
(Bastin, Sadka, Feith, Van der Veur, Dobbin, Reid, Castles) were all in
the Indonesia/Malaysia area. But the tragic death of Jim Davidoon in
April 1973 (one of sevetal premature deaths to mark this story) caused
a major rethink of what the department was about. Despite my youth
I was Acting Head of department at the tin10, mainly because of the
feuding 011 the Pacific side. More importantly we had an able group of
students working on Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippine,. 1 re.:all
Bob Reece making most of the running for reconstituting the
Dcpai:trncnt of Pacific History rather than sin1ply seeking another
Pacific lsh1.nd person to fill the chair. A inect.ing of the departtnCnt in
June declared unanimously that the name should be changed to Pacific
& Southea>t Asian History. In order both to continue the pioneering
role of the Department in Pacific J~listoty and to caret to the .rapid
growth in Southeast Asian I~listory~ that meeting demanded that two
chairs he advertised, one in each field, and that the incumbents should
share responsibility (Reid 1973.
111e autl1orities decided to advertise only one chair initially, wit;h
a second kept in reserve for when the firsr had been resolved. The first
one went to a second small-island Austronesian specialist. hut of a very
different kind in Hawaii-trained Gavan Daws. He accepted the notion
of a dualism between two $ide~ of the depa.r:t111ent~ and went :along with
the Re:f;earch School'~ con.side.rat.ion of a senior appointtnent in
 Reid
Southeast Asian hi•toi:y. But when he arrived l was at Yale, and I want
to pause a little to wonder what effect t:his American year had.
T have written elsewhere (1994:256-76; 1999:9-10) about the
two tt-.1diticms which have given rise to Southeast A•ian studies as ~n
enterprise in English. (There arc different trndi~ons in French, 111
Chinese, and to a degree in Japanese.) The more Wldely-acknnwledged
one is the American area studies pattet:n of Cornell~ )"ale, and so on;
the othe< is the unlversitles of Malaysia and Singapote, which
developed the undergraduate teaching of 'Southeast Asia' courses
since the 1950s. l believe this second one should be better
acknowledged~ $itlce it has produced a large proportion of those who
write about Southe;a:st Asi.'l as a coherent entity. I believe. it affecr·ed the
first genei::ation of recruits from hialaysia/Singapore to ANU to son1e
degree_ at leostSadka and Ho T know it greatly affected the second
ge~cration~ Wang Gungwu, myself and Terrr MtGee. Jt was at ~he
University of Malaya that I had been asked to teach Southeast Asian
history, and proce~ded to try to figure out what tt "Was.
When I first arrived at ANU in Febrnary 1970 I not only
·oined David Penny and Ruth Datusman in keeping the Indonesia
J. A'
Study Gtoup afloat, but l also quickly organised a Southeast Sia lune
gtoup, which ttied to meet on the first Monday of each month from
late 1970 to my dcpa<ture for Yak in 1973. There we<e only runetee~1
people on my first circulatlon list, and it offered to focus on Malaysia
and Indonesia wcith e>etcnsions to Thailand, Cambodia and the
Philippines. In fact we did fairly quickly have John, Gidin~ talking on
Thailand and. Hazel Richter on Burma, as well as Steve Fitzgerald on
Chinese polic;ie1< to the whole of Southeast Asia and lots of talks on
Malaysia. By hindsight, perhaps the highlight was the talk to the ~r?up
by Dr Mahathir during his subsequently n?rorio11s August 197 t .".1s1t t<>
Australia. Just emoxi,>ing from the limbo uito which his op~o~1t1on to
1engku Abdul Rahman had cast him, Mahathit had heen mVltcd and
then dis-invited by the Gorton government, and when subsequently re·
invited seemed thoroughly miffed by his treatment. I don't think we
knew this at the time, a~d he should have been pleased enough with the
talk and the dinner we gave him at ov.r place, to which Bill Morrison
(Opp<>Sition spokesm•n on Foreign Affa.ito) dropped in.
ln<kmesian Studios at ANU 67
This is to say that ir was not the Amcric~n a.tea studie$ n1odel
that got us started on organising cross-campus things on a Southeast
Asia basis. N evcrthdeM the American model did have some secondary
influence on me, and I suppose on <•then. I had sought oot people like
George Kahin, Herb Feith and Harry Benda before ever arriving at
ANU. And when I went to teach Southeast Asian history at Yale in
1973--4, I dearly found tlus model very exciting. During my nine
montl1' there I attended two of the Al\S conferences ;1nd visited
Sot1theast Asia Centres at Cornell (twice), Colombia (twice), Wi•consin,
Ohio, Northern Illinois, Michigan and Berkeley. I must have been keen.
'fhe two Southeast Asian historians appointed in. 1973-4 were
both Cornell gr.aduatcs in Leonard Andaya and Rey Ileto. Rey's
appointment was the first stretching of th1: bounds uf rl1e ol<l
Malaysia/Indmiesia focus, but still acceptable to Pacific people because
of the Austtnnesian, island and European-impact themes. When I
came back tu a new dcparttnent headed by Gavan Daws, having been
teaching Southeast Asian history at Yale, it seemed time to advertise
across the whole of the region. I was delighted when David Marr
applied, and he was appointed a Research Fellow in 1975.
h
Ruth Mc Vey had expressed interest i11 the chair advertisement,
and at a higher level than mine she was being considered for rhe second
chair on Southeast Asia. She came out as a Visiting Fellow in
January-February 1976, and gave a couple of very detailed seminars on
the 1965 coup. Whether from our side or hers, it w3' decided not to
ptoceed with this appointment, a11d we converted the chair into a
Fellowship. David Marr beat some sttu11g competition to get it in \ 977.
For the next 20 years he and I would be the two tenured Southeast
Asian historians. The idea wits that the next available tenured slot
would be uocd to again test the water for a chair, but that did not
happen until 1988. Ncverthcless the years 1975-85 were exciting ones
in terms of appointments, intellectual critical mass, and joint projects.
There were always between two and four non·totmred posts in
Southeast Asian lustory, and since we then rook the view tliat rwo years
was more sensible than five, the good people kept corning and doing
well. l\lost of them in this [>etiod were US-tra.inal ::ind perhaps too
many we.re Americans.
68 Reid
On Malaysia/Indonesia Deliar Nocr came i.t1 1975, Barbara
Andaya in 1977, Virginia Matheson in 1981, Lenore Manderson in
1983 and Bob Elson 1984. On the Philippines Rey Ileto was followed
by Mila Guerrero and Al McCoy (arriving late and leaving early) i.t1
1977, Glenn l\1:ay in 1981 and 'Norman Owen in 1983. Ben Batson
worked on Thailand from late 1977, though there was then a big gap
until Craig Reynolds in 1990. l\fike Vickety wrote his book on
Can1bodia in 1979-81, and Nayan Chanda his in 1983-4. Beyond the
Department of Pacific and Southeast Asian History, Jennifer Cushman
atrived in Far Eastern H.istory in 1975, providing a Thai historian and
a necessary link with Craig Reynolds in Sydney. In the Faculty of Asian
Studies, Thai began to be taught in 1974, and with Tony Dillds
rec<u.itment a few years latet it became ck>< that ANU was an
it1ternarional leader in '"fhai studies. Baa::;; Tc:rwicl and Ian "Proudfoot
added to the Southeast Asian histqry strength, while another
Cornellian, Tony Milner came to the History dcparnnent in the Faculty
of Arts in 1980. George Miller had been an outstanding rccmit to the
ANU library in 1973, and oversaw the extension of library holdings
from Indonesia and Malaysia to the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.
The positive side of all th.is excitement and building included (in
Hbtory) a series of good collective books covering Southeast Asia -
Perceptions of the Past (Reid and Marr 1979), ]a;xmm Omtpation (McCoy
1979), S/awry. Bondage and Dependenry (Reid 1983), Disease and Dealh
(Owen 1987) - as well as the usual individual books, of which Ilcto's
and Marx's were definitely. world-beaters. I guess we were leading the
world in vari0 us ways in this period, and we ran the publications •cries
of the Asian Studies Association of Austtalia as a means of showing
it. On the negative side, not enough of the Research Fellows remained
in Austtalia. Moreover these halcyon da}'l! did not produce a group of
graduate students commensurate with the academics. History was
perhaps already beginning to decline as a magnet for Australian
graduate students as politics became a pole of attraction, and
increasingly the scholai:ships were not there to allow foreign sn1dcnts
to come. We really had no systematic means to attract graduate
students tu work with this inc.teasingly stellar voup of people, nor
much of • plan to do so.
l11donesl111n Studies at ANU
·n1e excitement of th.is period WM enhanced by the new
Dep~rttncnt of Political and Social Change in the Research School. I
men.tJoncd the strange absence of Policies from the Sdmol in the
Davtdson days. Jack Ctawford had brought International Relations back
into the Schoo~ and JDB lvliller, Hedley Bull and John Girlin · did
supe~vtse students 111 Southeast Asian policies. But Interan~onal
Relations rem:uned a little wicomfortable dealing wid1 the study of the
mtcnial. polincal dynanlics, so d1at both d1ey and Heinz Arndt's
cconormsts were <:onvince<l a new opetation was essential. J seenl to
~ecall that it was especially Heinz who feared that a standard Political
Sctencc departm~t might lead to theoretical modd-buil<ling of 110 great
relevance to empmcal work. Hence the name Political and Social Change
was d"".'sed and a search was begun for a polirical scienti•t or sociologi'st
who . m; ..ht 'trike th ..; ..1 t
......,.. s . e '4'1' empmc · · al note. A'rte< several false starts the
tr"'.l lcd to.Ja~e Mackie in 1979. Although.Jainic had d1e best Southeast
Asian cre<lenllals of anybody in Australia at that point, he made it dear
th~t he wa.nte~ to focus. ~sc.a:rch on a 1nore Ji.mired area. This ended up
bemg Indonesia, thcPhiiippmes, Malaysia and New Guinea.
Within • few yea<S Jamie had built this Deparllnent's strength
~P __to .seven pc?pl~, si:x of them working 011 Indonesia or the
hilipp111cs. He IJUtiated the biggest focussed "'"arch projoot the
School had •
seen, with him<df • '
Bill O'MallevJ' Ken "ou-
1.,
, Colli
.. g, . l B rown
and Radin Fet:nando all working on a proj1;ct wJU~h began as a
Java-l,uzon rural comparison, and ended by looking ;,1 historical dopth
at. four rural k,t/,,tpaten in Java. It seemed a reasonable experiment in
us111g School resources for single major researd1 advance. Its failure
~nsured the department would turn into a more normal Political
Sc1c11ce departme~t theceafter, still empirically oriented but better
ad1u.tcd to attrac11ng Politics students from quite a bruad range. This
It has done rather well, and the declitling number of staff was
con:pensated for by the high quality with the arrival of Hawld Crouch
111 1985, and of Ben Kerkvliet as Jan:tie's replacement in 1989.
A centre without a Centre
By l'hc mid-l980s ANU was cleady an international leader if not.the
leader, in Southeast Asian studies. It probably has had sin:e then t:hc
70 Reid
la.rgest concenttation of academic specialists on the region of any
institution outside Southeast Asia - as indeed it should. The arrival of
senior figures such as Jim Fox in Anthropology in 197 5, together with
the Political and Social Change cluster, the economists, the historians,
the demographers, the language and literature people, meant thete was
a rounded strength of expertise that could not be matched elsewhere.
The extension of language teaching into Thai and Vietnamese in the
Faculty made it a genuinely Southeast Asian centre, with world stat:w:e
on most of its 'major countries despite the particular weight on
Indonesia.
Despite belonging to so many departments and struct:w:es on
the whole those working on the same areas got along, a;..d there was
cooperation despite the lack of strucrures for it. Among the major
coop eta cive end·eavours were the l11donesia Connection seminars i.11
1979 and the Torres Strait seminars of a similar period, both producing.
gargantuan books.n Periodically there were initiatives to organise or at
least ro list all the Southeast Asianists at ANU; but such attempts at
organising were usually defeated by the very variety and numbers of
those involved. In my day it ofton frustrated me that ANU projected
its Southeast Asian studies so poorly by comparison with the
Americans. More r~ccnt experience in the United States has largely
removed that cultural crioge. The study of Southeast Asia grew at
ANU not because of a specific plan or coherent purpose, but because
m~ny individuals in different part:s of the University believed an
a.ppointtnent in this area n1ade sense, and increasingly because good
candidates were attracted by the presence of other colleagues there.
Though slow to develop, and serendipitous at many points, the
concentration continues to rest on these factors, which n1ay be n1ore
fundamental and secure than on changeable university structures and
government initiatives.
lndot1Hl11n Studies at ANU
71
After a lon.g career in ""''!Y instilHtio11;, Antho'!J .Riid is c11"eitt!J a Vhiting
Fell~w in the Coll(f!! ef A.r)a and the Pad.fie, A11stralian National Universi[Y. Flis
•m~t'/ <1ddress is: anfho'IJ.reid@am1.edu.a11 These considerations were Jim
arlt1:11"'11d m 4 farewt// la/If, fo ANU} l11donesia St11dy Gro11p in 1999, which
ranged rather more broad!J into the grad11al devtlopmel// ef So11/bcast Asian
Slll~es in the period beilveen 1970 and 1999 when be was first al ANU, and
prev1011sfy,
Notes
l. p,,,,., •nd Varghese 1996:17.
2, W McMahon Ball (19Q·l-86) was the founding r•ofo••o.· of Political
Scien.ce at Melbourne University. His familiarity with the region wa.•
certamly enhanced by his appointment shortly after Pearl Harbour
(Decc=ber 1941) to head •Short Wave Propaganda Division of Radio
Aust~lia. l'his W:is inten<lcd both ro moniror bro..idcasring i.n Japanese
'l'h~ a~d French, and to transr'l'l.it propaganda in these fonguages. Hi;
Naflonalism a11d Co111111nnism in Ba.11 Asit1 (Melbourne Un1vcrsity Press for
Institute of Pacific Relations, 1952) has soine of rhe sa.tne hUinane
syrupathy for emer:gent nationa.lism as George Kahio~s book of the. same
year.
3. Rayrnond Firth (1901-2002), did his early training at Auckland in
economics, but switched ro anthropology for his PhD :i.t.l,oH<lon School of
Ecoooinics under the influence of Malinow!>ki_ 'l'hii; dissertation was
publbhcd a~ Primitive Ef.t'Jn1Jmii's ef /ht N~w Ztala11d Maori (1929). Frorn 1927
to 1~3~ he :as at th_e University of Sydney, where he began his long
assoc1atton wtth the tiny Polynesian 5ociery of 'fikopia, at the southetn
extremity of the Solot:non I.slands. Of many books emphasising the :?:Ocio~
~cono1~1ic re~li~cs (as opposed to normative social systen1s) of f>tc~
1ndu~tnal soc1c.1les, particularly the n1ost influential was perhaps U?e tht
TiktJpia: A S odologioil S Indy of Kinship in Pri,nilivt Polynesia (1936). He returned
to teach at the. LSE in 1933, where he eventually succeeded Malinowski a.s
l'rofe;sor of Anthropology in 1944. Meanwhile he had vennired into
Southeast A$ia in 1939-40, with the fieldwork in Kelantan that became
ilfakry Fishmntn: Thtir P,OJaNI Eronomy (1946), During the W..r he led the
Nav~l lri.telligcnce team of which the young fellow-New Zealandcr Jirn
Dav:td:son W<"lS a mctnber, pt:'oducing the U!lefu.l naval handbook" (T"irth and
other> 1943-5).
 Reid
unes Wightman Davidson (1915-1973) wa• educated in Wellington befo'."
oing his PhD at St John's College in Cambridge (19311-42). After hrn
'llrtinre experience helping Firth with the Naval Intelligence v~lumcs he
cc.ru:ne a Fellow of St John\; and Un.iver8ity Lecturer oo eolorual lustory
1944--50). Notes t<)wards a biogcaphy arc in Muni:o 2008. ,
~ote particularly Davidson's letter to Sir Do1,1glas Copl~n~ ~n 7 Sc:te:rnber
949, insisting that Stanncr's appointment should not d1m11ush ~1e •C:ol"'. of
.1 8 own chair extending into matters of Pacific government (1nformat.1on
roin Doug Munro). , P(lt/jic /Jla11d.t, 4 vols, Naval Intelligence Division Geographical
)n;sumably Jirn David!ion and John I .eggc were each a':'"'arc of tUhe .othe.r s
utiative at this time. Legge devoted h.is 1956 ..bbarical trom the n•vcmty
f Wet>te(n Australia to Cornell and Indonesia.
)e'('sonal co1rununiC::ation fro1n Doug M.unro, January 1995.
)ersona.J. c:::omrnunfr:ation fton'i. (·larry Benda. '1968.
\nnual Reports of Pacific History Department, 1970-1972.'
Woodon to llilltOn 24 Jl,ll1e 1955, in John• file, ANU Archive,, . McCoy, AW (ed.) 1979, SoHtheast Asia und;r Japanese Occ1ipt1tio11, Yale
Ridenstcin memorandl,U'n of 19 March 1956, cited in Reid 1997:xxV1.
'A note on Dr Reid 1, ir\ Reid file, P3.cific and Asian History.
Published respectively as Fox and others 1980, and Allen and others 1977.
·ferences
en, J, Golson, J and Jones, R (eds) 1977, S11nd,umd Sahu/, Preh:sfotfr
JJudies in Sontheast Asia, Melant.sia and Austml1a, Acadcmtc I re:s:s,
London. . Reid, Anthony 1973, 'Memotandum to Faculty Bo>rd of RSPS', 19
upuget, Blanche 1982, Rob.rt I Hawke: a biograp~y. Pcngmn Boob
Australia, Rillgwood. · . .
ndt, HW 1985, A co11m thro11gfi life: m•moirs of an A11straltan economut,
National Centre for Development Studies~ Canberra.
:wster, Jennife.r and Reid, Anthony 1989; '.A.W. Hamilton ~nd
origins of Indonesian Sn1clics in Australia.' In May, RJ and? Malle),
th:
WJ (eds), Obseroi~g (,!Jange in Asw: mq_y.r m ho11011r ef J.A.(.. Mad'"•
Crawford House Press, Bathurst, pp. 22-32.
ivldson, Jim 195Sa, Unpublished document 'Notes on the
Department of Paci& Historr', November 1955. ..
195Sh, Letter Davidson to Bastin, 6 December 1955, Bastin file,
Division of Padlic & Asian History, RSPAS, ANU.
l11do11esia11 Studies at ANU
73
- - 1956, Letter D•vid$On to B•stin, 9 March 1956, Bastin liie,
Division of Pacific & Asian History, RSPAS, ANU.
Dorling, Philip and Lee, David (eds) 1996, AN!lra/ia a"d Indo"esia}
l11depe"d"''~• The Renuil/e Agrmne"t: Dommmts 1948', vol. 2,
Australian Goverrunent Publishing Service, Canberra.
Firth, Raymond, Davidsou, JW and Davies, l\fargai:et (eds) 1943-5,
Handbook Series, HMSO.
Foster, SG and Varghese, Margaret 1996, The Maki11g ef the A11stra/jan
National Univmity, Allen & Unwin, St Leonai:ds.
Fox, James and others (eds) t 980, Indonesia: A11stra/jan Perspmiw,r,
Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University,
Canberra.
University Southeast Asia Smdies Monograph Series, New Haven,
Monro, Douglas 2008, 'On Being a Participant Biographer: The Seauh
for JW. Davidson', in Lal, Brij and Lukex, Vicky (eds), Telling Pacific
Uves: Prisms ef Procw, ANU E-Pre~s. Canberra.
Owen, Norman (ed.) t 987; Death and Disease ;,, Solllh<ast Asia:
Explorations in S otia/, Medical, and Dtmographic History, Oxford
Univexsity Press for ASAA Southeast Asian Publicatio~< Series,
Singapore.
June 1973.
- - (ed.) 1983, SlaV11ry, Bondage and Depentknry in SoH/heast Asia,
Queensland Unive,,.ity Press, St Lucia.
- - 1994, 'Recent 11:-ends and Future Directions in Southeast Asian
Studies (Outside Southeast Asia)', in Taufik Abdullah and Yekti
Maun•ti (eds), Toward th• Promotion of So11thea;f Asia11 St11dies i11
SoJ1the(1st .r:tsia, Indonesian Institute of Sciences, Jakarta, pp.
256-76.
- - 1997, '.Anthony Hearle Johns: a vocation in Islam', in Riddell,
Peter and Street, Tony (eds) E.<J'f)'S !Jn Script11r;, Tl1<111ght a11d Society. A
fistschrffi i11 Honour ef Antho11J H. johns, Brill, Leiden.
- 1999, 'A Saucer Mmlcl of Southe••t Asian Identity', Sou/heaSI
Asian Jo11rnal ef Social Sci•11ce, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 7-23.
 74 Reid
(ed.) 2003, So11theaSI Asian St11diu: Padfic Pmpective.r, Program in
Strangers in the house:
Southeast Asian Studies, Arizona State Ut\iversity, Tempe.
Dutch historiography and Anglophone trespassers
Reid, Anthony and Marr, David (eds) 1979, Pem:ptions of the Past in
Soulhea,r/ Asia, Heinemann for ASAA Southeast A•ia Publicatit>ns
Series, Singapore. . JoostCote
Sil cock, TH and Fisk, EK (eds) 1963, The Political Ec()//omy of b1dtpendent
Ma'1.ya: a <'aSe st11dy in developmml, ANU Press, Canberra.
Keyword~: Indonesian studies, historiogr~phy. i\uslralian academy, Dutcli
$f;;:holar:.-hip

Since Gear!!! McT11ri11 Kahin} landmark history ef th• Indti1wian re1J0/11/ion,

A11stra/im1-Amrrican 1"ckin.,ian bisroriogmpf!J has s/11dio1a!J a1JOided (with a
very ftw 11otabk exceptions) D11tch history 1>'riting on Indonesia. Until re/arive!J
re<w1t!J ii "'ms that a mther impmio11s /1itg11isHc and what might be loose!J
t'1m•d. postrokmialist, barrier has existed separattitg the two. The sta11d..JJ, if Sll<'h
it is, Ms been m11t11a/ with one venembk Dutch scholar 111,g_~esting /aromi:al!J in a
DJ1tch lang11agc p11blication little owr a d""ade ago that: 'American and A11stralia11
historians sometimes demonstrate an i1w1fident ,.,rognition of the prohkmatical
a,rpeels of the l11dti"1tlric persµcfive, '
In •x=ining post-war, Dutch language historiogmp!/y of the colonial-
'"'• this paper aims to provide perspective 011 the hi.rrorical ,gap Jefamrln.g 'post·
imperial' and postrolnnial writing in then two traditions. !1 identifies key themes
a11d figum and the role of inititu!ional sfrtlct11m in the perpetuation o/ Dutch
coh11ialiS1 historiogrrrphica/ tmditio11s th,,t explmit its ,.,r;ption ef poJt-war
theoretital and mbstantive A11!fof'Mne preomrpatio11s in thi' field The 11r1ick
ro11c/11des with a ro11,riderutio11 of more """' tnrnd.r in both ~amps' that provitks
evidenr; of a growing «mvergcnrt belllll!en the tlJll) bodi., o/ /Jistoriogmp/JJ and the
factors rontrib111i11g to thiJ monr rertnl m11t11al re«Jsessment,

The 'loss of the Indies' W'OS and remains a significant moment in Dutch
histoq.' lrtdonesian independence wns felt as 'loss' in both a quite
intimate sense across a significant proportion of the Dutch population
with historical and family connections, and nationally as a possession
of which it was fdt the Netherlands was unfairly deprived. 'rhc 'event'

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&vi•w ef I11do,,1,rian and Malqysimr Affairs, vol. 43, no. I (2009), pp. 75-94.

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