Retrospective

Looking back …

One of the little known pleasures for an Inside Indonesia editor is receiving mail from people who think we are Indonesian. Someone from Zambia wrote to protest the turtle slaughter in Bali. An American apologised for Bush’s ‘arrogance towards Muslims’. And then there were the rednecks. One wrote in 2005, ‘Indonesians have no respect for Australians. You just want to kill us … We should stop giving money to your country and develop nuclear weapons to protect our country from your hostile ways.’ The recent Lowy Institute poll, ‘Australia, Indonesia and the world’, showed that most Australians think the only country with which their relations are worsening is Indonesia. Relations with China, India, Japan, the US and the EU are all thought to be improving. The Bali bombs, Schapelle Corby and Papua dominate the images.

Inside Indonesia has always been a virtual community of people who do feel warmly about Indonesia. Flicking back through 23 years of the print edition is still a liberating experience. We scooped Robert Domm’s interview with Xanana Gusmao in East Timor’s mountains in 1990, the first with a foreigner since 1975. The topic index on the website (www.insideindonesia.org) shows us taking an interest in things that never reach the mainstream press — gay men in Surabaya, Bali’s Generation X, nude art, climbing an active volcano in Java, street kids and, of course, campaigning on the environment, labour, human rights, indigenous rights and gender equality. Inside Indonesia community members feel as much at home in Bandung’s urban slums as among Kalimantan’s forest dwellers.

Many have studied language in Indonesia and are now back in the west, fluent and itching to get on the plane again. Not a few fell in love with Indonesians. Our community finds something alive about Indonesia that is missing in suburban Melbourne ­ the youthful feeling that anything can happen at any time, overwhelming hospitality, food that leaves chops and two veg for dead, the art of conversation, ridiculous amounts of laughter. Naively romantic perhaps, but a lot more appealing than some of the hostile attitudes of those who write letters to us threatening nuclear extinction.

Inside Indonesia has always looked bigger than it actually is. Copies have been seen in the marble lobby of the Bank of Indonesia. Young journalists write asking us for a placement. In fact most of the work has been done by volunteers. The Melbourne office is run by a skeleton staff, working four days a week in total. The editor usually works from home and gets a paltry sum for the hundreds of hours it takes to put an edition together. The last seventeen editions were produced by guest editors, all academic or NGO experts with a busy career. Most could do only one edition.

The print edition is no longer viable and we are moving to the internet only. This is tragic for those without easy internet access, particularly schools. We now have to find alternative ways of communicating effectively about Indonesia. Please write to us with your ideas.

When a few Melbourne activists started the magazine in 1983 the oppressive New Order regime under Suharto was at its height. The little information in the western press highlighted security (Indonesia as Cold War ally) and western business opportunities. Today Indonesia is a democracy. Information is everywhere, increasingly in English. But the mainstream agenda remains far too narrow. A western obsession with the threat of Islamic terrorism in Indonesia is creating the tragic results visible in the Lowy Institute poll. Perhaps unfashionably, Inside Indonesia community members are internationalists. We also know the region includes Australia. The work for democracy, peace and sustainability and struggles against poverty, ignorance and intolerance are more important than ever. They do not stop at borders. Indonesians, Australians and all people interested in the region need each other more than ever.

Gerry van Klinken edited Inside Indonesia from 1996 to 2002 and now lives in the Netherlands. (Before that, Pat Walsh was editor for 13 years.)