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History of Inside Indonesia
Inside Indonesia was set up in Melbourne by the Indonesian Resources and Information Program (IRIP) in 1983. This was a time when the mainstream media in Australia included very little information about Indonesia. The diverse group of academics and activists involved in the establishment of Inside Indonesia wanted to provide an antidote to that situation. In particular, they wanted to provide information about the growing numbers of people and organisations in Indonesia who were involved in attempts to bring about social and political change amidst the very repressive conditions at that time under the Suharto regime.
On the history of Inside Indonesia see 'Twenty candles for Inside Indonesia', 'An audacious project', 'A little slice of magazine history', 'Bringing up Inside Indonesia' and 'Conception and birth'.
In its print form, Inside Indonesia was published quarterly until March 2007. Throughout those years, Inside Indonesia provided a unique source of high quality and original reportage and analysis about issues in Indonesia which were rarely covered by other media sources. The entire back catalogue of Inside Indonesia's print editions (1983-2007) is available in a digital archive hosted by the National Library of Australia.
All of our past online editions since we first went online in 1996, are archived on this website (Edition 46: Mar-Jun 1996 - current). In 2007, Inside Indonesia made the transition to an internet-only format.
In recent years Inside Indonesia has committed to publishing articles in both English and Bahasa Indonesia.
Purpose of Inside Indonesia
Inside Indonesia aims to provide a deeper image and understanding of Indonesia than that painted by mainstream media. It focuses on human rights, environmental, social and political issues, but is not limited to those issues. It is not an academic journal, but a publication which produces high standard, interesting, jargon free material about Indonesia by Indonesians or by others who have travelled, lived and/or done research in the country. Inside Indonesia is a non-profit endeavour, and is run on an entirely voluntary basis. None of our editors, writers or photographers are paid. We rely on donations to cover our overheads.
Inside Indonesia online
Inside Indonesia has been a completely online magazine since 2007. At the time the decision was made to accommodate the increasingly global spread of editors and contributors, to marshall our scarce resources, to make the publishing process more efficient and to broaden Inside Indonesia’s readership. The online format is similar to the original print version. Every three months we mark the publication of a new edition by publishing a new collection of articles on a major theme. In addition you we regularly publish off-theme 'Latest Articles'.
If you register here with our free subscription service you will receive an email notification when new material is available on our site. These notifications will be sent at a maximum rate of one per month and Inside Indonesia will not provide your email address to any third party.
We would love to know what you think about the magazine and to hear any suggestions you have for themes and/or article topics. Click here to give us your feedback .
Who runs and edits Inside Indonesia?
Inside Indonesia is a not-for-profit managed by the Indonesian Resources and Information Program (IRIP) Inc. (A0015981C). IRIP is an Incorporated Association registered with the Department of Justice, Consumer Affairs Victoria.
Read about the current IRIP Board.
Read the IRIP vision and mission statement.
Inside Indonesia is edited by a team of volunteer editors who collectively have many years of accumulated experience writing about Indonesia.
Read more about the current editorial committee.
Disclaimer
Inside Indonesia strives to keep information stored on this website up to date, but provides no express or implied warranty as to the quality or accuracy of the information supplied. Readers should not rely on the information provided on this website, but make independent investigations. The views of individual authors are their own and not necessarily those of the publisher.
Publication and Contact details
Inside Indonesia is published quarterly online. Additional off-theme articles are also published.
editor@insideindonesia.org
ISSN number: 0814-1185
*Inside Indonesia is a non-profit endeavour, and is run on an entirely voluntary basis. None of our editors, writers or photographers are paid. We rely on donations to cover our overheads.
Commissioning Editor
Jemma Purdey
Jemma is the current IRIP Board Chair. She joined the IRIP board in 2007 after a stint as guest editor a few years earlier. Her interest in Indonesia came via her passion for human rights causes beginning in the early 1990s and an interest in knowing more about our near neighbours. Jemma has spent extended periods of time travelling, studying and researching in Indonesia. She wrote a PhD on anti-Chinese violence in Indonesia during the last years of the New Order and after reformasi and she is author of From Vienna to Yogyakarta: The life of Herb Feith, UNSW Press, Sydney 2011. Until his sudden death in 2001, Herb Feith was one of Inside Indonesia’s earliest supporters. Jemma is a Fellow at the Australia-Indonesia Centre, and Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University. She is a co-host of the podcast Talking Indonesia.
Members of the Editorial Collective
Alexandra Crosby
Alexandra is a lecturer in Interdisciplinary Design Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. She first went to Indonesia in 2000, when she began studying independent art and media initiatives in Yogyakarta as an ACICIS student. Since then she has been reading and contributing to Inside Indonesia. She lived in Yogyakarta as a Visual Arts Officer for the Australian Youth Ambassador for Development program and in Jakarta as part of the project 'Beyond the Factory Walls'. In 2008 she received the Kirk Robson Memorial Award for Leadership in Community Cultural Development for her work connecting artist communities in Java and Australia. In 2013 she completed her PhD on the visual culture of activist communities in Java, focusing on festivals since the end of the New Order. Ali is a former member of the IRIP Board.
James Edmonds
James Edmonds is a Ph.D. Candidate at Arizona State University in the Anthropology of Religion tract in the Religious Studies Department. His research is focused on the place of materiality and exchange in the everyday spaces of ethical formation. His dissertation, 'Hunting Baraka: The Spiritual Materiality and the Material Spirituality reconfiguring the Indonesian Islamic Landscape' seeks to show how baraka, as both an actors’ category and a theoretical tool, challenges, evades and redefines Western, Indonesian, and Islamic visions of religion, materiality and existence.
Virginia Hooker
Virginia first visited Indonesia in 1969 to read 19th century Malay manuscripts from the Riau-Lingga islands which recorded local histories of the area. Since then she has moved ever closer to the present day and currently researches Islam in contemporary Indonesia, particularly Islam-themed art. Her publications include, Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia: A Contemporary Sourcebook (2006, 2007) co-edited with Greg Fealy, various articles in Inside Indonesia, and a photo essay in the New Mandala (July 2014). She retired as Professor of Indonesian and Malay, Faculty of Asian Studies, ANU in January 2007 and is now a Visiting Fellow in ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific.
Andy Fuller
Andy Fuller has contributed to Inside Indonesia over recent years as an editor and copyeditor. He edited a special edition on Sport in 2018. Andy is currently a post-doctoral Researcher at Utrecht University, where he is working on religious vigilantism and premanism in Jakarta. He is a co-founder of @reading_sideways_press which publishes books in Indonesian and English.
Elisabeth Kramer
Born to an Indonesian mother and an Australian father, Elisabeth mainly grew up between Jakarta and Sydney. After a 7 year hiatus from Indonesia she returned in 2008, reigniting a passion to learn more about the country and its people. Drawn to the complicated world of political power relations in Indonesia, Elisabeth’s early research focused on corruption: perceptions, practices and the world of political parties. Today, her researches focuses more on how individuals in Indonesian engage with political debates and the ways that networked relationships are created and mobilized to advocate for change. However, she is easily distracted and often finds herself pursuing numerous side projects around environmental and historical events Indonesia. She is currently Deputy Director at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre at the University of Sydney.
Nick Long
Nick's interest in Indonesia was sparked by the texts on his undergraduate anthropology course, and cemented by a visit to the Riau Islands in 2004. He continued to work in Riau for his MPhil and PhD, where he investigated the links between regional autonomy and Malay identity through such prisms as neighbourhood interactions, history-telling, entrepreneurship, notions of 'achievement' and relations with the 'spirit world' (the results have since been published as Being Malay in Indonesia: Histories, Hopes and Citizenship in the Riau Archipelago). He currently works as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.
Anton Lucas
Anton is Treasurer of the IRIP Board. He arrived in Yogyakarta from the University of Hawaii 's East West Center in late 1969 on an Indonesian language semester study programme and it changed his life forever. He wrote a PhD on the independence struggle of 1945 on Java's north coast, and has since taught in Indonesia, in Makassar (1984-85), and in Yogya (1990-92). After Inside Indonesia started in the mid-1980s, he signed up his wife Kadar's extended Yogya family and a Catholic nunnery in Central Java as subscribers. Kadar's family were interrogated by intelligence officers, and the nuns were accused of spreading banned Marxist teachings. Indonesia has changed a lot since then, but the magazine maintains its commitment to social justice, and what is happening at the grass roots level in the largest Muslim country in the world which is Australia's closest neighbour. Anton teaches Asian Studies and Indonesian at Flinders University, and does research on agrarian and environmental issues.
Julian Millie
Julian is professor of Indonesian studies, Faculty of Arts, Monash University. His current project concerns Islamic preaching in West Java. Prior to undertaking this project, Julian completed two other studies on the Islamic culture of Indonesia. He has taught in a number of departments in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, and is a member of the executive committee of the Monash Centre of Southeast Asian Studies.
Laura Noszlopy
Laura first visited Indonesia as a teenager, travelling from Jakarta to Flores and back. Since then, she has studied various aspects of Indonesian culture and society, concentrating on the ethnography of Bali, Indonesian performance, and youth and popular cultures. In addition to her research, she has worked in Indonesia as an editor for the Lontar Foundation, Equinox Publishing and Latitudes magazine. She is currently based at Royal Holloway, University of London and is working on a biography of John Coast.
Blair Palmer
Blair grew up in New Zealand and Canada, and first went to Indonesia in 1994 as a volunteer, spending a year in Papua as a mathematics education advisor. Since then he has spent most of his time in Indonesia, in a variety of roles, from working with local NGOs to research on Indonesian languages, documentary film-making, living in a village in Sulawesi to study migration and social change, policy work on conflict and democratisation, and program management in the climate change sector. Along the way he acquired an MSc in mathematics and a PhD in Social Anthropology. Blair first became involved with Inside Indonesia in 2004, guest-editing a special edition entitled 'From Mataram to Merauke'.
Yatun Sastramidjaja
Yatun Sastramidjaja has been a huge fan of Inside Indonesia since she was an anthropology student at the University of Amsterdam in the 1990s, and so she was delighted to join the editorial team in 2010. Born and raised in the Netherlands, she spent three childhood years in Bandung, after which she has returned to Indonesia almost every year for family visits and later for research. Yatun's research in Indonesia spans a range of topics, from youth cultures, to student movements, heritage and memory cultures, and most recently digitised protest, policing and political manipulation. She is deeply concerned with human rights issues, and constantly amazed by people's resilience and creativity in claiming their rights. Currently Yatun is an assistant professor in anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, and an associate fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.
Danau Tanu
Danau was born in Canada to an Indonesian father and Japanese mother, but grew up mainly in Indonesia among other places. She loves maintaining her links to Indonesia and was first introduced to Inside Indonesia after being invited to write an article based on her anthropological research on international schooling in Jakarta. Danau is now an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and is writing a monograph based on her PhD on transnational young people who grow up in several countries and are popularly referred to as 'Third Culture Kids'.
Dirk Tomsa
Dirk was born and raised in Germany. After visiting Indonesia as a backpacker, he decided to move to Australia and pursue a postgraduate degree in Indonesian studies. A political scientist by background, he wrote his PhD about the Golkar Party at the University of Melbourne and now works as a lecturer in the Politics and International Relations Program at La Trobe University in Melbourne. He visits Indonesia regularly to conduct research on parties, elections and local politics, and, whenever he finds a bit of spare time, to explore what’s left of the country’s magnificent natural heritage.
Gerry van Klinken
Gerry and his partner Helene became avid readers of the magazine when they were living in Salatiga, Central Java in the late 1980s. After both submitting pieces and being thrilled when they were published, Gerry found himself editing the magazine in 1996. After moving to a guest editor system in 2002 he continued to be actively involved in the magazine, first as coordinating editor, and later as a member of the editing committee. Helene and Gerry's own memories of Indonesia include high adventure, back-packing around the archipelago and being shipwrecked at night on a coral reef in a traditional sailing boat! They both want the magazine to be a 'bridge between people, to challenge stereotypes, to highlight movements and individuals who we think symbolise a better tomorrow.'
Eve Warburton
Eve Warburton became interested in Indonesia back in high school when her Society and Culture teacher diverged from the standard curriculum and taught a unit on the fall of Suharto. Since then, Eve has spent time studying, working and traveling throughout Indonesia, and has maintained a strong interest in the politics of Australia's nearest neighbour. She has a BA (Languages) (Hons) from the University of Sydney and an MA in Human Rights from Columbia University. Eve completed her highly acclaimed PhD in the Department of Political and Social Change at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on the politics of resource nationalism in Indonesia.
Elena Williams
Formerly based in Yogyakarta as Resident Director for The Australian Consortium for ‘In-Country’ Indonesian Studies (ACICIS) for many years, Elena Williams called Indonesia home for the better part of the last decade. She first read Inside Indonesia while studying Indonesian at university, and loved the articles that Keith Foulcher used to hand out after language classes. After a life-changing year on ACICIS in 2005, Elena gained her Honours in Indonesian Studies from the University of Sydney. She then worked as a researcher with The University of Sydney, The Australian National University and Oxfam Australia. In 2012, Elena completed her Masters of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development (Gender Studies) from The Australian National University, and subsequently worked with UN Women’s office in Jakarta as their Planning, Research, Monitoring and Evaluation Officer. She is currently undertaking her PhD at the ANU.
Ian Wilson
Ian started learning Indonesian at high school, and during the 1990s spent several years travelling throughout Java and Sumatera studying and later teaching the Indonesian martial art of pencak silat. He wrote his PhD on the cultural history of pencak silat, and worked as a medical interpreter in East Timor. He now teaches politics and development studies and is a research fellow at the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University. He researches and writes about Indonesian politics and society, including gangs and organised crime, religious vigilantism and political corruption. His current research is on the politics of urban planning and infrastructure and its impact on the lives of Jakarta’s poor. He also regularly translates comics and lyrics for Indonesian punk and hardcore bands.
Proofreading & Website Team
Garry Jennings
Garry worked as an ESL/ languages teacher in Newcastle, Australia until 2011. He started to learn Indonesian in the late 1990s in Jogjakarta and at the University of New England in Australia. After his retirement he volunteered as a proofreader for Inside Indonesia and enjoyed three semesters as a guest lecturer in English at Universitas Ahmad Dahlan in Jogjakarta. He has travelled in Sulawesi, Kalimantan, Lombok, Bali and Java. As well as Bahasa Indonesia, he speaks German and Spanish. Currently he proofreads theses for international students, teaches languages at the University of the Third Age and sings in an acapella choir.
Samantha Adioetomo
Samantha was born and raised in Michigan, USA, and first moved to East Java, Indonesia, in 2010 as a US Peace Corps Volunteer TEFL teacher. After completing graduate studies at Bowling Green State University (Ohio) in cross-cultural and international education in 2014, she returned to East Java as a US Fulbright Program Student Researcher. Currently, she works as a writer/editor in Jakarta. Her research interests include traditional/local knowledge transfer, education policy, and women's studies.
Tim Fitzgerald
Tim first joined Inside Indonesia when he was living in Jakarta, working as a copy editor at The Jakarta Post and various local organisations. He has a Bachelor of Arts (Indonesian and Cultural Studies) from the University of Melbourne and a Grad. Dip. in Education from RMIT. Before moving to Indonesia he taught Indonesian and Humanities at high schools and primary schools in Victoria. He started learning Indonesian because he had to; continued to Year 12 because he enjoyed the performance challenge; and then majored in it and moved there because he was, and is, excited about the greater understanding and engagement speaking the language provides for as a visitor and a guest there. Tim also served as a member of the IRIP Board.
Adeline Tinessia
Adeline is an International Security Studies Honours student at the Australian National University. She was born in Jakarta and moved to Canberra during high school. She is currently a newsletter editor at AIYA and a social media coordinator at NAILA.
Social Media Team
Aruna Anderson
Aruna spent the first twelve years of her life in Jakarta. She is now studying politics, philosophy and economics at the Australian National University. Raised by humanitarian activists, she feels strongly about social justice issues and plans to focus her future studies on climate change and human rights.
Past Team Members
Edward Aspinall
Ed became involved in things Indonesian when he spent a year in Malang, East Java, as a teenager in 1983 (his father was working on an Australian government aid project). Later he studied Indonesian at high school and university. He wrote his PhD on the democratic movement which overthrew the Suharto regime (this was published as a book - Opposing Suharto: Compromise, Resistance and Regime Change in Indonesia - in 2005). Now he researches Indonesian politics at the Australian National University, currently with a focus on the conflict and the peace process in Aceh. Ed served as a longtime member of the IRIP Board and also Coordinating Editor for many, many years.
Emma Baulch
Emma teaches at Monash Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur. She has been learning about, writing about, teaching about and living in Indonesia on and off for the past thirty years. She completed her PhD in politics and is an expert of media and popular culture.
Thushara Dibley
Thushara grew up in Yogyakarta and has maintained her links with Indonesia ever since. A major in Indonesian Studies led to an interest in Timor Leste, where she volunteered for a year with a small NGO. She completed a PhD in Indonesian Studies at the University of Sydney, where she researched the relationship between local and international NGOs doing peacebuilding work in Timor Leste and Aceh. Thushara was involved in various capacities with Inside Indonesia including the IRIP Board from 2007-2016.
Michele Ford
Michele became interested in Indonesia when she was studying Engineering and Industrial Relations at the UNSW. In 1990, she took an Indonesian language summer school on a whim. It changed her life. She is married to an Indonesian, and has a house in Tanjung Pinang, as well as a PhD in Indonesian labour relations. When she is not working on Inside Indonesia, she researches Southeast Asian labour movements and directs the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide interdisciplinary centre that brings together the 250 academics at the University of Sydney working in or on Southeast Asia. Michele served as a longtime member of the IRIP Board and also Coordinating Editor for many years.
Keith Foulcher
Keith retired in 2006 after more than 30 years teaching Indonesian language and literature studies at Monash, Flinders and Sydney universities. During that time he found himself (at times) a reluctant participant in Indonesian literary politics because of his interest in oppositional writers and their work during the New Order years. He is now an Honorary Associate of the Department of Indonesian Studies at Sydney University. Keith's involvement with Inside Indonesia spanned almost three decades, as editor, committee member and contributor.
Nik Tan
Nikolas Feith Tan has lived and worked in Indonesia and East Timor and is a PhD fellow in the field of international refugee law. An Australian lawyer admitted to practice, Nikolas is a former officer of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He holds a Master of Law from the University of Copenhagen and Bachelors of Law and Arts (Political Science) from the University of Melbourne.
Chair
Jemma Purdey joined the IRIP board in 2007 after a stint as guest editor a few years earlier. Her interest in Indonesia came via her passion for human rights causes beginning in the early 1990s and an interest in knowing more about our near neighbours. Jemma has spent extended periods of time travelling, studying and researching in Indonesia. She wrote a PhD on anti-Chinese violence in Indonesia during the last years of the New Order and after reformasi and she is author of From Vienna to Yogyakarta: The life of Herb Feith, UNSW Press, Sydney 2011. Until his sudden death in 2001, Herb Feith was one of Inside Indonesia’s earliest supporters. Jemma is a co-host of the Talking Indonesia podcast, Director of ReelOzInd! Australia Indonesia Short Film Festival and an adjunct Fellow at the Australia-Indonesia Centre and Deakin University.
Treasurer
Anton Lucas is Treasurer of the IRIP Board. He arrived in Yogyakarta from the University of Hawaii 's East West Center in late 1969 on an Indonesian language semester study programme and it changed his life forever. He wrote a PhD on the independence struggle of 1945 on Java's north coast, and has since taught in Indonesia , in Makassar (1984-85), and in Yogya (1990-92). After Inside Indonesia started in the mid-1980s, he signed up his wife Kadar's extended Yogya family and a Catholic nunnery in Central Java as subscribers. Kadar's family were interrogated by intelligence officers, and the nuns were accused of spreading banned Marxist teachings. Indonesia has changed a lot since then, but the magazine maintains its commitment to social justice, and what is happening at the grass roots level in the largest Muslim country in the world which is Australia 's closest neighbour. Anton taught Asian Studies and Indonesian at Flinders University for many years, and has a particular research interest in agrarian and environmental issues.
Secretary
Tito Ambyo grew up in Bandung, where he wrote plays, poems and punk songs (he was a member of at least three punk bands) and failed a year of high school. He came home from school one day to find out that Soeharto was no longer president; that confused him enough that he started asking questions that led to his first article as a journalist, and since then he has worked in East Timor, Indonesia and Australia and his articles have been published by magazines and newspapers such as Visual Arts Magazine and The Guardian. Tito moved to Australia at the beginning of the millennium and has worked as a reporter, producer and executive producer in his seven-year stint with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He is now an Associate Lecturer in Journalism at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, teaching online and broadcast journalism.
Other Members
Gerry van Klinken and his partner Helene became avid readers of Inside Indonesia when they were living in Salatiga, Central Java in the late 1980s. After both submitting pieces and being thrilled when they were published, Gerry found himself editing the magazine in 1996. After moving to a guest editor system in 2002 he continued to be actively involved in the magazine, first as coordinating editor, and later as a member of the editing committee. He is now a researcher in the Netherlands. Gerry is continually struck by the infectious energy that Indonesia inspires in those who return from their travels. He sees that energy as a sustaining force for the magazine. Helene and Gerry's own memories of Indonesia include high adventure, back-packing around the archipelago and being shipwrecked at night on a coral reef in a traditional sailing boat! They both want the magazine to be a 'bridge between people, to challenge stereotypes, to highlight movements and individuals who we think symbolise a better tomorrow'.
Yatun Sastramidjaja has been a huge fan of Inside Indonesia since she was an anthropology student at the University of Amsterdam in the 1990s, and so she was delighted to join the editorial team in 2010. Born and raised in the Netherlands, she spent three childhood years in Bandung, after which she has returned to Indonesia almost every year for family visits and later for research. Yatun's research in Indonesia spans a range of topics, from youth cultures, to student movements, heritage and memory cultures, and most recently digitised protest, policing and political manipulation. She is deeply concerned with human rights issues, and constantly amazed by people's resilience and creativity in claiming their rights. Currently Yatun is an assistant professor in anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, and an associate fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.
Vannessa Hearman was born in Indonesia and is a historian of Southeast Asia who lectures in history and international relations at Curtin University in Western Australia. Her research deals with the 1965-66 anti-communist violence in Indonesia, the politics of memory and human rights, and East Timorese diaspora and migration. She is the author of Unmarked Graves: Death and Survival in the Anti-Communist Violence in East Java, Indonesia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2018) which was awarded the Asian Studies Association of Australia’s inaugural Early Career Book Prize in 2020. She is a certified professional Indonesian interpreter and translator. Before entering academia, Vannessa worked in the aid and development sector and as interpreter and translator in Australia and Timor-Leste. Reading Inside Indonesia taught her much about the politics of the country she left behind as a child, including the contentious issue of East Timor. Access to the magazine encouraged her to maintain her links with Indonesia and to become actively involved in campaigns in Australia supporting the Indonesian pro-democracy movement in the 1990s.
Tim Fitzgerald first joined Inside Indonesia when he was living in Jakarta, working as a copy editor at The Jakarta Post and various local organisations. He has a Bachelor of Arts (Indonesian and Cultural Studies) from the University of Melbourne and a Grad. Dip. in Education from RMIT. Before moving to Indonesia he taught Indonesian and Humanities at high schools and primary schools in Victoria. He started learning Indonesian because he had to; continued to Year 12 because he enjoyed the performance challenge; and then majored in it and moved there because he was, and is, excited about the greater understanding and engagement speaking the language provides for as a visitor and a guest there. He was previously Media and Communications manager at the Australia-Indonesia Centre.
Our Vision
IRIP understands that:
All human beings have the right to live free from poverty, violence and political oppression, gender, racial and other forms of discrimination, and in conditions of environmental sustainability;
Many citizens of Indonesia have long struggled to achieve peace, economic justice, human rights, equality, democracy and environmental sustainability, often in the face of great domestic obstacles and international isolation;
Citizens of wealthy countries like Australia have global social responsibilities to understand and assist the struggles of those in poorer countries;
Due to our geographic proximity, citizens of Australia have a particular responsibility to understand and assist our Indonesian neighbours in their struggles;
That a primary obstacle to mutual understanding and support between the peoples of Australia and Indonesia is lack of information and mutual understanding;
That better understanding between the two peoples is possible, and that such understanding can assist communities and citizens to act together to transform and improve their societies.
Our Mission
IRIP’s primary mission is to encourage greater international understanding of Indonesia and Indonesians, in particular amongst Australians. We aim to raise awareness about the diversity of Indonesian society, and about the struggles of those Indonesians who aim to achieve greater democracy, human rights, gender and racial equality, tolerance and environmental sustainability.
A primary means by which we pursue the aim education and awareness-raising is by publication of the magazine Inside Indonesia. We do not view education and awareness-raising as ends in themselves. IRIP’s greater aim is to encourage Australians, Indonesians and others to reflect on the issues confronting Indonesia, and on the Australian-Indonesian relationship, and take action to:
promote mutual cooperation and understanding between the peoples of Indonesia and Australia.
support the struggles of those Indonesians who are aiming to improve their society.
promote international awareness of the issues facing the Indonesian people today