Assembled staff of the Department

It was gratifying to see the strong expressions of support at all levels. The Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor International both spoke of the University's continuing support, the Indonesian Consul General, Pak Sudaryomo, gave a very warm and heartfelt appreciation of our links, and most importantly our alumni described how the study of Indonesia had changed their lives, and expressed the importance of maintaining the Department.

And it is quite an illustrious list of alumni: the late Glenda Adams, one of Australia's leading novelists; Les A. Murray, Australia's foremost poet; media magnate Kerry Stokes; the leading landscape architect Made Wijaya; Professor Toru Aoyama, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies; A/Prof. Husein Mutalib of NUS; Dr Lono Simatupang of Gadjah Mada University; Prof Mike Laffan of Princeton; former staff from Leiden such as A/Prof Stuart Robson; academics from most of Australia's universities (such as Prof Harry Aveling, Prof Barbara Hatley, Dr Angus MacIntyre, A/Prof Richard Chauvel, Dr George Quinn...); Terry Rolfe from the UN; Dr Helen Jarvis who is now a state secretary in Cambodia; federal civil servants in Immigration, Education, Defence, Foreign Affairs and other areas; missionaries; journalists in SBS, the Sydney Morning Herald and elsewhere; and importantly teachers who have in turn had a major impact of the lives of generations of Australians.

My fellow committee members, Keith Foulcher, Trina Supit and Leonie Wittman, did a great job, and thanks too to the Alumni Office, the Dean of Arts and the School of Languages and Cultures for their subsidies and other forms of support.

PM Kevin Rudd recently said in Singapore: "I am committed to making Australia the most Asia-literate country in the collective West. My vision is for the next generation of Australian businessmen and women, economists, accountants, lawyers, architects, artists, filmmakers and performers to develop language skills which open their region to them" (quoted in the Sun Herald 17 August 2008). As yet this vision has yet to link up with the strong commitment shown by our alumni, and it is worrying that the Rudd Government's good intentions are undermined by lack of real funding to universities.

A couple of crucial issues of getting the exchange working came up in the Symposium, since the Minister raised the inequality in exchanges: there are 17,000 Indonesian students studying in Australia, but only 60 Australian students in Indonesia. David Reeve gave an elegant summary of the problems that lead to this on both sides, including of course the insane Australian travel warning. On the Indonesian side, there is the bureaucratic process of getting visas (as David said, if you want students to come from Australia you need to actually let them in the country). Study visas take 3 months, a lot of expense and a lot of hassle reporting in and out. I also raised with the people from Ristek the issue of research visas.

Gambuh, a classic dance drama that now is on the edge of extinction,
is considered as the ancestor of all Balinese dances. All
dance-techniques originate in its movement, all scales and melodies
from its peculiar gamelan. It is so rare that a Balinese may never see
a gambuh performance throughout his life.

http://blog.baliwww.com/dance-drama-music/708/

Just gathering my thoughts for the Bali Cultural Congress on 14th and 15th, where I'm talking about the future of Balinese culture. It seems now that Bali's 'cultural tourism' strategy is long dead, so where does that leave us?

By a strange coincidence yesterday also saw the death of Ali Sadikin (b.1926), Jakarta's most popular governor ever from the 1970s, and the man who pioneered the wearing of batik shirts as official uniform (I used to have one of the black and gold Ali Sadikin batik shirts, but it has long since gone to Vinnies). Probably the President who never was.

See images
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/14740699@N07/sets/72157604836805045/> of
Laksmi Pamuntjak's public lecture 'The Impossibility of History' (1 May
2008), download her notes
<http://www.asiainstitute.unimelb.edu.au/docs/laksmi_pamuntjak_talk.pdf>
for the talk, or listen to the audio recording
<http://harangue.lecture.unimelb.edu.au/lectopia/lectopia.lasso?ut=1123&id=50852>
of the event.

There's a lot on this coming week, with 100 years of Hari Kebangkitan Nasional. I'm off to Jakarta for part of the celebrations, I'll post my newspaper article on the subject letter

On another aspect of ignorance, the Australian Government has just advertised its latest round of scholarships for languages teachers to undertake immersion programs. Chinese teachers go to China, Arabic teachers go to Jordon, but if anyone applies for the study of Indonesian, they get to go to Darwin. Many of you may not have thought that daily conversations on the streets of Darwin are in Indonesian, but apparently the Australian Education Foundation, on behalf of the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations considers this to be the case. Yes, it's our old friend the Government travel warning, which rates Indonesia as more dangerous than Israel or South Africa (I heard that Johannesburg has the highest crime rate in the world, can anyone tell me if that's true?).

In 1958 the first classes on Indonesian language and culture at the University of Sydney were taught by Dr Frits van Naerssen, who had arrived from the Netherlands at the end of the previous year to take up his duties as Senior Lecturer in Indonesian and Malayan Studies. Van Naerssen went on to become the first Professor, and led the Department in its hey-day of the 1960s, when a new generation of Australians was discovering Asia, and the focus of world politics was on the region. Graduates of the Department have gone on to become distinguished academics not only in Australia, but also at institutions such as Princeton and Leiden Universities, and to be come leading Australian writers, diplomats, school teachers, aid workers, journalists and internationally-successful business figures. Through collaborative programs such as that with Satya Wacana University in Java, the University has reached out to the wider community, and the Department has always emphasised strong collaboration between Indonesian and Australian academics, producing Indonesian PhD graduates in areas as diverse as architecture, politics and literary studies.

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The temple itself is huge, having been the heart of the sub-kingdom of Kadaton, which played a key role in the rise of the kingdom of Badung in the eighteenth century, although Kadaton itself was subsumed into Kesiman when the neighbouring lord of that area became the power-broker of South Bali in the middle of the nineteenth century. The outer courtyard of the temple contains a huge cock-fighting barn (wantilan), although interestingly there isn’t as much cockfighting as there used to be. But it is essential for the temple festival that there are cockfights going on, so the noise of betting (‘cok’; ‘sal’, the calls for even or odd wagers on the central betting pool) booms out and blends in with the gamelan, singing of kidung and kekawan and megaphone instructions to worshippers from the usual self-important gentleman attempting to wrest order out of chaos.

In the early afternoon, worshippers crowd in with their offerings. Some then move on while others stay as more people pour in accompanying the different figures of gods who either reside in the temple or belong to connecting temples from the region that Kadaton once controlled, over to Tohpati in the east and Sanur in the south. Amongst the deities coming in are a number of Barongs (lion/dragons) and Rangdas (witches), this time there were three of the former and I think five of the latter. Initially they are rested in different buildings when they arrive, but then, as the ritual gets more intense, the various temple priests attached to each of the deities gather together in huge clouds of incense. The build-up for the main part of the ceremony takes place over about an hour-and-a-half. At a certain point when the main prayers have been said suddenly everyone stands up to get ready to process. Meanwhile, not only have the main priests who will put on the Barong and Rangda costumes gone into trance, but so have a number of members of the congregation, male and female (it just happens spontaneously, one minute someone is sitting there looking intense, the next minute he is shrieking and his body convulsing as a couple of friends try to support him and keep him under control).

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Now we have the situation where Suharto is all but dead, his vital organs seem to have packed up, but his doctors have announced triumphantly that the life-support machines have maintained the appearance of life. I don't particularly like Suharto, but I feel sorry for him and think that he should be allowed to die with dignity, without the horrible press crushes around his comatose body.

Although he was almost totally blind by the late 1980s, Sartono's teaching and commentary continued to influence Indonesian history up until the present day. I saw him in action at the 1994 National History Conference at Udayana University in Bali. Seeing this old, frail man being led in, I did not expect much, but I still remember his session as one of the most exciting of the many conferences I have attended. Satrono gave a brilliant analysis of the lack of a concept of 'heritage' in Indonesia, and the need for a national heritage body, and his discussion showed that he was as sharp as ever. However it was in the question-and-answer session that the Conference really came alive.

You will remember this was still in the period of Suharto's proclaimed 'Openness', but most Indonesian academics, cowered by years of intimidation and spying on campus, were too scared to raise issues. Some of the more daring students began to ask Sartono about his education, and at first I wasn't sure where this was leading. Sartono had been a student of Harry Benda at Yale, and then studied under Wertheim in Amsterdam. The questions amounted to asking him whether he followed Wertheim's theory of the 1965 Coup (never explicitly stated at the meeting, but everyone knew that this was the theory that the Coup was all Suharto's doing). Sartono made a very skillful answer about having more than one 'guru', meaning that he wasn't tied to the ideas of Wertheim, but he never directly denied the suggestion that Wertheim's theory might be true.

He was then asked why the last volume of the National History had never appeared. Some of his panel co-members (from the University of Indonesia) prevaricated, too scared to discuss the problems directly, but Sartono was very firm in saying that he refused to allow this final volume to be published because the military were trying to force their interpretations on him. If I remember rightly, this was just before the press bans, but people understood that there were penalties for being too outspoken, and Sartono would have been aware that some of the members of the audience (including members of the History Department at the host university) were military appointees of little talent except for enforcing New Order ideology. My strongest memory of that Conference was the formidable intellect of Sartono, as he put all the other paper-givers and commentators into the shade.

This is the first of my contributions to this blog. If you are an Australian woman who has had some kind of sustained involvement with Bali, such as being a repeat holiday maker over many years, business interests in the past or present, other personal commitments, or are an expatriate living in Bali, my research may be of interest to you. In early 2005 I was immensely privileged when the owner of this blog Professor Adrian Vickers agreed to supervise my PhD project researching the experiences of Australian women in Bali. This is a brief introduction to my research, and a little information about me. I hope you will find the project sufficiently interesting that you may consider being interviewed yourself, or maybe pass my contact details on to someone you know. I am interested in reading any comments you may wish to contribute here on the blog, on any issue that touches on Australian women in Bali, and I interpret this very broadly. So if you love Bali, or your feelings are more restrained, I am interested in hearing from you. As very little has been written about Australian women in Bali and their experiences, and my research is the first on the topic, we can start discussion anywhere. Maybe you would like to comment on your favourite place in Bali and why it matters to you, or changes you have witnessed over the years. Maybe you are an Australian woman who has grown up visiting Bali, and would like to comment on what this means for you.

The text has an interesting relationship with Panji stories, not just because both are concerned with journeys, but also because the expositions of contemporary life and values is clearly meant to provide models for readers. I look forward to sitting down with this book next to the full Javanese text. It would be nice if this could also provide a precedent for publishers to sponsor translations (preferably in full) of other classics of Indonesian literature. Stuart Robson long ago talked of the need for readable versions of some of the great Kekawin in a series like the Penguin Classics.