Australian attitudes to Indonesian reviewed

Australian attitudes to Indonesian reviewed

By Rob Goodfellow

WOLLONGONG, New South Wales (JP): A finding of my research about how little Indonesia is known in Australia was published in The Jakarta Post in November last year. While the research method was not particularly remarkable the data proved to be the right information at the right time in terms of the debate about Australia' economic integration with the region and Australian beliefs about our closest Asian neighbor, Indonesia.

In this article I would like to look at some of the Australian responses that I received to my data published in the Australian current affairs magazine Inside Indonesia.

First of all Public Radio News Service presenter Superna Aggarwal produced a feature program on the research. In Dispatches Superna spoke to The Indonesian Resources and Information Program Coordinator Pat Walsh about Australian perceptions of Indonesia and supplemented my findings with a number of impromptu street interviews.

Following the Dispatches I received a number of interesting letters. These included correspondence from a director of a large Australian company, the President of the Indonesian Teachers' Association, The Asian Studies Department of the University of New England and the State President of the Victorian Branch of the Returned Servicemen's League. In addition I later discovered that the data had been referenced by Professor Jamie Mackie of The Australian National University or ANU in his paper `In Each Other's Minds: Indonesia in Australia's Mind' (Darwin : 1993). All this attention confirmed that the article had reached a wide audience.

Why then were the candid comments of one hundred ordinary Australians collected in the research taken so seriously?

Part of the answer can be found in the results of another survey -- The Australian Election Study, 1993 -- lead by Professor Ian McAllister of the ANU. The ANU data demonstrated that while the Australian political and business elite were strong supporters of economic integration with the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, ordinary Australians were more likely to foresee "threats" from the region. The survey further pointed out that Australians remained significantly insecure about the sort of regional policy which our political leaders had taken for granted, especially in respect to Indonesia.

This view was supported by Superna Aggarwal in Dispatches, who argued that most of the progress in respect to the Keating government's push to integrate the economies of the Asia-Pacific had been made at the 'elite' level only. It was suggested that the public discourse about 'human relations' with our northern neighbor had been overlooked and that ordinary Australians needed to closely examine how they felt and what they believed about Southeast Asia.

Further to this Prof. Mackie maintained that, "The fact that so many Australians have had stereotyped ideas about Indonesia and vice versa is hardly surprising, in view of the limited personal contacts between us hitherto and the inadequate flows of information about each other. Nor is it particularly reprehensible in view of those factors. The situation has been improving steadily in recent years. But there is still a long way to go, on both sides".

Clearly, because of Australia's historical isolation from Southeast Asia, the stereotypical responses of my respondents are, as Prof. Mackie commented, hardly surprising.

The writer is a PhD student at the University of Wollongong.