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.