Indonesia loses a great friend in Herbert Feith

Indonesia loses a great friend in Herbert Feith

Ong Hok Ham
Historian
Jakarta

I was shocked and grieved to read of the death of Herbert
Feith caused by an accident in Melbourne. Just a week before he
died he had made one of his frequent visits to Inodnesia, which
proved to be his last. Dr. Feith visited me at home and as usual
we had a long chat until dinner time.

A professor in political science at Monash University who
specialized in Indonesia, Dr. Feith and professors John D. Legge
and Jamie Mackie were the founders of modern Indonesian studies
in Australia. All three graduated from Cornell University and
were students of the professor George McTurnan Kahin, "the
father" of modern post-colonial Indonesian studies.

Since his student days professor Feith was under the guidance
of Macmahon Ball, a professor who was the first Australian
scholar and intellectual to interest Australians to their
immediate Asian neighbors in the North.

An Australian by citizenship, Feith was born in Vienna,
Austria 71 years ago from Jewish parentage. Vienna in the 1930's
was not particularly friendly to Jews. Fortunately the Feiths
were able to escape the holocaust, first to England and then to
Australia -- not many countries welcomed Jews at that time.

New societies of the New World, the United States and
Australia, thus came to benefit from the migration of an ancient,
cultured people of a high civilization and with a great
intellectual tradition; a cosmopolitan nature and high skills in
entrepreneurship, business and finance, and who possesed an
internationally wide network.

Indeed the Feith family proved to be no exception. Like so
many other Jews his father was a small shopkeeper in Vienna while
his mother was a nurse. The Feith family was rather neutral in
religious affairs; his father was anti Zionist, influenced
instead by Gandhi and the London publicist Victor Gollanoz who
propagated reconciliation between Jews and Germans.

Feith's mother found her Jewish roots back while in Australia
and it was here that the young Feith was exposed to a synagouge
and Jewish traditions.

When he met his future wife Betty, he became interested in
Christianity, especially in Quakerism and its anti violence and
anti-war aspects. However Feith, like many of his generation
including this writer, was also formed by World War II.

This war and its experiences still leaves traumatic feelings
within Australian society and government. After the sinking of
the American Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor which led to the
involvement of Australia and the Netherlands Indies in the
Pacific war against Japan, Japanese airplanes sank the two big
battle cruisers, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse off the
Malay coast and attacked Singapore, till then the impregnable
fortress in the Far East belonging to the British.

Its fall sealed the fate of the Netherlands Indies which the
Japanese occupied with lightning speed. Australians were angry
and felt to be left alone; they were angry especially against the
Dutch who abandoned the colonies almost without a fight after
gaining so much profit.

This later led Australians to take an attitude of being both
very anti-Dutch and strongly for the Indonesian Republic during
the revolution of 1945-1960, including in the period of the armed
conflict between Indonesia and the Dutch.

Australian diplomats of that period, like Tom Critchley, are
still fondly remembered by Indonesians. This was the atmosphere
in which Feith grew up. He joined the Volunteer graduate service,
an Australian prototype of the American peacecorps of a much
later date.

Australia's idea was to send young Australian university
graduates to Asian countries, notably Indonesia, where they would
live like Indonesians on Indonesian government salaries.

Feith went to Indonesia and spent some three years working for
the ministry of information. It was here that he met a remarkable
Australian woman, Molly Bondan, wife of a former political
prisoner of the Netherlands Indies who had been exiled in Digul,
West Papua.

As a student, Feith wrote essays on several topics of the
Indonesian revolution, among others on the 1946 Linggarjati
Agreement between the warring parties, Indonesia and the Dutch.
As a student he participated in many student demonstrations,
protesting Dutch military action in Indonesia against the
Republic.

All through his life, including since his student years, Feith
was a close observer of Indonesia, and through his many writings
he actually participated in the discourse on Indonesian politics.
He was not only a close personal friend -- but also a great
friend of Indonesia.