Population expert Hull has RI in his system

Dewi Anggraeni, Contributor, Melbourne, Australia

The place is the living room of a family home in Sydney; the time an evening in the mid 1960s. The television news is beaming images of Indonesia. A reporter is standing on a leafy street of Jakarta, with armored personnel carriers in the background. Tension is in the air.

But the picture is then rendered somewhat confusing at best and unreal at worst, when a crowd is seen quickly forming behind the reporter, obviously trying to get into the picture.

Those were the first images which entered the consciousness of a youngteenage high school student, who had migrated with his family from the United States, and had never come across any Indonesians. So much of what he saw and heard in those days was filtered through the commentary of Australian journalists covering the events.

A great deal has happened since then in the life of Terrence Hull, now professor of population, health and development at Australian National University in Canberra. Those images from 40 years ago have proven to have more influence in his development than how he felt about them then, "frightening, but also enticing".

Hull was introduced to international traveling in his early teen years. When he was 14, his parents took him and his three brothers to live in Sydney, Australia. The move turned out to be more brief than they had expected. Four years later, immediately after Hull finished high school, the family returned to the U.S., where Hull went to the University of Miami.

Hull had always planned to come back to Australia, so much so that he was admitted to the University of Miami as an international student. And he also knew that he wanted to work in Asia; for his master's, he went to the East West Center (EWC) in Hawaii in the late 1960s.

The EWC was a pivotal point in his life in more ways than one. It was there that he met his partner and wife Valerie. Together they began serious work in population studies, which have continued until today. "The EWC also prepared us to move to Canberra for Ph.D studies," said Hull.

It was in the EWC that Hull met his first Indonesian friends, and he decided to study Bahasa Indonesia.

"In some ways it was an uninformed decision," he confessed, "I suppose the thought of Chinese characters or tonal pronunciation pushed me away from the East Asian languages. At the same time the idea of Indonesia was appealing."

The first Indonesian Hull really got to know was the language tutor, Nico Winter. The learning was fun, because Winter used songs a lot. Hull still remembers Halo-Halo Bandung and Sarinande. He and his fellow students also had to make up stories to expand their vocabulary. Naturally they often drew on their own nursery rhymes, which occasionally would cause some hilarity.

One popular nursery rhyme in English speaking countries is This Little Piggy Went to Market. True enough, one of the students translated it into Indonesian: "Babi kecil ini pergi ke pasar, babi kecil ini tinggal di rumah, babi kecil ini makan roti dengan mentega, babi kecil ini tidak makan apa-apa..."

"Nico was totally puzzled," recounted Hull. "He had never heard this child's ditty, and probably felt that all this talk of babi was not particularly respectful. However, he took it in good humor and once the full tale was told, he joined in the laughter."

During the first year at EWC, a large group of students were trained briefly by a leading exponent of Balinese dance to perform the kecak dance in the Kennedy Theater.

Hull recalled that the group had some very strange-looking monkeys -- Hanuman-white, but large and gawky.

"Pak and Ibu Narendra (the leading dancers) displayed the grace and lithe movements we all know of Bali, but the chorus of the kecak was just as chaotic as a real mob of monkeys. However we all loved the experience, and I think our Balinese teacher was happy to have such willing, if awkward, pupils," recounted Hull.

The EWC was ideal for meeting people from other countries, because it was a mutual learning experience all round, Hawaii being a foreign place for most of them.

"I still look back on those days as some of the happiest of my life," Hull reminisced.

Valerie and Terrence Hull's first fieldwork was in Fiji, where they spent two periods of three months. Then they went on to village study in Indonesia, in Maguwoharjo village, Depok, Sleman in Yogyakarta.

While Valerie, who had studied anthropology, and was doing a thesis on the status of women, Hull, having studied institutionalist economics, did research on the value of children. They combined the qualitative methods of anthropology with the kind of survey research more common in sociology or economics.

Hull has fond memories of the 14 months they spent in the village. They lived with 14 student assistants and two servants; it was like having a huge family with all the responsibilities and fun as well.

"What was remarkable then, and would be impossible now," said Hull, "was the fact that the household survived quite well on food and lodging purchased from the modest scholarships the Australian National University gave the two of us. Today my students need a lot more support if they want to do much smaller studies."

Hull believes that his research has gone a long way to shaping his values.

"When you attend funerals for small children who die of hunger-related illnesses, or see people displaced from their houses by a gang of thugs with no more authority than their fists, and the money some developer has put in their pockets, it cannot help but change the way you see the world," he explained.

Vis-a-vis the region, Indonesia, according to Hull, has undergone a remarkable change in sexuality that is related to the historical transformation of gender roles.

"Unfortunately most of the world does not appreciate the richness of the cultures of Southeast Asia, and as a result they have very biased views of Indonesia," he said. "In the U.S. all talk of Asia is interpreted in terms of experiences of China or India. That is a shame because Indonesia is very different from both those nations."

His mastery of Indonesian language, and his knowledge of the culture, provide him with very useful insight in his continuous research. His sensitivity to the culture of the "other" helps him to make inroads into further studies in the region.

Hull's current research in gender and sexuality covers the whole of Southeast Asia, while his footprints are very much in Indonesia. He is conducting analysis of the 2000 Indonesian census.

Asked what kind of conversation he often has about Indonesia outside academia, Hull related one he recently had in Dallas, Texas. He was having lunch with some people who knew little about Indonesia except for the stories of bombings they saw on TV or read in the New York Times. They were worried about words like jihad, wanting to know what the impact of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was in Indonesia.

Hull explained the situation as best he could.

"I don't know what impact that would have, but perhaps, if some day they visit Bali or Jakarta, they will have a vague memory of something I said, and recognize it in the places they see and the people they meet. That is about all we can hope for."

Indonesia, said Hull, continues to play an important role in his family's life. He, Valerie and their son have very close friends who are Indonesians, whom they have known for decades. And, of course, all those memories.