Recalling Herbert Feith: Indonesia's great friend

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 Indonesia, 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 possessed 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 synagogue 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 Linggajati 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.