Was the life of late K'tut Tantri's fact or fiction?

By Ratih Hardjono

MELBOURNE (JP): K'tut Tantri, born Muriel Stuart Walker, and better known as Surabaya Sue, was a controversial figure for most of her 98 years.

The reason is not just because her autobiography Revolt in Paradise is often referred to as a piece of fiction, or that she collaborated with the Japanese in the 1940s, but also because of the way she lived.

She died on July 27, 1997, at an old people's home run by the Sydney City Mission.

She was not beautiful or charming, but she was enigmatic. In the 1960s, a journalist described her as "resembling a frosted electric light bulb swollen to monstrous proportions... the most immediately startling feature was a pair of spectacles such as no man or woman has sported in the history of our race... If the whole seems grotesque, I have failed completely... Above all, there was a sparkle about her which outshone her costume."

She managed to persuade many people to pay for her very comfortable way of life, like her hotel bills and flights to and from London, the U.S. and Indonesia.

From film producers in Hollywood and Australia to Indonesia's state-owned oil and gas company Pertamina, they all supported her life style. She gave them nothing in return. She would have made it clear that they should be grateful to have known her.

My first meeting with her was through a keyhole. I was trying to conduct a conversation with her and she was refusing to come out of her room. It was not as if I had sprung it on her. She had agreed to meet me at a certain date and time at her hotel.

Staff at the expensive Hyde Park Plaza hotel where she was staying in Sydney passed by a few times as I was bent down with my back to the corridor, trying to get K'tut Tantri to let me into her room.

Finally one of them said: "Forget it." I did, but only for that day.

I had expected K'tut to be like my adopted aunt, Molly Bondan, an Australian-Indonesian woman who dedicated her life to Indonesia.

Auntie Molly was a firm, no-nonsense person, yet extremely warm and giving. I imagined K'tut would be extremely well-versed in every aspect of the Indonesian revolution.

I expected to learn more about Indonesia's early history, the way I had from auntie Molly. I was wrong in all my assumptions.

Book

I used to visit her at her hotel and then later in hospital where she was recovering from a broken hip. K'tut was always secretive and suspicious, never letting her guard down.

In our conversations, she chose the topics, like Sukarno used to. When asked about things she did not want to discuss, she would just stare into the distance or talk about something else.

A recent book by Timothy Lindsay, The Romance of K'tut Tantri and Indonesia, Text and Scripts, History and Identity, tries to uncover the real K'tut.

However, this is a revised PhD thesis. It could have been an interesting book, not easily put down. It isn't, and at A$65, is expensive.

No logic or rational analysis can explain a woman like K'tut. Her actions and her life will only make sense if they are seen from an emotional perspective.

What was the dominant emotion in K'tut's life, which made her cling so unbending to her view of what happened in her own life, inaccurate as her view was?

So many things in K'tut's life were ambiguous. Did she collaborate with the Japanese? When the Japanese first arrived in Indonesia they were welcome, because they had got rid of the Dutch.

However, the evidence Lindsey provides gives the impression that she may have done more than simply welcome them. From his own interviews with her, he says: "On her own account she would, indeed, have appeared to have been a mistress of the Japanese officers, perhaps even living with them."

In situations of war, survival becomes a priority. The whole issue of comfort women is not clear cut. A gray area exists.

Some of the women, after being held in the camps under the most terrible conditions, caved in, and reluctantly volunteered to be comfort women.

What makes K'tut's situation complex is that the reader of Revolt in Paradise doesn't quite understand why initially she was accepted by the Japanese, only later to be interned. Her refusal to talk about this period does not help.

One thing that struck me was her puritanical view on sexual relationships.

K'tut was very prickly about her relationship with a Balinese prince. She claims in her book that it was strictly platonic.

The facts point to a different situation. Lindsey exposes in his book that the Balinese prince, who in real life was Anak Agung Ngurah, was the son of the raja of Bangli.

Anak Agung Ngurah's son has confirmed to Lindsey that K'tut was "installed in the Demullih bungalow as Ngurah's Western concubine".

It seems certain that after her internment, K'tut did have some form of nervous breakdown. I base this not just on certain sources, but also my instinct as a woman talking to K'tut.

In this state of mind, she joined a group of freedom fighters under the leadership of Sutomo.

Her rabid anti-Allies broadcasts came to the attention of the Allied Forces, who named her Surabaya Sue. Surabaya Sue's hatred for the Dutch was clear. Yet, despite her internment by the Japanese, K'tut never hated them, in fact, was rather fond of them.

Sharp

Martha Morrison, wife of a former Australian ambassador to Indonesia, introduced me to K'tut Tantri in 1991. She was 93 years old, but her mind was as sharp as a knife.

Physically, K'tut had shrunk to a tiny woman. She was thin, fragile, unsteady on her feet, and needed help to move from her bed to her arm chair. She still had on the strange pair of spectacles, often referred to as a butterfly style.

The theme of our conversations was always what she had done for Indonesia and how she had been forgotten. Some of the sparkle was still there but she was bitter, and she repeated herself. She told and retold the same stories, slightly different each time.

Jokingly, she would hint that whiskey and chocolates would be appreciated. I refused to turn up at the nursing home with whiskey but I did bring her some chocolates.

She would ask me to hide them, insisting they would be stolen. I had to stop bringing chocolates when the sister rang me to say that K'tut had eaten a whole box in one go and was sick for three days.

Eventually, her luck and funds ran out. She had to be moved to the Sydney City Mission home.

The undisclosed amount of money she received from McElroy & McElroy Pty Ltd to do a film based on her book was all gone.

It wasn't a small amount. K'Tut was stubborn to the end and the whole project came to a grinding halt.

The Sydney City Mission is a long way from the Mandarin Hotel in Jakarta, where she lived for some years, as well as the Hyde Park Plaza Hotel in Sydney.

She hated the other old people in her nursing home, referring to them as "gone in the head". I asked her how she felt about the rapid decline in her life style. She didn't answer for some time, then gave me one of her sharp looks.

"The only way to live is to enjoy life, even if it's only temporary," she said.

It is this inner stubborn strength of K'Tut which, despite everything, you couldn't help admiring. Her courage to hang on to her dreams. To live the way she wanted. She lived life to the full despite the fact that life was often so cruel to her.