"Freedom or Death": Australia's Support for the Indonesian National Revolution

One form of support was giving nationalists a platform to propagandise both to their countrymen and Australian allies.  But the faces of the Revolution were sometimes surprising.  Our first source is a transcript of a speech, Independence or Death, delivered on September 30, 1945, in Melbourne’s Savoy Theatre by “a young Indonesian girl” of around 16, speaking in Indonesian “to her country people.”[7]  Her tender age accords with the nationalists’ portrayal of the Revolution as youth-led.[8]  Indeed, Ricklefs acknowledges that it was the nationalist youth leaders who pressured Sukarno into declaring independence so soon after Japan’s August 15, 1945 surrender.[9]

Proclaiming that “[t]he time [had] indeed come for the colonial countries to fight for freedom,” the girl placed her country’s revolution into the context of the rising global struggle against European colonial rule, seen in Vietnam, India, and elsewhere.[10]  Crucially, the girl asserted that “the people of Indonesia are no longer stupid.”[11]  Said famously maintained in Orientalism that for Western colonialism, knowledge was power.[12]  He wrote that “[t]o have such knowledge of a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it.  And authority here means for ‘us’ to deny autonomy to ‘it.’”[13]  ‘It,’ in this case, was Indonesia.  However, by declaring that Indonesians were “no longer stupid,” the girl implicitly rejected the colonial narrative justifying Dutch control – as the Indonesians were now self-aware and enlightened, they were ready for self-rule.

Australia’s second form of support for Indonesia began with the actions of trade unions.  As our second source, Gerald Peel’s Hands off Indonesia pro-republican pamphlet notes, Australian waterside unions began their ‘Black Armada’ boycott of working on Dutch vessels on September 23, 1945.[14]  Despite international pressure, the Australian government refused to intervene.[15]  The boycott would thus last until the Dutch recognition of Indonesian independence in December 1949.[16]

Meanwhile, in Indonesia, nationalists set about organising ‘struggle groups’ to establish radio stations and newspapers promoting the “Independence or Death” slogan, alongside ‘struggle committees’ (militias) that would soon fight their first major battle in Surabaya in October 1945.[17]  There, 14 British soldiers (who were supporting the Dutch) would perish alongside up to 15,000 Indonesians.[18]

But for the first time since Federation, Australia failed to back the British motherland in war.

In Australia’s third act of support for Indonesias, the Chifley Labor Government tacitly sided with the revolutionaries.[19]  As Peel wrote in his pamphlet, the Australian government had a moral imperative – with the Indonesians positioning themselves as democratic, pro-worker, and anti-capitalist, according with Labor’s values – and a pragmatic reason to do so, given Australia’s proximity to Indonesia and potential trading relations.[20]  National security – especially the need for a geographical buffer against future Asian threats (memories of Japan’s 1942 bombing of Darwin remained fresh) – also influenced Labor’s decision.[21]

After two years of skirmishes, between July 21 and August 4, 1947, the Dutch launched their first so-called “police action” against the Indonesian Republic.[22]  In violation of an international agreement with the Indonesians, the Dutch attacked and occupied Republic-held territory on and around Java and Surabaya.[23]

Our third source, the September 1947 Australian-Indonesian Association newsletter, reveals what happened next.[24]  Living up to its word in supporting Indonesia, the Australian government urgently raised the dispute with the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on July 30, calling for an immediate ceasefire.[25]  In Yogyakarta, the Republic’s capital, this order was received on August 4, but inexplicably, Dutch-held Jakarta claimed not to have received it until August 6, allowing the Dutch to continue warring against the unexpectant Indonesians.[26]

However, the Association’s newsletter highlighted several questions of truth surrounding the episode.  Unsurprisingly, being pro-independence, it dismissed the Dutch’s claims of taking “purely domestic ‘police action,’” instead labelling the incident part of “the war in Indonesia.”[27]  It thus legitimised the Indonesian Republic as not merely a band of rebels, but a state capable of making war with others.  More interestingly, however, it rejected the Dutch authorities’ claims of receiving the ceasefire order two days late.  Rather, it revealed “information direct from the Australian consul” in Jakarta that the Dutch did receive it on August 4 – but ignored it.[28]

In the above, I have attempted to draw a ‘true story’ about Australia’s support for the Indonesian National Revolution from three sources.  Clearly, however, even within these sources, questions of truth remain.

Once, historians considered themselves the archive-dwelling arbiters of truth.[29]  But today’s historians like McCullagh and Hunt have recognised that writing history is not merely an exercise in recounting facts from ‘reliable’ archival sources.[30]  Rather, a single source can provoke multiple interpretations based on a historian’s perspectives and interests, many of which may be ‘true’ if they are attentive to the facts, coherent, and as complete as possible.[31]

Like any history, my ‘true story’ is necessarily selective, offering only one among many interpretations of Australian-Indonesian relations.  Indeed, it may lead readers to assume that most Indonesians were committed nationalists – a claim Ricklefs dispels – or that all Australians supported Indonesian independence, an assertion undermined by publications like Pacific Islands Monthly, a Sydney-based newspaper that lamented “Australia’s Betrayal of the Indonesian Dutch.”[32]  Other histories will take different approaches to mine without necessarily being any less ‘true.’

Thus, 300 years on from Australians’ and Indonesians’ first meeting, the shared history of these incongruous neighbours remains ever in flux.