Adrian Vickers

The country and the cities

Abstract Labour migration between countries such as Indonesia and Hong Kong needs to be contextualised within the general patterns of movement throughout the Asian region. These patterns are long term, but accelerated in the late colonial period. As well as physical mobility, such patterns of movement involve cultural and even social forms of mobility. They should be seen as continuous with processes of urbanisation, particularly the formation of “urban corridors” where the distinction between “country” and “city” has increasingly become blurred.

Public debates about history: Comparative notes from Indonesia

Since the fall of President Suharto in 1998, new debates have opened up in Indonesia about the nature and purpose of national history. The most controversial of a series of issues is the interpretation of the 1965 Coup and killings of communists that followed it. The debates involve questions of historical truth and of the narration of the past in terms of national ideology. Parallels with Australia’s ‘history wars’ indicate the centrality of history to problems of national identity. This article has been peer-reviewed.

When did legong start? A reply to Stephen Davies

Stephen Davies has recently opened up new ways of looking at the history of Bali’s premier dance form, legong. He has argued that legong started in the late nineteenth century, more specifically after 1887, probably in 1889, and that it is primarily derived from a form which Balinese presently call andir. Davies’ article involves a substantial reconsideration of the canonical nature of certain dance forms in Bali. The evidence Davies used is largely oral history. What is missing from Davies’ account is evidence from closer to the time period, evidence that can allow us to fix the date of the origins of legong more closely, and also to understand precisely what its performative and musical associations and origins might be. This evidence is present in Balinese and Dutch-language sources, and while there are limitations to these sources, they certainly modify Davies’ thesis.

Indonesians overseas - deep histories and the view from below

Indonesian mobility is often regarded as a present-day fact. In 2007 the number of Indonesians reported working abroad had reached 4.3 million, bringing in an income of US

Bali rebuilds its tourist industry

6 billion in remittances (Widodo et al. 2009). By 2010 the numbers working abroad would have well passed 5 million, especially considering the numbers ‘smuggled’ across the Indonesian-Malaysian maritime borders (Ford & Lyons 2011). In recent years attention to Indonesian migration has seen important studies of workers, particularly women workers. Beginning with studies of Indonesians working in Malaysia (Jones 2000), attention has now spread to the wider movement of workers throughout the Middle East and East Asia (Loveband 2004). One of the major publications on labour migration points out that it is often women from eastern Indonesia, from the poor Province of Nusa Tenggara Timor, who form a significant number of these mobile workers (Williams 2007). While the scale of movement may be significantly larger, the nature of Indonesian mobility is not at all new. The largest proportion of people have moved to find work, although others have moved for religious, social, educational and political reasons. Mobility is built into deep cultural patterns and is a norm of social life. In our research on the movement of peoples from present-day Indonesia to Australia, we have found that patterns of moving overseas began in societies where movement between islands and sub-regions within current Indonesian borders was well established before those borders came into being. Compared with the literature on the Chinese, Japanese and Indian diasporas, there has been little recognition of Indonesians as a migrant people. More than 40 years ago Craig A. Lockard (1971) published a survey of Javanese emigration calling for further research into this neglected aspect of Indonesia’s history. Since then there has been a number of specific country studies, but little work has been done to link the different forms of mobility to find common patterns. Up until recently there were only a few

Post‐coloniality: Australia and Asia

The 1950s is a gap in the usual studies of tourism in Bali, but this was a crucial decade for rebuilding the tourist industry after World War II and the Indonesian Revolution, and for establishing a post-colonial industry. The reconstruction of the tourist industry drew on Dutch attempts to rebuild tourism during the 1940s. The process of reconstruction required the creation of a souvenir industry, in which Balinese women entrepreneurs played a key role, the building of networks of hotels, and the recreation of tourist itineraries. Paradoxically, the leaders in rebuilding the industry were leading figures on the Republican side during the Indonesian Revolution, but relied on Dutch precedents and patterns. The 1950s represented an optimistic period of relative autonomy, before the centralised control of the New Order government came into play.

A History of Modern Indonesia

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post–Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989.