Indonesia
This week on the ABR Podcast we tell the story behind Indonesia’s twentieth-century literary masterpiece, the Buru Quartet, a set of novels that began life in a jail cell. The Buru novels were written by Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer, widely considered a potential winner of the Nobel Prize. Nathan Hollier, publisher at Australian National University Press, explains why the Buru novels hold special significance for Australia, even though, as he writes ‘few Australians have heard of them’. Listen to Nathan Hollier’s ‘”At least I’ve told these stories to you”: Pramoedya Ananta Toer and the Buru Quartet’, published in the March issue of ABR.
... (read more)War on Corruption: An Indonesian experience by Todung Mulya Lubis
Young Soeharto: The making of a soldier, 1921–1945 by David Jenkins
A Narrative of Denial: Australia and the Indonesian violation of East Timor by Peter Job
Walter Spies by John Stowell & Brown Boys and Rice Queens by Eng-Beng Lim
That Sinking Feeling: Asylum Seekers and the search for the Indonesian Solution (Quarterly Essay 53) by Paul Toohey
Have the Bali Bombings completely changed our view of Indonesia? Although obviously not designed to do so, these three books provide necessary background on how such an atrocity might be possible in the near-anarchic circumstances of that country. They also give a wide-ranging and informative picture of the present state of Indonesia in all its chaos and uncertainty. They make sobering reading, as if Indonesian politics is a mixture of Shakespearean tragedy, Javanese shadow play and gangster drama: Hamlet, Semar and The Godfather.
... (read more)