Adrian Vickers

• The University of Sydney

During the Indonesian Revolution of 1945–49, Australian unions and activist groups organised black bans on Dutch shipping from Australian ports to hamper Dutch attempts at recolonisation. Indonesian and Dutch-language sources demonstrate the importance of unions and communist organisations in these actions. These sources show that links between lef...

During the New Order period (1966–1998), Chinese Indonesians or Tionghoa were systematically excluded from Indonesian accounts of history. After the fall of the regime, there was a resurgence of writing by and about Chinese Indonesians. One element of this resurgence was the translation into Indonesian of books by Western writers on the topic, but...

Putu Shanty was one of Bali’s leading intellectuals in the middle of the twentieth century, but he has been effaced from official publications identifying cultural leaders of the island. His short stories, written in a social realist style, were intended as interventions that would influence the course of history but are also a valuable record of h...

Digital tools offer new possibilities for visual research, and such tools can provide methods for revitalising our understanding of the field of culture. Despite the importance of the visual as an element of culture, it is only in the last decade that the visual as a phenomenon of seeing has been a major feature of theoretical and methodological ap...

The circulation of Panji stories throughout Southeast Asia has been studied as a textual phenomenon. These same texts, however, provide evidence of how theatrical forms were important as a source for the dispersal of Panji stories. The textual evidence demonstrates that dance-dramas presenting Panji stories were performed in Majapahit times. These...

The Island of Bali, by Miguel Covarrubias, has remained one of the definitive treatments of the subject since its original publication in 1937. The book’s facility with words is matched by elegance of drawing. The book was also composed in a colonial context, written by a Mexican who was part of a Euro-American group of cosmopolitan intellectuals a...

While the long history of “commerce” in Southeast Asia is well studied, less examination has been made of the histories of capitalism, particularly in terms of the encounters that took place around commodities. This article provides a translation and analysis of a description of Dobo on Aru in 1911. At the time it was a “Klondike”, on what Julia Ma...

In Bali, heritage is more-or-less synonymous with tradition. The popular view of what constitutes Bali’s heritage tends to focus on the village and wider district of Ubud. Through examing at the strategies employed by the lords of Ubud during the middle part of the twentieth century, we can better understand how the image of heritage sites is creat...

This works offers a cross-analysis of the development of tourism in Bali, combining international and intercultural (from Indonesian, French, Australian and English researchers), transdisciplinary and inter-generational research. It questions the capacity of tourism to be a vector of sustainable development, by analyzing its various social, economi...

Over a century of mobility in the pearl-shell industry the Indonesian presence in northern Australia helped to shape a unique multi-ethnic society. What began as a colonial indentured labor trade over the years came to represent a subaltern challenge to that colonial system. As the Indonesians lobbied for equality within Australian society, they we...

In 2010, while presenting a Broome public seminar, the authors were privileged to meet Aboriginal elder, Susan Edgar, and the remarkable community of Indonesian-Aboriginal people who shared their stories of the men who came to north Australia for the pearl-shell industry. The history of pearl-shell began at the time of high imperialism when this ri...

In the early twentieth century pearling masters recruited some 1000 Indonesians yearly, though estimates are made difficult by the use of the generic term "Malay". In 1913 the Federal government thought to shut down the indenture trade, but the 1916 Royal Commission found in favor of Asian recruitment. Both Burns Philp and Dutch KPM steamers facili...

Indonesian labor was drawn from a variety of ethnic and linguistic groups primarily from eastern Indonesia. These maritime peoples had a complex relationship with the sea: as a source of economic sustenance; a means of transport; and as a spiritual connecting feature. These were peoples who embraced the concept of mobility that was integral to the...

At the turn of the twentieth century tightened restrictions in Australia led some pearling masters to move their business to the Netherlands East Indies. In 1904 Queensland's James Clark the Celebes Trading Company (CTC) in order to take out a pearling lease in the Aru Islands. He was later joined by the leading Arab trader Sech Said bin Abdullah B...

Between the 1870s and the 1970s thousands of Indonesians worked in the northern Australian pearl-shell industry. They came to the ports of Broome, Darwin and Thursday Island as indentured laborers. Before 1945 the new arrivals were classified into two broad categories “Koepangers” or “Malays”. The term “Malays”, used as a British racial category, w...

In the 1860s European pearling masters employed Pacific Islanders and Aboriginal peoples as laborers. With allegations of kidnapping, however, protection laws were put in place, forcing them to look for new sources of labor. British explorers had already demonstrated that the Netherlands East Indies was within easy reach of the pearling ports. The...

The entry of Japan into World War II in 1941 and its occupation of Indonesia forced the pearling industry to halt operations. The northern pearling ports were evacuated and Indonesian workers were scattered across Australia. From Broome a number were sent south to Melbourne where they worked for the duration of the war. There they experienced a new...

The lives of Asian indentured workers in Australian pearling ports was subject to strict regulation in an attempt to defend 'White Australia' from the perceived threat of racial intermingling. Prior to White Australia's consolidation in 1901, the idea of colonizing the tropical north using a Southeast Asian pluralist model was seen as a pragmatic s...

Following World War II, the newly independent Indonesian government challenged the supply of Indonesian labor to Australian companies and their access to pearling grounds within Indonesian waters. In 1948 the Chifley government had given its support to Indonesian independence, but by the 1950s the relationship with Liberal Menzies government was st...

Indonesians in postwar Australia faced the threat of deportation under the 1949 Wartime Refugees Removal Act. To avoid this fate, the now aging pearling indents were forced to return to the pearling industry. As the men lobbied to leave the industry their success depended on gaining support from local officials as well as federal Ministers. Moral a...

Based on careful archival research and intimate life stories, the Pearl Frontier offers a subaltern imagining of Australian historical connections with Indonesia through labor migration. This study of maritime mobility demonstrates how, in the colonial quest for valuable pearl-shell, Australians came to rely on the labor of Indonesian islanders, dr...

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 reconstru...

Controversies about the 1965-66 killings of communists in Indonesia have revolved around questions of "how many?" and "who was responsible?" While there is general agreement that at least 500,000 people were killed, public discourse in Indonesia plays down the significance of tile killings by placing the burden of responsibility on the victims. Att...

Since the Bali bombings of 2002 and the rise of political Islam, Indonesia has frequently occupied media headlines. Nevertheless, the history of the fourth largest country on earth remains relatively unknown. Adrian Vickers's book, first published in 2005, traces the history of an island country, comprising some 240 million people, from the colonia...

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 reco...

Although Indonesia has the fourth largest population in the world, its history is still relatively unknown. Adrian Vickers takes the reader on a journey across the social and political landscape of modern Indonesia, starting with the country's origins under the Dutch in the early twentieth-century, and the subsequent anti-colonial revolution which...

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...

Most case studies of nonviolent action have focussed on prominent instances of open resistance to repression, especially successful resistance. Additional insight into the dynamics of nonviolent action can be gained by studying cases when resistance has been less widespread, less visible or less effective. The value of looking at such cases is illu...

The "Asian values" debate preceding the 1997 economic set-backs should be seen not only as a lost opportunity for the critical social sciences, but as a failure of nerve -- even responsibility -- especially among sociologists and anthropologists. The debate was framed not by free intellectuals but by noted ideologists of various state directorates,...

Adrian Vickers reviews five books on violence in the Indonesian state, specifically as it pertains to killings in Bali in the mid-1960s. His analysis of these works reveals that current research casts a different perspective on the "Edenic image" of Bali as well as on the interrelationships existing between the colonial past and the postcolonial pr...

Published exactly 50 years after Gregory Bateson's and Margaret Mead's "Balinese Character" (which still stands as a standard reference on Balinese culture), this study of the Balinese people - a collaboration between a Western psychiatrist with wide experience of Balinese culture and a Western-trained Balinese psychiatrist - finds their basic assu...

L'A.essaie de definir un des aspects de la nature de l'identite culturelle qui reliait la majorite des Royaumes Indonesiens et des tribus avant que l'Indonesie n'existe en tant qu'etat moderne. L'A. etudie la representation symbolique du bateau dans la peinture de Bali et le textile de Lampung comme representative d'un sens de la civilisation dont...

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

The Balinese painter Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai died in 2000, leaving behind one of the few depictions of the Japanese occupation of Bali, an enigmatic work that has only now come to public attention. A 'history painting' that tells us much about Balinese art and its development during the modernist period, it also shows how art that appears to represent...