Thriving on a zigzag
life
Back in the 1970s when Australia ‘discovered’ Asia there
were few books to guide newcomers to the Republic.
Texts about the 1965 coup that felled first president
Soekarno were mainly academic. More
relevant was American travel writer Bill Dalton’s Indonesia Handbook and the translated works of Pramoedya Ananta
Toer made more exciting because they’d been banned by second President Soeharto
– though few outsiders could understand why.
Blanche d’Alpuget’s Monkeys
in the Dark and Christopher Koch’s The
Year of Living Dangerously both featured reporters in Jakarta. Koch, surprised by success mused that the
public wanted ‘to see the Australian imagination cross that little bridge into
Asia’.
There was another must-read – Australian journalist Bruce
Grant’s Indonesia, 1964 and revised
in 1996 proving its enduring relevance. Looking
back he describes it as ‘a young man’s book … with a brash and critical tone.’
Although now eclipsed by time, events and Elizabeth Pisani’s
Indonesia Etc,
Grant’s book was once
an essential for any Westerner trying to wrap her or his mind around this
complex, compound nation.
Now Grant, 92, has released his autobiography Subtle Moments. The author is a polymath with the enviable
knack of locating himself at the center of major events as a reporter,
diplomat, academic, novelist and lover during his ‘zigzag life’.
Above all he is an informed prosemaster from a pre-Facebook
time when Australian newspapers demanded excellence and editors debated
viewpoints with their contributors.
Born in Western
Australia Grant won scholarships which took him to university and a world wider
than the wheatbelt where ‘space and heat … the baked earth and lack of rain meant
that growth was sparse and low. The
hills were worn down’.
As an only son he could have inherited the family farm. Instead his inquiring mind lured him into a
world of learning and adventure as a foreign correspondent covering the
Hungarian Uprising and the Suez Crisis, both in 1956.
He worked for The Age
where his elegant style suited the quality Melbourne broadsheet. He found journalism ‘a useful antidote to
daydreaming’ while deadlines helped sharpen his natural skills.
Covering Southeast Asia out of Singapore he became friends
with the late Ananta Toer (they were the same age), and the Indonesian’s
nemesis, journalist Mochtar Lubis.
Later Grant was appointed High Commissioner to India and was
close to the reformist Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam (1972 – 75); the
two men realised their country needed to refocus its interests from Europe to
Asia.
Grant had studied ‘the sardonic, mocking, fatalistic message
of Australian history’ so understood its fears and foibles. As a public intellectual involved in
statecraft he took part in pivotal debates about Australia’s mates and
neighbors.
He cites the joint Australian-Indonesian police co-operation
approach to terrorism after the 2002 Bali bomb as a model to follow rather than
aggressive military action like that taken in Iraq by the US with Australia riding
pillion.
This is a book that will have many important Indonesians rushing
to read because Grant doesn’t shy from details about his complex personal life
– including painful correspondence from his son about remarriage.
After divorcing his
Australian sweetheart Enid Walters he settled with American poet Joan Pennell,
but that relationship became ‘essentially an intellectual commitment to
reforming the world.’
He then wedded Kompas correspondent
Ratih Hardjono – they had worked together on assignment in Croatia. She wrote
another essential volume though this time for Indonesians - The White Tribe of Asia – an analysis of Australian history, politics and culture.
When the marriage started to crumble and his wife turned to
Islam Grant sought advice from Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur). By then Hardjono was running the State
Secretariat and had fallen for a much younger man in the Islamic organization
Nahdlatul Ulama.
After the former fourth president passed away in 2009 Grant
wrote a newspaper obituary disclosing the Indonesian leader had asked for
details of their correspondence to be kept confidential.
Now Grant reveals the intimate contents of this and other
letters: ‘May God bless us together in
finding our different targets in life although with the same aim: To make other
people happy while we ourselves are suffering,’ wrote Gus Dur.
Grant’s fiction includes a trilogy about affairs
between older Australian men and younger Asian women, which start well but end
badly. As academic Alison Broinowski
has noted, ‘the metaphor for the relationship between Australia and Asia is
overt.’
Writes Grant: ‘The novels are hopeful in tone and
neighborly in disposition, but in recognition of reality, none has a happy
ending.’
 |
| (Cartoon from the book of Australian PM Gough Whitlam ‘discovering’ Asia by Indian cartoonist Abu Abraham.) |
In Crossing the
Arafura Sea (2015) the principals are an Australian businessman hoping his
nation will ‘count for something important in its region’ while ‘she is the
daughter of an Indonesian mystic whose secret hope is that she will become the
country's president.
Grant parallels his
autobiography, which he subtexts as Scenes
on a Life’s Journey, with Australia seeking its international role. He concludes his nation, first settled by
Europeans in the late 18th century and only federated in 1901, is ‘still
a kid’ in its relationships with Asia as he said in a recent broadcast.
This is not a stationary list of triumphs and big
names but the restless story of recent times told by an articulate hack still
gripped by the journalist’s three-letter palsy - Why?
Adventurers heading to the Archipelago and concerned
they might be seduced by Indonesia should consult this splendid book before
jumping the next jet to Ngurah Rai.
Subtle
Moments by Bruce Grant Monash University Publishing 2017
(First published in The Jakarta Post 29 May 2017)
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