In mid-October 1945, barely two months after the Japanese surrender announcement and the Indonesian proclamation of independence on August 17, the Esperance Bay left Sydney for Jakarta (then Batavia) to repatriate 1416 of the 2856 Indonesians stranded in Australia by the Pacific war. They happened to be virtually all voluntary returnees, mostly seamen from Dutch ships, members of the Netherlands East Indies armed forces, and detainees who had been prisoners held in exile before the war in the notorious Dutch camp at Boven Digoel, north of Merauke in West Papua. But they were due to be repatriated as soon as the war ended in any case, in accordance with the requirements of the ‘White Australia’ Policy.

The story of the return of these exiles, comprehensively researched and engagingly related by Frank Bennett, a former US diplomat now living in Melbourne, provides an illuminating record of how relations between the Australian, Dutch and Indonesian governments developed in those early months of Indonesia’s struggle for independence. ‘Australia was [then] in the process of defining a distinct foreign policy of its own’, he notes,’ and the Esperance Bay incident was part of the evolutionary development of such a policy.’

Because various issues arose, some of them quite minor ones, on which the Chifley government found itself seriously at odds with the Dutch (and sometimes also the British, whose forces had landed in Java and Sumatra to handle the surrender of the Japanese), Australia became directly involved in making decisions about both the exiles and the new Republican government in Indonesia, which crucially influenced the course of Australian policy there from the outset. Bennett points out that the various Australians who became directly involved in negotiations with the Indonesian leaders, MacMahon Ball, Justice Richard Kirby, Tom Critchley and Alfred Brookes were favourably impressed by them, but mostly critical of the stiff-necked stubbornness and arrogance of the Dutch, who even then were trying to re-establish their former pattern of colonial rule.

Chifley and the young Acting Secretary of External Affairs, John Burton, also became increasingly unsympathetic to the Dutch and their policies, although Australia remained committed to de jure recognition of Dutch sovereignty. Bennett makes an interesting point that a comparison of the situation in Indonesia with that in French Indochina shows that the lack of interest in the latter by Mountbatten’s forces (and, politically, by the US) enabled the French to re-establish their rule quickly, which later gave rise to the long and bitter war of liberation there. Conversely, in Indonesia the involvement of the British and Australians - and later the Americans too - made it essential for the Dutch to start negotiating with the Republic of Indonesia almost immediately. So the Australian government was thereby ‘pushed into a direct relationship with the new Republic from its earliest days’ by its experiences with the seamen and refugees, as well as ‘the pressure to get them out of Australia’.

Perhaps we were lucky that our controversial immigration policy had such a serendipitous political outcome! Although the voyage of the Esperance Bay forms the major part of his book, along with the later, less controversial three voyages of HMAS Manoora in 1946-7, Bennett has traced very well the background to the broader story of how the Indonesians came to be in Australia between 1941-45 and what they did here after they heard about the proclamation of Indonesian independence. (Those of us who knew of the parts played by Molly Bondan and her splendid Indonesian husband will be pleased to read of their sensible handling of some politically complex problems in their relations with the Australian authorities.) Old naval men like me will also find a lot of intriguing nuggets of interest in the very detailed story - almost too detailed at times - of the Esperance Bay’s unique problems of transporting an over-crowded boatload of Indonesian men, women and children whom it had promised to deliver to a port under Republican control at a time when neither the Dutch nor the British military authorities in Batavia were at all happy about receiving them anywhere.

My only (minor) complaint about this book is that not enough effort has been put into the job of transforming a good and very detailed Monash University MA thesis into a more attractively readable book. Not that the book is not readable: it is. But it is overburdened with the scholarly apparatus required for a thesis, such as references and footnotes, and it has so much detail that it could easily have been pruned drastically. Short books are generally better books. And a book and a thesis serve different purposes. A graduate student’s concern to satisfy demanding examiners about a thesis should not apply to a book, since any assiduous reader can go to the thesis for further details if they are needed.

Bennett says he hopes his book will help to make this remarkable story better known than it is to today’s young Australians. His conclusion that ‘the story of Australia’s reaction to the Indonesian exiles and their campaign of resistance to the Dutch is an inspiring one’ deserves our respect and appreciation.

Tags: frank c. bennett