Travels with a Teakwood Desk: Fleeting Memories, Solid Facts

By Alan Smith

On arrival in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1969 with his wife and young daughter, Alan Smith, a twenty-eight-year-old research student, was shaken by the pervasive presence of armed military in the airport, at the same time enchanted by the warm, clove-scented air.

In a captivating retelling of his personal experiences, Alan, turning seventy, begins writing to share his insight into a life full of joy and pain, struggles with sexual identity, and sharing the frustrations of ethnic people and their quest for self-determination. Alan grapples with his memories of his own path through life as he learned to acknowledge and accept his true self. He invites you to share his experience of the people and places he encountered in this life journey and what he learned, close up, about significant global challenges around the issue of self determination of peoples.

Travels with a Teakwood Desk is a story of self-discovery, of love and passion for people and places, personal memories and some facts about self-determination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Aug 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781982291372

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Copyright © 2021 Alan Smith.

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ISBN: 978-1-9822-9136-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-9137-2 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date:   08/05/2021

From Orhan Pamuk’s The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist: Understanding What Happens When We Write and Read Novels, Vintage International, 2011, p.22.

At the heart of the novelist’s craft lies an optimism which thinks that the knowledge we gather from our everyday experience, if given proper form, can become valuable knowledge about reality.

From John Berger’s Here is Where We Meet:

Vintage International, August 2006 pp. 51-53

He meets his mother (long dead) and talks with her about his writing. His mother speaking:

Let’s only look for what has some chance of being achieved! Let a few things be repaired. A few is a lot. One thing repaired changes a thousand others.

So?

The dog down there is on too short a chain. Change it, lengthen it. Then he’ll be able to reach the shade, and he’ll lie down and he’ll stop barking. And the silence will remind the mother she wanted a canary in a cage in the kitchen. And when the canary sings, she’ll do more ironing. And the father’s shoulders in a freshly ironed shirt will ache less when he goes to work. And so when he comes home he will sometimes joke, like he used to, with his teenage daughter. And the daughter will change her mind and decide, just this once, to bring her lover home one evening. And on another evening, the father will propose to the young man that they go fishing together... Who in the wide world knows? Just lengthen the chain.

The dog was still barking.

…

Just write down what you find, she said.

Contents

Acknowledgements

1   Prelude to Indonesia

I Arrival in a strange place

II Jakarta

III The chorus of self-doubt

IV The long Road to Jakarta begins in Perth and continues in Melbourne

V I become a teacher and I meet Beattie

VI The house in Brighton

VII Alice is born

VIII Meanwhile back in Jakarta

IX To East Java

2   Java Daze

I Back to Malang

II Reflections in floodwaters

III Meanwhile, back in Malang

IV Bogged down

V Transformation

VI Bali

3   Australia Interlude

I Back to Australia

II Search for ‘the alternative’

III Things fall apart

IV Changing the Narrative

4   PNG’d from Papua New Guinea

I 1969 comes back to haunt me

II A Little bit of history

III Life in Papua New Guinea

IV Love in Papua New Guinea

V Back to Indonesia ...crossing the border into West Papua

VI Expelled

5   Finding Myself in Thailand…and Burma

I Self-determination

II My own self-determination

III Self-determination of peoples

IV The beginning of transition to yet another life

6   Crossing the Border…again

I Manerplaw

II Meeting the committee

III Further agenda

IV My first ‘Thinking about Politics’ workshop

V The heavenly choir

7   Determining My Own Identity

I Bangkok and Chiang Mai

II Gay Bangkok

III Managing a project

IV Rangoon

V I am in Bengaluru

VI I am in Brisbane (for another PNG encounter)

8   Finally: Back to Australia

I Another return home

II That dream

Acknowledgements

To My mother and father who brought us up to be free spirits.

To my two sisters, for their inspiring strength, passion and determination.

To my three daughters for their love, understanding, encouragement and support.

To Janet, who once said to me: We are all alone, each of us absolutely alone, but from time to time we are able to comfort one another in that sometimes terrifying aloneness.

To Herbert Feith and David Taw, unsurpassed as mentors, colleagues, comrades.

To my good fortune in having lived and worked with wonderful friends and colleagues, in Melbourne and Sydney, in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, in Chiang Mai, Bangkok, Rangoon/Yangon, Taunggyi and Mae Sot.

To my partner of many years, Praphawin Saenkurung for his drawing of my teakwood desk for the cover, and of course for the years of love and companionship.

1

Prelude to Indonesia

Hey Mr. Tambourine Man

Play a song for me

In the jingle jangle morning

I’ll come following you.

From Bob Dylan, Hey Mr. Tambourine Man (extract)

I Arrival in a strange place

J akarta, 1969. I am already a little shaken by the first impression provided by Kemayoran airport, the pervasive presence of armed military-uniformed men and the shambles of the baggage collection area…. but at the same time, I am captivated by the warm, humid, clove scented air! James, a fellow scholar, has come to meet us and take us to the rented house that he and his family have occupied over the past year and which we have agreed to take over. It is in Tanah Tinggi, which roughly translates as ‘high ground’, but turns out to be a poor inner suburb and I am guessing, quite low-lying. After leaving the somewhat busy main road, we enter a tiny lane just wide enough for a car, it is flanked on either side by open concrete drains, they are flanked in turn by tiny single storey row houses. James has met us in I don’t know whose borrowed car and welcomes us into what has been his and is to be our home. Another fellow scholar, Terry, is there also to welcome us. We sit, sweating, in the tiny front room by the one tiny electric fan, the blades of which barely rotate, under a faltering fluorescent light, drinking tea and eating cookies and exchanging the usual pleasantries and gossip of the Jakarta and Jakarta-academia connection. Suddenly there is a developing roar of unimaginable proportions. I sit rooted to my rattan chair, as this booming roar envelops us, expecting the end of the world.

Oh, murmurs James, apologetically, perhaps disturbed by my degree of discomposure, didn’t anyone tell you about the flight-path?

Well, no, we had not been warned that the little house in this little lane in this very poor area lies directly under the flight path of the Kemayoran airport, and not far beyond the end of the runway. One of the evening’s several 707s has just taken off. James quickly reaches for the, as yet un-opened, bottle of Johnny Walker that I had been advised to bring as a gesture, and with that, our Indonesian interlude has commenced.

II Jakarta

Alice, my daughter had been born five years earlier while I was just commencing studying for an MA. There was always an understanding that it would at some stage require a period of field work. In the last months of 1968, somehow a support package emerged – I would do some research in what there was of the Jakarta archives for a professor who was writing something to do with the life of Sukarno, the not so long deposed founding President of Indonesia. After independence, the charismatic and flamboyant Sukarno had led his country into deepening poverty amidst popular delusions of fierce and brave confrontation with an unjust world order, flirting with both sides in the world’s cold war, watching this cold war begin to play out on the political and cultural divides of his country. I had been chosen for this research task because I had been involved already in academic work of this kind, from a distance, watching as in 1965-66 the cold war ripped Indonesia apart. This assignment required me to research the media records concerning Sukarno’s early years, the 1920s and 30s, working in the old National Museum Library in Jakarta. After that, I was hoping to secure some kind of stipend that would allow me to conduct field research in one or more of the provinces for my MA.

It must have been around the time when the ‘field trip package’ emerged, that our second child was conceived. To me, the field trip was always seen as ‘something we would do together, a family encounter with Indonesia’ and far from Beattie’s new pregnancy requiring a change of plan, or at least a delay, I saw it as eminently sensible, after all, Beattie would not be ‘wasting time’ during the pregnancy but instead using the time for gaining a whole new experience in Indonesia. There was also something very romantically attractive – to me -- about having a child born in Indonesia.

And so it was that in early 1969 we set out. Me, my several months pregnant wife Beattie and 5 years old Alice. To me, this felt like what I had been living for. The academic years behind me had been intense; a period of intellectual growth sure, though always anxious that I may be ‘out of my depth’ and that I would be found out as naive and shallow. I was twenty-eight. I had been married six years and had a five-year-old daughter. It had also been a time of deep emotional turmoil, my troubled relationship with Beattie, with my daughter Alice and of course Beattie’s mother, whom I had admired a lot but feared even more. To be in Indonesia at that time seemed predestined, but looking back now it was also, for me, an escape.

III The chorus of self-doubt

I can hear them in my head, like a Greek chorus; I can see them in the background, snickering.

What a prick this guy sounds. His wife would not be ‘wasting time’! Not exactly your reconstructed male!

I think to myself, yes, point taken, but give me a break, this was fifty years ago, just the beginning of the new feminism. I did get into it, and I did seriously try to reconstruct, and sure ‘wasting time’ was a pretty crass way to put it, but the fact is Beattie was kind of beached, no direction, so what I meant was simply that pregnancy was not a great time for her to be launching in a whole new career direction, this would at least be a wonderful new cultural experience at the same time.

This does not silence the chorus in my head. They are demanding that I justify my incorrect thinking.

Explain yourself, you moron, yes it was fifty years ago, but you were already twenty-eight, you hadn’t been born yesterday, but you sound so naïve.

And I am thinking, well I was, I had always joked to myself about it, when I went to work at the ABC, what’s a kid from the suburbs doing in a joint like this? And the chorus of self-doubt continues, relentless. If I am saying Beattie was lost, am I able to say that because I was not? I suppose the truth is, when I look back now, at that time I wasn’t sure who I was, what I was. I can only tell you now, and I am trying as honestly as I can, as honestly as I can bear to be, what I remember, what sticks in my mind, what comes back to me now, so that now I can go on and tell the story that I want to tell.

IV The long Road to Jakarta begins in Perth and continues in Melbourne

Well, I was born in Perth, but got shaken loose from where I belonged when my family migrated from one side of Australia to the other, to Melbourne, me aged fifteen.

The chorus nags at me:

Ironic that, don’t you think, Aborigines were referred to as ‘nomads’ when they so ‘belonged’ to their place. I mean, us identifying more with the houses we build, or more likely buy (and sell!) or rent, the things we own, we are the ones who migrate from place to place – and belong where? Everywhere, or as in my case, maybe not anywhere.

So, suddenly there I was in 1957, a short-sighted, bookish and puny kid of fifteen, pulled out of a sheltered, elite high school in Perth, and dumped in a street-fighting gang of a school in outer Melbourne. I was the pimply ‘little professor’ figure of fun,

The chorus continues to nag…

Did you know you were gay?

Did I? Are you kidding? No, that was unimaginable. But because I was puny and professorish, I had felt at home with some other professorish kids at high school in Perth who were certainly ‘effeminate’. None of those at the new school!

It nags at me,

When did I know I was gay?

Here I am telling about arriving in Jakarta with my young daughter and pregnant wife, and have already acknowledged, that yes, I am a gay man. But when did I know that? No, that’s not really the question, the real question is when did I allow myself to know that. It was years later, certainly not when I met Beattie, got married, went to Jakarta. Let me think. I left school, and found a job, went to night school over two years to finish the university entrance exam. And with the two years lab work behind me at a young age, that secured me what was called a government ‘cadetship’ to go to university and do engineering. The next part is hard for me even now to comprehend. Someone older at work must have recognised something in me…something, what? missing? that led him to suggest to me that this cadetship idea could be really great, it would really allow me to enter into university life to the fullest, it would be enough to let me stay in a college. There it was, this vision of escape from lost in the suburbs into I guess a romantic dream of the real life at university. But the next step came from me, and I don’t know where it came from: the even more romantic possibility of being among the foreign students, the international contingent, the Asian contingent, still in 1960 quite small at Melbourne University, staying at Global College.

Global College was only in its second year when I joined. A men’s international college, with a small group of locals. I shared a room with a young, quiet, rather reserved Chinese boy from Singapore who was also doing engineering, but repeating first year, so extra serious. There was a little group of us who were doing engineering and somehow, I fell in with an Indian crowd. I think it was through Rajiv a post-grad student from Bangalore who was the resident tutor for the engineering students. Rajiv was short, very dark and rather ugly. Well, he had ‘odd features’ that could in no way be thought of as handsome. But those eyes! And he was as gentle in his personality as those eyes and as playful. He became exotic India for me! The exotic that I have loved ever since.

Did I fall in love with him? "No, no, no, unimaginable in 1960 and I would not have dreamed of being gay, and even at 19, I probably hardly knew what that even meant. But whatever it might mean, there was no way that I would have wanted to be known as one of those. We became friends, we were close, I suppose I had a crush on him, Of course, yes, I was in love with him! Does that mean that by then I knew I was gay? No, it doesn’t. If deep inside I felt I was, it was something that I hated and wanted to hide. The word was not yet even there – only ‘homo’ or ‘poofter’. More important, I was suddenly part of a crowd, the Indian engineering crowd. There was Johnny, a kind of liberated Sikh from Penang, tall, handsome, popular with the girls, a flirt. And there was Johnny’s off-sider companion, a Tamil from Johore, who made up our little group. They were also both doing engineering. Later there was Ernest, a Sinhalese… studying English literature. And the two Indians led also to another two Indians, post grad engineering students who had their own rented house not far away from Global College and who always cooked! And being part of this little crowd started me even to fantasise about actually going to India, maybe even trying to go to study there and become an exotic foreign student there. I recall I started to read brochures for Indian universities, I read of Gandhi and Nehru and the ideals of the new post-colonial world. I read Tagore. I began to listen to Indian music and of course I was eating Indian food. And, yes, there was something about Asian men, a beauty that attracted me. I wanted to be like them, to be them, maybe to possess that beauty.

The chorus in my head is celebrating.

It’s all coming out now. Go ahead, tell the story as you remember it.

Well, I discovered a social life, lots of friends, lots of parties, and then came Susan, a short, plump, but very adorable mixed race – Chinese and Indian- girl from Johore Bahru. She was doing first year medicine. I seem to recall both her parents were doctors. Susan and I became quite a number for the second half of that year. No, no, no sex but Susan came home to meet my family who also adored her. She was such a sweet girl. It broke up at the end of the year. She was Catholic. I had grown up with my half-Jewish background, and by the time I hit university, I was agnostic, not hostile to Christianity but also not much inclined to make any concessions to it. Came the end of the year, exam time, Susan made it very clear she was praying for me. I did not reciprocate. I shiver with the embarrassment at such uncompromising foolishness. When results came out, I was almost OK. I passed most of my subjects but not well. I narrowly failed one. But Susan had failed. Of course, it was because I had failed to pray for her. She went home, I am sure she never forgave me… and she never came back from home out of shame.

It became my moment of reckoning; barely passing first year engineering, though I was told I could continue, I chose not. I went home, a bit tail between legs. What to do now, I needed to earn money. I am amazed looking back, trying hard to recognise myself, I applied to the Government Tramways for a job as a conductor. I remember I passed the ‘aptitude test’ i.e., I could work out how much change to give when someone bought a ticket for 1 shilling and 9 pence and offered a two-bob coin. I could distinguish green from red. I was not given a job however, because I could not get to work for the early morning shift, because I lived beyond the end of the tram line and basically had to rely on waiting for the first train. That gave me a bit more time to think, though I was a bit flattened at first, having imagined myself as one of the ‘characters’ to be seen among the conductors on Melbourne trams. Me? A character?

V I become a teacher and I meet Beattie

Well from the Tramways, the next stop was the Education Department, and I got a job teaching junior technical high school maths and science. It was a grim encounter with reality. The poor underbelly of public education in Australia of the time, poor facilities, under-achieving over-age students, bored and untrained and uncommitted teachers, a nightmare that I won’t dwell on, but which lasted a year. I quickly realised, I wanted to go back to the university but on different terms. I went to ask if I could enroll part-time, but this time for a BA. And then it was a question of what I would study. Luckily, I was allowed to enroll initially for a single subject rather than having to put myself down for some set course. After having languished in the giant impersonal lecture halls of engineering, I asked what was the smallest class. And now came a fateful lightning strike…by an amazing stroke of fate, they told me that Indian Studies would be introduced for the first time, I would be only the third person enrolled so far, and when classes began, it turned out I was one among eight. The Professor, newly arrived from Calcutta introduced us to what was for me a scintillating programme of history, art, philosophy, and literature. I was enraptured. Beattie was one of the eight. After the first lecture we went for coffee in the student caf. I was included I don’t know how with Beattie and two of her friends from ‘Arts’. Hard to know how we hit it off. It turned out Beattie had a favourite aunt, her father’s sister, who was married to an Indian journalist and who lived half her life in India.

So, that is how I met Beattie. She lived with her mother and brother in more comfortable suburbia than I was used to and her mother taught English literature at an elite girls’ school and came from a family background that she regarded and talked of as somewhat distinguished.

The chorus resumes.

You didn’t like Beattie’s mother did you?

When I met her, I think, I liked her immensely. She was very motherly and tended to mother everyone who came her way. Generous, and open-hearted and she accepted me into her home but with some obvious reservation, still recovering from having failed to forestall her daughter’s earlier painful affair. (I soon found out that Beattie was just rebounding from what had been an apparently torrid affair with an older man. I gathered he had dumped her and she was a bit lost.) Beattie’s father was a rough, tough, government civil engineer. A less well-matched pair of parents could hardly be imagined.

As Beattie and I became close, I realised that in fact she was deeply troubled, maybe looking back now, clinically depressed. She relied on her mother to keep her going to the university and then relied on the constant company of her friends for talking and joking for hours into the night. It came to be me who often drove her home, where despite the late hour we would be welcomed by her mother, plied with coffee, sherry, red wine, chocolate biscuits, and usually quite demanding ‘talk’. I would then make my way home, but of course had to be at school sharp at nine the next morning. I was only studying the one subject at uni, my Indian Studies, and it was a source of great pleasure and not too demanding in terms of assignments. Somehow, I came to be a bridge socially between my Indian ‘family’ of the previous year and Beattie and her ‘arty’ friends. I think it became quite a wild year, which I lived entirely at the expense of my teaching life which I can honestly say I loathed. Somehow, I got through the year, but determined to find a way out.

The chorus in my head is asking me if this long story is really getting any closer to Jakarta. Is all this necessary? And I am thinking, if I am going to tell the story, as my story, it is. But I will get on with it.

I had a stroke of luck, I found myself offered a traineeship that I had applied for, in a fit of wild optimism, in the ‘Talks Dept" at Radio Australia, which is the overseas service of the government funded ABC. So, I escaped from teaching! And that allowed me to enroll part-time for two subjects, embarking now on Indonesian Studies, which included, like Indian studies, an introduction to history and politics, but also language. This was more demanding, but I loved it. I began to enjoy, probably for the first time, some serious learning. And finally, now, you see, the Indonesia connection.

I was overjoyed but also, I was poor. As Trainee, I was paid rather less than a teacher, but Radio Australia seemed actually rather taken with my interest in Asian Studies and agreed to give me study-time off work. There really was no training, I was just cheap labour, but my colleagues I saw as talented people who had lifestyles that I could identify