*Inside Indonesia is a non-profit endeavour, and is run on an entirely voluntary basis. None of our editors, writers or photographers are paid. We rely on donations to cover our overheads.
Commissioning Editor
Jemma Purdey
Jemma is the current IRIP Board Chair. She joined the IRIP board in 2007 after a stint as guest editor a few years earlier. Her interest in Indonesia came via her passion for human rights causes beginning in the early 1990s and an interest in knowing more about our near neighbours. Jemma has spent extended periods of time travelling, studying and researching in Indonesia. She wrote a PhD on anti-Chinese violence in Indonesia during the last years of the New Order and after reformasi and she is author of From Vienna to Yogyakarta: The life of Herb Feith, UNSW Press, Sydney 2011. Until his sudden death in 2001, Herb Feith was one of Inside Indonesia’s earliest supporters. Jemma is a Fellow at the Australia-Indonesia Centre, and Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University. She is a co-host of the podcast Talking Indonesia.
Members of the Editorial Collective
James Edmonds
James Edmonds is a Ph.D. Candidate at Arizona State University in the Anthropology of Religion tract in the Religious Studies Department. His research is focused on the place of materiality and exchange in the everyday spaces of ethical formation. His dissertation, 'Hunting Baraka: The Spiritual Materiality and the Material Spirituality reconfiguring the Indonesian Islamic Landscape' seeks to show how baraka, as both an actors’ category and a theoretical tool, challenges, evades and redefines Western, Indonesian, and Islamic visions of religion, materiality and existence.
Virginia Hooker
Virginia first visited Indonesia in 1969 to read 19th century Malay manuscripts from the Riau-Lingga islands which recorded local histories of the area. Since then she has moved ever closer to the present day and currently researches Islam in contemporary Indonesia, particularly Islam-themed art. Her publications include, Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia: A Contemporary Sourcebook (2006, 2007) co-edited with Greg Fealy, various articles in Inside Indonesia, and a photo essay in the New Mandala (July 2014). She retired as Professor of Indonesian and Malay, Faculty of Asian Studies, ANU in January 2007 and is now a Visiting Fellow in ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific.
Andy Fuller
Andy Fuller has contributed to Inside Indonesia over recent years as an editor and copyeditor. He edited a special edition on Sport in 2018. Andy is currently a post-doctoral Researcher at Utrecht University, where he is working on religious vigilantism and premanism in Jakarta. He is a co-founder of @reading_sideways_press which publishes books in Indonesian and English.
Elisabeth Kramer
Born to an Indonesian mother and an Australian father, Elisabeth mainly grew up between Jakarta and Sydney. After a 7 year hiatus from Indonesia she returned in 2008, reigniting a passion to learn more about the country and its people. Drawn to the complicated world of political power relations in Indonesia, Elisabeth’s early research focused on corruption: perceptions, practices and the world of political parties. Today, her researches focuses more on how individuals in Indonesian engage with political debates and the ways that networked relationships are created and mobilized to advocate for change. However, she is easily distracted and often finds herself pursuing numerous side projects around environmental and historical events Indonesia. She is currently Deputy Director at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre at the University of Sydney.
Nick Long
Nick's interest in Indonesia was sparked by the texts on his undergraduate anthropology course, and cemented by a visit to the Riau Islands in 2004. He continued to work in Riau for his MPhil and PhD, where he investigated the links between regional autonomy and Malay identity through such prisms as neighbourhood interactions, history-telling, entrepreneurship, notions of 'achievement' and relations with the 'spirit world' (the results have since been published as Being Malay in Indonesia: Histories, Hopes and Citizenship in the Riau Archipelago). He currently works as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.
Anton Lucas
Anton is Treasurer of the IRIP Board. He arrived in Yogyakarta from the University of Hawaii 's East West Center in late 1969 on an Indonesian language semester study programme and it changed his life forever. He wrote a PhD on the independence struggle of 1945 on Java's north coast, and has since taught in Indonesia, in Makassar (1984-85), and in Yogya (1990-92). After Inside Indonesia started in the mid-1980s, he signed up his wife Kadar's extended Yogya family and a Catholic nunnery in Central Java as subscribers. Kadar's family were interrogated by intelligence officers, and the nuns were accused of spreading banned Marxist teachings. Indonesia has changed a lot since then, but the magazine maintains its commitment to social justice, and what is happening at the grass roots level in the largest Muslim country in the world which is Australia's closest neighbour. Anton teaches Asian Studies and Indonesian at Flinders University, and does research on agrarian and environmental issues.
Julian Millie
Julian is professor of Indonesian studies, Faculty of Arts, Monash University. His current project concerns Islamic preaching in West Java. Prior to undertaking this project, Julian completed two other studies on the Islamic culture of Indonesia. He has taught in a number of departments in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, and is a member of the executive committee of the Monash Centre of Southeast Asian Studies.
Laura Noszlopy
Laura first visited Indonesia as a teenager, travelling from Jakarta to Flores and back. Since then, she has studied various aspects of Indonesian culture and society, concentrating on the ethnography of Bali, Indonesian performance, and youth and popular cultures. In addition to her research, she has worked in Indonesia as an editor for the Lontar Foundation, Equinox Publishing and Latitudes magazine. She is currently based at Royal Holloway, University of London and is working on a biography of John Coast.
Blair Palmer
Blair grew up in New Zealand and Canada, and first went to Indonesia in 1994 as a volunteer, spending a year in Papua as a mathematics education advisor. Since then he has spent most of his time in Indonesia, in a variety of roles, from working with local NGOs to research on Indonesian languages, documentary film-making, living in a village in Sulawesi to study migration and social change, policy work on conflict and democratisation, and program management in the climate change sector. Along the way he acquired an MSc in mathematics and a PhD in Social Anthropology. Blair first became involved with Inside Indonesia in 2004, guest-editing a special edition entitled 'From Mataram to Merauke'.
Yatun Sastramidjaja
Yatun Sastramidjaja has been a huge fan of Inside Indonesia since she was an anthropology student at the University of Amsterdam in the 1990s, and so she was delighted to join the editorial team in 2010. Born and raised in the Netherlands, she spent three childhood years in Bandung, after which she has returned to Indonesia almost every year for family visits and later for research. Yatun's research in Indonesia spans a range of topics, from youth cultures, to student movements, heritage and memory cultures, and most recently digitised protest, policing and political manipulation. She is deeply concerned with human rights issues, and constantly amazed by people's resilience and creativity in claiming their rights. Currently Yatun is an assistant professor in anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, and an associate fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.
Dirk Tomsa
Dirk was born and raised in Germany. After visiting Indonesia as a backpacker, he decided to move to Australia and pursue a postgraduate degree in Indonesian studies. A political scientist by background, he wrote his PhD about the Golkar Party at the University of Melbourne and now works as a lecturer in the Politics and International Relations Program at La Trobe University in Melbourne. He visits Indonesia regularly to conduct research on parties, elections and local politics, and, whenever he finds a bit of spare time, to explore what’s left of the country’s magnificent natural heritage.
Gerry van Klinken
Gerry and his partner Helene became avid readers of the magazine when they were living in Salatiga, Central Java in the late 1980s. After both submitting pieces and being thrilled when they were published, Gerry found himself editing the magazine in 1996. After moving to a guest editor system in 2002 he continued to be actively involved in the magazine, first as coordinating editor, and later as a member of the editing committee. Helene and Gerry's own memories of Indonesia include high adventure, back-packing around the archipelago and being shipwrecked at night on a coral reef in a traditional sailing boat! They both want the magazine to be a 'bridge between people, to challenge stereotypes, to highlight movements and individuals who we think symbolise a better tomorrow.'
Elena Williams
Formerly based in Yogyakarta as Resident Director for The Australian Consortium for ‘In-Country’ Indonesian Studies (ACICIS) for many years, Elena Williams called Indonesia home for the better part of the last decade. She first read Inside Indonesia while studying Indonesian at university, and loved the articles that Keith Foulcher used to hand out after language classes. After a life-changing year on ACICIS in 2005, Elena gained her Honours in Indonesian Studies from the University of Sydney. She then worked as a researcher with The University of Sydney, The Australian National University and Oxfam Australia. In 2012, Elena completed her Masters of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development (Gender Studies) from The Australian National University, and subsequently worked with UN Women’s office in Jakarta as their Planning, Research, Monitoring and Evaluation Officer. She is currently undertaking her PhD at the ANU.
Ian Wilson
Ian started learning Indonesian at high school, and during the 1990s spent several years travelling throughout Java and Sumatera studying and later teaching the Indonesian martial art of pencak silat. He wrote his PhD on the cultural history of pencak silat, and worked as a medical interpreter in East Timor. He now teaches politics and development studies and is a research fellow at the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University. He researches and writes about Indonesian politics and society, including gangs and organised crime, religious vigilantism and political corruption. His current research is on the politics of urban planning and infrastructure and its impact on the lives of Jakarta’s poor. He also regularly translates comics and lyrics for Indonesian punk and hardcore bands.
Youth Editorial Team
Annisa R. Beta
Annisa is an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow (2023-2025) and a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Pious Girls (Routledge, 2024) and a co-founder of Anotasi and Jaringan Etnografi Terbuka.
Sofia Jayne
Sofia is a graduate year Bachelor of Communication student from RMIT University, specialising in Journalism and Politics. Her fascination with Indonesia began during her internship with Amnesty International Indonesia in 2023, while on the ACICIS Journalism Professional Practicum in Jakarta. Immersed in dynamic conversations with young journalists and activists, she was inspired by their bravery and determination when challenging oppression. Since returning to Melbourne, she has continued delving deeper into Indonesian politics and human rights issues. As the only Inside Indonesia youth editor based in Australia, her focus is to encourage interest in young Australians about Indonesian affairs. In partnership with her classmate, she has begun producing a podcast to inform Australians about Indonesia and amplify young Indonesian voices, while fostering cross-cultural connections.
Husna Hayati
Husna is an emerging photographer focusing on photojournalism and documentaries. Her work focuses on identity, community, and liberation. It reflects on her experience of being persecuted by her parents because of her identity. Her works were featured at the Jakarta International Photo Festival (2023) and the 25th Suwon International Photo Exhibition (2020). She also participated in the VII Academy L1 Program for Narrative and Documentary Practice for Southeast Asia (2024), and Youth Voices: Democracy Today Workshop and Grants by PannaFoto Institute (2023). Husna remains actively engaged in photography projects, with a vision to preserve queer stories in conservative Indonesia. She dreams of a safer space for everyone, and visual storytelling is her way of advocacy.
Ayom Mratita Purbandani
Ayom is a recent philosophy graduate from Universitas Gadjah Mada, who has a passion for imagining political alternatives. Ayom is a researcher at the Center for Digital Society (CfDS), where she explores the intersections of digital, gender, environmental, and social epistemology. As a recipient of the Toeti Heraty Scholarship 2022, she was appointed coordinator for Toeti Heraty Scholarship at Jurnal Perempuan in 2024. Her future studies will focus on environmental humanities, further solidifying her commitment to exploring the interconnectedness of world-living.
Aulia Sabrini Saragih
Aulia is an undergraduate at Universitas Sumatera Utara (USU) where she is actively involved in the student press organisation BOPM Wacana, frequently covering issues related to students and campus life. In addition to writing, Aulia has a strong interest in photography.
Sarah Wisista
Sarah recently graduated from the Universitas Gadjah Mada where she studied Cultural Anthropology. She writes and researches on topics alongside youth, fan culture, and digital citizenship.
Proofreading & Website Team
Garry Jennings
Garry worked as an ESL/ languages teacher in Newcastle, Australia until 2011. He started to learn Indonesian in the late 1990s in Jogjakarta and at the University of New England in Australia. After his retirement he volunteered as a proofreader for Inside Indonesia and enjoyed three semesters as a guest lecturer in English at Universitas Ahmad Dahlan in Jogjakarta. He has travelled in Sulawesi, Kalimantan, Lombok, Bali and Java. As well as Bahasa Indonesia, he speaks German and Spanish. Currently he proofreads theses for international students, teaches languages at the University of the Third Age and sings in an acapella choir.
Tim Fitzgerald
Tim first joined Inside Indonesia when he was living in Jakarta, working as a copy editor at The Jakarta Post and various local organisations. He has a Bachelor of Arts (Indonesian and Cultural Studies) from the University of Melbourne and a Grad. Dip. in Education from RMIT. Before moving to Indonesia he taught Indonesian and Humanities at high schools and primary schools in Victoria. He started learning Indonesian because he had to; continued to Year 12 because he enjoyed the performance challenge; and then majored in it and moved there because he was, and is, excited about the greater understanding and engagement speaking the language provides for as a visitor and a guest there. Tim also served as a member of the IRIP Board.
Dana Throssell
Dana is a Jakarta-based young professional, whose interest in Indonesia began with her studies at the Australian National University and only grew through her time living in Yogyakarta and Malang. Dana's studies and career to date has focused on the Indonesia-Australia relationship, non-traditional security challenges, and gender and social inclusion. Since graduating, Dana has worked in public policy and programs, volunteered with various youth organisations, and has acted as Vice Chair of the Australia Indonesia Business Council's ACT Chapter.
Social Media Team
Aruna Anderson
Aruna spent the first twelve years of her life in Jakarta. She is now studying politics, philosophy and economics at the Australian National University. Raised by humanitarian activists, she feels strongly about social justice issues and plans to focus her future studies on climate change and human rights.
Past Members
Samantha Adioetomo
Samantha was born and raised in Michigan, USA, and first moved to East Java, Indonesia, in 2010 as a US Peace Corps Volunteer TEFL teacher. After completing graduate studies at Bowling Green State University (Ohio) in cross-cultural and international education in 2014, she returned to East Java as a US Fulbright Program Student Researcher. Currently, she works as a writer/editor in Jakarta. Her research interests include traditional/local knowledge transfer, education policy, and women's studies.
Edward Aspinall
Ed became involved in things Indonesian when he spent a year in Malang, East Java, as a teenager in 1983 (his father was working on an Australian government aid project). Later he studied Indonesian at high school and university. He wrote his PhD on the democratic movement which overthrew the Suharto regime (this was published as a book - Opposing Suharto: Compromise, Resistance and Regime Change in Indonesia - in 2005). Now he researches Indonesian politics at the Australian National University, currently with a focus on the conflict and the peace process in Aceh. Ed served as a longtime member of the IRIP Board and also Coordinating Editor for many, many years.
Emma Baulch
Emma teaches at Monash Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur. She has been learning about, writing about, teaching about and living in Indonesia on and off for the past thirty years. She completed her PhD in politics and is an expert of media and popular culture.
Alexandra Crosby
Alexandra is a lecturer in Interdisciplinary Design Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. She first went to Indonesia in 2000, when she began studying independent art and media initiatives in Yogyakarta as an ACICIS student. Since then she has been reading and contributing to Inside Indonesia. She lived in Yogyakarta as a Visual Arts Officer for the Australian Youth Ambassador for Development program and in Jakarta as part of the project 'Beyond the Factory Walls'. In 2008 she received the Kirk Robson Memorial Award for Leadership in Community Cultural Development for her work connecting artist communities in Java and Australia. In 2013 she completed her PhD on the visual culture of activist communities in Java, focusing on festivals since the end of the New Order. Ali is a former member of the IRIP Board.
Thushara Dibley
Thushara grew up in Yogyakarta and has maintained her links with Indonesia ever since. A major in Indonesian Studies led to an interest in Timor Leste, where she volunteered for a year with a small NGO. She completed a PhD in Indonesian Studies at the University of Sydney, where she researched the relationship between local and international NGOs doing peacebuilding work in Timor Leste and Aceh. Thushara was involved in various capacities with Inside Indonesia including the IRIP Board from 2007-2016.
Michele Ford
Michele became interested in Indonesia when she was studying Engineering and Industrial Relations at the UNSW. In 1990, she took an Indonesian language summer school on a whim. It changed her life. She is married to an Indonesian, and has a house in Tanjung Pinang, as well as a PhD in Indonesian labour relations. When she is not working on Inside Indonesia, she researches Southeast Asian labour movements and directs the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide interdisciplinary centre that brings together the 250 academics at the University of Sydney working in or on Southeast Asia. Michele served as a longtime member of the IRIP Board and also Coordinating Editor for many years.
Keith Foulcher
Keith retired in 2006 after more than 30 years teaching Indonesian language and literature studies at Monash, Flinders and Sydney universities. During that time he found himself (at times) a reluctant participant in Indonesian literary politics because of his interest in oppositional writers and their work during the New Order years. He is now an Honorary Associate of the Department of Indonesian Studies at Sydney University. Keith's involvement with Inside Indonesia spanned almost three decades, as editor, committee member and contributor.
Nik Tan
Nikolas Feith Tan has lived and worked in Indonesia and East Timor and is a PhD fellow in the field of international refugee law. An Australian lawyer admitted to practice, Nikolas is a former officer of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He holds a Master of Law from the University of Copenhagen and Bachelors of Law and Arts (Political Science) from the University of Melbourne.
Adeline Tinessia
Adeline is an International Security Studies Honours student at the Australian National University. She was born in Jakarta and moved to Canberra during high school. She is currently a newsletter editor at AIYA and a social media coordinator at NAILA.
Danau Tanu
Danau was born in Canada to an Indonesian father and Japanese mother, but grew up mainly in Indonesia among other places. She loves maintaining her links to Indonesia and was first introduced to Inside Indonesia after being invited to write an article based on her anthropological research on international schooling in Jakarta. Danau is now an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and is writing a monograph based on her PhD on transnational young people who grow up in several countries and are popularly referred to as 'Third Culture Kids'.
Eve Warburton
Eve Warburton became interested in Indonesia back in high school when her Society and Culture teacher diverged from the standard curriculum and taught a unit on the fall of Suharto. Since then, Eve has spent time studying, working and traveling throughout Indonesia, and has maintained a strong interest in the politics of Australia's nearest neighbour. She has a BA (Languages) (Hons) from the University of Sydney and an MA in Human Rights from Columbia University. Eve completed her highly acclaimed PhD in the Department of Political and Social Change at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on the politics of resource nationalism in Indonesia.
