Memories of a homeland

With mixed feelings, Indisch Dutch Australians still think of Indonesia as home

Njonja Peters

Between 1945 and 1949, around 300,000 Indies-born and Eurasian Dutch relocated from the Netherlands East Indies to the Netherlands as a result of the Japanese Occupation of Java and Sumatra and the Indonesian Revolution. Not only did the Indos (Eurasian Dutch) have to leave members of their Indonesian family behind. Numerous Indies-born Dutch also had to bid farewell to Indonesian and their relatives. For the vast majority of the refugees, the Netherlands was a mythical land rather than an actual place, since few had ever seen it.

Some years after relocating – and mainly in response to the objectionable treatment they received on arrival in the Netherlands – around 30,000 left to go elsewhere. Approximately 20,000 made their way to the USA, while 10,000 chose Australia. But despite their double migration and the traumas that dictated their exile from it they retain an enduring attachment to their country of birth. Little, however, is known about the nature of their ongoing connection with Indonesia.

In 2005, my colleague Dr Sue Summers and I travelled around Australia to collect information, photos and life stories for my research project, ‘Footsteps of the Dutch in Australia’. We found out that hundreds of Indisch Dutch Australians, both Indos and Indies-born Dutch, harboured bitter memories of the war, and felt they had nowhere to go with these experiences. Despite the hardships they had experienced, their connection to their country of birth as ‘homeland’ was mostly expressed in positive terms.

Sense of place

‘Sense of place’ is the emotional relationship between people and their homeland. Documentary maker John Hughes maintains that Australians think and talk a lot about ‘home’ because our personal heritage and sense of identity relate to a place and a history not really our own. This irony is especially relevant to Indisch Dutch Australians. Despite not always being indigenous to it, or only partly so, as previous inhabitants of the Indies (now Indonesia), they nonetheless express strong feelings of connection. For them, a sense of place has come to depend less on physical environment and more on the senses, memories and beliefs that sustain their familiarity with the distant homeland.

The depth of this attachment is clearly articulated in the autobiography of Indo Dutch Australian Andreas Flach (founder of the Indies magazine, Bambu). Writing for his Dutch Eurasian Australian children, in the epilogue Flach records the brutal Japanese Occupation and the violence of the Bersiap period (which marked the start of the Indonesian Revolution) as the darkest episodes in his life. Not only because of the many intense and traumatic experiences he endured but more because a direct consequence was the loss of his beloved country of birth and blood. Andreas has requested that on his death, his ashes be returned and scattered in his ‘motherland’.

Nell van de Graaff, a Totok (Indies–born person of Dutch parents) and now Australian author, describes this enduring bond in her autobiography, We Survived: A Mother’s Story of Japanese Captivity. Concerned with her first visit back to Java, her birthplace, since leaving it 30 years earlier, it confirms that even her double displacement – first to the Netherlands and then Australia – had not erased this bond. Nell’s first strong memories came flooding back when the plane touched down at sunset after a heavy downpour of rain that left the tarmac glistening. As the warmth and humidity generated by the rain enveloped her and the distinctive sounds and the smells of Indonesia rushed in, in a flash she realised how much she had missed all this. She felt emotional, close to tears. Over the next days Nell revelled in Chinese bread and freshly brewed coffee, and the distant calls of street vendors selling sate and other delicacies from their mobile stalls. ‘The sweetness of it all’, she remembers, ‘was almost too much to bear, how I loved this country, I felt I had come home … I sighed and felt blessed.’

Even ambivalent reflections by Indisch Dutch Australians attest to the continuing hold the Indies has on them as the source of their sense of place, of origin. As Willem explained, ‘I have been living in denial for a long time about my formative years in the Netherlands East Indies; however, I know it is part of me, my upbringing, and it just doesn’t disappear. I keep going back for more information and I understand the significance of the part it played and the shaping of the man. I am now proud to be a person with such a complex background.’

Frank expressed similar sentiments about his visit back to Indonesia in 2000, with his wife, to reconnect with his roots on the various islands where had lived and to see the camps where he had been interned. He described this reconnection as both a moving emotional experience and liberating. ‘In Indonesia I felt at home at once, surrounded by all the familiar sights, smells and the landscapes. Until today – and more so in the autumn of my life – I feel increasingly more bonded with things Indisch, especially people and Indisch organisations. I look for them and attend their events regularly and have made many friends at these activities.’ Indeed, sharing the bond is part of what keeps it alive.

Sharing pasts

Indos and Indies-born Dutch Australians validated this bond in the 1980s when they began for the first time to establish social clubs based on their attachment to the former Netherlands East Indies. Those we interviewed explained how at their first meeting with other people from the Indies they immediately felt at home. Everything was familiar – the accent, language, experiences and stories. It felt like they were related. They had the same background, had gone to the same schools, liked the same kind of food, told the same kind of jokes and listened to the same music. Most considered the first meeting a sort of homecoming. As one man pointed out, ‘You know what is so lovely about meeting another Indisch person? They know what I mean when I say pisang, babu or botol tjebok … We don’t have to explain our past to each other. We share our past. That is what makes it so special.’ Those who attend the club functions do so because they enjoy their shared heritage.

The social gatherings in Australia of these ‘other Dutch’ (as Indo/Indies-born Dutch Australians often call themselves) centres on their collective memories of nostalgic imagining and the communicating of ‘Tempo Doeloe’ – the good old times. In Western Australia the Bambu fellowship meets at a local suburban function centre. Here they gather to share experiences and their love of Indonesian food. Dutch from other clubs often also come to partake of the delicious ‘rijst tafel’ they serve and the friendship they find there. The fact that the members meet in a suburban function centre rather than the Neerlandia Dutch Clubhouse is a clear indicator of where Indisch Dutch feel at home and where they do not. Moreover, Bambu patrons are generally younger than Neerlandia Clubhouse regulars. They are closer in age to the migrants who came to Australia as children who we tend to call the second generation.

Untold stories

Indisch Dutch Australians are not only concerned with nostalgia. Their other serious concern is a platform on which to relate their untold wartime experiences.

An important outcome from a letter about our project sent to Indisch Dutch Australians by ‘Stichting Het Gebaar’, the Dutch compensation agency for survivors of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps 1942-1945, was the feeling that their story had never been heard. An amazing one thousand sent us expressions of interest to be involved. Later, when we sent respondents an extended questionnaire, there was an astounding fifty percent return rate. It was not unusual to receive sixty page responses, additional life histories, a range of photographs and historic documents, and supplements to both stories and questionnaires. As one woman commented, ‘After receiving your request regarding my experiences during the war, it was as if the load was lifted from my shoulders. At last someone is interested in what that time was like. I’m 80 now, but those awful happenings are as clear in my mind as yesterday.’

A particularly fraught aspect of these Indisch Dutch wartime stories concerns Australia’s active indifference to their perilous predicament during the Bersiap months. Mary Briggs-Koning, who was among those evacuated from the NEI to join her father in Australia in 1945, recalls, ‘While people around the world celebrated the end of the war, we who had survived [Japanese concentration camps], were now at risk of being killed as we were thrust into a civil war – the Indonesian Nationalist Revolution. Consequently the banning of Dutch ships in Australian ports by the Australian wharf labourers, greatly diminished assistance to provide us (and all Indonesians) with much needed supplies of food, medicines and a means of leaving the country.’

A nostalgic performance at a get-together of Bambu members from New Zealand, Australia and The Netherlands in    Brisbane    Wieneke Coppins

Indisch Dutch who, like Mary Briggs-Koning, were children at the time, remember the Indonesian Revolution as even more frightening than their internment under the Japanese, as the atrocities with which they were then confronted were worse even than those inflicted by the Japanese. Eduard will never forget the horror he felt when his parents told him two children of their friends had been murdered. Both were around Eduard’s age of 13 at the time. The girl was doused in petrol and set alight, the boy hacked to pieces. Around 20 per cent of interned Dutch died. In the period of terror during the Bersiap period, which lasted until early 1946, another 6500 Dutch died and 16,000 went missing are presumed to have met the same fate. In this period most of the Indos were also interned for the first time, but in Republican internment camps for their safety.

Trauma and telling

In Australia, Indisch Dutch Australians have come up against a lack of recognition and care, including appropriate geriatric psychiatric care to help them deal with symptoms of post-traumatic stress that often manifested for the first time in older age. To them, it appeared as if nobody cared about what had happened to them. As one man recalls, ‘We were really starved. To the point that we were bleeding and had beri beri.’ But few Australians know about this suffering. The fact that their traumatic experiences remain largely unacknowledged irks them, and has for some contributed to the intensity of post-traumatic stress symptoms. As another man explains, ‘My doctor tells me that I need to talk about my experiences, but there is nobody to talk to who has a clue about our lives in the Indies!’

For some Indisch Dutch Australians, our study was the catalyst that helped to put them more in touch with their past, including their family histories. For many it also tapped into a growing need to express the past positively and openly. Many are reluctant to see themselves as victims and prefer to be seen as survivors with resilience. The study has also motivated many children of survivors to help their parents to write their story down, with the help of information that is now available online. This process has in turn helped the second generation forge a unique connection to the history of their former homeland.

Indies war victims are part of the collective memory in neither Australia nor the Netherlands. Neither country has acknowledged the fact that they endured world and civil wars and a process of emigration and remigration. In essence, they are a people dispossessed, who lost, not only, their country, their home and all their worldly possessions, but had nowhere to turn with their stories and experiences. The telling of these stories now helps to relieve the trauma. It is another part of ‘coming home’.

Njonja Peters (N.Peters@curtin.edu.au) is the Founding Director of the Curtin’s Migration, Ethnicity, Refugees and Citizenship Research Unit (MERC) and is curator of permanent and travelling museum exhibitions on migration. She is the author of Milk and honey but no gold: postwar migration to Western Australia 1945-1964 (2002), The Dutch down under 1606-2009 (2006) and From tyranny to freedom: Dutch children from the Netherlands East Indies to Fairbridge Farm School 1945-1946 (2009).

This article is part of the Being 'Indo' miniseries

Inside Indonesia 103: Jan-Mar 2011