Indonesia Council Digest - February 2023
Hi folks,
It feels like a long time since our last Monthly Digest. We hope you had a good break over the new year and are looking forward to whatever 2023 has to offer. This year we are bringing you the ICOC in September 2023, and also moving forward with the incorporation process.
Salam,
Natali
iclistdata@gmail.com
What's happening...
We’re partnering with Monash and ACICIS to bring you another information session with BRIN – scheduled for Monday 3 April from 15:00-16:30 AEST (Sydney) / 12:00-13:30 WIB (Jakarta). We will share registration details once available, but keep that time free if you want to hear more from BRIN about how the new ethics / permit / visa process is working out. We will be joined by a few Australian researchers who have successfully navigated the system and have their research visas in hand. It will be great to be able to share these good news stories and get some tips about what (not) to do. If you missed our first info session with BRIN, you can find it here.
Call for papers
The 6th Conference on Human Rights provides a platform for academics, human rights activists and practitioners to explore current human rights issues in Southeast Asia and beyond.
Dates: 25 & 26 October 2023
Venue: Online via Zoom and in person at the University of Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia
The cfp closes 31 March: apply here.
Other cool stuff
Congratulations to Rachel Diprose, Ken Setiawan and Ewa Wojkowska, who have received funding from the Australian Research Council for their Linkage Project on Building Durable Responses to Gender Inequality in Indonesia. It is so exciting to see research on Indonesian being funded!
Indonesia Council Open Conference
Registrations for the ICOC 2023 closed last week. We received 618 (!!) abstracts, which our esteemed Disciplinary Champions are busy sorting through. The conference organisers – Michele Ford at University of Sydney, Zulfan Tadjoeddin at Western Sydney University and myself – will be in touch in early March to advise if your abstract has been accepted. We’ll also be opening registrations then, and will share more information about that in the next Digest.
We’ve set aside some time at the Conference for book launches, so if you’ve published an Indonesia-related book since the last ICOC and would like to launch it, get in touch with the conference organising committee: icoc2023.conference@sydney.edu.au.
Publications
Jacqui Baker and Rus’an Nasrudin published a great article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia on Indonesian police shootings: Is Indonesian Police Violence Excessive? The Dynamics of Police Shootings, 2005–2014. In Indonesia, debates about police use of force occur in the absence of data, with empirical and theoretical consequences for how the problem of police shootings is framed and understood. This article makes a first contribution to addressing that absence by analysing the National Violence Monitoring System dataset for spatial and temporal patterns in police shooting rates across provinces from 2005 to 2014, the nine years prior to the first term of President Joko Widodo. It assesses the causal relationship between police shootings and officer perceptions of threat in the environments where they operated threat. For the period surveyed, it is found that while police shooting rates were comparatively low, police officers had a significant monopoly on firearm-related violence and operated in environments of low perceived threat. No causal relationship is found between police shootings and police perceptions of threat.
Balawyn Jones, Inayatillah and Nursiti have published a new article in the Australian Journal of Asian Law on Islamic criminal law and domestic violence in Indonesia: Using Aceh’s Qanun to Expand Protection for Domestic Violence Victims . As they explain, domestic violence was criminalised by Indonesian Law No 23 of 2004. The Indonesian State Courts (Pengadilan Negeri) have authority to apply the criminal provisions of this Law. However, most victims of domestic violence do not report to the police, so these criminal provisions remain critically underused. Instead, most victims prefer to seek divorce in the Islamic courts (known as the Mahkamah Syariah in Aceh). Although many divorce applications are based on domestic violence, the Mahkamah Syariah rarely engages with these issues when granting divorce. This lack of engagement is largely due to it lacking jurisdiction to apply State criminal law. At present, the State criminal and religious law jurisdictions operate as separate systems, and domestic violence victims fall between the cracks. This article explores the option of making the Islamic criminal law jurisdiction of the Mahkamah Syariah available to victims of domestic violence by enacting domestic violence protections in Qanun (that, is Acehnese local laws) to bridge the gap between the two systems.
Vale
My thanks to David Hill for this obituary of Philip Kitley (1946-2022).
***
Philip Thomas Kitley passed away on 20 June 2022, a generous teacher, a life-long learner, and a passionate promoter of Indonesia. There are few colleagues or friends with whom I have had as long and as diverse a relationship as I had with Philip. I want to remember him publicly and acknowledge my debt to him. Philip helped introduce me to two things, eclectically, that stayed with me through much of my life: Indonesia and the music of Richard Clapton!
After completing his schooling at The Armidale School, NSW, where his father was Anglican chaplain, Philip graduated from University of New England with B.A. (1964), Dip. Ed. (1967) and B. Ed. (1968). He began his teaching life at North Sydney Boys High School, where I was a student.
Mr Kitley was popular, certainly with the senior students, whom he treated with respect and encouragement. I recall, when I was in Fifth Form, he volunteered to help us put together our annual School Revue, and encouraged us with some very entertaining tips on stagecraft and performance.
In January 1972 together with fellow NSBHS teacher Colin Freestone, he led the first Australian student study tour to Indonesia, taking about 20 high school and university students across Java and Bali for a month. It was my in-country initiation into things Indonesian, an inspiring experience that set my feet on a path that was to take me into my professional life for the following decades.
Phil was the kind of teacher who kept a proud eye on his former students’ progress. When I returned to Australia after a ‘gap year’ studying in Singapore he made contact and invited me around to his flat for dinner. With Richard Clapton’s recently released debut album, Prussian Blue, playing all night on his record-player, I had my first taste of what was to be a life-long enjoyment of this Australian singer-songwriter’s work.
I moved to Canberra to the ANU while Philip soon became a Lecturer in Education at the University of New South Wales, moving in 1977 to Toowoomba as Lecturer in Distance Education at what was then the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education (DDIAE).
He always had a broad and eclectic interest and knowledge of Indonesia. I recall in 1978 seeing a beautiful photographic essay on head-wear in Indonesia by him in a no-longer existent quality Australian magazine,Simply Living, consisting of stunning close-ups of Indonesians from all walks of life, captured in their array of head-attire. In letters, he encouraged me to write for the magazine. (I never did.)
In what was a rare move for an academic in 1985 Philip was seconded to the Department of Foreign Affairs as Cultural Attaché in Jakarta for three years. It produced the book Australia di mata Indonesia: kumpulan artikel pers Indonesia 1973 – 1988 [Australia in Indonesian eyes: a collection of Indonesian press articles 1973-1988], which he co-edited with Richard Chauvel and David Reeve who taught Australian Studies at the University of Indonesia.
Philip often chuckled over the fact that the popularity of a particular Dutch brand of light globe meant that he was forever known in Indonesia as ‘Pak Philips’. Following suit, the book’s cover and catalogue entry attributed it to ‘Philips Kitley’. The volume was great material for Australian teachers of Indonesian language and became an essential in many university libraries. Copies even found their way into places like the Indonesian Department of Internal Affairs’ Strategic Policy Board library.
Back teaching in Toowoomba, Phil made contact with me again, alerting me to an Indonesia-related job there (I didn’t get it.) On completing my PhD in 1988, I moved to Perth, eventually settling in to a long and satisfying career at Murdoch University.
To my surprise, it was to Murdoch that Phil turned to seek first his M.A. in Literature and Communication in 1990 and, subsequently, his Ph.D. completed at the Asia Research Centre under the supervision of my research colleague (and occasional co-author) Professor Krishna Sen in 1998.
It was a great pleasure for me to have him in the same town, and to enjoy sharing our interest in Indonesia.
His doctoral studies on Indonesian television presented him with an enormous logistical and personal challenge. Taking study leave from his university and his family in Toowoomba, he spent long periods in Fremantle working zealously, and in Jakarta doing fieldwork intensively, to complete the research and writing as efficiently as possible. Yet he still found time to babysit our infant daughter, and participate fully in the intellectual life of the Asia Research Centre.
Publications flowing from his PhD research, including Television, Nation and Culture in Indonesia (Ohio University Press, 2000) and Television, Regulation and Civil Society in Asia (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) earned him international recognition as a leading scholar in the field. He had a full career of teaching, supervision, publication and academic leadership.
In 2006 he took up the appointment as Chair Professor of Communication and Head, School of Social Science, Media and Communication at the University of Wollongong, where he remained until his retirement in 2011.
Beyond his academic pursuits, Philip always maintained a broad engagement with Indonesian culture. He published onbatik, and during his time in Toowoomba negotiated the purchase of a Balinese Gamelan for the university. Together with his wife Yvonne, he enthusiastically promoted gamelan playing.
During retirement, Philip continued some doctoral supervision and was a volunteer researcher/curator at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, working on the museum’s South-East Asian Textiles collection.
In his later years he left Sydney for a more relaxed lifestyle on a property in Megan near Dorrigo NSW. He is survived by Yvonne, daughter Clare and her family, and son Ben.
David T. Hill
Fremantle
31 January 2023
ACICIS update
Applications are now open for Winter and Semester 2 2023! Eligible students can receive a $3,000 - $7,000 New Colombo Plan grant to study abroad as part of their degree. Applications close 12 March and you can find out more here. If you’re teaching undergraduates this semester, please share this great opportunity with them.
ACICIS has recently welcomed The University of Newcastle into the consortium. The University of Newcastle becomes the 19thmember of ACICIS, joining 16 Australian universities and two international universities. This means that University of Newcastle students will soon be able to join ACICIS short course practicum and semester programs. Both Australian and international universities can apply to become members of the ACICIS consortium. Details about joining the consortium are available on the ACICIS website.