Indonesia’s National Heroes Day, or Hari Pahlawan is celebrated on November 10 each year. The day commemorates the Battle of Surabaya, which took place on November 10, 1945, during the Indonesian National Revolution. The day honours the heroes who fought for Indonesia’s freedom and independence from colonial forces.
The Battle of Surabaya was against British forces attempting to reoccupy Indonesia on behalf of the Dutch. However, it was a turning point for the Dutch who came to realize that the Republic of Indonesia was a country with the support of the whole population and not just a group of rebels.
K’tut Tantri was born Muriel Stuart Walker, a Scottish American woman who lived in Bali and who wrote the book, Revolt in Paradise. She was best known for her work in support of the Indonesian Republicans when she had a regular radio broadcast from Surabaya during the Indonesian National Revolution. Due to this work she was referred to as ‘Surabaya Sue’ by British and Dutch news correspondents.
Please put Thursday 28 November at 12pm in your calendar, as the date for the book launch of Dangerous Passage at the Australian National Maritime Museum
Please follow the link below to register for this free event.
Ian Burnet is an Australian author who has spent thirty years living, working, and traveling in Indonesia, and his books reflect his fascination with the diverse history of the vast archipelago to the north of Australia. He is the author of seven books related to maritime history, the spice trade, and the Indonesian archipelago, including Spice Islands, East Indies, Archipelago – A Journey Across Indonesia, Where Australia Collides with Asia, The Tasman Map, Joseph Conrad’s Eastern Voyages – Tales of Singapore and an East Borneo River. His new title, Dangerous Passage – A Maritime History of the Torres Strait, offers a fascinating look at the reef-strewn passage between the Australian mainland and Papua New Guinea, which remains the most hazardous of all the major straits in the world. Burnet shares how early navigators such as Torres, Cook, Bligh, Flinders, and King contributed to charting this dangerous passage and sheds light on the evolution of maritime navigation, revealing how this passage was transformed into a crucial shipping corridor.
Ian Burnet adalah seorang penulis asal Australia yang telah menghabiskan tiga puluh tahun tinggal, bekerja, dan berkeliling di Indonesia. Buku-bukunya mencerminkan ketertarikan mendalamnya terhadap sejarah yang beragam dari kepulauan luas di utara Australia ini. Ia adalah penulis tujuh buku yang berkaitan dengan sejarah maritim, perdagangan rempah-rempah, dan kepulauan Indonesia, termasuk Spice Islands, East Indies, Archipelago – A Journey Across Indonesia, Where Australia Collides with Asia, The Tasman Map, serta Joseph Conrad’s Eastern Voyages – Tales of Singapore and an East Borneo River. Judul terbarunya, Dangerous Passage – A Maritime History of the Torres Strait, menawarkan pandangan menarik tentang jalur berkarang yang terletak antara daratan Australia dan Papua Nugini, yang menjadi salah satu selat paling berbahaya di dunia. Burnet membagikan bagaimana para penjelajah awal seperti Torres, Cook, Bligh, Flinders, dan King berkontribusi dalam pemetaan jalur berbahaya ini dan menjelaskan evolusi navigasi maritim, mengungkap bagaimana jalur ini diubah menjadi koridor pengiriman yang penting.
The fact that his first book, Almayer’s Folly, almost immediately met with extraordinary critical acclaim would have certainly started Joseph Conrad thinking about another book. Conrad’s imagination returned to East Borneo, the Berau River, and his meeting there with Carel de Veere, who became his Peter Willems and the main protagonist of An Outcast of the Islands.
The first time myself and Captain Craig dined with Almayer there was Carel de Veere sitting at the table with us in the manner of a skeleton at a feast, obviously shunned by everybody, never addressed by anybody, and for all recognition of his existence getting now and then from Almayer a venomous glance which I observed with great surprise … Didn’t that fellow bring the Arabs into the river!
The Vidar at the port and quay in Macassar, 1883, J.C.Rappard, Antique Maps of Indonesia
Peter Willems obtained employment with a prominent shipping agent in Macassar and to his own surprise, found himself adept at business practices. During his 14 years of service with the Hudig Company he found himself handling Hudig’s most confidential business transactions – chests of opium which were silently transferred from one vessel to another, sensitive negotiations with ruling Sultans, the illegal shipments of arms and gunpowder to both sides of a local power struggle. These transactions required large sums of cash to exchange hands and some of it may have even stayed in Peter Willems hands. He was boastful of his own abilities and experienced that irresistible impulse to impart information that is inseparable from gross ignorance. As Conrad wrote:
There is always some one thing which the ignorant man knows, and that thing is the only thing worth knowing, it fills the ignorant man’s universe. Willems knew all about himself. On the day when, with many misgivings, he ran away from a Dutch East-Indiaman in Semarang Roads, he had commenced that study of himself, of his own ways, of his own abilities, of those fate-compelling qualities of his which led him toward that lucrative position which he now filled. Being of modest and diffident nature, his successes amazed, almost frightened him, and ended as he got over the succeeding shocks of surprise by making him ferociously conceited. He believed in his genius and his knowledge of the world. Others should know of it also; for their own good and his greater glory.
This is the beginning of a moral tale. Willems had departed from the straight and narrow and has made what he describes as a ‘little excursion’ into dishonesty for a cause that is not immediately explained, but as soon as this has achieved its desired effect, then, he is resolved to return to the straight and narrow path. But somehow, we know that this is not going to happen.
Willems dishonesty is discovered, he is fired from his job, and he retreats to the Berau River where he lives as an ‘Outcast of the Islands’.
In A Personal Record, Conrad describes writing the tenth chapter of Almayer’s Folly on board the Adowa in Rouen harbour. The remaining two chapters, which brought his novel to its fatal conclusion, were completed in only three months and on 22May 1894 he sent it off to a publisher. His choice of potential publisher was T. Fisher Unwin, a patron of letters and of considerable reputation. Conrad said that ‘Acceptance, came some three months later, in the first typewritten letter I ever received in my life’. He could scarcely have realised his own good fortune, that a first work, even of originality and merit, would be immediately accepted. An extremely unusual event and had he been more familiar with the world of publishing he would have recognised this as a miracle.
Every miracle needs a miracle worker, and this person was Edward Garnett, a man younger than Conrad and a professional reader who was then advising Fisher Unwin. Garnett immediately recognised the rare quality of Conrad’s work and was particularly intrigued by the identity of this new voice.. The strangeness of the tropical atmosphere, the poetic realism of his romantic story, made him think he was of eastern origin. No doubt he was quite surprised to meet a 38 year old master mariner of Polish origin.
Almayer’s Folly is the story of Kaspar Almayer, a man who betrays his own integrity, because he accepts Tom Lingard’s promise of his inheritance on the condition that he marries his adopted daughter. They then move to an isolated trading post on the Berau River in northeast Kalimantan and it is from this initial mistake that follow all his later woes.
From the opening sentence when Almayer stands on his veranda watching the river swollen with rain, a reader will know they are in the presence of a writer blessed with astonishing ability
One of those drifting trees grounded on the shelving shore, just by the house, and Almayer, neglecting his dream, watched it with languid interest. The tree swung slowly around, amid the hiss and foam of the water, rolling slowly over, raising upward a long denuded branch, like a hand lifted in mute appeal to heaven against the river’s brutal and unnecessary violence. Almayer’s interest in the fate of the tree increased rapidly. He leaned over to see if it cleared the low point below. It did; then he drew back, thinking that now its course was free down to the sea, and he envied the lot of that inanimate thing now growing small and indistinct in the deepening darkness.
All the hallmarks of Conrad’s fiction are stamped on the opening pages. The alienation of the individual, the uncaring brutality of the natural world, the serpentine sentences which begin with close observation and finish with a flourish of dark rhetoric.
The first edition of this book, published in 2019, has been sold-out for some time.
I have published an updated edition in 2024 with a new Forward and Preface. The book is available from the usual online retailers, from the State Library NSW bookshop, on order from your favorite bookshop, or directly from myself via the comment form on this website.
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