Bridges of Friendship

Bridges of Friendship unveils the personal ties between Indonesians and Australians in the newly formed Indonesian Republic. This work brings together previously unpublished manuscripts by Betty Feith, who has combined teaching and lecturing with a lifelong involvement in church and humanitarian service, and Kurnianingrat Ali Sastroamijoyo, an educator who worked extensively in English language teaching and training, and who took an active part in the Indonesian Revolution.Feith’s history of the Volunteer Graduate Scheme in Indonesia 1950–1963 provides a bird’s-eye view of the ethos and workings of the Volunteer Graduate Scheme, an initiative under which Australian graduates were employed in the Indonesian civil service. Her nuanced and insightful narrative reflects her intimate involvement in the inception and running of the Scheme.Kurnianingrat’s reminiscences, ‘Other Worlds in the Past’, offer insights into Indonesian social and cultural history at a critical time for the nation, as historian Jean Gelman Taylor observes, at the same time as they chronicle Kurnianingrat’s own experiences and perspective. Kurnianingrat’s memoirs include a fascinating and moving account of daily life in occupied Yogyakarta during the struggle for independence against the Dutch.A common thread in these works is the friendships of Kurnianingrat and Harumani Rudolph-Sudirdjo with Australian volunteer graduates, Betty Feith and Ailsa Thomson Zainuddin. The final section of Bridges of Friendship, containing extracts of correspondence, illustrates the lasting, mutual interests, connections and commitments developed among this circle of friends.

Ann McCarthy was raised in New Zealand, and has a background in archival work at Archives New Zealand and also at the e-Scholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne, where she was a member of the team that worked on the archival records of Diane Elizabeth Barwick, anthropologist, historian and Indigenous rights supporter (available from htm). Ann studied history and English at Victoria University of Wellington, and her Masters thesis, completed at the University of Melbourne under Patricia Grimshaw and Katherine Ellinghaus, was a postcolonial analysis of an early novel by a Native American woman – Cogewea, by Mourning Dove (Okanogan). Ann’s current PhD project, which is informed by the work of philosopher Agnes Heller, explores the emotional households of fictional characters, drawing on two 1940s Australian novels. Ailsa Thomson Zainuddin is a writer and scholar who has specialised in the history of education. Born in Melbourne in 1927, Ailsa studied English and history at Melbourne University, and received her MA for a thesis entitled “The Bulletin and Australian Nationalism”. In 1954, Ailsa travelled to Jakarta under the Volunteer Graduate Scheme, working at the English Language Inspectorate. In 1965 she joined the Faculty of Education, Monash University, where she carried out pioneering work in relation to Southeast Asian history of education, and the history of education for girls and women. Ailsa was awarded a PhD from Monash University in 1983 for her centenary history of Methodist Ladies’ College, Kew, the school she herself attended, and which she maintained an association with for over fifty years. Ailsa’s published works also include A Short History of Indonesia, and an Indonesian cookery book. She retired from Monash in 1992. Ailsa and her husband Zainu’ddin (Minangkabau), whom she married in 1954, have two daughters.

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