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John Peterson’s passion for old Javanese manuscripts
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Devotion: John Peterson and a staff member of Yayasan Sastra Lestari (Yasri) read an ancient script in Surakarta, Central Java. (JP/Ganug Nugroho Adi)
An Australian scholar shows how the love of ancient manuscripts and history does not recognize borders.
When John Peterson arrived in Indonesia from Australia in 1996, he was a doctoral student of the history and culture of 19th century Java at Monash University, Australia. During this time, he visited Sebelas Maret State University (UNS) in Surakarta to conduct research for his dissertation.
“I needed old manuscripts to complete my dissertation. I was crazy about old texts for a long time and thus got fully engrossed,” said Peterson at the office of Yayasan Sastra Lestari (Yasri), a literary foundation in Banjarsari, Surakarta, Central Java, recently.
Peterson, who was born in Melbourne in 1956, and Supardjo, a lecturer at UNS Surakarta, founded Yasri in 1997. The foundation’s missions are the preservation, transliteration and digitization of manuscripts in Javanese and old Javanese.
Today, Yasri has transliterated over 6,000 texts or around 15 million words of the old documents, mostly comprising Javanese literary manuscripts from Central Java and its nearby regions written during the 19th century and the early 20th century.
“I just feel worried lest the old manuscripts be lost or gone. I think they’re important documents authored by literary men from the Kasunanan Surakarta and Pura Mangkunegara [palaces],” revealed Peterson.
