JP/Catriona Richards

Charlotte Maramis remembers a Jakarta without malls or skyscrapers, when the main concern in traffic was coming across an unpredictable becak driver.

“People who come to Jakarta for the first time now say ‘oh this needs doing, or this is bad’ and so on.” she says. “I don’t think like that. I think God, 65 years and they’ve achieved all this? It’s wonderful!”

Arriving in Jakarta in 1949, the young girl from Sydney witnessed an extraordinary period in Indonesia’s history, from president Sukarno entering the Presidential Palace for the first time, to the Asia-Africa conference in Bandung, and the early development of the newly independent nation and its capital.

At the age of 83, Maramis has just completed her third book of memoirs on her time spent in Indonesia between 1949 and 1962, launched at Balai Kartini in Jakarta last weekend. The three-part series entitled Echoes relates her experiences as a young bride in the new republic, where she came to live with her husband, a petty officer and independence fighter from North Sulawesi.

Charlotte Reid was only 16 years old when she was introduced to her future husband at a family gathering in Sydney. Ten years her senior, Anton Maramis had come to Australia working on a Dutch fleet, and was stranded in Sydney at the time of the Japanese occupation of Indonesia.

“I fell in love immediately,” she says. “My parents thought I just had a schoolgirl crush on this older man. He apparently did love me but he was scared to make a move because he thought God, that’s just a baby there.”

After two years of courting, the pair decided to marry. However, they were forced to delay their wedding plans for over a year while Anton worked in Singapore for the Indonesian rebel government, earning funds through clandestine trade.

Charlotte’s parents told her that if she could endure waiting for Anton for a full year, they would agree to the union, and would organize a “lovely wedding” for the pair.

“He came back almost a year to the day, so what could they do?” she recalls, laughing.

The wedding went ahead as planned, and Charlotte’s parents were very supportive of their daughter’s marriage.

“They really admired my husband,” Charlotte says. “My whole family really admired him. He was a great man.”

Public support for Indonesian independence among Australia’s trade unions and labor movement was growing at that time. Wharfside workers in Sydney even took action by refusing to load Dutch ships carrying arms to Indonesia that would be used to suppress the independence struggle.

Charlotte and Anton’s love story is one of many to come out of the relationships formed between Indonesians and Australians in Sydney during that era. However, despite the positive ties growing between Australians and their new neighbors at that time, negative stereotypes still persisted in the general community and in politics.

With the White Australia policy still in place, the Australian government supported Dutch efforts to maintain control of their former colony in numerous ways, including the deportation of “illegal” Indonesians living in Australia.

Only four months after Charlotte and Anton celebrated their wedding, Anton was arrested by the Australian police, and detained in Long Bay jail, pending deportation. Eventually, Anton was deported, and Charlotte made the decision to travel alone to Indonesia to be reunited with her husband.

Charlotte recalls the early days of independence fondly.

“In those days, everyone was as one. They’d got their independence, and very few people had money, because they’d been through a war and a revolution. But it was more like, let’s get on with it, and build up our country,” she says.

Charlotte herself became involved in setting up Indonesia’s first English-language newspaper, the Indonesian Observer. Working as a journalist, editor and type-setter, she became a witness to many great events in Indonesia’s history through her work, including the Asia-Africa conference in Bandung in 1955.

Unable to have children due to a bad case of mumps in her early childhood, Charlotte worried that Anton’s family in Manado would not accept her as his bride. However, the family were convinced of Anton’s love for Charlotte, and still regard her as family to this day.

“The Papa even made a speech one day, saying that ‘no matter what happens in our life, she is our daughter’,” Charlotte remembers.

Australian friends still question Charlotte about her life in Indonesia, and how she managed to cope with adjusting to a foreign culture.

“People say: ‘did you really live in Indonesia? Were you really married to an Indonesian?’ But it’s only because people don’t know what it’s like. There’s a lot of ignorance between both these countries,” she explains.

Today Charlotte is the patron of the Australia Indonesia Association, a group focused on building people-to-people relations between the two countries to promote mutual understanding. The group recently hosted an event in Jakarta called Australia Calling, to promote friendship, travel and sharing between the neighboring countries. Charlotte believes that despite differences between the two nations, mutual understanding can be reached via cultural exchange.

“I think now Australia and Indonesia have grown more and more apart,” she says. “We need people-to-people friendly relations, between real people. Sometimes I think politics just gets in the way.”

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