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span class="inline inline-left">JP/Dina Indrasafitri “Hey mate, can you get Balinese money out of this?”

David T. Hill, an Australian academic and noted expert on Indonesia, had the question addressed to him in a robust, friendly manner and broad Australian accent in Ngurah Rai International Airport, Bali, recently.

His reply, a somewhat amused “Well, you can get Indonesian rupiah, yes,” can be considered low-key in many ways, especially since he has been encouraging Australia to engage more with Indonesia over the last few decades.

“I thought at some point we would be able to educate Australians that Bali is actually part of Indonesia but we’ve still got a long distance to go. So ‘Hey mate, can you get Balinese money out of this’ was one of the things that made me realize that we have not been very successful in our education,” Hill said, chuckling, during a recent interview with The Jakarta Post.

His view has taken a more optimistic turn now that Australia has published its Australia in the Asian Century white paper, which calls for greater ties with the country’s Asian neighbors, including Indonesia.

As a matter of fact, the White Paper, which was published in October last year, quoted several of Hill’s works, especially concerning the decrease in the number of Australian students learning Indonesian in universities.

For many, the paper is seen as part of Australia coming to grips with its geographical state in the East, by shifting from its Western-centered history and politics.

Hill’s relationship with Indonesia, however, began long before this recent move.

He began traveling to the archipelago in the 1970s — back when one could not simply type “Indonesia” into a search form in the Internet to satisfy one’s curiosity. In his own words, “if you wanted to know about places you headed off and visited them.”

Hill studied in Singapore for a year when he was 18 before going across from Penang to Medan, Aceh and Padang. He then took a boat from Padang to Jakarta and spent around two months traveling around Java. He began to develop an interest in Indonesian literature and media and, in general, spends time in Indonesia every one or two years since then.

As an island hopping hippie backpacker, he encountered a number of challenging situations — some of which made their way in the form of articles published in Indonesia’s Kompas daily.

His favorite is entitled Pengakuan Seorang Hippy (Confessions of a Hippie), an account of three experiences of suffering and death in Indonesia. One involved a baby choking on its mother’s earrings during a trip on a rickety bus in Bali. The emergency forced the bus to stop at a puskesmas (community health center) in Bali.

“…The nurse ran out of the puskesmas, came out to a tree and broke off the branch of a tree and ran back... I never knew what happened to the baby because the bus drove off but I assume that the nurse had come out of the puskesmas because they did not have an instrument they can use to extract the earring from the baby’s throat. I thought this is an indication of the lack of basic medical facilities,” Hill recalled.

“These sorts of things made me think as I traveled around; made me think about what poverty means. What a challenge it is to develop infrastructure, electricity, roads. These sorts of things require commitment and government policies and funding…” Hill said.

Today, he is chair of the Board of Management of the Asia Research Center at Murdoch University in Western Australia. Research-wise, he is working on an academic book about Indonesian political exiles abroad since 1965.

Hill is the founder and director of the Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies (ACICIS), which assists foreign students to study in Indonesian universities.

The ACICIS is commended as a “successful model for in-country learning” in the White Paper.

During his public speaking sessions, Hill usually wears a suit and his clean cut appearance bears little traces of his hippie days.

But he is not the only one who has undergone changes. Indonesia, to him, is “a completely different place now”, thanks to the Internet and other wonders that seems to shrink the world. He mostly sees this tendency in pop culture.

Hill views some of the changes — the outcomes of the 1998 reformation movement, for example — with tinges of disappointment.

 “Of course there are a whole
variety of things that frustrate me about Indonesia. That I wish could’ve been handled differently. But that’s what Indonesian friends of mine think as well. So I don’t think anybody goes through life without being disappointed about things,” he said.

And of course the source of Hill’s frustrations can come from his own country as well, as the “Balinese money” incident demonstrated.

“Something like 900,000 Australians visit Bali… each year. So at one level they are attracted enough to go come…for a holiday. What I suppose I am frustrated about is that I can’t convert it into an interest in actually learning the language of this country they come to visit,” he said.

Nevertheless, Hill seems far from losing his passion. While it is probably less “exotic” now, Indonesia is becoming more interesting in other ways to him.

He cites the increase in religious appearances among Indonesian Muslims and the fact that many high Indonesian officials took their degrees from Australian institutions as recent developments that intrigue him nowadays.

Despite still having disappointing encounters every now and then with Australians with very limited knowledge of Indonesia, after all these decades Hill remains steadfast in his effort to persuade more of his students to spend time in the neighboring archipelago.

And, of course there is the imminent challenge of gaining government support for his cause, even with the publishing of the White Paper.

“Far less attention was paid to the social and cultural benefits of Australia’s relationship with Asia. For me, a key question now is: will the government act appropriately to redress this decline and stimulate greater study of Asian languages, including Indonesia?, Hill commented on the paper.

He fears, moreover, that the White Paper’s outcomes might be lost in the unfolding political process, especially with Australia’s upcoming general election this year.

Hill added that the White Paper is yet to increase the funding for Indonesian language learning.

 “The government has a particular amount of money and they have to decide where they spend it. Competing forces within the community make arguments for different allocations from the budget. I am making arguments that it should be put
into education and a particular kind of education. I don’t know if I will succeed in the argument but I think it’s an important argument to make,” he said.