The Battle of Surabaya was the most ferocious fighting of Indonesia's war against colonisation. There was wide press coverage of this event in both Australia and India, but the tone and content of the reports diverged markedly. This chapter investigates how the Battle was recorded in the press in Australia, which followed the conflict closely, and considers how it reshaped political and union attitudes to the shipping Boycott through November and into the following months. There were also Indian seamen in Australia, who were participating in the Boycott and trying to intervene in newspapers’ reporting. As most seamen were not literate in English, they relied on images to follow the press coverage – and it was through images – press photographs and later film – that they were to try to make their voices heard.

Chapter 11 looks at the coverage of Surabaya in the English-language press in India, where the part played by Indian troops meant that the Battle was followed even more urgently than any of the concurrent independence conflicts in other places. Australia was mentioned frequently in the Indian coverage, both because of its ongoing Boycott and because Australia was often the source of news about Indonesians’ views on Surabaya, through CENKIM or Australian journalists.

There seems to have been some common ground between the reports in the two countries. Both countries focused their attention on the British – not surprisingly given each had a colonial relationship with Britain and the British were leading SEAC and conducting most of the fighting with the Indonesians. Yet both India and Australia were alert to the attitude of the United States, which had not yet become directly involved in Indo-China or elsewhere in Asia, although its rising anti-communism was evident. Indians, like many colonised people, saw the US role in nurturing the Atlantic Charter as a guarantee that decolonisation movements would be respected. Australians were disillusioned with Britain after Singapore, and had looked on the USA as a crucial ally against the Japanese expansion in the Pacific War. So newspaper reports of both countries kept readers updated on US positions on this conflict even while they focused attention on the British and SEAC.