This chapter explores the first Australian newspaper coverage of the Boycott in September and October 1945. This coverage offers some suggestion of how, as we saw at the close of the last chapter, the Waterside Workers Federation found it so easy to ignore the role of Indian seamen in the Boycott. A series of powerful stereotypes informed media representations and popular expectations, which shaped how Indians’ role in the Boycott was presented. The next chapter, Chapter 8, considers the views expressed by Indian-owned newspapers in India. Photographs were not common in Indian papers; although photos were more common in the Australian press, there was little visual coverage of the early months of the Boycott – although that changed once the Battle of Surabaya began.

In both countries, the early news about the Boycott was entangled in the news about and attitudes towards the Indonesian Declaration of Independence. In both countries, the journalists who reported on the story and the editors who selected copy and wrote headlines were all themselves influenced by their attitudes towards wider events. In Australia, it was the bitterness towards the Japanese after the long war, as well as disillusionment about Britain and suspicions about the continuation of colonialism, which shaped the newspaper coverage of the Indonesian Declaration and therefore of the Boycott. In India, it was instead anger at the continuation of colonialism despite the end of the war which shaped journalistic writing and editorial selection. In addition, there were grave concerns about the Calcutta trials of the INA survivors captured in Burma and Malaya – instead of reminding the general population about the threat of Japanese invasion, as the British might have hoped these trials would do, in fact the trials fanned anger against Britain for its intransigence in holding on to power over India.

Indonesian Independence in Australia

There was widespread awareness in Australia that Indonesians would push for Independence once the war was over. On 21 June 1945, Tribune, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia, printed the letter of an Australian RAAF airman who had been working with the Javanese ‘somewhere in the South Pacific’.