In late October 1945, the Boycott of Dutch shipping in Australian waters seemed to be holding. There was support from many of the Australian unions and widespread sympathy among the public. Prime Minister Ben Chifley had refused to take a role in SEAC and was tacitly supporting the Boycott. The situation in Indonesia seemed to be static; most news coming to the Australian Government and press was through British military reports from Batavia, and the British were getting most of their views directly from the Dutch. While Indonesian organisations in Australia – such as CENKIM – were beginning to receive more accurate information, the news was still scattered. Foreign Minister Bert Evatt was not following Indonesian events, but instead concentrating on what appeared to him to be the more pressing issues of the peace conference, the formation of the United Nations, and the bargaining with the United States over whose military forces would occupy Japan.

The Battle of Surabaya changed all that.

The first shots were fired on 28 October 1945, and over the next month, Surabaya was the site of brutal fighting and massive bombardments, resulting in thousands of fleeing refugees and many deaths. The Battle came to be a symbol of the whole revolution and the struggle to free Indonesia from Dutch colonialism, but the combatants were Indonesian, British, and Indian.

The united Indonesian rejection of the British ultimatum on 10 November, which lead to a relentless bombardment, is commemorated in Indonesia each year as Heroes Day. The story of the Battle rapidly became mythology, first by Sukarno and then by Suharto to serve their own regimes, and later through the scattered memoirs of Indonesian participants published since the fall of Suharto. We have only one detailed account of how it was seen by Indian troops, through the eyes of P.R.S. Mani. There were many civilians, too: representing their story are fragments of writing, photos, and family stories from T.D. Kundan. It is only with the emerging Indonesian and Chinese writings that it will be able to gain a more complete account of the complex events at Surabaya. While these Indian voices cannot tell the whole story, they do show how a regional perspective developed.