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.

World War II was experienced very differently in Asia than it was in Europe. There were parallels: both regions suffered enormous brutality and fearful occupations, devastating destruction and mass displacements. Yet there were also many differences: Asia had long-standing European colonial regimes, resulting in ongoing independence movements, and was in conflict with non- European aggressors. While there are many popular media representations of the war in Europe – films, songs, memoirs, and histories that circulate globally – there are relatively few about how the war was experienced in Asia. This has led to only limited recognition of the parallels and differences between the two.

World War II also brought some shared and some different experiences to the three Asian countries considered in this book: India, Indonesia, and Australia. The most important difference was whether the country experienced face-to-face engagements with the Japanese. Indonesia was invaded and occupied; India and Australia were threatened and attacked, but not invaded. Both had troops dying in conflicts with the Japanese. At the same time, India was grappling with the implications of long-term occupation by the British and Australia, with its British-derived settler majority itself divided over the desired attitudes to Britain, vacillated over the future of the region. Powerful feelings were generated in each case, but these varied widely and changed over time.

Though each event had roots in earlier periods, World War II reshaped each of the three countries. The war drastically interfered with what had been slower, longer processes: sometimes destroying them, sometimes accelerating them, sometimes holding them up only to release them with greater energy once the war had formally ended.

This chapter can give no more than glimpses of the complex histories of these three countries, but it aims to identify both the differences and common themes in the events of this time. Perhaps even more important, this chapter points out why the activists in any one country failed to realise just how differently the same events were viewed in other places nearby. This meant that their transnational interactions in the postwar period – even when in solidarity – were distorted by misunderstandings.

The changes brought about by the war in Asia were sometimes felt when people were at home in their own countries, and sometimes when they were outside their homes, serving as soldiers, working as forced labourers, or fleeing as refugees.

This chapter traces the growth of support networks between unions and ethnic groups during the war until the formation of the ISUiA on 4 November 1945. The following two chapters address, first, how the Boycott of Dutch shipping in support of the Indonesian Republic was represented in the Australian media, and second, the perspective of the Indian participants and media.

The social clubs set up in Australia for Indian and Indonesian seamen offered more than a way to pass the time and practise English. It was certainly not only the young Australian volunteers who were ‘do gooders’, as Phyllis Johnson joked. There were also intensely politicised seamen and activists, like the Indonesians who had been imprisoned in Boven Digul, Chinese and Australian activists who opposed the war in China, and Indian members of the Communist Party and unions, who were able to meet in such venues and learn more about each other.

The Chinese Seamen's Union (CSU) had managed to negotiate better wartime conditions for its members than other groups had, largely because of the Chinese Youth League (CYL), a longstanding organisation among Australians of Chinese descent. While many Chinese were heavily involved in the Australian branch of the Kuomintang and the CYL had strong links to the Communist Party, both groups were very active in publicising the war in China and seeking support against the Japanese. The CSU and CYL jointly operated a social club for seamen that drew not only Chinese members but also others, particularly Javanese sailors, a transnational interaction which alarmed the Australian security service. The Indonesian Club also drew seamen from other nationalities, but did so largely along class lines, appealing to petty officers rather than ordinary seamen. It seems that the Indian Seamen's Social Club was more successful in drawing together ordinary seamen from equivalent working-class groups: the Javanese in Indonesia, Muslim seamen who shipped through Bombay and Bengal, and Konkani-speaking Goans. What is particularly important is that this experience brought together people who had not previously been in contact, as the Indian seaman's picnic speech quoted in Chapter 5 demonstrates.

Visions of new worlds –Abdul Rehman, Dasrath Singh

The war in Europe ended with the military defeat and surrender of Germany in May 1945, but the Japanese did not surrender until 15 August after the atomic bomb blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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.

By the end of 1945, the striking Indian seamen believed that their occupations and protests at the KPM offices and Indian High Commission had been very effective. They had followed the fear-mongering press coverage of the Battle of Surabaya, where Indonesians and sometimes Indians were represented as fanatical ‘extremists’ and anyone supporting them dismissed as ‘communists’. In response, they generated powerful images through press photos of the demonstrations and their appearances in the filming of Indonesia Calling!, which they hoped would carry their message across the Left and perhaps internationally. Their protests forced KPM to pay for much of the repatriation process and to promise them back pay to cover the strike. The Indian High Commissioner had also promised support and protection.

Some seamen had been deported very quickly. Abdul Rehman, for example, President of the Union and a high-profile leader of the Boycott, had been shipped out in mid-December 1945, while Mohammed Hanif, the Vice President, was among 135 Indians repatriated on the Mooltan in mid-January. Rehman wanted to see his young family, but he was also eager to return to Australia. He had been crucial in building the confidence of Indian seamen in the ISUiA and knew he still had important work to do.

For the others, repatriation had been promised in the New Year, as was pay for the period of the strike. They had also received promises that no retaliation would be exacted for their stand, which for them meant they would be protected against the power of the nully. They expected that there would be no negative reports on their CDCs and that they would not be discriminated against by either Dutch or British shipping companies in the future.

The December promises seemed to offer some stability, allowing the Union to get on with its core business of trying to get better wages and conditions. Campbell was making plans to travel to India to maintain his contacts with Indian seamen and unions, and expected to be in India for six months from November 1946.

As a group of seamen prepared to leave in early February, they held a dinner in honour of the Australian trade unionists who had worked so closely with them.

Ideas, trade, and empires – including the colonial armies that enforced their power – all drew apparently disparate places together. The flow of ideas had always occurred along trading routes, and intensified as transportation possibilities expanded. Arabic and Indian traders moved cargo around the Indian Ocean for centuries by ship, and after 700 ad their visits fostered the adoption of Islam in the seaports along trading routes. In Southeast Asia, this new religion encountered local ideas and the long influence of Hindu and Buddhist thought. Although Islam became the dominant religion in many places, it had syncretised with more local beliefs. Thus at the same time as it was becoming a global religion, Islam was also diversifying across many cultures and races. The awareness of the Umma, the community of believers, not only spread outwards from Mecca but also returned with the ritual of the Hajj, itself made easier with expanding trade routes and the later cheaper, more rapid steam transport between colonial holdings and the Middle East.

From the sixteenth century, European empires had fostered the expansion of Christianity, so new proselytisers of the Western variants of the Christian faith travelled along the old trading routes, where they met the earlier forms of the faith, established in Southern India by the third century ad. The European missionaries, however, brought new ideas and hierarchies. Their impact accelerated with the nineteenth century introduction of new technologies, such as steam power.

By the early twentieth century, as steam technologies continued to expand the transport of empire, the visions and hopes of socialism also began to spread along trade routes, circulating alongside and often both embedded within and in conflict with the ideas of organised religions. Like Islam, the ideologies of Western Christianity and socialism were carried by the mobile peoples of the trading routes themselves: the labourers, traders, and seamen.

Finally, the rapidity of new modes of transport ensured that where armies were used to enforce imperial control, it was far easier to move colonial troops from their place of origin to more distant colonial holdings, contributing to the mobility of subaltern (non-elite) groups between areas which had not previously been in contact.