The last chapter traced the thinking that emerged around trade through 1946 as both Indians and Republican leaders recognised the potential of Indonesia's rice crop to bring in both textiles and international alliances. In Australia, the battle outlined in Chapter 12 between right- and leftwing unions over the Boycott of Dutch shipping was being waged, with the Australian Government sitting uneasily between the two. After the Battle of Surabaya in November and December 1945, the Dutch increased their military presence on land and tightened their maritime blockade of Republican areas; it is this strategy that Republican leaders hoped the Indian trade would be able to disrupt.

The growing military pressure led Indonesian Republican leaders into negotiations for a political settlement with the Dutch. The result was the Linggadjati Agreement, a political accord concluded on 15 November 1946, that was intended to lead to a ‘United States of Indonesia’ in which the Republic would have only a limited area within a confederation still under the Dutch monarchy. One of the gains that the Linggadjati Agreement promised to the Republic was relaxation of the Dutch blockade, but in March 1947 the Dutch Parliament approved only a truncated form of the agreement. As a result, the Republic rejected it, leaving only uncertainty over future trade.

In Australia, Clarrie Campbell's plans for an active role in the development of trade between Australia and India were crumbling. As recently as 21 May 1943, the Postmaster General had informed the Security Services that Campbell was a man of good character, was not a security risk, and had no association with the Communist Party. But with his part in the Boycott and Campbell's growing association with the CPA unions, he was increasingly coming to the notice of ASIO. They passed on the possibility of Campbell's coming Indian trip to the British Government of India and that trip never eventuated. As the months wore on, Campbell was caught up in an increasingly desperate attempt to defend the seamen as they were confronted with bad nullies upon their arrival in India. He also kept up his involvement with the Indonesians, but it was an uneasy time.

While newspapers in India and Australia were reporting on the same incidents, there were significant differences in how they represented Indonesians, Indians, and Surabaya itself over the course of the conflict. Indian seamen in Australia tried to intervene through the imagery in newspaper photos and films to demonstrate their rational demands, but they were ignored at the time. Indian-owned newspapers in India addressed some of the same themes as the Indian seamen in Australia, eventually identifying and expanding upon at least some of the issues the seamen were trying to raise.

This chapter pays attention to the same Indian-owned, English language newspapers, focusing on the three dailies: the Free Press Journal of Bombay, the Madras-based Hindu, and the Calcutta-based Hindusthan Standard. The Delhi-based Indian Communist Party paper, The People's War, had less access to news of the particular battles and addressed the overall Indonesian campaign for Independence rather than localised struggles. In the three dailies, shifts in the narrative are clearly correlated with specific day-to-day events on the front lines.

As a comparison with the Australian papers, this chapter considers the sources from which these Indian papers gained their copy, the context they gave to the Indonesian conflict, and their reactions to the course of the Battle. Another focal question concerns the meanings embodied in the term ‘extremist’. This term was used commonly in the Australian (and British) media, and its use has persisted in recent British analyses such as the 2014 work by David Marston, in which the term ‘extremist’ is used unproblematically for virtually all Indonesian military opposition to the SEAC force. While the Indian media in 1945 used the word almost as commonly as the Australian and British papers of the time, the Indian-owned press understood it to have very different meanings.

Sources

The Battle of Surabaya took everyone by surprise when it exploded on 28 October. There had been other fighting after the SEAC landings in early October, but Surabaya had appeared to be stable. The initial accounts were from the British military and the Netherlands News Agency, and then from journalists in Batavia associated with the London presses or agencies like Reuters and AAP.

This final chapter reviews what this book has aimed to do differently and suggests some conclusions. There have been a number of histories written in Australia and Indonesia about the momentous events described above. In India, only P.R.S. Mani has published about these events despite the importance of Indian involvement in them. Each of these histories leads to questions about who has been remembered and who has been forgotten in each country. I consider the implications for future histories of the region, before turning to consider the afterlife of the visions that motivated the actors in the 1940s. By 1950 these visions of new worlds beyond borders seemed to have stalled, but they were to re-emerge in later decades. This chapter closes with a sketch of some of those reimaginings.

Beyond Borders has stepped outside the usual frame in two ways: first, by looking at two major, simultaneous events – the Boycott of Dutch shipping in Australia and the Battle of Surabaya – from the perspective of the region; second, exploring this regional view by following the working people whose mobility took them back and forth across this region, making the region itself a lived experience. The soldiers, sailors, and traders in this book, as well as the activists they worked with, were not limited to one place or one affiliation.

Neither the Boycott nor the Battle was an isolated event: both involved networks of people from many different places that had been building for centuries through religions and colonial trade, and that accelerated during World War II due to changes in the technologies of transport and communication, moving people ever more quickly and stories even faster. For these two events, not only the participants but the news itself became part of the story. Accounts and images of the conflicts were cabled around the world and back, selecting, interpreting, and reshaping the stories as they went. These two events interacted with each other: not only did they occur simultaneously and in relatively close proximity, but they were also linked through new forms of media. This ensured that the events in Indonesia would have ramifications in India and in Australia, as well as in the colonising metropoles of Britain and the Netherlands.

As war threatened in the late 1930s, the seamen's campaigns became even more urgent. While Indian merchant seamen needed no reminding of the deaths in the Atlantic during World War I, the British had eventually acknowledged these deaths in 1924 with a 100-foot-high ‘Lascar War Memorial’ in Calcutta dedicated to the memory of the ‘896 merchant seamen from Assam, Bengal and Upper India’ who had died in the war from that port alone. The collaboration between Indian and Chinese seamen's unions at the ILO meeting in 1936 had shown that there was support across racial lines for consolidated action to protect merchant seamen endangered by the Asian Articles in times of war. But what was urgently needed was practical support on the ground, in the port cities where seamen could take political action.

Four maritime disputes in Australia were about similar issues which all reflected the growing pressures of war. They involved first Chinese seamen, then Australian waterside workers in 1937 and 1938, then Indian seamen in 1939 and finally Indonesian seamen in 1942. Each one built on the links created by the earlier ones, and fostered support from Australian unions, even though networks across racial lines had been rare before the war. This chapter describes all four disputes, but the 1939 Indian seamen's strike in eastern Australia is considered in most detail. Security surveillance created an unusually large amount of documentation of this strike, analysis of which provides the best glimpse of the growing, complex networks of support, as well as some of the associated cultural confusion.

It was no accident that maritime disputes were highly visible, receiving much press coverage and government attention. Ports, ships, and merchant seamen played central roles in all trade and most communication in the interwar years. Economic interactions were conducted through the waterfront, where there were many workers because mechanisation was still low; if these workers unionised, they could take powerful collective action. Meanwhile, the ILO was attempting to have seamen's voices heard. In 1936, it had been hoped that the ‘hours of work’ Convention 57 would change the racial disadvantage created by the Asian Articles, but its ratification was slow in coming – and the looming dangers of war brought the racial injustice of fixed inferior wages and conditions more clearly into view.

From the Indian perspective, the events in 1945 looked very different. To realise just how different, we need to think beyond borders.

This chapter traces the Indian view of the early days of the Boycott as they appeared in the Indian-owned press in India, which drew the content of their articles mainly from sources in Britain but also from Australia, where some of those correspondents were Indonesian. The Indian owners and editors of these papers could shape opinion, first, by selecting what to report and how much space to give the available news articles. Second, they took strong editorial stances, which were often very different from the content of news articles. Third, they exercised influence by publishing political cartoons. Indian media had few photographic images in 1945 – implementation of the required technologies was slower in India than in Australia – but political cartoons were used to offer a space for dissent and comment. It was such visual material that gained the attention of non-literate audiences.

The press inside India

There were many newspapers in India that were edited, owned, and printed by Indians. Although they all drew content from international sources, each was shaped by regional affiliations and the interests of its audience. Four English-language newspapers are discussed here – all nationalist to some degree, but varied because of being in different parts of India and having owners with different political affiliations in the 1940s. As discussed in Chapter 1, these newspapers are the Free Press Journal of Bombay (FPJB) from the western coast; the Hindusthan Standard (HS) from the eastern city of Calcutta, the capital of Bengal; The Hindu, based in Madras, on the southeast coast; and The People's War (PW), the Communist Party of India newspaper published in Delhi and aiming to be read throughout India.

It is clear from these newspapers that Indians had little idea of what was happening for Australians. There seems to have been no indication, for example, of the length of time it was taking for Australian troops ‘in the islands’ or released prisoners of war to be returned home. Nor was there any awareness of the wave of strikes and loud political protests in Australia and Britain against the persistence of wartime regulations months after the enemies’ surrender.

May 4, 2014. I am in a dark gymnasium, part of a former school across the street from the Hollandsche Schouwburg. Since the school moved out some time ago, the building has been used as a temporary residence. Today, however, about 50 people are gathered here for the Open Joodse Huizen on national Remembrance Day. Annemiek Gringold, curator of the Jewish Historical Museum, tells us about the history of this location as it relates to the Jewish children who were kept at the Crèche two doors down. Several hundred of these children were rescued and one of the smuggling routes passed through this building. Next to the Crèche was Huize Frank, an elderly home that stood empty in January 1943. The building was taken into use by Walter Suskind as office space and by Virrie Cohen, one of the nurses who took care of the children at the Crèche during the deportations. On the other side of Huize Frank was the Kweekschool, the building we are currently visiting, at that time a training college for schoolteachers, run by Johan van Hulst. As the Creche became too small to accommodate all the children, Cohen asked Van Hulst if he could use one of the classrooms as a dormitory.

At this moment in her presentation, Gringold points to her left in the general direction of this classroom. The audience collectively turns its heads despite the fact that there is nothing to see. Some people keep looking, in vain, as if they expect to find a trace of these events.

Gringold continues her story. The gymnasium dates from 1953 and during the occupation it was a garden through which dozens of Jewish children were smuggled out into hiding. She points out that this route went into the opposite direction of the path that we took going into the room. The children were taken outside through the main entrance of the Kweekschool. The passing of the tram was used as a diversion for the guards who stood in front of the Hollandsche Schouwburg. Further down the street, another member of the resistance pulled the children into a portico. Another tactic was to take a group of children out for a walk, have some of them taken away and upon returning, grabbing some children who had not been outside to make sure that the headcount was correct.

Where the previous chapter dealt with the institutional development of the memorial complex, this chapter traces performances of memory that both attached meaning to and derived meaning from the Hollandsche Schouwburg, beginning as early as 1948. Sites of memory such as the Schouwburg are never simply there but rather produced over time as they are invested with meaning by performances of memory. Such practices have greater impact if they allow the public to appropriate the site through an affective investment, be it a collective and organized commemoration or a private visit. The relationship between site and performance is always reciprocal. If we take, for example, the early commemorations at the doorsteps of the building, we see how, on the one hand, that the structure provided a unique spatial framework for these ceremonies: people assembled at the very spot from which Jews were deported during the occupation. On the other hand, the Hollandsche Schouwburg became a meaningful site because of these commemorations and other performances that could have been held at other locations. It is impossible to speak of a fixed and spatial memory that is inherent to the material building and that precedes performances of memory. Rather, the Hollandsche Schouwburg is a site where the memory of the persecution of the Jews has been and continues to be actively reproduced through collective, individual, official, informal, traditional and innovative practices. These performances cocreated, defined and altered the Hollandsche Schouwburg as an important site of memory. Some of these practices – such as the early commemorations on the doorsteps in the late 1940s – foreshadowed its future purpose as a site of commemoration. Other practices were made possible by the installation of the memorial, in particular early visiting practices. As such, these performances are both related and run parallel to the institutional development of the building as discussed in the previous chapter, challenging, following and at times expediting this process.

In order to better understand the character of the Hollandsche Schouwburg as both a public and Jewish site of memory which was turned into a memorial museum in the 1990s, four topics are addressed: small-scale commemorations; presenting a public memorial; adopting Yom HaShoah; and visiting practices and the installation of a museum exhibition.

The barely legible handwriting projected on the facade of an old theater building, as seen on the cover of this book, demands an effort to be read. The most notable line translates as follows: ‘I have taken cyanide.’ We are looking at an enlarged suicide note. The two visual artists Femke Kempkes and Machteld Aardse used fragments of this letter, stored in the archives of the Jewish Historical Museum, for their installation Vaarwel/Last Words in 2013. They processed the handwritten note and projected it on the Hollandsche Schouwburg (Dutch Theater), a former theater in Amsterdam used for the registration and deportation of at least 46,000 Jews during the German occupation of the Netherlands (1940-1945). The letters on the facade provide only a glimpse of a human life in an extreme situation. They hardly represent the full complexity of its historical moment or give any explanation.

One might wonder how such a fragment leads to a greater understanding of the past. However, Holocaust memory, as all cultural memory, defies the logic of accumulative understanding, as if something was broken into shards that need to be pieced together. Instead, it is generative, produced in the present rather than retrieved from the past. Fragments of a traumatic past remain precisely that: fragmented and partial, part of an ever expanding and changing landscape of objects, sites and media that never leads to a complete and final understanding of the past.

The memory of the Holocaust has its own historiography. Soon after World War II, there was no coherent discourse concerning the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands or abroad that resembles our current view. In the first decades, commemorations and memorials were key in shaping the memory of the war. In the Netherlands, the persecution and victimhood of Jews was overshadowed by narratives of national recuperation. In the young state of Israel, the image of the passive victim was outflanked by that of the active resister, more specifically the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. Only in the 1960s was the voice of Holocaust survivors heard, under the influence of the Eichmann trial, and appeared the first large-scale historical studies that dealt specifically with the persecution of the Jews.