| Book Review | Labour History, 96 | The History Cooperative

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BOOK REVIEW

*Jan Lingard, Refugees and Rebels: Indonesian Exiles in Wartime Australia, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2008. pp. 312. $39.95 paper.*
On 23 June 1943, a 34-year-old Javanese man by the name of Soeka Soemitro arrived in Brisbane on board a Dutch ship. Guarded by Australian soldiers, he was taken by train to an internment camp in Cowra (New South Wales). He was one of more than 500 political prisoners accommodated in Australia during World War II: men, women and children from the Netherlands East Indies who had been banished by the Dutch colonial authorities to a malaria-infested settlement in West New Guinea, often for many years, and sent to Australia when that settlement was threatened by Japanese forces. In November 1943, Soemitro was released from internment. He moved to Melbourne, where he initially worked for the Indonesian-language newspaper Penjoeloeh. In May 1945, he married an Australian, Gwendoline Westbury, with whom he had a daughter the following year. In May 1947, he had to leave Australia because the Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, insisted that all non-Europeans who had entered Australia during the war return 'home'. His wife and child were not allowed to accompany him.	1
Refugees and Rebels is about people like Soeka Soemitro, who hailed from the Indonesian archipelago, for a variety of reasons ended up in Australia during World War II, and were repatriated in the second half of the 1940s. It is also about Australians like Gwendoline Westbury, who befriended the evacuees and exiles from Southeast Asia and supported those who, like Soemitro, were campaigning for an independent Indonesia.	2
Their story has received comparatively little attention in Australia – Rupert Lockwood's 1975 book Black Armada, Margaret Kartomi's excellent 2002 monograph The Gamelan Digul and Frank Bennett's The Return of the Exiles (2003) notwithstanding. Given the tendentiousness of Lockwood's account and the comparatively narrow focus of Kartomi's and Bennett's work, a book that tells that story is bound to fill a significant gap. Jan Lingard, who carried out exhaustive research in Australian archives, consulted numerous English- and Indonesian-language sources, and conducted oral history interviews both in Indonesia and in Australia, is probably better equipped than anybody else in Australia to tell that story.	. . .

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