Is Indonesian really on the way out in Australia? Why?

Global education plays a key role in connecting Indonesians studying abroad and Australians learning about Indonesian language and culture. While navigating cross-cultural challenges, pop culture and social media goes a long way to teach Australians about Indonesia.

As more Australians engage with Indonesian culture, we start to see positive changes. This allows for meaningful connections and enhancing cultural exchange efforts.

Sharyn Davies, Director of the Herb Feith Indonesian Engagement Centre and Associate Professor at Monash University, joins Billy Adison Aditijanto on The Perantau Podcast to talk about the impact of cross-cultural education, transnational identities and social networks, and what it means for Australian-Indonesian ties.

This episode is predominantly delivered in English.

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Transcript

 BILLY: Hey everyone! I’m Billy and welcome back to The Perantau Podcast.

Coming on the podcast today is Sharyn Davies, Director of the Herb Feith Indonesian Engagement Centre and Associate Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University.

Sharyn is recognised internationally as an expert in the field of Indonesian Studies and for her contributions to the study of gender, sexuality, policing, social media, and moral surveillance.

I was honoured to have had the chance to visit her office and have a chat on all things to do with Indonesian education, language, and identity.

In this episode, we talk about the impact of cross-cultural education, transnational identities and social networks, and what it means for Australian-Indonesian ties.

So please welcome, Sharyn Davies.

SHARYN: I like to think of myself as an academic, as someone who recognises that for anything to get done in the world, people have to get on. So we can have a whole lot of knowledge generation, a whole lot of outputs, impacts and metrics, but if people fundamentally do not get on, then everything is so much harder to do.

So what I have spent the last thirty years of my academic career doing is trying to – very specifically – bring Indonesia and Australia closer together by enabling both countries to understand a little bit more about their neighbour and when we understand about each other, we are much less likely to get into geopolitical conflicts. And if something tricky arises, we have a much better skill set to be able to get through that.

So, we see with Australia It has really close allied relationship with the UK with the US with New Zealand. And they are easy relationships because we understand each other very well in terms of those countries and because there is a lot of interaction at a people to people level.

But with Indonesia, there is still a misunderstanding by the majority of Australians and partly that is because our media doesn’t do a good job of covering Indonesia. The only thing it covers are other bad news and even the election recently, most of the news coverage in Australia wasn’t about the fact that Indonesia managed to pull off the largest single day election in history, it was about personal politics and coverage lasted the day of the election and the day after and that was it.

So, first to summarise my academic career it would be about trying to build bridges between Australia and Indonesia with the understanding that the better we understand each other not only the better it is for our relationships for education, for trade, for tourism, but also it just helps us navigate a way forward when inevitable complex might arise.

BILLY: Do you find it ironic though, considering that, as you said, Australia spends most of its time and efforts and building relationship with other global powers on the other side of the world whereas Indonesia, being one of the largest Muslim countries, as well one of the largest island nations in the world, considering it’s one of Australia’s closest neighbours and definitely a regional power, don’t you find it ironic that so relatively little amount of effort and time into building that relationship? Even though that we see some of it now especially you have grassroots, but also on political levels, do you think you can still do more to build that connection?

SHARYN: I don’t find it ironic, I find it perfectly sensical because they look towards countries that speak English and any country that doesn’t speak English, Australia is wary of. And we saw in the AUKUS deal, Australia had an agreement with France about buying submarine,. But now, we have an agreement with the US. and with the UK, and I think there are many things underlying that, but one of them is the fact that Australians –however we define that – as a nation as a majority population have a suspicion of people who do not speak English and we see this through so many policy decisions.

So at the moment we have about four percent of Australian students learning a language other than English and this is because we don’t prioritise learning languages and we think everybody should learn English and so Australia’s reluctance both at the political level and at the population level to engage with Indonesia makes sense when you think about what Australia is in the dominant discourse around um Australia.

I think it’s really sad that we have a neighbour that is right there and that we are not more willing to engage with Indonesia, even if you just thinking about how can I make money in Indonesia. Indonesia is a perfect place to go and do that.

But if you’re thinking more sensitively about how to how does Australia be a good player globally, but specifically also in the Asia Pacific region, there is much more that we could be doing to build those relationships and in saying that you know the Australian government at the moment is doing much more than previous governments at least in the short term previously. The government is doing much more and we have incredible ministers like Penny Wong who actively engages in the region but they are exceptions rather than the rule.

 BILLY: And I just want to touch on the topic of learning languages and all that the topic of education and you know probably just for the listening to this you are an Associate Professor in Indonesian studies at Monash and Director of Herb Beith Indonesian Engagement Centre, where you have been instrumental in enhancing Monash’s engagement with Indonesia, especially with you know the opening of the Indonesia campus in Tangerang.

So, could you talk more on the role of a globalised education and fostering a more interconnected perspective between a) Indonesians studying abroad and b) Australians immersing themselves in Indonesian language and culture from here.

SHARYN: So I think both the Australian and the Indonesian government could do a lot more in encouraging education.

So, you know if we look at the Australian government for instance, they have had some initiatives to get more Australians learning Indonesian. So if you study a language you can reduce your HECS debt, so that’s the amount of fees you pay to go to university. So there are small incentives like that but what the Australian education sector and you know including myself and others in that need to do is provide both career paths for students that learn Indonesian and opportunities to do that.

The Indonesian government also doing a lot more. At a round table on Sunday night with the all of the consul generals from Indonesia based in Australia the ambassador and representatives from Balai Bahasa, which is the Indonesian language groups based in Australia, there was brainstorming about how can we collectively improve the number of Australians learning Indonesian and also the quality of that.

But really to translate that we need industry and businesses to start demanding Indonesian language skills from Australian and at the moment industries and businesses that I speak to think it would be possibly nice for people particularly those working in Indonesia to have Indonesian language skills but the retort is they already have Indonesian who speak great Indonesian so English as a lingua franca will do.

And then I think if we think more about the global stage, Indonesia has just become the tenth language for UNESCO, so recognition of the importance of Indonesian on the global stage and so also making sure that students in countries beyond Australia and Indonesia are learning Indonesian.

So, I’m not even sure now if any universities in the UK offer Indonesian. New Zealand certainly doesn’t, the US is shrinking and so the Indonesian government can play a more proactive role in getting Indonesian on the radar of people globally and I think that will help promote Indonesia’s interest but also lead to better geo-political stability because people just understand each other better.

BILLY: Do you think it’s more effective or feasible in terms of bringing Indonesian teaching to Australia? Or to bring Australians to do in-country learning in Indonesia about the language and culture?

SHARYN: Great question, and we spent nearly 3 hours on Friday night talking about exactly that.

So at the moment, the Indonesian government has an initiative to bring 20 Indonesian language teachers from Indonesia to come to schools in Australia and that’s great, fantastic. Part of the issue is that they are not accredited teachers, so if you want to be accredited as a teacher in Australia, you need to do courses here to get to get that accreditation. The Indonesian language teachers coming over do not have that, so they can just be assistants. So if some way can be worked out that Indonesian teachers can fast track accreditation to be able to teach and have some ownership of their courses that would be great.

The other issue of course is that the teaching style in Indonesia and Australia tend to be quite different and so students here expect a different style of teaching. So what might be common in Indonesian language instruction for someone to maybe instruct and encourage students to learn more by road would not necessarily be the best way for student here to learn where they used to a more interactive egalitarian system where you know we question the teacher for instance.

So it may be better for Australians to go to Indonesia to get up-skilled in the language and come back, or to be up-skilling Indonesian teachers in pedagogy and methodology around teaching so that they can come here. Maybe we need both of those.

BILLY: There are a lot of existing programs like that. One of the programs I remember for Australians going to Indonesia for in-country learning ACICIS (Australian Consortium for ‘In-Country’ Indonesian Studies). I think I met a few of those when interning at – I won’t say the name – but while at a media outlet in Indonesia. And based on your own observations, how effective has that been so far?

SHARYN: ACICIS are amazing, they are doing incredible, incredible work and they are up against the barriers that all of us are up against and that is both providing pathways to have students come in who can then go on and be teachers.

So, I think Monash last year there were very few students who graduated with Bachelor of Education specialising in Indonesian. So universities are not producing enough teachers and that means that high schools and primary schools therefore have to cut their Indonesian language program. So then they are not studying at a high school or primary school, they’re not coming through to university and then this very cyclical problem.

So ACICIS are doing amazing stuff, but we need to support them to ensure we have more teachers that can go on to do the programs that ACICIS runs.

BILLY: Based on what I understand so far, it seems like the most realistic expectation would be for the Indonesian government to play a bigger part in terms of building their own identity, in terms of making it a global language, and then it could be more top-down approach from the Australian government because then they have a more tangible incentive to introduce more comprehensive educational structures right?

So now I want to talk about the more contemporary world and the more digital world and the role that social media plays in teaching these kind of things. Because I saw, I think you wrote an article about how we can support Indonesian netizens to play a more constructive role in terms of language teaching, language learning.

So I wanna ask about what have you found so far in terms of in Indonesians in Indonesia, Australians in Australia connecting through social media, connecting through polymedia practices and how do they you know build this transnational identity if you will?

SHARYN: I think this is one of the keys, one of the untapped keys of motivating and inspiring Australian students to take up Indonesian, and to give them more exciting and dynamic ways of learning the language. So, I literally just come from my first year Indonesian class and I showed some clips from something from YouTube, something on another social media platform uh that students can watch and found really funny and entertaining and so the advantages of using social media content are that you know my students in this class they’re all eighteen can relate to that content. It’s entertaining and therefore they captivated and focused on it and it’s also teaching language as it’s used.

So, you know our content is quite formal, using for instance ‘Anda‘ for you but the various ways of uh using you and the social media content of often uses a lot of the slang that the students are going to be more likely to encounter when they go to Indonesia rather than the formal aspect.

So I think it’s it’s really good for students so that it captivates their interest and secondly, there’s lessons to be learned from Korean for instance. So not that many years ago, Korean wasn’t even taught often uh at university and now it’s the second most popular language to study and K-pop has a lot to do with that because students can see K-pop uh social media content and they get excited about that and want to learn more about the language in the country.

So I think promoting social media content that’s coming out of Indonesia can help inspire students to actually learn the language but also inspire new students to take up the language to learn about the country.

BILLY: Do you find anything noticeable in terms of the differences between teaching 17-18 year-old Australians, with say, an older demographic of Australians in their later 20s or 30s?

Do you find a difference of the methodology in terms of the resources that you would need, that they would consume. What is it that drives them in terms of learning?

SHARYN: I think someone who is very strict on pedagogy would give you an answer that says yes, that you need to provide content for primary school kids differently to university kids differently, again to if you are teaching DFAT or defence and you are teaching people in their thirties for instance.

But I think for me, and it sounds a little bit simplistic, but for me it works well that we all learn a mother tongue and we learn that through various ways that are fun, engaging, that is simple, easy to grasp and so I think I like to take that kind of thinking and then in the sense it really doesn’t matter if I were to be teaching primary school students or people who are much more advanced with their career.

The key for me is to make students wanna be in the class and that is the same across all of those age groups they want engaging material that speaks to them, that’s entertaining, that’s fun, that there’s different ways of learning so it’s not just sitting down so I always make sure we have lots of games, lots of standing up, lots of kind of little competitions and and prizes that gets the students moving, as well as kind of thinking about things.

So sure the content would be different if I was teaching class to Defense people in Canberra than if I was teaching primary school kids, you know the content would be something that they could relate to but I think the underlying principle of making a fun, engaging, and stuff that they can grasp carries across that whole spectrum.

BILLY: I think it’s really interesting when you talk about language learning for second generation migrants, where they’ve been born and raised here, and I want to talk about transnational identities. In the more globalised world that we are in today, you have different you have a lot of different and diverse set of social groups, demographics.

If we’re talking about Indonesians here in Australia, you have groups like international students which are generally more short-term and they have stronger linkages to Indonesian ties to people back home, they are still more Indonesian than anything else. Most of the time.

But then on the other end of the spectrum you have, Indonesian families who have migrated here for, you have second generation migrants born and raised here where the mother tongue is English in uh in most cases.

So in terms of you know that kind of identity, how do you see these different groups navigating and shaping their identities in a globalised educational landscape?

SHARYN: So, interestingly, in my classes. quite a few students of em em mixed heritage and in one class in particular em for the students all women uh their moms are Indonesian and their dad’s white Australian. They didn’t know each other before the class because they’re from like engineering and computing and medicine and education so they didn’t know each other and they just happened – I put them randomly in starting one of our activities uh and then that they all learn that their moms were Indonesian and so I think for them they they’ve been raised not as Indonesian but as you know, Australians of Indonesian descent. But also without language.

And I think you know parents are always trying to do their best for their kids and for a long time that has been English is the language so let’s just focus on your English and make sure your English gets really good because that’s what’s gonna get you ahead.

And so lot of kids from different backgrounds don’t necessarily speak the language of whichever parent migrated to hear but then what happens is uh of these kids get to a certain age and they want to learn about their heritage and so we have students who are coming back now without language schools but you know have family and those connections and for them they have realised that language is actually really important part of their heritage and so they wanting to learn that uh now, so I think that connect but sometimes happens different ages.

At least based on what you’ve seen in a class setting or in a social setting. How how do you know mixed heritage babies? How how do they interact with their identities in terms of learning more about themselves they usually mostly family you know, is it asking about their family heritage when when they become older or like you said sharing experiences between people of similar backgrounds or do you find it or do you find it that it is more helpful for them to connect with international students and anyway so that they can learn more about language you know social media is effective in terms of their identity building.

I think probably there is just such a vast array of different experiences so if your mom is from Indonesia and marries into a a non- Indonesian family in Australia, you know, if they’re in which is where I’m from Probably unlikely there will be a big diaspora of people so you you grow up without that kind of connection whereas you know if you’re in Melbourne or Darwin you might much more easily have that connection.

One of the really exciting thing is when these young women got together they could start sharing their different stories and immediately have that bond even though their mom are from different parts of Indonesia and their experiences have been very uh different in Australia, there’s something about that heritage that just connects em immediately and so I think everyone’s experience is very different and looking for multiple ways to uh make that connection is is quite important, I think probably on the podcast. Why why is it that you choose to be you know you have sometimes you have that you know

about you know about their identity culture. So. Why you like what what is it that has drawn to you in the past that you chosen to spend decades just working on you know teaching Indonesian, teaching about the culture being involved in the space.

uh So when I was eighteen, I was a rotary exchange student to the US and we all of the rotary exchange students from across the world who were based in the US went on this three week bus trip em from New York to um LA which was pretty epic and I remember standing out of the bus and two people were talking to a third person and they were saying that from Indonesia and I remember where the heck is that em and then they were explaining to this other person that it’s a country near Australia and I was like it’s not I would have heard of it if you know there’s a country near em Australia.

So that was the first time I had you know thoughts had mentioned I think of Indonesia and as soon as I had that conversation, I forgotten about it and and you know, have barely remembered that until you just asked me now uh what was my thinking about Indonesia. So at eighteen that was my thinking there was some country apparently em near Australia called Indonesia didn’t know anything else about it and then I wanted to do a language at university and Indonesian was the only language on offer em and then the teacher pulled down you know this big old map that was at the front and pointed to where Indonesia was and I was like huh!

This is actually near Australia. I never heard about this. And I think my ignorance that made me em I have to learn, I have to learn a bit more. em and then of course the same with everybody who who engages with Indonesia the people that you just fall in love with and and becomes a bit addictive, you just wanna go back to the absolute chaos and

that is Indonesia because along with that chaos and just randomness it’s just exciting and wonderful to be there. So I think that was the the start of the journey and and now thirty something years later still.

Sulawesi. I called my parents at the six month mark from a like down the road and like for two minutes because the money is clicking over and it’s really really expensive. I don’t think my parents really had an idea where I was. um I think, you know Indonesia with something somewhere north but you know, what what more do we know about that?

So, I guess that was a blessing in that em they weren’t too worried because I was there in nineteen ninety-eight, nineteen ninety-nine em

I like this while I was in then I had to get evacuated the embassy a bit of a evacuation of Australian citizens to some place apparent safety so there was a lot of unrest so I think it was quite good because know much about what was happening.

I think two things, I think one something that has always stayed with me is that people can get quite scared of travelling and particularly you know for young women I I first time I went to Indonesia nineteen em I think they can get quite worried about young women particularly travelling on their own full stop and so I think I had a bit of that like can I travel on my own but The first memorable thing is that yes, people will absolutely help you, help you out and it’s ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent safe and you know ninety-nine point nine nine percent of people are wonderful and really helpful em and just how generous people were like I would.

Be somewhere doing an interview I was a bit too late to go home and the family just be like ah you know you can have this sp bedroom the kids can move in here or you can share it with you know the the young women of the house, you can go in there and so people would just open you know their house and and the dinner table and everything to be so welcoming so I’ve never felt scared at all being in Indonesia travelling you know em on my own so, so I think that’s definitely The first thing and the second thing I think is just how important relationships are like once you have personal connection with the country.

You can see something terrible on the news but you know that that’s one terrible thing that doesn’t define the whole country and I think still in Australia can’t because something about Indonesia and assume that that’s the whole country because they don’t have substantial connection that will be the second value.

Oh, absolutely, absolutely and I remember a different time in Indonesia I had to not gonna evacuated this time but go and stay with um there was an expatriate family because we will need which also had a whole bunch of right I so Australian white Australian couple. in this big house with their made and and you know, I’ve been previously staying with the host family who had nothing and so I had to go for a week to this Australian.

place and I arrived em and I remember the the the woman em I was just before dinner and she said ah I’m sorry, we don’t have anything for dinner for you. I just bought two pieces of steak. Like for me and my husband we don’t have anything for you and I just thought you are so rich and you have so much food and you’re telling me you can’t go half a steak so I can eat something and I’ve just spend most of the last year living with people who can’t even afford a bowl of rice and would share that bowl of rice.

BILLY: Do you think that sort of mentality has persisted until now?

the hospitality in Indonesia. Absolutely, absolutely, yeah, I’m always blown away em by em Indonesia. I mean I can go somewhere and someone will say oh come and stay and sometimes I need to for whatever reason and it could be literally sharing a bedroom but people will find space for you and they will accommodate for you and you come back to Australia and you know people are like oh sorry, we’ve only got four bedrooms, we can’t fit you in you know because either they think you need a whole bedroom on your own or you know it’s just different em.

different, different hospitality expectations I think in Indonesia my experience has been. always accomodate you and always beat you. And in Australia.

Do you think that sort of hospital hospitality is reflected in the language because you know whenever I talk about language, I see it as well language is a window to someone else’s culture, right?

It’s really reflect someone’s way of thinking how they see the world and how they feel about the world so do you think the Indonesian language reflects quite a bit.

It might do I mean I hear that you know a greeting in Indonesia is like you know have you eaten you know

that show some kind of concern about whether people whereas you know if you’re speaking English in Australia, that’s not really that’s not really not really a thing.

I don’t know it’s an interesting question. Certainly more inclusive of gender for sure, you know we have in Indonesia so it doesn’t have to be exclusionary of things whereas English not as bad as French but you know it’s gendered in that so you could argue that makes it more inclusive em I always find like you know I can do assalamualaikum as aing and people are very receptive to that I don’t have to be.

Muslim to say that I can, I can just say that but I think maybe in Australia, you wouldn’t I don’t think you would use religious greetings unless that whole community the same religion whereas in Indonesia I find you can you know use all of that, so I think that again would be more inclusive that religion is much more inclusive and I think um I found that you know because I would you know majority Muslim people, I’ve been invited to mosque and you know I find that incredibly inclusive and I don’t know other I don’t know so I I generally find Indonesia very inclusive in ways that I think people in Australia would be em not necessarily aware of them perception might be that you couldn’t go into a mosque and you couldn’t join in the prayer and people you know wouldn’t take the time to teach you things whereas in my experience they have been with no expectation that I would become Muslim just they sharing part of their culture and belief system.

So yeah, I think that’s examples of of um incredible inclusiveness.

take a look at the language you know you have gotong royong whereas you know English there aren’t exactly that and it goes to reflect that sort of community where everyone is just being to each other you know working as a community and if you take language English to be individual

you know that in Indonesia and and I’m always struck by em Two things actually well, lots of things but two things I’ll mention one is lots of rombongan, lots of groups who all wear the same shirt or something so they can be easily identified as part of this communal group and the other thing which Monash needs to do is come up with some kind of finger sign so every photo we have, you know everyone has to pose in a particular way and then we at Monash don’t have a something.

So again that shows that the whole is much more important than the individual and I think that’s a it’s a stereotype but I think in general that is true that Indonesia is much more em collective I it would be very rare I think for a young Indonesian woman to travel the world on her own for instance I you know, have some great friends who have done exactly that is Indonesian women but that would be you know pretty out there whereas you know other other cultures it’s not so exceptional.

And I think it’s interesting that you know you don’t find that sort of uniformity in terms of celebrating culture. I guess you know sort of

all of that You know we see resonances of that particularly more so in the US but in Australia, you know even if you are committed green or labour or liberal or whoever em you know there’s not like a an informal uniform that you wear to to show that you belong to that there might be t-shirts or something around that but not on the same scale em in Indonesia where your uh your identity is part of absolutely something bigger than just you.

Whereas You know in Australia. at the national level at least is you know individuals who can represent things broader than just themselves but you know the individual is, is kind of the key as opposed to Indonesia where the collective is much more important.

I think there is, there is so many travelers nothing more exciting another like you know the and just you immediately have a whole lot of stuff in common and what I quite like about Australia and New Zealand is that travelling you know if there’s only one Kiwi then they become part of the group or there is only one become part of the part of the Kiwi group.

um I think it’s great to be you know travel and I mentioned when I was an exchange student in the US like the that trip we still. you know in touch because there is something about growing up in a particular place and then going overseas where everything is strange and foreign and finding someone who knows some of the same in jokes and knows where you want to find particular food so I think there’s something really endearing about that and I suspect also for communities that um May together maybe but I I mean you never hear about a little Australia.

you know it’s probably part of London that have more Australian than others or maybe a part of New York whether the Aussies might gather but I think Australians are probably quite good at at moving to other countries and and you know meeting meeting more broadly em em so I like to think that Australians are quite good at at getting together with other Aussies when they are overseas but also you know the reasons for moving tend to be maybe work so that you might be the only Australian or uh you know, following a partner he is from a different place so em I imagine.

more spread out maybe than say the Indonesian diaspora where. you know particular type of food might be more important. em I always find that very Interesting that we receive a lot of groups from Indonesia on very short visit em but even after only being away from Indonesia for twenty-four hours they still want in Indonesian lunch uh I don’t think you would have Australian who went to Indonesia that they want to try the Indonesian food absolutely where Indonesians they just still want Indonesian food.

You know I think you know Indonesian colleagues only wanted rice. They didn’t want sandwiches, they didn’t want muffins, just rice so yeah like I find that quite quite interesting the typical Australian pallet is is so broad that you might have rice once a week but you of course you know that could be the question.

Well, I think that’s a good note to end it all. Well, you know thank you again for taking the time to talk to me about

BILLY: The Perantau Podcast is always looking for new stories to tell and people to meet, so if you have a story worth telling, don’t be shy!

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Until then, thank you and see you soon.