Languages other than English in Australian Higher Education by Jennifer Joan Baldwin

Author:Jennifer Joan Baldwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030057954
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

5.12 Government Commitment to Indonesian Language Teaching

It is surprising that – with the trade relationships which had existed between Australia and Indonesia for some 50 years, the Colombo Plan which helped to engender positive contacts, and the diplomatic support which Australia had given to Indonesia in its quest for independence – there was still no formal study of Indonesian language in Australian schools and universities. It also appears that amongst Australian trade and diplomatic representatives dealing with Indonesia, none were fluent in Indonesian. Since the early twentieth century, Australia had been dealing with the Netherlands as a colonial power, and probably saw no need either for trade or security reasons to have Australians trained in the Indonesian language. The initiative for the establishment of such language studies, said Worsley, a noted Indonesianist, came not from the Indonesian community,

not from the scholarly community nor even from public demand. The impulse came from the Commonwealth government, which announced its interest in the teaching of Indonesian and Malayan Studies in a letter from William Weeden, Director of the Commonwealth Office of Education, to the Vice-Chancellor [of the University of Sydney] in June 1955. (Worsley, 1994, p. 54)

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