Readings
Anton and Me: When Merdeka! came to Sydney
Lottie and Anton A story of love and politics
A CROSS-CULTURAL LOVE STORY adds a touching human dimension to the political movement that, 75 years ago, saw Australian maritime unions and politicians support the Indonesian people in their struggle for independence, after more than three centuries of Dutch domination in the East Indies. This political story was told in the museum’s travelling exhibition Black Armada, which has appeared extensively throughout Indonesia, and is currently online as Two Nations: Australia–Indonesia 1945–1949 (sea.museum/two-nations).
The love between Lottie and Anton bloomed as postwar politics unfolded, and her book’s early chapters sketch these events. Indonesian nationalists had declared independence (the Merdeka of the book’s title) as soon as Japan surrendered, while the Dutch were determined to resume their overlordship of the East Indies. Australian maritime workers showed solidarity with their fellow Indonesian seafarers by black-banning ships carrying Dutch arms and troops back to reoccupy the Indonesian islands.
Charlotte Reid was a respectable middle-class Sydney teenager, daughter of a strict merchant mariner and a country-born mother. Lottie, as she was known, was working as a clerk in the city at the end of World War II when she fell in love with a handsome Indonesian exile. Anton Maramis, an educated Christian from a Minahasan family in North Sulawesi, was stranded in Australia, along with thousands of Indonesian seafarers, after the Japanese had driven their Dutch employers from the East Indies. He had arrived as a purser with the Dutch line KPM.
Anton Maramis undertook important work in Australia for the Indonesian nationalist leaders, while they battled the Dutch for their freedom. The couple’s marriage in 1947 was disrupted when he was deported from Australia and later imprisoned by the pro-Dutch British in Singapore. Shortly after the UN recognised Indonesia’s independence in 1949 (championed by the Australian government, which took a surprisingly anticolonial position), Lottie joined Anton to make their lives together in the brand-new Republic of Indonesia.
Lottie’s kind-hearted mother was part of a small group offering support and hospitality to KPM’s native petty officers, marooned far from their homes and families in the midst of a white nation that had excluded coloured people since Federation, and neither knew nor cared much about the inhabitants of their near neighbour the East Indies. 70
By Charlotte Maramis, published by Australia Indonesia Association, Sydney, 2020. Softcover, 192 pages, BW illustrations. ISBN 978-0-646-81726-2. Available in the Store or online, special price $20
Signals 133 Summer 2020–21
Most of Lottie’s book relates her life there learning about her new home with its monsoon climate, its ancient monuments of earlier kingdoms, its very different customs, religions and spicy cuisines, all of them utterly unknown to her and just about all Australians. These early years of Indonesia’s independence were marked by economic hardship, shortages and poverty, and considerable political and social upheaval.
