Readings

Lottie and Anton

A story of love and politics

Anton and Me: When Merdeka! came to Sydney

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

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). 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

‘People would glare and look us up and down as we walked around the streets of Sydney arm in arm’

To some extent she was shielded from these by Anton, who was part of an educated elite, and whom she portrays as an understanding, loyal and supportive husband. Their domestic lives in the better parts of Jakarta (the former Dutch capital Batavia) and travels in Java, Sulawesi and Bali make fascinating reading, as she learns the national language, forges friendships and teaches English to the wives of prominent Indonesians. Lottie is recruited to write for Indonesia’s first English-language newspaper, and as a journalist she attends President Soekarno’s Bandung Conference, where he founds the world’s Non-Aligned Nations movement in 1955. One poignant personal story has her going to a traditional shaman healer seeking a cure for infertility due to a childhood illness, since Western treatments have failed. Secretively she visits a giant bronze Portuguese cannon where Javanese women come to make offerings, believing in its mystical power to make them pregnant. (The famous cannon, called Si Jagur, stands in the same public square today where it is still visited by women for the same reason.) Sadly these steps fail, though the exemplary Anton assures Lottie he’s happy just with her. After living through the dramatic, turbulent era of independent Indonesia’s first leader, President Soekarno, Lottie and Anton returned to Sydney, where they were involved with the growing Indonesian community and its Consulate until the end of their respective long lives. The most exceptional aspect of this story is one to which Lottie gives very little space in her account. It’s how utterly fearless she was in following her heart in mid-1940s Australia, when the overwhelming response to marrying a dark-skinned Asian was racist disapproval. She wrote: ‘People would glare and look us up and down as we walked around the streets of Sydney arm in arm.’ Her marriage was reported in the Sunday Sun with the condescending speculation that she would live the life of a poor Javanese peasant. Although her immediate family accepted Anton, many of the Dutch who remained in Indonesia snubbed her. It’s likely some of Anton’s compatriots would have questioned his choice of bride, too. Lottie Maramis née Reid was surely a pioneer of Australian–Indonesian friendship, from a historical period that got our national relations with the Republic of Indonesia off to a flying start.

Jeffrey Mellefont, ANMM Honorary Research Associate

Anton and Lottie at their wedding, Wesley Chapel, Sydney, 18 January 1947.