anti-Dutch resistance were to be found in Australia. Japan had failed to occupy the Dutch territories of the island of New Guinea, and in mid 1943, Charles van der Plas, then the senior Dutch official in Australia, secretly moved 507 exiles and their families from the Boven Digul isolation colony to Bowen and Sydney, where they were placed in a guarded camp together with Axis internees. Many were members of the Partai Komunis Indonesia, imprisoned after the uprisings of 1926–7, including Sarjono, the party’s former chairman. The Digul families were the first convicts to land in New South Wales for over a century, and when two notes dropped by Indonesians at the quayside and on a train platform were picked up by Australian workers, their plight attracted wide sympathy. The exiles were released and, notwithstanding the ‘white Australia’ policy then in force, were assimilated into the Australian workforce. They included graduates and skilled craftsmen, and such was the Dutch military’s own desperation for personnel that some of them even found employment with the government-in-exile. But biding their time, the Indonesians organized, formed strong links with the Australian left and in 1944 set up their own independence committees. When Japan surrendered there was a wave of strikes by Indonesian seamen who refused to return to pre-war conditions of employment. In six days after 24 September, 1,400 of them came ashore. When Indian workers were drafted in as replacements, they joined the strikers. The Dutch, desperate to ship men and materials to Java, were thrown into panic.4 As ex-detainees began to resign from Dutch service they were arrested as illegal immigrants by the Dutch authorities, who prepared to send them back to Digul camp. This was an extraordinary use of their extra-territorial privileges. By April 1946 820 Indonesian mariners and soldiers were interned in Australian jails.5 The Australian unions joined the protest, declared that ‘everything Dutch is black’ and boycotted Dutch ships. On 11 November at Morton Bay there was a mutiny on a RN auxiliary vessel at Woolloomooloo. The sailors draped slogans on their ship: ‘Food for Britain before troops for Java’. The Australian government’s decision to repatriate some exiles and their families (which now included some Australian Aboriginal wives) in October 1945 inflamed the controversy. The Dutch were unwilling to have so many seasoned radicals land, and wanted to take them into custody. Mountbatten felt unable to guarantee their safety. But many evaded capture and, in the event, only nineteen ‘extremists’ and eight of their family members were despatched on the Esperance Bay and landed at Kupang in Timor. They took with them a large Indonesian flag, embroidered with the words, ‘To Dr Soekarno from Queensland Trade Unionists’.6
The Vietnamese and Indonesian revolutions drew upon networks of support across the region. Bangkok was a huge arms bazaar, stocked by supplies from surrendered Japanese garrisons and from SEAC’s airdrops to the Free Thai resistance. ‘Buying arms in Thailand’, the veteran southern Vietnamese revolutionary Tran Van Giau joked, ‘was as easy as buying beer’. The Filipinos and Burmese also offloaded guns onto the Thai market, and Chinese, Swedes, Czechs and Americans – idealists, freebooters and demobbed special forces – all got involved in the trade. Jim Thompson, a Princeton-educated ex-OSS man, invested his profits in a silk business that still bears his name.7 Vietnamese exiles in Singapore tried to recruit fighters from Malaya, and they approached the Malayan Communist Party for 500 guns from its secret stockpile in Johore. It became impossible to ship them by junk to Cochin China, but the contacts were important in other ways: through them, Chin Peng and others began to learn more about the secret lives of Lai Teck.8 Malaya was the armoury of the Indonesian republic. The British dumped as many as 2,000 tons of surplus arms at sea south of Singapore, and they easily found their way into Indonesia through the Riau islands. The first major republican