K'tut Tantri
Sydney Morning Herald
Sunday August 10, 1997
K'tut Tantri
1898 - 1997
In 1945, a 46-year-old Scottish-American woman who called herself K'tut Tantri - "The Fourth Child, Teller of Tales" - was released from a Japan ese prison camp in East Java. Emaciated and ill from torture, K'tut Tantri was offered repatriation to America.
In prewar Bali, she'd been a painter, a princess and a hotelier. She would later become a writer - but this was the decisive moment in her life. She rejected the offer and went with the Indonesian revolutionaries. On July 27, she died in her sleep in Sydney's Redfern. She was 99.
That decision to stay in Indonesia was courageous to the point of foolishness. K'tut Tantri was then, as an Indonesian revolutionary put it, "the only white person to come out fully and openly and boldly to our side ... Indonesia's Joan of Arc".
She was soon famous as "Surabaya Sue", a propaganda broadcaster with a price on her head who dodged Allied bombers during the battle of Surabaya. To the Dutch - and the British, who had arrived to take the Japan ese surrender - Indonesia's hero was a "traitor to the white race".
She began broadcasting for the radical guerilla general Soetomo, whom she called "the sweetest man in Java", but within months was interpreter and English speech writer to Sukarno himself.
In early 1947, she chartered a DC-3 in Singapore to fly Abdul Monem, the envoy of the Arab League, through the Dutch air blockade to Sukarno. His visit was the first formal recognition of the embattled Indonesian republic and she soon found herself in Singapore and Australia mustering support.
The Waterside Workers' Federation had black-banned Dutch naval ships which remained trapped in Australian waters. The WWF was K'tut Tantri's host and its strong campaigning led the Chifley government to throw its weight behind Indonesia in the UN.
K'tut Tantri played a key role in changing Australian opinion, but in July 1947 she was deported to the US - the country she'd left behind in 1932 when she abandoned a broken marriage for Bali. She would not return to Indonesia until after it won sovereignty in December 1949.
In peacetime she was determined to gain recognition for her exploits in Indonesia, telling friends: "I freed 70 million people, honey ... then I wrote the President's speech for him. One woman can't do much more!"
In 1960, she published her best-selling autobiography, Revolt in Paradise, a purple prose epic in which she was firmly centre-stage.
The opening of the first hotel on Kuta beach with an American couple, Bob and Louise Koke, and their dispute that led to the division of the hotel between them was the prelude in her book to the arrival of Japan and her romantic revolution.
Her book a huge success, she set her sights on a film. With support from Sukarno and later Soeharto, a succession of producers gladly joined forces with her. All were defeated by her rigid demands - no smoking, swearing or kissing in her film.
Her determination to write herself into history led to her being written out of it. Her critics found much support from the enemies who'd dogged her since Kuta days, malicious Dutch colonists who saw her as a whore, a traitor and liar. Increasingly, her story was dismissed as fantasy and she became a near-paranoid recluse.
Her feeling that Indonesia owed her a living lost her friends in Jakarta and she became bitter. When local producers brought this charismatic and difficult woman back to Sydney in her 80s, she took Australian citizenship.
She died in her sleep in a Redfern nursing home 50 years from the day Chifley first ordered her out of Australia. Her book is still in print, the film is unmade.
Her story's loss of credibility was her tragedy. Of more importance was what gave rise to it in the first place - a passionate belief in racial equality and a profound commitment to Indonesia and the freedom of its people.
© 1997 Sydney Morning Herald
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