Abstract
The change in Indonesian politics in 1965–6 trapped many hundreds, if not thousands, of Indonesian leftists abroad. Moving around as international alignments shifted, these exiles lobbied, wrote and published a wide range of material. This paper tentatively broaches a collective silence about Indonesian political exiles. It poses the curious question of why so little attention was directed at exilic communities when their existence was relatively common knowledge amongst Australian Indonesianists. Instead, Indonesian exiles and Australian academics maintained very separate perspectives, while both ‘knowing Indonesia’ from afar.