David T. Hill AM

The thirteen essays in this volume come from Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Malaysia, South Africa, and Hawai‘i. With a shared focus on the specific local conditions that influence the ways in which life narratives are told, the authors engage with a variety of academic disciplines, including anthropology, history, media studies, and literature, to challenge claims that life writing is an exclusively Western phenomenon. Addressing the common desire to reflect on lived experience, the authors enlist interdisciplinary perspectives to interrogate the range of cultural forms available for representing and understanding lives.

That the dramatic fall of Indonesian president Suharto in May 1998 was accompanied by equally wide-ranging changes in the Indonesian media industry has been much discussed. Less evident is the fact that the complex transformations experienced by the media nationally have not necessarily been uniform across the archipelago, nor uniformly positive where they have been felt. While ending the New Order requirement for strictly controlled 'publication permits' and the opening up of local media markets to new players might have stimulated greater competition and a diversity of voices in some regions (such as Manado), it remains to be seen whether the economic, political, cultural and security conditions are such as to convert media reforms and liberalisation into a successful democratising force throughout the archipelago.

It has been argued that the social sciences in general are currently undergoing an ‘auto/biographical turn’. Internationally, the field remains largely Eurocentric and discussion of the particular problems presented by life writing in contexts such as Indonesia—in Asia more broadly—remains relatively rare. Nonetheless, within Indonesian studies, academic interest is increasing in the critical production, use, and interpretation of such materials, particularly in the context of the imagination and representation of an emerging ‘modern’ Indonesian identity. This paper examines ethical issues relating to such writing of Indonesian lives. It emerges from a concern over the ‘over-ethicizing’ and ‘over-institutionalising’ of non-medical life writing and examines the effects of prevailing regulations governing this activity in Australian universities. It then explores additional institutional constraints—sometimes directly contradicting Australia's national code of ethics—that might apply in the Indonesian context. It concludes with a discussion of the consequent challenges of attempting to write a biography of Indonesian author and journalist, Mochtar Lubis.

One of the most visible changes to Indonesian public culture since the fall of President Suharto and his ''New Order" in May 1998 has been the increasing diversity of the nation's media. This chapter is an initial attempt to examine these changes at the local level in the perimeter province of North Sulawesi, about 2,000 kilometers from the political epicenter of Jakarta. It explores the impact of a raft of central government policies, collectively dubbed "de-centralization" or "regional autonomy," in North Sulawesi and its capital, Manado. Prior to 1998, with only rare exceptions, studies of the Indonesian media - by both Indonesian and foreign scholars - concentrated on the national media. However, since the post-Suharto deregulation of the media and the dismantling of the repressive Department of Information which had controlled the media centrally, the most dramatic transformation is being driven not from Jakarta but from local media enterprises. At its broadest, this current study of media in North Sulawesi questions whether the collapse of an authoritarian regime and abandonment of media controls axiomatically produce a pluralist democratic media, or whether equally as likely is the capture of the media by particular political interests, for whom media influence - if not control - is a valuable asset in influencing public opinion and electoral outcomes.

In May 1998, Indonesia's second and longest-serving president, retired general Suharto, stepped aside in the face of sustained public demonstrations, and the world's fourth most populous nation emerged from more than three decades of authoritarianism. Suharto's overthrow came barely three years after subscriber Internet services arrived in Indonesia and only two years after public Internet cafes began fanning out across the archipelago, providing Internet access to those who could not afford personal computers. The internet did not directly cause the fall of the dictator, for the mix of economic, social and political factors that catalysed the oppositional groundswell was much more complex--but 'neither the fall of Suharto nor its aftermath can be described or fully understood without reference to this new mode of communication' (Hill and Sen, 2005, p.l6). Since Suharto's exit the Internet has continued to make a valuable, if less dramatic, contribution to the institutionalisation of democracy in Indonesia through its role in national elections, most strikingly in 1999 and, to a lesser extent in 2004.