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SOCIAL HISTORY A Quirky Look at Australia's Northern Neighbor John Mateer. Senior's Cave: An Indonesian Journal. Perth: Fremantle Arts Centre P, 2004. 334 pp. pbk $24-95. ISBN 1920731148),
Nicholas Birns
The New School
The years since the 1998 resignation of longtime Indonesian President Suharto have been tumultuous ones for Australia's giant and heterogeneous northern neighbor. Three Presidents came and went quickly, while the Bali bombings underscored the tensions latent in an ethnically diverse country with a large Muslim population poised to Australia's north. But John Mateer eschews both political diagnosis and a conventional travelogue in his quizzical, probing account of his time spent in Indonesia. Far from being a practitioner of what the American writer Michael Massing once called "snap journalism," Mateer, a well-known poet, observes, mulls, and muses over his highly individual contacts with people and locales in Indonesia. His independence from inherited stereotypes of "area studies" is seen in this key sentence, near the opening of the book. A friend asks him about his trip to Asia: "I hadn't thought about Indonesia as being pan of Asia, in the same way that I hadn't-until very recently-thought about South Africa as...