Changes & Chances
Chapter 27 The Years of Living Dangerously
The tensions of living at the end of the Sukarno regime have been immortalised in the film based on Christopher Koch’s novel The Year of Living Dangerously. You may be disappointed to know that the vicar of the time, Derick Catley., was far from a Mel Gibson figure, being an Anglo-Indian gentleman in his later years. When Coleman departed, Catley was appointed vicar by Bishop Sansbury, faithfully serving from August 1963 to May 1970 throughout the Confrontation crisis. This hit the British and Commonwealth community in Jakarta suddenly, for within two days of the State of Malaysia being declared on 16 September 1963, the British Embassy and 21 staff houses were burned and British and Australian women and children were evacuated. There is a legend associated with the burning of the British Embassy that was included in The Year of Living Dangerously about the Assistant British Defense Attaché playing the bagpipes to drown out the cries of the very angry demonstrators, who were then so incensed that they came over the gate and burned the Embassy and beat up the staff. At least, I thought it was a legend until I saw some photographs of the incident on the wall of the “Goose and Durian” pub at the Embassy.
Being regarded as a British institution and being located in the heart of the Indonesian capital, All Saints was an obvious target for attack or seizure, so on 20 September Catley was moved to an American house for one week. Fortunately for the church he could not play the bagpipes. In May 1964 all British estates in the country were seized by the government. Church attendance during this period reached its nadir in 1966, the register for Sunday 3 July recording there were only nine at the morning Holy Communion service and 14 at Evening Prayer, Catley's bemused comment in the margin being “Dutch 6; Chinese 3; British 2; Indonesians 1 (Anglicans- 2)!” The average attendance for Sunday services for the month of November, which normally had good attendances, was only 28.
Another casualty of the era was the Church Women’s Association. In May 1952 Council agreed to the formation of a Ladies' Altar Guild. It reached its zenith in 1958 when at the AGM in March it was reported it had 29 active members, but by October 1960 declining membership was noted. In March 1961 it was in dispute with Council over its desire to be independent, a sensitive matter which appears to have involved a conflict between the vicar and the president of the Guild, who happened to be an ambassador's wife. The outcome was that in January 1962 the relationship was redefined with a new constitution and a change of name to the Church Women's Association, although it continued Guild's right to have a seat on Council. In February 1964 its major enterprise, the Thrift Shop, was closed and a month later at the AGM in March 1964 it was decided that, in the light of declining numbers in the community, CWA discontinue.
Initially the Guild was intended just to organise flowers for the altar and keep the church clean. However, from the beginning it was associated with the Children's Church, a midweek program which took the place of a Sunday School and which, by its first anniversary, was flourishing with 40 regular members. Examination of its minutes shows that the Guild also provided a social gathering for the women of the English-speaking community, raised money for furnishing the church and vicarage, supported a number of Indonesian agencies like hospitals and orphanages, and inspected and maintained British civilian graves in the Tanah Abang and Menteng Pulo cemeteries. In 1956 it opened a Thrift Shop, housed in the old parsonage, to raise money. Trade in second-hand clothes was the mainstay of the shop, but members also busied themselves with sewing, knitting, baking and crafts to boost their fund-raising. Social events like bingo drives, bazaars and bridge parties were other popular fund-raisers.
Council had first call on Guild funds and received the bulk of its profits. However, a generous amount still went to the charities. "The Objects of the Guild" of January 1955 included “to undertake to help one charitable institution in Djakarta”. The charities targeted seemed to vary according to the particular interests of members of the Guild, and most of them did not receive regular, ongoing support. These institutions generally received a basic government subsidy but were so poor that their needs were as simple as bedding and clothing. Over the 12-year existence of Guild and CWA 25 different charitable causes were supported. These included hospitals; institutions for orphans, delinquent children, the elderly, lepers, disabled children, psychiatric patients and women prisoners; poverty, famine and flood relief programmes; college scholarships; and individual cases like clothing a destitute 10-year old Dutch girl who was being repatriated or providing the fare of an Indonesian theological student to Singapore. Later in the century, as the expatriate population of Jakarta mushroomed, such valuable social and charitable functions were taken up by non-religious groups like the American, British and Canadian Women’s Associations, the Australian and New Zealand Association, and Rotary.
Bishop Cyril Sansbury attempted to carry on Baines' commitment to the work in Java and Sumatra. However international events soon hampered his efforts. In September 1963 relations between Indonesia and the British Commonwealth countries swiftly deteriorated. Council was informed by the Indonesian government that the church could no longer have a connection with Singapore, leading to some pan-Anglican manouevring that culminated in All Saints being placed under the temporary jurisdiction of Bishop Lyman Ogilby (1964-1969) of the Philippines from March 1964. In August Ogilby made his one and only visit to All Saints where he encouraged Council to move ahead positively, urging it to ignore the present uncertainties and to conclude a new contract with Derick Catley. He also urged Council to replace the old, unreliable car and promised to raise the money for it, as well as promising to provide a locum for the three months that Catley would be on leave. He kept both promises, the second in the form of the visit of Rev. W G Houghton from the Philippines. In February 1967 he wrote to Council about his imminent departure from the Philippines and his hope that oversight could soon be handed back to Singapore, which the ongoing political crisis prevented until January 1969.
The situation heated up again in September 1964 with hostilities in Malaysia, and in January 1965 President Sukarno closed all United Nations offices in Jakarta, causing the church to increase its efforts to protect the property from confiscation. Under the threat of seizure the hak pakai land title was transferred to the DGI. The process took from October 1963 to May 1965 and involved Ogilby and the Australian Ambassador, K C O Shann, as well as Council members. The agreement stated that the use of the land and buildings for social, religious or educational purposes under a rent-free and perpetual tenancy was controlled by BPC, which soon afterwards handed over its functions to Council and ceased to exist. The situation with Christ Church Surabaya was less decisively dealt with because the British community in Surabaya had shrunk so much that services were suspended, and when the crisis abated the DGI was entrusted with the property which was already being used by two Indonesian congregations. The attempt by the vicar, J A Brook, to gather an Easter congregation in 1971 failed through lack of interest.
On 15 June 1965, the BPC handed over ownership of the church and property to Council and finished its 122-year existence. Council then transferred the church’s land title to the DGI. Things improved after Sukarno's downfall with the end of Confrontation hostilities in August 1966 and the restoration of diplomatic relations between Indonesia and Singapore in September 1967, which led to the return of All Saints to the fold of the Bishop of Singapore at the beginning of 1969. Another threatening situation occurred in November 1966 when the government queried Catley's special diplomatic status. This was resolved early the next year when the status was withdrawn and the Indonesian authorities agreed to accept him as a British Embassy staff member. Catley's ministry was made a little easier by the involvement of several other Anglican clergy, namely Dr Houston of the Commonwealth Medical Scheme, who was both a deacon and member of the church, Dr E Fritschl of the Leprosy Mission, who was a priest of the Church of South India and was particularly helpful in the interregnum after Catley's departure, and Rev. Edwin B Stube an American Episcopalian priest who visited the church several times between 1963 and 1967, on at least one occasion celebrating Holy Communion. Unusually for an Episcopalian priest of the time, he was involved in independent missionary work in East Java and made visits to Singapore Anglican churches, where he is remembered as one of the early promoters of the charismatic movement.
In the early years after the transfer of land title, Council had wisely cultivated its relationship with DGI, a fruit of this cooperation being the establishment of a school for intellectually disabled children at the rear section of the church property. Yayasan Sumber Asih, a Christian foundation with links to DGI, operated a school for intellectually disabled children. Initially Sumber Asih was given weekday use of an outbuilding called the Pendopo (literally “pavilion”) because the military had taken over one of their premises. In March 1968 Sumber Asih signed a lease agreement with Council, and in August Sumber Asih handed over the new building to Council, with the arrangement for the Foundation to pay a token rental.
The other allies Council cultivated were the embassies. Over 1967 it requested representatives to join Council from the Australian, Canadian, British and American Embassies. This was generally successful, remarkably so with the Americans because of their strongly held principle of separation of Church and State.
What was a hostile business climate for foreigners was a struggle for survival for most Indonesians. By the end of the Sukarno era, the country was being tossed around in a three-cornered contest between the army, the PKI (Partai Kommunis Indonesia, the Communist Party) and Sukarno. Sadly, each had their reasons for preferring chaos over stability, the losers being the ordinary Indonesians. The resolution of this contest was to be confusing and ultimately very bloody. 30 September 1965 marked the beginning of the end for both the Sukarno era and Confrontation. The actual events and significance of what for the next 33 years was termed a “Communist coup” are currently being revised and reinterpreted. It is certain that a number of Air Force officers, assisted by PKI cadres, abducted and killed leading army generals. It is probable that it was a pre-emptive strike approved by Sukarno against an anticipated coup by the generals. It was short-lived because a suspiciously rapid and effective response from Colonel Suharto crushed the coup and took away Sukarno's executive powers. Once a pretext had been found to annihilate the PKI, Suharto directed a savage purge which caused the deaths of between 200 000 and 700 000 suspected communists in East and Central Java and about 50 000 in Bali, mainly perpetrated by military and Islamic groups. Subsequently, in March 1966 Sukarno officially handed power over to Suharto and the 32 year “New Order” regime began. In August 1966 Confrontation hostilities ceased, but it was not until September 1967 that diplomatic relations between Indonesia and Singapore were restored. In the early days of the New Order elements of the military were not properly under control. In November 1967, while the vicar was away, 15 armed men of the PKD, a special military unit, entered the church compound at 2.30 am, walked around the property and left after assaulting the church night guard. One of the ways in which the new regime celebrated its triumph was to rename the road outside the church Jalan Arif Rahman Hakim, after a little-known student martyr of the anti-Communist struggle. This act of dropping the historic name of Jalan Gereja Inggris, literally “English Church Road”, was one of the more minor acts of historical vandalism of the New Order that for the next 32 years induced a national amnesia about the country's pre-1965 history.
During the economic malaise of the 1950s and 60s construction activity was mainly limited to building status symbols that pandered to Sukarno’s vanity, including a rash of mostly ugly monuments, the impressive national sports stadium and the luxury Hotel Indonesia. There was such a dearth of accommodation that even the ramshackle old parsonage at the front of the church property had a succession of tenants including Qantas cabin crew, British Embassy staff and UNICEF. It was during this time the old library building at the back of the church was extended to accommodate the vicar.
The tensions of living at the end of the Sukarno regime have been immortalised in the film based on Christopher Koch’s novel The Year of Living Dangerously. You may be disappointed to know that the vicar of the time, Derick Catley., was far from a Mel Gibson figure, being an Anglo-Indian gentleman in his later years. When Coleman departed, Catley was appointed vicar by Bishop Sansbury, faithfully serving from August 1963 to May 1970 throughout the Confrontation crisis. This hit the British and Commonwealth community in Jakarta suddenly, for within two days of the State of Malaysia being declared on 16 September 1963, the British Embassy and 21 staff houses were burned and British and Australian women and children were evacuated. There is a legend associated with the burning of the British Embassy that was included in The Year of Living Dangerously about the Assistant British Defense Attaché playing the bagpipes to drown out the cries of the very angry demonstrators, who were then so incensed that they came over the gate and burned the Embassy and beat up the staff. At least, I thought it was a legend until I saw some photographs of the incident on the wall of the “Goose and Durian” pub at the Embassy.
Being regarded as a British institution and being located in the heart of the Indonesian capital, All Saints was an obvious target for attack or seizure, so on 20 September Catley was moved to an American house for one week. Fortunately for the church he could not play the bagpipes. In May 1964 all British estates in the country were seized by the government. Church attendance during this period reached its nadir in 1966, the register for Sunday 3 July recording there were only nine at the morning Holy Communion service and 14 at Evening Prayer, Catley's bemused comment in the margin being “Dutch 6; Chinese 3; British 2; Indonesians 1 (Anglicans- 2)!” The average attendance for Sunday services for the month of November, which normally had good attendances, was only 28.
Another casualty of the era was the Church Women’s Association. In May 1952 Council agreed to the formation of a Ladies' Altar Guild. It reached its zenith in 1958 when at the AGM in March it was reported it had 29 active members, but by October 1960 declining membership was noted. In March 1961 it was in dispute with Council over its desire to be independent, a sensitive matter which appears to have involved a conflict between the vicar and the president of the Guild, who happened to be an ambassador's wife. The outcome was that in January 1962 the relationship was redefined with a new constitution and a change of name to the Church Women's Association, although it continued Guild's right to have a seat on Council. In February 1964 its major enterprise, the Thrift Shop, was closed and a month later at the AGM in March 1964 it was decided that, in the light of declining numbers in the community, CWA discontinue.
Initially the Guild was intended just to organise flowers for the altar and keep the church clean. However, from the beginning it was associated with the Children's Church, a midweek program which took the place of a Sunday School and which, by its first anniversary, was flourishing with 40 regular members. Examination of its minutes shows that the Guild also provided a social gathering for the women of the English-speaking community, raised money for furnishing the church and vicarage, supported a number of Indonesian agencies like hospitals and orphanages, and inspected and maintained British civilian graves in the Tanah Abang and Menteng Pulo cemeteries. In 1956 it opened a Thrift Shop, housed in the old parsonage, to raise money. Trade in second-hand clothes was the mainstay of the shop, but members also busied themselves with sewing, knitting, baking and crafts to boost their fund-raising. Social events like bingo drives, bazaars and bridge parties were other popular fund-raisers.
Council had first call on Guild funds and received the bulk of its profits. However, a generous amount still went to the charities. "The Objects of the Guild" of January 1955 included “to undertake to help one charitable institution in Djakarta”. The charities targeted seemed to vary according to the particular interests of members of the Guild, and most of them did not receive regular, ongoing support. These institutions generally received a basic government subsidy but were so poor that their needs were as simple as bedding and clothing. Over the 12-year existence of Guild and CWA 25 different charitable causes were supported. These included hospitals; institutions for orphans, delinquent children, the elderly, lepers, disabled children, psychiatric patients and women prisoners; poverty, famine and flood relief programmes; college scholarships; and individual cases like clothing a destitute 10-year old Dutch girl who was being repatriated or providing the fare of an Indonesian theological student to Singapore. Later in the century, as the expatriate population of Jakarta mushroomed, such valuable social and charitable functions were taken up by non-religious groups like the American, British and Canadian Women’s Associations, the Australian and New Zealand Association, and Rotary.
Bishop Cyril Sansbury attempted to carry on Baines' commitment to the work in Java and Sumatra. However international events soon hampered his efforts. In September 1963 relations between Indonesia and the British Commonwealth countries swiftly deteriorated. Council was informed by the Indonesian government that the church could no longer have a connection with Singapore, leading to some pan-Anglican manouevring that culminated in All Saints being placed under the temporary jurisdiction of Bishop Lyman Ogilby (1964-1969) of the Philippines from March 1964. In August Ogilby made his one and only visit to All Saints where he encouraged Council to move ahead positively, urging it to ignore the present uncertainties and to conclude a new contract with Derick Catley. He also urged Council to replace the old, unreliable car and promised to raise the money for it, as well as promising to provide a locum for the three months that Catley would be on leave. He kept both promises, the second in the form of the visit of Rev. W G Houghton from the Philippines. In February 1967 he wrote to Council about his imminent departure from the Philippines and his hope that oversight could soon be handed back to Singapore, which the ongoing political crisis prevented until January 1969.
The situation heated up again in September 1964 with hostilities in Malaysia, and in January 1965 President Sukarno closed all United Nations offices in Jakarta, causing the church to increase its efforts to protect the property from confiscation. Under the threat of seizure the hak pakai land title was transferred to the DGI. The process took from October 1963 to May 1965 and involved Ogilby and the Australian Ambassador, K C O Shann, as well as Council members. The agreement stated that the use of the land and buildings for social, religious or educational purposes under a rent-free and perpetual tenancy was controlled by BPC, which soon afterwards handed over its functions to Council and ceased to exist. The situation with Christ Church Surabaya was less decisively dealt with because the British community in Surabaya had shrunk so much that services were suspended, and when the crisis abated the DGI was entrusted with the property which was already being used by two Indonesian congregations. The attempt by the vicar, J A Brook, to gather an Easter congregation in 1971 failed through lack of interest.
On 15 June 1965, the BPC handed over ownership of the church and property to Council and finished its 122-year existence. Council then transferred the church’s land title to the DGI. Things improved after Sukarno's downfall with the end of Confrontation hostilities in August 1966 and the restoration of diplomatic relations between Indonesia and Singapore in September 1967, which led to the return of All Saints to the fold of the Bishop of Singapore at the beginning of 1969. Another threatening situation occurred in November 1966 when the government queried Catley's special diplomatic status. This was resolved early the next year when the status was withdrawn and the Indonesian authorities agreed to accept him as a British Embassy staff member. Catley's ministry was made a little easier by the involvement of several other Anglican clergy, namely Dr Houston of the Commonwealth Medical Scheme, who was both a deacon and member of the church, Dr E Fritschl of the Leprosy Mission, who was a priest of the Church of South India and was particularly helpful in the interregnum after Catley's departure, and Rev. Edwin B Stube an American Episcopalian priest who visited the church several times between 1963 and 1967, on at least one occasion celebrating Holy Communion. Unusually for an Episcopalian priest of the time, he was involved in independent missionary work in East Java and made visits to Singapore Anglican churches, where he is remembered as one of the early promoters of the charismatic movement.
In the early years after the transfer of land title, Council had wisely cultivated its relationship with DGI, a fruit of this cooperation being the establishment of a school for intellectually disabled children at the rear section of the church property. Yayasan Sumber Asih, a Christian foundation with links to DGI, operated a school for intellectually disabled children. Initially Sumber Asih was given weekday use of an outbuilding called the Pendopo (literally “pavilion”) because the military had taken over one of their premises. In March 1968 Sumber Asih signed a lease agreement with Council, and in August Sumber Asih handed over the new building to Council, with the arrangement for the Foundation to pay a token rental.
The other allies Council cultivated were the embassies. Over 1967 it requested representatives to join Council from the Australian, Canadian, British and American Embassies. This was generally successful, remarkably so with the Americans because of their strongly held principle of separation of Church and State.
What was a hostile business climate for foreigners was a struggle for survival for most Indonesians. By the end of the Sukarno era, the country was being tossed around in a three-cornered contest between the army, the PKI (Partai Kommunis Indonesia, the Communist Party) and Sukarno. Sadly, each had their reasons for preferring chaos over stability, the losers being the ordinary Indonesians. The resolution of this contest was to be confusing and ultimately very bloody. 30 September 1965 marked the beginning of the end for both the Sukarno era and Confrontation. The actual events and significance of what for the next 33 years was termed a “Communist coup” are currently being revised and reinterpreted. It is certain that a number of Air Force officers, assisted by PKI cadres, abducted and killed leading army generals. It is probable that it was a pre-emptive strike approved by Sukarno against an anticipated coup by the generals. It was short-lived because a suspiciously rapid and effective response from Colonel Suharto crushed the coup and took away Sukarno's executive powers. Once a pretext had been found to annihilate the PKI, Suharto directed a savage purge which caused the deaths of between 200 000 and 700 000 suspected communists in East and Central Java and about 50 000 in Bali, mainly perpetrated by military and Islamic groups. Subsequently, in March 1966 Sukarno officially handed power over to Suharto and the 32 year “New Order” regime began. In August 1966 Confrontation hostilities ceased, but it was not until September 1967 that diplomatic relations between Indonesia and Singapore were restored. In the early days of the New Order elements of the military were not properly under control. In November 1967, while the vicar was away, 15 armed men of the PKD, a special military unit, entered the church compound at 2.30 am, walked around the property and left after assaulting the church night guard. One of the ways in which the new regime celebrated its triumph was to rename the road outside the church Jalan Arif Rahman Hakim, after a little-known student martyr of the anti-Communist struggle. This act of dropping the historic name of Jalan Gereja Inggris, literally “English Church Road”, was one of the more minor acts of historical vandalism of the New Order that for the next 32 years induced a national amnesia about the country's pre-1965 history.
During the economic malaise of the 1950s and 60s construction activity was mainly limited to building status symbols that pandered to Sukarno’s vanity, including a rash of mostly ugly monuments, the impressive national sports stadium and the luxury Hotel Indonesia. There was such a dearth of accommodation that even the ramshackle old parsonage at the front of the church property had a succession of tenants including Qantas cabin crew, British Embassy staff and UNICEF. It was during this time the old library building at the back of the church was extended to accommodate the vicar.