Intellectual freedom in Australia

Mei Hoong emailed yesterday to ask me about my experience and impression of Australian tertiary education.

I think the lasting and enduring impression of Australian tertiary education has on me is its intellectual freedom. It was in Australia that I not only for the first time read Playboy, Penthouse and Karma Sutra, but also the classic works of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Adam Smith, David Richardo, John Stuart Mill, Milton Friedman, Frederick Hayek, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V.I. Lenin, Mao Zedong, Leon Trotsky, Antonio Gramsci and Rosa Luxemburg.

Professors, lecturers and tutors there were not bureucrats or politicians, but academics and intellectuals. Most of them wore simple and decent attires because they were not PROs, movie stars or singers. Students were always encouraged to challenge their teachers. And when teachers were wrong, they readily said sorry, and vice versa.

The most memorable one was the late Professor Herbert Feith who taught me Southeast Asian and Indonesian politics. He was a vegetarian and a lover of Bahasa Indonesia and Malaysia as well as kacang putih. He did his field research in Indonesian politics as early as the historic 1958 General Elections there. Feith cycled to work in his batik shirt even during winters!

It was Feith who first recommended me to read Tan Malaka's Dari Penjara Ke Penjara and the collection of letters of Ibu Kartini. Sadly, Feith passed away a few years ago in an accident in Melbourne.

We could join any political clubs in the unversity like Labour, Liberal, Communist, Anarchist and Troyskite, etc. We could publicly expressed support for or opposition to any political parties by printing books, leftlets or pamphlets. We held political discussions, debates and demonstrations inside and outside the campus. Sometimes, some professors, lecturers and tutors also joined in our demonstrations.

The Malaysian Consulate in Melbourne could not control me because I was not on government scholarship. I was a free man and I visited it only once in my five-year stay in Australia to renew my passport.

It was during one those political activities that I befriended many friends of the Persatuan Melayu Victoria (PMV) and Fatimah Sham, one of our own student leaders in the 1970s and daughter of Teluk Gong peasant leader Pak Hamid Tuah. It was Fatimah Sham who first told me many alternative sides of Malaysian history. We used to gather at the flats at Clayton's Wellington Road which is not far away from the main campus of Monash University.

I also frequented Jenny's house which kept a lot of free beer because her father Nick worked in a brewery. Usually, Jenny's mother would cooked seafood spaghetti for us while we were debating with hair-splitting seriousness on the earth-shaking quesion of whether it was the structure or superstructure of the social formation which is more critical in effecting social changes in human history.