[Lgpolicy-list] [lg policy] Look who’s talking: Indonesian in Australia

Wed Dec 10 15:51:00 UTC 2014

 Look who’s talking: Indonesian in Australia A TV ad featuring an
Australian woman travelling to Bali and falling for a Balinese man captures
Australia’s love affair with Indonesia. EPA/Made Nagi

Recently, Indonesian language has begun to make an appearance in Australian
popular media. There is evidence too that, after years of decline, student
interest in Indonesian language and studying in Indonesia is on the rise.

International comparisons suggest that popular culture and language
learning may be connected. Bollywood cinema has spread Hindi through India
more successfully than the shambolic national language policy. Some argued
that the growth of interest in Japanese in the 1980s was fuelled by the
global rise of manga comics.

More recently, Korean pop music and video games have driven interest in
Korean language in Australia.
Rhonda and Ketut

Over the past three years, one of Australia’s largest insurance companies,
AAMI, has run a series of ads featuring an average Australian woman,
Rhonda, who travels to Bali and falls for handsome Ketut.

The ads captured Australia’s love affair with Bali. More broadly, they
tapped into Australia’s affection for Indonesia and Indonesians living in
Australia.

In the final episode, to Ketut’s declaration of love in Indonesian, Rhonda
responds in a broad Australian accent: “*saya cinta kamu*” (“you too”). The
episode underlines a phrase that Australian girls learn on a visit to Bali
– “*saya cinta kamu”* (I love you) – but shows too that Rhonda doesn’t
quite know what the words mean.
AAMI’s ‘Rhonda and Ketut’ TV ads were the first to feature Indonesian
language in Australian commercials.

As far as we can tell, this was the first time that Indonesian has been
used in an Australian television ad. These ads seemed to simultaneously
“normalise” Bali holidays and the use of Indonesian language and
cross-cultural miscommunication as part of the everyday experience of
Australians.
Indonesian featured in Australian TV series

In addition to the Rhonda and Ketut ads, the successful ABC series Rake
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rake_%28Australian_TV_series%29> also
presented characters speaking Indonesian.

In episode seven of series three, broadcast in March this year, main
character Cleaver Greene’s ex-wife Wendy suffers an emotional shock and
loses her ability to speak English.

Propelled by memories of “Seminyak years ago”, whenever the ex-hippy opens
her mouth, words come out in fluent Indonesian, albeit with a rather cute
Australian accent. The series' creators used subtitles for Wendy’s
Indonesian until they introduced the daughter of Wendy’s therapist as her
interpreter in episode eight.

The ethnicity of the therapist is not clear in the series. The daughter is
Indonesian-looking and speaks fluent English with an Australian accent.

By episode eight, Wendy has become quite a celebrity in Indonesia. The
Indonesian media send film crews to interview her, paying $50,000 for the
privilege. Cleaver is perplexed. “There’s 250 million people there speaking
[it] – why are they getting excited about one more?” he grumbles.

It is a somewhat ridiculous sub-plot, though not entirely out of character
with the inanity of the series. Wendy loses her inexplicable Indonesian
ability when her emotional turmoil is resolved and she reverts to speaking
English.

We never learn whether she had previously learnt or spoken Indonesian, or
whether she ever spoke it again. But for a moment in the fantasy of
Australian television, Indonesian is spoken with consummate ease by a white
middle-aged Australian mum.
Indonesian in Australian universities

The period between 2001 and 2010 was marked by a dramatic decline in
interest in Indonesian language in Australian universities. Enrolments dropped
by 37%
<http://theconversation.com/%28http://www.murdoch.edu.au/ALTC-Fellowship/Final-Report/>
that decade, followed by five years of flat-lining. But now more Australian
students are heading to Indonesia to study.

The Australian Consortium for “In-Country” Indonesian Studies
<http://www.acicis.murdoch.edu.au/> (ACICIS) has announced the biggest
cohort ever (76) for the first semester of 2015. The ACICIS internship
program also set a record by sending 74 students to work in Indonesian
organisations in January-February 2015. For the same periods in 2014, the
figures were 46 and 44 respectively.
 Australians who have studied Indonesian in school have a significantly
more positive attitude to Indonesia than does the general population. DFAT, CC
BY <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s signature New Colombo Plan
<http://www.dfat.gov.au/new-colombo-plan/about.html> (NCP) to encourage
students to study in Asia is also having an impact. Of the 69 NCP
scholarships awarded last week, ten went to students who will study in
Indonesia for a semester or more in 2015 – the second-largest number to any
single destination, after China.

In the latest round of NCP “mobility grants” (for semester or short-term
programs), more than 600 of the estimated 3173 undergraduates funded will
go to Indonesia, the largest allocation to any single jurisdiction.

Indonesian language enrolments have always been sensitive both to events in
Indonesia and the Australian media’s coverage of those. The 1997 Asian
financial crisis triggered falls in enrolment. The Bali bombings in 2002
and 2005 and the rise of militant Islam in Indonesia coloured Australian
perceptions
<https://www.dfat.gov.au/publications/australian-attitudes-towards-indonesia/australian-attitudes-towards-indonesia.pdf>
of Indonesia and its language.

Such negative images are now receding. Broader public interest has been
generated by positive Australian media coverage of Indonesia’s new
president, Joko Widodo, a “cleanskin” former furniture exporter from
outside the old Jakarta political elite.

There is evidence <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2014.940033> that
Australians who have studied Indonesian in school have a significantly more
positive attitude to Indonesia than does the general population.

Indonesian is still one of the top three most-studied languages in
Australian schools. While fewer students are continuing Indonesian to Year
12, about 190,000 school students were studying some Indonesian in 2010
<http://www.murdoch.edu.au/ALTC-Fellowship/_document/Resources/CurrentStateIndonesianLanguageEducation.pdf>.
No more recent study has been published.

Sadly, Indonesian-language teachers in schools across Australia might not
be able to show Rake to their classes, given the M-rating for the constant
swearing and frequent sexual references. Wendy does not swear in Indonesian
or English, but her young interpreter does take a few liberties in adding
swear words in English. No swear words occurred in the Indonesian dialogue.

Interpreting pop culture’s inner message is always fraught. But these
episodes of Rake do suggest that Indonesian is easily absorbed, that
Indonesians get pretty excited when we speak their language – and that it
may even be quite lucrative.

http://theconversation.com/look-whos-talking-indonesian-in-australia-35097

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