Black Armada

Australia & the struggle for Indonesian independence 1942-49

by Rupert Lockwood

Hale & Iremonger, 1982 [First Edition], ISBN 0868060046, black and white photographic plates, hardcover, dust-jacket

Very Good Condition, a little edge and shelf wear, a little rubbing to edges and corners, no inscriptions, ex-library with sticker to front end-paper and residue to back end-paper, tape residue on caver; dust-jacket shows minor edge and shelf wear with a little rubbing to edges and corners and creasing to wraps, small chips to edges and corners (see photographs)

"So incisive is Rupert Lockwood's account of Australian assistance to the Indonesian rebellion against the Dutch that Lord Louis Mountbatten of Burma, Supreme Commander, South-East Asia Command and the leader of Anglo-Dutch intervention in Java in 1945, was moved to write to Lockwood, 'I have read all you have written with great interest and it explains a lot that happened to us in South East Asia Command Headquarters'.
Rupert Lockwood, correspondent for such diverse newspapers as the Melbourne Herald and Tribune, a journalist in Moscow, radical publicist and veteran of the Petrov inquiry, witnessed many of the events he so vividly describes.  he recalls the campaign to release Indonesian political prisoners detained by the Dutch in Australian POW camps and examines the boycotts and mutinies in Australia that crippled Dutch attempts to reoccupy their former colony.  He reveals deep-going anti-colonial attitudes not often suspected in White Australia, discusses the impact of the union boycotts on the armed forces and war supplies of the only foreign regime to which Australia has ever played host, and brings to light Australian ambitions for an independent influence in Asia.
More than forty contemporary cartoons and photographs and previously unpublished stills from the Australia film Indonesia Calling unite with the text to produce an exciting and moving account of a critical period in Australia's foreign relations."