4.28pm, Canberra.
Just came back from a coffee session with Ed Aspinall (my supervisor), Professor Harold Crouch, and my postgraduate friends - Velix, Wai-Weng, and David - all of us are doing projects on Indonesia. This department really loves to drink coffee! There's even an espresso machine in the pantry. It's probably what keeps us sane I reckon. Anyway, we were talking about the current elections in Aceh, with live updates from Ed's contacts in Aceh. I'll say this again: it's really a privilege to learn and interact with the leading academics on Indonesia here at ANU. Especially if you consider how Asian Studies is declining across all the Australian universities, with the sole exception of ANU.
Last Saturday, I had lunch with Wai-Weng and Marzuki in the city. Wai-Weng's PhD thesis is on Muslim Chinese identities in Malaysia and Indonesia, and Marzuki is doing Malaysian law and politics. Got to hear from Marzuki insider knowledge about Anwar Ibrahim and that fateful month in September 1998 where he got sacked - the stuff you don't read in Malaysian newspapers. :)
Chatted to Ed today about my project - he isn't in Canberra very often, so we always catch up when he's around. The project will be a comparative study of the military in Indonesia and Thailand - why coups happen in a cyclical fashion in the latter, compared to what appears to be a reduction of the Indonesian military in national politics since 1997. There's lots of stuff / readings on Indonesia out there, but relatively few on Thailand, and even less so on the recent coup in Thailand. So was quite happy when Ed gave me a few contacts working on Thailand in the Faculty of Asian Studies, which is located just down the road from RSPAS, where I am.