Richard Kirby and the Tjaringin Murders A Western Response to the Indonesian Revolution, 1946

Abstract

On 17 April 1946, seven Australian war crimes investigators left the military perimeter British troops were maintaining around the city of Batavia and travelled into an anarchic, lawless Javanese hinterland, rife with different Indonesian revolutionary militants fighting the Dutch and each other. As they entered the kampong of Tjaringin, north of Bogor, automatic rifle fire hit their car. Two men died immediately; a third was found days later in a nearby ditch, shot in the back of the head. Amid outrage in the Australian press, External Affairs Minister H. V Evatt announced he was sending an Australian judge, Richard Kirby, to investigate the killings. This article analyses Kirby's trip to Indonesia and his approach to the task of locating and bringing to trial the murderers.Kirby's task was a microcosm of the challenge the West faced in responding to the nationalist uprisings that convulsed postwar Asia. Those uprisings, at times marked by violent antiforeign sentiment, raised for Western nations the spectre of permanent instability and anarchy impeding their interests and influence: O.S.S. officer Peter Dewey's murder in Vietnam the year before had similarly encapsulated this issue for the United States. Yet by the end of the 1940s, Western policymakers had for the most part moved from supporting formal colonialism to supporting the formation of independent states run by Asian nationalists. Australia's support for the Indonesian Republic in its struggle against Dutch rule was an early example of this shift. It so happened that Kirby's 1946 Java mission coincided with a period of backtracking in Australia's progressive attitude to the Indonesian question: indeed, Kirby's minister at times expressed qualms with Kirby's approach.