Editor’s note: this essay is an edited excerpt of the author’s chapter in a new volume from ANU Press, Experiencing Indonesia: 30 years of ACICIS, which contains reflections on the origins and achievements of the Australian Consortium for “In-Country” Indonesian Studies (ACICIS) since its establishment in 1994.

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Indonesian studies as an academic field in Australia originated in the mid-1950s amid the geopolitics of the Cold War. Shortly after Australia signed the Manila Pact, which provided for the establishment of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation, representatives from relevant departments of the Australian Government—including External Affairs, Defence and the Prime Minister’s Department—met in Canberra in December 1954 “to consider strategies which Australia could implement to fulfil its treaty commitments”.

Among the proposals put to, and ultimately approved by, the cabinet in January 1955 was the allocation of A£18,000 (approximately A$750,000 in 2024) that led directly to the establishment between 1956 and 1958 of Australia’s first three Indonesian studies programs at the University of Melbourne, the University of Sydney and Canberra University College (CUC, incorporated into ANU in 1960).

Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, the students of this first generation of programs fanned out across Australia to establish Indonesian studies programs at both older and newly established Australian universities. This second wave of program establishment included James Cook University and Griffith University in Queensland in 1974 and 1975 respectively, Murdoch University in Western Australia in 1975 and Flinders University in South Australia in 1976. This expansion continued through the 1980s, such that by 1992 there were 22 tertiary institutions spread across every Australian state and territory with Indonesian language programs. This expansion was one of the necessary preconditions for the establishment of ACICIS in 1994, an innovation driven primarily by this second generation of Indonesia-focused scholars.

These scholars sought a pragmatic solution to a set of common financial and administrative problems experienced by Australian universities attempting to place their students in Indonesia for in-country study. By aggregating Indonesia-specific expertise and administrative capacity as well as student demand for in-country programs at a national level, ACICIS has allowed Australian universities to overcome their own individual institutional limitations to create a permanent student support infrastructure in Indonesia and to achieve efficiencies, economies of scale, and outcomes of program quality and durability unlikely to have been achieved by any individual Australian university working alone.

Many among the more than 5,000 ACICIS alumni are today found in every corner and every aspect of the Australia–Indonesia relationship, from diplomatic missions to Indonesia to the public service in Canberra and academia across Australia and beyond. Just as ACICIS’ birth grew out of more than 40 years of Cold War-era Indonesian studies in Australia, ACICIS’ institutional endurance in the 30 years since has reflected its times. That the program’s longevity is so distinctive underlines how Australia’s post-Cold War “Asia literacy” project has been defined by uneven government commitment to supporting the broader ecosystem of Asian language learning and Asian studies to which ACICIS contributes and draws upon.

Boom and bust

ACICIS was the somewhat-organic product and outgrowth of four decades of an academic field deeply intertwined with the strategic imperatives and ideological conflict of the Cold War. But it was also to a significant degree shaped by the specific historical moment in which the consortium came into being—a time in the early 1990s when the regional and domestic political constraints imposed by the Cold War were loosening.

In particular, the confluence of the Keating government’s “Asia literacy” policies of the mid-1990s and its broader push for closer ties with Australia’s Asian neighbours, the fall of Suharto in 1998 and the East Timorese independence referendum in 1999, all shaped markedly the experiences of the first decade of ACICIS students and their encounters with Indonesia.

ACICIS’ establishment in 1994—and its survival over the following 30 years—is also inescapably the product of Australian Government intervention, policy and funding. The consortium was established with A$200,000 of funding provided by the Commonwealth Department of Education to Murdoch University between 1994 and 1995. In the decade between 2003 and 2012, ACICIS secured, cumulatively, a further A$1.8 million in funding from the Commonwealth Department of Education. This helped to underwrite the consortium’s core operational costs, to diversify its program offerings in Indonesia and to ensure ACICIS’ survival through the turbulent decade after the Bali bombing in 2002 and its implications for the ability of Australian students to study in Indonesia.

The first 10 years of the 21st century were something of a lost decade and missed opportunity for the building of a more complex and rich relationship between Australia and Indonesia, with the possibilities opened by the end of the Cold War narrowed considerably by the new imperatives of the US-led “Global War on Terror”, the Australian polity’s newly heightened preoccupation with irregular immigration and boat arrivals, and the Australian public’s pragmatic safety concerns after the Bali bombing in October 2002.

2002 also saw the discontinuation of the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools (NALSAS) strategy, mirroring the Howard government’s reorientation of Australian foreign and defence policy towards a renewed emphasis on the United States alliance and a concomitant de-emphasis of the Keating-era push for building closer ties with Australia’s Asian neighbours.

However, by the early 2010s, the pendulum of Australian politics and public discourse had once again begun to swing back towards an emphasis on the opportunities, rather than the threats, inherent in Australia’s relationship with Indonesia. The election of the Rudd Labor government in November 2007 signalled the beginning of the change. Kevin Rudd had been a key architect and driver of the Keating-era NALSAS initiative, and as prime minister Rudd reinstated federal funding for Asian-language education in Australian schools under the National Asian Language and Studies in Schools Program (NALSSP) that ran from 2008 to 2012. Of more practical and immediate significance for ACICIS’ operations was DFAT lowering its travel advisory for Indonesia in May 2012 for the first time since the 2002 Bali bombing. This development was a crucial precondition for the significant expansion of the number of Australian students travelling to Indonesia for study that was to occur in the following decade.

By October 2012, Julia Gillard’s government had synthesised and formalised this new emphasis on the opportunities arising from regional engagement via its Australia in the Asian Century White Paper. After the paper’s publication, the Australian Government announced A$37 million (A$51 million in 2024 dollars) in funding for a new AsiaBound initiative under which Australian university students would be eligible to receive Commonwealth grants of between A$2,000 and A$5,000 to support short-term or semester-long study in Asia.

The Rudd–Gillard Labor government lost office in September 2013. However, by this point, bipartisan support had consolidated behind the idea of funding students at Australian universities to study in the Indo-Pacific and behind the Australian Government’s co-option of outbound student mobility as a tool of foreign policy and public diplomacy. Under the new conservative Abbott Coalition government, Labor’s AsiaBound program was reinvented as the New Colombo Plan (NCP), under the political stewardship of foreign minister Julie Bishop.

The NCP retained many features of the predecessor AsiaBound scheme but differed, for ACICIS’ purposes, in one very significant respect. Under the guidelines of the NCP’s Mobility Program, provision was made for Australian universities to apply for project funding jointly, as consortia. This represented the first time that “the consortium model” for the delivery of learning abroad programs for Australian students, a model that ACICIS had pioneered for two decades before the advent of the NCP, was explicitly recognised (and encouraged) in the guidelines of an Australian Government funding program of this kind.

This administrative change opened the door for an entirely new level of Australian Government funding of ACICIS’ activities. Between 2014 and 2024, the consortium was successful in securing (cumulatively) over A$21 million of NCP funding—or, on average, A$1.7 million each year over this 12-year period, to support student participation in the consortium’s Indonesia-based programs.

It is difficult to overstate the impact of the NCP on the scale of ACICIS’ operations since 2014. The organisation has more than tripled in size—with the annual number of ACICIS students increasing from 134 students in 2013 (pre-NCP) to more than 600 students in 2024. The number of in-country study options has increased from eight to 15, with the establishment of programs in fields and disciplines well outside the consortium’s traditional remit of in-country (Indonesian) language study, including programs in business (2015), agriculture (2016), public health (2016), creative arts and design (2017), law (2018) and tourism (2019). Meanwhile, the consortium’s annual operating revenue has increased from A$600,000 in 2013 to more than A$3 million in 2024, and the number of ACICIS staff working in Australia and Indonesia has increased from 10 personnel in 2013 to more than 30 personnel in 2024.

To put the size of transformation more starkly: it took ACICIS eight years to send its first 500 students to Indonesia between 1995 and 2002. As I write this, the consortium has sent its most recent 500 students to Indonesia in just the last six months. The two decades of patient, although often improvisational, organisational development and maturation leading up to 2014 meant that ACICIS has been, arguably, better poised to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the NCP than any other actor in Australian higher education.

What 30 years of ACICIS has delivered

Adam Hughes Henry in his 2015 book The Gatekeepers of Australian Foreign Policy 1950−1966 describes the small coterie of Anglo-Australian men who shaped Australia’s relationship with Indonesia during the second half of the 20th century. Although undoubtedly in possession of the best educational pedigrees of their day, what these earlier generations of Australian diplomats and stewards of the Australia–Indonesia relationship, for the most part, did not have in their biographies was a period spent during their formative undergraduate years studying in Indonesia or Southeast Asia alongside Indonesian and Southeast Asian peers.

The key achievement of ACICIS has been, since 1995, to routinise this process of relational capital and solidarity building between Australians and Indonesians at an entirely new scale, enabling hundreds of Australians each year to study in Indonesia, at Indonesian universities and among Indonesians, during formative undergraduate years. It is perhaps too early for a complete stocktake of the collective impact of nearly 5,000 ACICIS alumni. Even the earliest cohorts of ACICIS students are only just now reaching their 50s and the senior ranks of their respective occupations. We have not yet had an ACICIS alumni serve as the Australian ambassador to Indonesia. However, in 2024, Australia’s High Commissioner to Brunei, Consul-General in Makassar and Deputy Consul-General in Surabaya were all ACICIS alumni. Perhaps it is only a matter of time.

At the very least, the cumulative work of ACICIS over three decades means it is entirely more probable today than 30 years ago that a future Australian ambassador to Indonesia, Secretary of DFAT or future Director-General of the Office of National Intelligence, or perhaps even a future foreign minister, will have in their educational background, lived experience of studying in Indonesia alongside Indonesian peers.

This is no small achievement. It is a measure, however modest and incremental, of progress towards an Australia more familiar with its neighbours and more at home in our region. Against considerable odds, the second generation of Australian Indonesianists who saw fit to establish ACICIS in the mid-1990s have also succeeded in begetting a third generation of Indonesia-focused scholarship within Australia’s universities.

Although the resourcing and status of Indonesian studies as a discipline—along with area studies more generally—has diminished significantly within the Australian higher education system since the mid-1990s, Indonesian language remains taught at 13 of Australia’s 42 universities and significant Indonesia-focused scholarship continues at Australia universities, particularly (but not exclusively) at Australia’s long-standing centres of excellence in Indonesian studies, including the University of Melbourne, Monash University, the University of Sydney and ANU.

Yet at most Australian universities where significant Indonesia-focused research and scholarship continue, one will find ACICIS alumni. Indeed, much of Australia’s new knowledge of and about Indonesia is now mediated through their research, teaching and work.

ACICIS’ role within Australia’s uncertain regional future

ACICIS, along with Asialink and centres like Murdoch University’s Indo-Pacific Research Centre (formerly the Asia Research Centre), is among a handful of remaining institutional legacies within Australian higher education, vestiges of the Keating-era push for Asia literacy. Since 2001, Australia has retreated from the aspirations of the mid-1990s of reorienting Australian society, culture and politics towards Asia. The Australian Government has abandoned the specific ambition of achieving widespread literacy in Asian languages among the Australian community through our schools and universities. The dismantling of the Keating government’s NALSAS strategy in 2002 marked the end of the last meaningful system-wide effort to integrate Asian language learning across Australian education.

To an extent, the ambition of broad-based Asia literacy lives on in the NCP. For this, we should be extremely grateful. However, 14 years on from the end of the Rudd government’s NALSSP, Australia remains without a national languages education policy. The Australian Government’s withdrawal of leadership, coordination and funding in this policy area since 2012, has implications that will last at least a generation. The failure to embed Indonesian and other Asian languages across Australia’s education systems has narrowed the base from which initiatives like ACICIS and the NCP can draw. With the decline of Indonesian language education in our schools, and of Indonesian studies in our universities, the structural foundation that ACICIS was built to complement has weakened dramatically.

The NCP is the sole, significant piece of public policy currently working to reorient the hearts, minds and livelihoods of young Australians towards our regional neighbourhood. Yet, the NCP cannot do everything; already it is arguably being asked to do too much. The NCP promotes Australian undergraduate student mobility into the region. It does not, on its own, remake curricula or strengthen language programs in Australia’s schools, nor does it nurture subject area expertise or research capacity at Australian universities, at least not of the sort, or at the scale cultivated over the course of the second half of the 20th century, and not in the way that a new comprehensive national Asia literacy strategy might.

As things stand, and looking forward, the policy terrain ACICIS inhabits remains ambiguous and contradictory. Australian foreign policy—at least rhetorically—affirms the strategic importance of the Indo-Pacific and of Indonesia specifically, whereas domestic policy, and particularly Australian education policy, is failing to cultivate the linguistic and cultural capabilities or the subject area expertise at the scale needed to make good on that affirmation.

The Albanese government’s Invested: Australia’s Southeast Asia Economic Strategy to 2040, published in September 2023, makes rhetorical signals in the right direction. The strategy’s first recommendation calls for National Cabinet to “consider developing a whole-of-nation plan to strengthen Southeast Asia literacy in Australian business, government, the education and training system, and the community” but so far, no significant public funding has been allocated, nor any policies enacted, in order to implement this recommendation.

More recently, in June 2026, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education—chaired by the Albanese government’s Indian Ocean Envoy, Tim Watts—handed down the findings and recommendations of the Committee’s inquiry into Building Asia Capability in Australia through the education system and beyond. The Committee’s final report, titled Security and Prosperity in Asia, contains 34 recommendations for state and federal governments.

The inquiry’s recommendations include: development of a 10-year “National Asia Capability Strategy” buttressed by annual progress statements to Parliament; establishment of a “National Data Framework and Dashboard on Asia capability” to track participation rates across all levels of Australia’s education systems; establishment of an “Asian Leader Schools” program to preserve the teaching of “priority” Asian languages in Australian schools; and the establishment of an ACICIS-like “Australian Schools in Asia (ASIA) Consortium” to facilitate outbound student mobility to Asia by Australian school students.

In the long history of similar reports, starting with the Auchmuty report in 1970, it is only the Rudd Report of 1994 that has ever prompted federal funding of a quantum sufficient to make measurable systemic change—leading, in 1994, to the establishment of NALSAS. It is far too early to judge if this latest intervention, spearheaded by Watts, will be backed by a similar level of federal funding or have the lasting impact of the Rudd-architected, Keating-era NALSAS.

The A$50 million per year currently spent on regional engagement through the NCP looks exceedingly modest when considered alongside the Australian Government’s large public investment in national security and defence spending—AUKUS chief among this investment—and the reaffirmation of the United States alliance that this spending signals. AUKUS’ Pillar 1, which provides for the procurement of nuclear submarines, is set to cost the Australian community between A$8 billion and A$12 billion per annum over the next 30 years.

We are yet to see a national Asian languages program, or any kind of Australian education policy, that might underwrite greater regional enmeshment at anything like the scale and long-term ambition of AUKUS. A revived NALSAS strategy, allowing for inflation and growth in the size of the Australian school population since 2002, would cost the Australian Government approximately A$84 million per year, or A$2.5 billion over 30 years. It would be a modest investment in creating an Australian population with the discernment to know when our vital interests are actually in peril, better able to differentiate actual threats from imagined ones and capable—as a population—of calibrating our anxiety appropriately.

Against this backdrop, what future role might we imagine for ACICIS? Part of the answer lies in Australia’s demographic trajectory. The most transformative development in Australia’s engagement with Asia of the first two decades of the 21st century has arisen not from Australian education policy but from immigration policy—and in particular the rapid expansion of Chinese and Indian diasporas in Australia. The presence of 1.39 million Australians of Chinese ancestry, constituting 5.5% of the Australian population as of the 2021 Census, and 780,000 Australians of Indian heritage, or 3% of the Australian population as of 2021, has changed considerably the makeup of the Australia community and will pay dividends for Australia’s relations with China and India well into the future.

For now, at least, the Indonesian diaspora in Australia remains comparatively small—just 88,000 people in 2021. This demographic reality means that relationship building, cross-cultural outreach initiatives and advocacy for closer ties between Australia and Indonesia remain disproportionately driven by Indonesia-engaged Australians of non-Indonesian heritage—and, as Kirrilee Hughes has observed, distinctively dependent upon government support.

For 30 years, ACICIS has worked to deepen Australia’s people-to-people ties with Indonesia, the most populous country of Southeast Asia and an emerging regional—if not global—power. In so doing, ACICIS has quietly helped to lay the foundations for a more regionally embedded future for Australia. Three decades after David Hill and colleagues established the organisation, ACICIS’ core proposition—that placing Australian students in Indonesian universities, workplaces and communities is a good idea, and potentially transformative for both the student and bilateral ties—remains prescient, potent and urgent.