Special Collections has recently launched a digitised collection of material from the Anton Lucas Collection!
Anton Lucas has been involved with Flinders University since 1981, commencing as an Indonesian language teacher & then helping to establish the Asian Studies major and Department of Asian Studies. He also worked in the Social Sciences Research Training Centre (PLPIIS) at Hasanuddin University, Makassar, South Sulawesi (1984-85), and in the Inter-University Centre, Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta (1990-1992). Anton became Head of the Department of Asian Studies and Languages in 2002, then Director of the Flinders Asia Centre from 2004 to 2009. He taught undergraduate classes as well as in the off-shore MA International Relations programs in China and Indonesia, and has a long history of PhD supervision, including many international students, some of those holding AusAID and other awards. Since 1999 Anton took part in three shared ARC Discovery Grants which examined land tenure, livelihood and the law, community, environment and local governance, and social capital and natural resources management in Indonesia. He has published widely on a range of social and political issues at the local level. Additionally Anton has worked tirelessly in his endeavours to improve Australia-Indonesia engagement and international understanding of Indonesian society. Anton retired from teaching at the end of 2010. Since then he co-supervised two PhD students on the topics of social capital and village governance in West Kalimantan, and the East Java mud volcano. He also co-edited a performing arts issue of Inside Indonesia to coincide with the 2016 OzAsia Festival.
The Anton Lucas Collection contains letters and documents from the Japanese occupation and the Indonesian revolution, press clippings, unpublished memoirs written by former participants, letters, and audio recordings and transcripts of interviews with 324 participants at the local level in the revolution. It also includes photographs of the people involved in these events, plus photographs and drawings of important landmarks. These items particularly pertain to “Persitiwa Tiga Daerah”, the Three Regions Affair in 1945. The Collection topics also include women in the revolution, religious movements, and agrarian and environmental protest movements that continued in later periods.
The digitised collections provide access to hundreds of these rare, primary source documents regarding Indonesian political and social history. This enables researchers around the world to connect with the rare and unique materials in this collection.
The records can be searched through FindIt@Flinders. More information can be found on the Anton Lucas webpage.