Friends and readers,

Here is the second guest letter, this time from Kate Walton, an Australian activist and journalist who lived for several years in Indonesia before moving back to Canberra, Australia, in 2019.

Some time ago, I had read her tweet about being deported from Indonesia and prevented from returning. When I decided to start guest letters here, I thought it might be interesting to hear her story. What is it like to be barred from the place you most love, the place that made you? I especially liked reading about what brought her to Indonesia. It reminds me of all the little influences we pick up along the way, how they can make an impression and direct our lives in ways we never dreamed of. Thanks for sharing, Kate.

You can also read the first guest letter, from Malaysian novelist Elizabeth Wong, here. If you’re interested in writing, please reach out.

Till the next,

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A guest letter from Kate Walton

Photographs also by the writer

Kate Walton during her early twenties in Kendari, South Sulawesi, c. 2012.

At the immigration office in Central Jakarta, a young official stared at his computer. He was reluctant to engage with me and seemed to be pretending to scroll through a document. I stood in front of him, waiting.

“It turns out you’ve been blacklisted,” he said eventually, glancing up briefly before returning his gaze to his screen.

“What do you mean, ‘turns out’?” I asked. “Isn’t it Immigration who makes these decisions?”

The young man looked at his colleague, who busied himself with sheets of paper and refused to look back.

“I don’t have any other information except that you’re on the blacklist and your visa won’t be extended.”

I tried to remain calm, going through a list in my mind of the people I could call and ask for help.

“So, I need to leave the country?”

He nodded.

“When?”

“As soon as possible.”

I left Indonesia and flew back to Australia two days later, in mid-June 2019. It was the day before my best friend’s karaoke birthday party. We hugged goodbye at the airport, watched closely by immigration officials.

In retrospect, I wish I had stayed on a few more days to say farewell to everyone, because my blacklisting turned out to be more complicated to revoke than anyone had expected. I was a full-time feminist activist and a part-time journalist for international news outlets, and I had known that it could happen one day. I just didn’t think I would have to leave after only seven years.

Petoaha, a village in Kendari, South Sulawesi.

I am often asked, “Why Indonesia?” As in, why did I choose Indonesia to make a life in?

There isn’t really a straightforward answer. It was just the way things fell. But significantly, Bahasa Indonesia was compulsory at my primary school in Canberra in the late nineties, as it was at many primary schools in the country due to the language’s relatively simple grammar and Indonesia’s geographical proximity as Australia’s largest Asian neighbor. The language was first introduced in schools between 1955 and 1970 by the Commonwealth Government, supposedly to better steer Australia’s relationship with the newly independent nations of Southeast Asia. Then, at high school, all students had to study a language, so I stuck with Indonesian.

My teacher there, Kirsten, who we called Nona (“Miss”), was a white Australian woman then in her early thirties who spent most of our classes telling us stories about living, working, and traveling in Indonesia during the nineties. I remember her sitting on top of a large desk at the front of the classroom, barefoot, telling us about the hilarious cultural faux pas she’d made in front of horrified Javanese elders too polite to tell her off. About watching wayang kulit performances in the kampung through the night, complete with full gamelan orchestras, during the late New Order period under Suharto from 1966 to 1998. About delicious food and freezing cold showers and cramped bemo mini buses. How never to turn your bare feet towards others. How ribald the jokes are.

I call her Nona to this day. Now that I’m back in Canberra, we have coffee every few months and talk about how to inspire her students to keep studying Indonesian, at a time when learning the language is becoming less popular. She has suggested I come in and speak to them, but I don’t know how inspiring a story that ends in deportation really is, even if the years leading up to it were full of laughter and purpose.

The first Women's March Jakarta in 2017.

The seven years I spent in Indonesia made me who I am. The work I did there—the feminist community I helped grow, the women’s marches I helped organize, the socio-political issues I wrote about—became so central to my identity, that I wonder who I am now that I am in Australia again. I was away for so long, there is hardly anyone I know here anymore. Most of my school friends have moved elsewhere, and I’ve been out of touch for too long with the rest.

I identified as a queer feminist before I ever touched down in Indonesia, but it was there that I fully came of age. International Women’s Day isn’t a big deal in Australia—unless you count business-led morning teas where people sit around and politely discuss women in leadership—so it wasn’t until I was working with Koalisi Perempuan Indonesia (Indonesian Women’s Coalition) in Kendari, Southeast Sulawesi, in 2012 when I was twenty-three years old that I attended my first march. We all dressed in red and rallied up one of the town’s main streets, yelling about worker exploitation in palm oil and mining. It was thrilling, and that’s where I was radicalized. It makes it all the more amusing to recall how immigration officials had accused me, to my face, of “bringing feminism to Indonesia from Australia” prior to my deportation.

In 2013, I moved to Jakarta to work with a religious women’s organization, then joined an international development project that focused on maternal health. I started a feminist discussion group on Facebook in late 2014 called Jakarta Feminist, and in 2017, we started the annual Women’s March Jakarta. I remember standing on a pedestrian overpass in Central Jakarta during the following year’s march, and hearing the roars of several thousand women as one, demanding the fulfillment of their rights: “Perempuan bersatu, tak bisa dikalahkan!” (“Women united, will never be defeated!”)

It was a privilege to be involved, and despite being trailed home by immigration officials afterward (I weaseled my way out of that one), it’s something I will never regret.

Young voters during the 2019 general election in Indonesia, which Kate covered for Al Jazeera.

Like any country, Indonesia has its problems and is far from perfect. But it became my home, my community. It was the place where I felt everything just fit.

While the sudden end to my life in Indonesia has been devastating, I am incredibly fortunate that I was only deported and blacklisted. My Telkomsel SIM card was blocked, and I had to leave my three beloved cats behind, but at least I am safe. Some of my Indonesian activist and journalist friends have been targeted with much worse, and I worry about them endlessly. They have had their phones hacked, their homes raided, their families threatened. Some have been bundled off the road into unmarked police cars in the middle of the night. According to Reporters Without Borders, Indonesia ranks 113 out of 180 countries in the 2021 World Press Freedom Index.

Last year, I quipped on social media that I was tired of being in exile. An Indonesian activist friend quickly called me out and reminded me that some Indonesians were genuinely exiled after the mass anti-communist killings in 1965 during the Cold War, never to return. She is right, of course. My experience is minor in comparison. While I did lose a place I called home, I haven’t lost my “motherland”. Yet, I’ve always struggled with the idea of being Australian, as I think many young Australians now do. I’m a woman of Welsh heritage who spent several years as a child in Cornwall, England. I’m a white citizen of a nation where Indigenous sovereignty was never ceded. I live on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land, and I struggle deeply with how to be a white ally for Indigenous justice in a country where the racist colonial system remains strongly embedded.

It’s possible that I may never be able to return to Indonesia, even for a holiday to see my friends and my cats and my housemate’s dog. I’ll almost certainly never be able to live there again. After six months of trying to get some clarification from the authorities, the legal aid body assisting me finally received a letter from the Directorate General of Immigration. Apparently, I was deemed “a threat to national security” because of my involvement in the women’s rights movement.

My legal representative followed up on this allegation in person. She asked a senior official why criminal charges weren’t brought against me if I was really such a threat. She told me he just laughed and replied, “Why would we do that when we can just deport her? It’s much easier.”

I still don’t know exactly what I did to run afoul of the authorities. Maybe one day I’ll find out; maybe I never will. I’ve written letters to tens of officials appealing my blacklisting, all to no avail.

In the end, it was probably due to an accumulation of things. The immigration officers who interviewed me before I was deported had even seemed suspicious of the fact that I had visited so many parts of the country and speak fluent Indonesian—ironic, considering the push in Australia for students to learn the language. Serba salah, as Indonesians would say: Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

But I have learned to be comfortable with this lack of clarity, this unknowingness.

Kate was part of the Canberra organizing committee for March4Justice, an Australia-wide campaign against gendered violence, this year.

Just over two years have passed since I had to leave Indonesia. Physically, I am safe, though I remain apprehensive of immigration officials and the police. Mentally, I’m in a sort of locational limbo, wondering what comes next, how to put down roots and begin thinking of Australia as home once more. I know that logically, as an Australian citizen, I will never be forced to leave, but I still can’t help thinking, what if I had to move again? I don’t know if I could withstand another rupture.

Now, though, it’s time for me to accept that I can’t go back to Indonesia any time soon, and to start learning, over again, who I am and what my purpose is. I’ve taken tentative steps into the local women’s movement here in Canberra, attended rallies in support of Palestine and refugees, and begun writing more about the massive issues Australia faces with climate change. I’m even trying to buy a house, though I haven’t had any luck so far; the housing market here is not a friend to freelancers.

This isn’t the 2021 I ever imagined, but I’m doing my best to make peace with it.

This is a guest letter, and views and experiences related are the writer’s own. Guest appearances here aim to reflect the variety of life in this world.

KATE WALTON is a queer Australian feminist activist and writer. She lived in Indonesia between 2011 and 2019, and is the co-founder of Jakarta Feminist. She also writes a fortnightly newsletter, Solidaritas, about women’s rights and feminism in Asia and the Pacific.

Read more about this newsletter. If you’d like it in your inbox, please subscribe. It’s free by default, or you can choose a paid membership to access private letters and help fund guest writers. Thank you!

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Kate Walton: I’m in a sort of locational…