Why a Booktrail?
1960s: A vivid account of Indonesia under Sukarno’s rule and the journalists who go there to find out. Also a 1982 film starring Mel Gibson.
The Year of Living Dangerously
What you need to know before your trail
Guy Hamilton is an Anglo-Australian journalist who travels to Jakarta in order to be a corespondent for Australian ABC Radio. He is one os several foreign journalists heading to the area to see what will happen in Sukarno’s country. There will soon be a revolution which will see more than a million people killed.
These correspondents are about to experience what it means to be caught up in a country where colonial attitudes, war and tragedy will come together in a dramatic way.
Travel Guide
1960’s Indonesia is a country and a people in turmoil. The country is slowing sliding into the abyss under President Sukarno’s rule and people are either in poverty or living in extreme wealth with no one in between. Guy meets up with a Photojournalist called Billy Kwan who is well aware of the position they are in and the political turmoil unfolding.
Kwan is able to work with Guy to show him what he and other pampered Western journalists can not see. Through his eyes, they see what lies behind the truth if the county or rather when the country is going to collapse completely. Even in a country so devastated, there seems to be strength in numbers for they are able to report and to find out just exactly what is really going on. They then will have the decision of if and when to expose or use what they find out in some way but there are divided loyalties everywhere and it’s a political and social minefield.
This is a picture of poverty in every sense of the word, of a country on its knees and unlikely to get up again anytime soon, of journalists risking life and death to report on the real news, and those seemingly unaware of the real dangers they face.
Sukarno’s Indonesia is a complex place where you don’t know where boundaries or loyalties lie. Shaky political power and the rising threat of a military coup creates some unique and shattering situations and the beat of the country, the beat of its heart and of its future can be felt on each and every page.
Where Next?
