Talking Indonesia

In the Talking Indonesia podcast, Dr Jemma Purdey, Dr Jacqui Baker, Tito Ambyo and Dr Elisabeth Kramer present an extended interview each fortnight with experts on Indonesian politics, foreign policy, culture, language and more. Find all the Talking Indonesia podcasts and more at the Indonesia at Melbourne blog.

Talking Indonesia is a news podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 294 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts Talking Indonesia, a news show with 294 episodes published.

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  Talking Indonesia

  Dania Joedo - LGBTQI+ Community under Attack

  Aug 12, 202636 min

  Last month a series of attacks on transgender women in Bogor, sent a chill through a community for whom this kind of violence is increasingly normal. The recent attacks have coincided the release of the full text of Presidential Regulation No. 111 of 2025 concerning the 2025-2029 General Policy for National Defense, classifying the spread of LGBTQI+ culture as a ‘non-military’ threat to the state, placing it within the same category as terrorism, separatism and radicalism. A recent Human Rights Watch report quoted the chairperson of LGBTQI+ advocacy organisation, Arus Pelangi, Nono Sugiono, as saying, “Patterns of hate based on gender identity and sexual orientation are building year on year.” So, what forms does this ‘pattern of hatred’ take, how is the LGBTQI+ community coping and ultimately, why do morality issues have such social currency in Indonesia? In this week's episode, Jemma chats with Dania Joedo, a musician and human rights activist based in Jakarta, Indonesia. Dania works with a variety of NGOs such as Jakarta Legal Aid, Omah Munir, New Naratif, ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights, YAPPIKA ActionAid, and Indonesia Legal Aid Foundation. With her band, Tashoora, Dania makes music that aims to raise awareness about issues that are underrepresented today. In 2026, the Talking Indonesia podcast is co-hosted by Dr Jemma Purdey from the Australia-Indonesia Centre, Dr Jacqui Baker from Murdoch University, Dr Elisabeth Kramer from the University of New South Wales, Tito Ambyo from RMIT and Dr Clara Siagian from University College, London. Image: Indonesian LGBT activists protests in Jakarta 2018/ Bayu Fuller Wikimedia CC

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  Talking Indonesia

  Syarafina Vidyadhana - Indonesia's Independent Publishing

  Jul 30, 202637 min

  Independent publishing might seem like a small element of Indonesia’s cultural landscape: limited print runs, niche books, and audiences that rarely extend into the mainstream. Yet these spaces can matter precisely because they make room for voices, ideas, and forms of cultural expression that have little place elsewhere. This matters in Indonesia today, where civic space is increasingly constrained and marginalised communities, including queer people, face growing stigma, scapegoating, and political hostility. In this context, publishing becomes not only about circulating books but a way of sustaining communities, and creating spaces where people can think, disagree, and imagine different forms of social and political relations. In this episode of Talking Indonesia, Dr Clara Siagian speaks with Syarafina, co-founder and commissioning editor of Cahyati Press, an independent publishing practice based in Bali. Cahyati publishes books, zines, and artist books by writers, poets, artists, and researchers, particularly queer, working-class, and BIPOC voices that are often overlooked by mainstream publishing. Syarafina reflects on her twelve-year journey through independent publishing and on why Cahyati Press came into being. For her, independent publishing is less about size than editorial freedom to publish work because it matters, even when it defies common literary classification or when it is not commercially viable. That freedom takes on particular significance when we talk about queer publishing. As LGBTQ+ people in Indonesia face increasing stigma and political scapegoating, Syarafina argues for the importance of documenting queer lives in all their complexity. This means communicating not only stories of violence and survival, but also stories of friendship, family, work, migration, desire, boredom and joy. Publishing, in this sense, can be a quiet form of resistance which encompasses preserving stories, creating memory, and allowing people to recognise that they are not alone. The conversation also takes us beyond Indonesia. Cahyati Press is part of a growing international network of independent publishers, artists, writers, booksellers and cultural organisers across Southeast Asia, Australia, Europe and beyond. Rather than seeing Indonesia simply as a place where international researchers and artists come to study or work, this network points to Indonesia as a place from which connections are being forged, and cultural conversations are being shaped. Finally, we discuss what independent publishing might offer academics: an opportunity to experiment with shapes, audiences and methods, and to imagine forms of knowledge production beyond the rigid conventions of academic publishing. In 2026, Talking Indonesia podcast is co-hosted by Dr Jacqui Baker from Murdoch University, Dr Clara Siagian from University College London, Dr Elisabeth Kramer from the University of New South Wales, Dr Jemma Purdey from the Australia-Indonesia Centre, and Tito Ambyo from RMIT.

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  Talking Indonesia

  Liam Prince - Experiencing Indonesia

  Jul 15, 202634 min

  The problem of Australian knowing and engaging Indonesia, as our closest neighbour, has vexed successive Australia governments ever since Keating called for Asian literacy in the 1980s. Toward that end, we have seen intermittent policy interventions recognizing the strategic importance of what has come to known as Australia’s “Asian capabilities”. This includes a National Asian Language and Studies program in the 1990s, a 2012 white paper under the Gillard government and in 2015, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade unveiled the New Colombo Plan which provides grants and high prestige scholarships to Australian undergraduates studying in the region. And yet Australia’s quest for “Asian Capabilities” has been nonetheless been marked by declining numbers in Asian language learning, closures of Asian studies departments and programs at senior high school and in universities and with repeated warnings from educators, language teachers, high schools and universities about the catastrophic decline in student numbers. An important element of Australia’s relationship to Asia has been forged through study abroad programs which send hundreds of Australian students to Asia each year. The Australian Consortium for In Country Studies Indonesia Studies, known as ACICIS, is the longest running facilitator of these kinds of programs to Indonesia, having facilitated some 5000 of Australian students to Indonesian universities since it was established nearly 30 years ago. This month also marks the launch of a new book on the generational impact of these programs called Experiencing Indonesia: 30 years of ACICIS published by ANU Press and edited by Kirrilee Hughes, Kate Naidu and David Reeve. Today I’m speaking to Liam Prince, Director of the ACICIS program based at the University of Western Australia about the future of Australia’s Asia and Indonesia capabilities.

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  Talking Indonesia

  Austin Jenish - Environmental activism, the law and SLAPP

  Jul 1, 202635 min

  Indonesia is home to some of the largest stretches of tropical rainforest left on Earth — and to a growing community of people willing to put themselves on the line to defend it. But across the archipelago, environmental activists are increasingly finding that the sharpest threat they face isn't out in the field. It's in the courtroom. In this episode, we're looking at how the law itself is being turned against environmental defenders in Indonesia, especially through what are known as SLAPPs — strategic lawsuits against public participation. What are these suits, and what is the intention behind them? To unpack this, I'm joined by Austin Jenish. Austin recently finished his studies, and his path into these questions didn’t begin in a lecture or a research program, but with a study abroad program that took him to Indonesia. He came to the country's legal system and its environment out of genuine curiosity, and followed that interest far enough to start writing about it. So, we connected through an article Austin wrote for Earth.org on SLAPP which can be found at https://earth.org/how-malicious-lawsuits-are-silencing-climate-activists-in-indonesia/. Austin holds degrees in both law and genetics from Monash University and now works at a commercial litigation firm, but his engagement with environmental issues is a longstanding passion. He's served as a conservation status assessor with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, contributed environmental law and policy work to NGOs including the Institute for Criminal Justice Reform in Jakarta, and through Monash's law clinics helped draft a framework for environmental litigation and supported the Cook Islands in the UN's plastic pollution treaty negotiations.

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  Talking Indonesia

  Tito Ambyo and Jamie Edmonds - Indonesian Ghosts and Ghost Stories

  Jun 20, 202639 min

  What does it mean to believe in ghosts? It turns out that's exactly the wrong question. In this special episode of Talking Indonesia, co-hosts Tito Ambyo and Jamie Edmonds sit down together not as interviewer and guest, but as co-editors who have spent months immersed in a collection of essays on ghosts and haunting in Indonesia. The result is something that is a bit different than the usual podcast interview: two scholars thinking aloud about what the ghostly has done to them. They move between the personal and the theoretical. Jamie's childhood on a road called Whispering Woods, his years navigating psychosis and hallucination, and the way ghost stories kept refusing to let him stay on the outside. And Tito's discovery, buried in a Dutch East Indies newspaper, that his grandfather hosted a radio programme about spirituality, which was a revelation that arrived mid-thesis, mid-life, with the force of a haunting. The episode also serves as a guide to the Inside Indonesia special edition on ghosts that Tito and Jamie co-edited: essays on pulung gantung in Gunung Kidul, haunted manuscripts that resist digitisation, headless soldiers whose presence keeps colonial violence from being forgotten, female dancers whose spectral power is reshaping Indonesian cinema, and journalists learning to take seriously the tree that refused to be felled. What emerges from all of it is not an argument for or against the existence of ghosts, but something more interesting: a case for sitting with what we cannot explain, and for the kind of knowing that begins with admitting we do not know. In this episode of Talking Indonesia, Tito Ambyo and Jamie Edmonds explore what ghosts teach us about Indonesia — and about ourselves. Jamie Edmonds is Director of the Critical Languages Institute, Associate Director of the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies, and Clinical Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University. His research focuses on Islam, popular culture, and the supernatural in Indonesia. In 2026, the Talking Indonesia podcast is co-hosted by Dr Jemma Purdey from the Australia-Indonesia Centre, Dr Elisabeth Kramer from the University of New South Wales, Dr Tito Ambyo from RMIT, Dr Jacqui Baker from Murdoch University, and Dr Clara Siagian from University College London.

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