Draft:Anthony Hearle Johns

Anthony Hearle Johns (born London, 1928) was the first Professor of Indonesian Language and Literature in Australia and helped establish modern Indonesian as a subject of academic enquiry in the Anglosphere.

Formation

Tony Johns was born on 28 August 1928 of a Polish-English ancestors. He was sent to Malaya for his compulsory military service (1947-9), but spent it teaching Malay recruits English in Johor for the Army Education Service. This 'intoxicating' experience launched him into an unusual academic career on return, as virtually the only student of Malay at the School of Oriental and African Studies, where he did both BA and PhD in 5 years (1950-54). Johns was then recruited by the Ford Foundation to teach English in Teacher Training institutions (1954-58) in Bukittinggi (where he taught and later married Yohanni) and a second contract in Yogyakarta.

ANU Appointment

The teaching of Indonesian (or its predecessor Malay) was a late development in Australia, stimulated by Government pressure in the context of first the Pacific War and then the Cold War. Federal Government intervention had established a School of Oriental Languages at the Canberra University College (CUC) in 1952. When this failed to initiate Indonesian, Government intervened again to fund specific Departments of 'Indonesian and Malayan Studies' in three centres in 1955. Sydney opted for a Dutch orientalist, Melbourne for an Australian social scientist, while Canberra's CUC concluded that British Johns was the ideal appointment. He insisted on staying in Indonesia as long as his Ford contract allowed, but arrived in Canberra as Senior Lecturer and head of the new department in August 1958. He built this as a 'Language and Literature' Department on the model of earlier French and German and became its first Professor in 1964. The old School had by then become the Faculty of Oriental (later Asian) Studies at the Australian National University (ANU). He turned the Orientalist teaching approach on its head by beginning with the modern languages and their literatures, and only introducing classical Malay and Javanese in the later years.

By 1970 these methods had made Indonesian the most popular foreign language at ANU with over 100 students enrolled. The numbers enabled Johns to appoint three young Indonesian graduates to do the language teaching while studying for their ANU PhDs and a fourth, prominent novelist Achdiat K. Mihardja, to teach literature. His wife Yohanni also designed a syllabus for modern Indonesian, published as Bahasa Indonesia: Langkah Baru.

Research

Johns' earliest publications (see below) were classical Malay Islamic texts including his SOAS dissertation. Most influential was a paper on Southeast Asian Sufism for the first (1961) International Conference of Southeast Asian Historians, in Singapore.

In Canberra, however, he devoted his early energy to establishing Modern Indonesian and Malay literatures as subjects for academic enquiry. A number of articles in 1959-63 argued this explicitly Johns was one of the first to publish an English translation of a modern Indonesian novel, Mochtar Lubis' Djalan Tak Ada Udjung. The 1960s also produced translations of short stories by Achdiat K. Mihardja (1960) and Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1963) as well as various critical studies of other authors.

A sabbatical in Cairo in 1964-5 was, in his words, "an experience that utterly changed my world", giving him the confidence in Arabic to a chart new course on Islamic story-telling. Regular articles appeared over the next 40 years on mainstream Islamic literature.

A.H. Johns books

• Malay Sufism as illustrated in a Collection of Anonymous Malay Tracts JMBRAS 178, part 2 (1957).
• Rantjak di Labueh, a specimen of the traditional literature of Central Sumatra, comprising introduction, text and translation, Data Paper 32, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University,1958.
• The Gift Addressed to the Spirit of the Prophet, Oriental Monographs no.1, Australian National University, 1965.
• Mochtar Lubis, trans. A.H. Johns, A Road with No End, London: Hutchinson, 1968.
• with Y. Johns and Richard Woldendorp, Indonesia, Thomas Nelson (Australia), 1972.
• Cultural Options and the Role of Tradition: A Collection of Essays on Modern Indonesian and Malaysian Literature Canberra: ANU Press for Faculty of Asian Studies, 1981.
• ed., with R. Israeli, Islam in Asia, Vol. II: Islam in Southeast and East Asia, Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1984.
• ed., with Nelly Lahoud, Islam in World Politics, London: Routledge, 2005.
• The Dye of God: Essays on Islam and the Quran, Adelaide: ATF Press, 2023.