A very privileged day yesterday - spent at the oldest university in Bandu - established in 1955, ten years after the gaining of independence by Indonesia from the Dutch. We worked in the Faculty of International Relations - headed up by a professor who gained her doctorate at Monash University in Melbourne, assisted by an Australian professor Colin Brown from Griffith University in Brisbane. We worked with teams of Indonesian undergraduate students inquiring into contemporary issues associated with Australian-Indonesian relations. In my group these included fanatacism, boat people, East Timor, economic contexts and Papua. It was a day of rich learning and opportunities. The young people we worked with were exceptionally passionate about working with us and very generous in sharing thier knowledge and understandings of how our countries, indeed all countries need to work together
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