White Coolies

In 1942 a group of sixty-five Australian Army nursing sisters was evacuated from Malaya a few days before the fall of Singapore. Two days later their ship was bombed and sunk by the Japanese. Of the fifty-three survivors who scrambled ashore, twenty-one were murdered and the remaining thirty-two taken prisoner. White Coolies is the engrossing record kept by one of the sisters, Betty Jeffrey, during the more than three gruelling years of imprisonment that followed. It is an amazing story of survival and deprivation and the harshest of conditions.

Publisher Description

A stunning personal account of a Eurasian family living in Malaya during WWII.

2007 Winner of the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award of the Organization of American Historians, 2006 Winner of the History/Social Science Book Award of the Association of Asian American Studies How did thousands of Chinese migrants end up working alongside African Americans in Louisiana after the Civil War? With the stories of these workers, Coolies and Cane advances an interpretation of emancipation that moves beyond U.S. borders and the black-white racial dynamic. Tracing American ideas of Asian labor to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, Moon-Ho Jung argues that the racial formation of "coolies" in American culture and law played a pivotal role in reconstructing concepts of race, nation, and citizenship in the United States. Jung examines how coolies appeared in major U.S. political debates on race, labor, and immigration between the 1830s and 1880s. He finds that racial notions of coolies were articulated in many, often contradictory, ways. They could mark the progress of freedom; they could also symbolize the barbarism of slavery. Welcomed and rejected as neither black nor white, coolies emerged recurrently as both the salvation of the fracturing and reuniting nation and the scourge of American civilization. Based on extensive archival research, this study makes sense of these contradictions to reveal how American impulses to recruit and exclude coolies enabled and justified a series of historical transitions: from slave-trade laws to racially coded immigration laws, from a slaveholding nation to a "nation of immigrants," and from a continental empire of manifest destiny to a liberating empire across the seas. Combining political, cultural, and social history, Coolies and Cane is a compelling study of race, Reconstruction, and Asian American history.

Losing Hearts and Minds explores the loss of British power and prestige in colonial Singapore and Malaya from the First World War to the Malayan Emergency. During this period, British leaders relied on a growing number of Asian, European and Eurasian allies and servicepeople, including servants, police, soldiers, and medical professionals, to maintain their empire. At the same time, British institutions and leaders continued to use racial and gender violence to wage war. As a result, those colonial subjects closest to British power frequently experienced the limits of belonging and the broken promises of imperial inclusion, hastening the end of British rule in Southeast Asia. From the World Wars to the Cold War, European, Indigenous, Chinese, Malay, and Indian civilians resisted or collaborated with British and Commonwealth soldiers, rebellious Indian troops, invading Japanese combatants, and communists. Historian Kate Imy tells the story of how Singapore and Malaya became sites of some of the most impactful military and anti-colonial conflicts of the twentieth century, where British military leaders repeatedly tried—but largely failed—to win the "hearts and minds" of colonial subjects.

This historiographic study of K'tut Tantri - alias Vannen Walker, the journalist from the Isle of Man; Muriel Pearson, the unhappy wife; and Surabaya Sue, the notorious revolutionary - compares her romantic and colorful autobiography, Revolt in Paradise, with other versions of her past, including those of her fellow Bali colonists and her revolutionary comrades, as well as her foes, the Dutch, and various intelligence organizations. These alternatives accounts of her past question the image of K'tut Tantri as hero, portraying her instead as dishonest, unstable, egotistical, and immoral. Such criticisms have overshadowed proper recognition of her role in the development of modern Indonesia, both as a bohemian hotelier in between-wars Bali and later as propaganda broadcaster and adviser to Indonesian revolutionary leaders including Soekarno, Sutomo, and Syarifuddin. Focusing on the nature of biography and autobiography, this book analyses K'tut Tantri's self-defeating battle to use history - in text and film script - to define her identity and reappropriate her past. An examination of the use of ideas of "truth" and "fiction" in understanding the past leads to broader consideration of the nature of history and its uses. Finally, an attempt is made to reconcile the deconstruction of K'tut Tantri's autobiography with both an acceptance of the validity of "alternative" historical genres and an acceptance of the problems inherent in writing a history of a living person. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Timothy Lindsey is Professor of Law, Director of the Asian Law Centre, Director of the Centre for Islamic Law and Society and Federation Fellow in the Law School at the University of Melbourne.

An account of the true story which inspired the film Paradise Road. In 1942, a group of Australian Army nursing sisters was evacuated from Malaya a few days before the fall of Singapore. two days later their ship was bombed and sunk by the Japanese. Of the fifty-three survivors who scrambled ashore, twenty-one were murdered and the remainder taken prisoner. this engrossing record was kept by one of the surviving sisters, Betty Jeffrey, during the three-and-a-half gruelling years of imprisonment that followed.