Herbert Feith

Herbert Feith (1930 – 15 November 2001) was an Australian academic and world leading scholar of Indonesian politics.

Born in Vienna, Austria in 1930, Feith witnessed oppression of the Jews and witnessed Kristallnacht in 1938 at the age of 7. He came to Australia as a refugee in 1939 with his Austrian Jewish parents, one of a few thousand Jews granted humanitarian visas. He took an undergraduate degree in political science at the University of Melbourne, working with Professor W. Macmahon Ball. After graduating, fascinated with Asia and inspired by Molly Bondan, he got a job in Jakarta in at the Indonesian Department of Information and worked from 1951–2 as an Indonesian civil servant on a local salary. This gave him contacts and language fluency. His Masters at Melbourne was completed in 1954.

Still in his twenties, he helped to negotiate an inter-governmental agreement whereby new Australian graduates could volunteer for service as Indonesian public servants. The Volunteer Graduate Scheme has expanded to become Australian Volunteers International. Feith and his new wife, Betty, returned to Indonesia as the first volunteers under the scheme from 1954 to 1956. Later he obtained a PhD scholarship at Cornell University (1957–1960). His thesis later became a renowned book, The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia.

After working as a post-doctoral fellow at the Australian National University he was appointed to a lectureship in Politics at Monash University in Melbourne, in the early 1960s. He helped found the Monash Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, which became one of the world's best institutes on the region. He was promoted to Professor in 1968. Unusually, he demoted himself 1974, to avoid bureaucracy associated with the Chair. He re-oriented from academic scholarship to more activist work, but continued teaching and research, taking early retirement from Monash in 1990.

In retirement he returned to Indonesia with Betty, teaching at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta and Andalas University in Padang, West Sumatra, again on local salaries. A lifelong Melbourne cyclist, he died while pushing his bicycle across a train line near his small house in Glen Iris, Melbourne. Feith was 71 years old, and had three children and several grandchildren.

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