However, it was in the question-and-answer session that the conference really came alive. Sartono gave a brilliant analysis of the lack of a concept of ‘heritage’ in Indonesia, and the need for a national heritage body, and his discussion showed that he was as sharp as ever. But his session proved to be one of the most astonishing of any Indonesian conference. Seeing this old, frail man being led in, I did not expect much. I saw him in action at the 1994 National History Conference at Udayana University in Bali. Fifty years after the defining Indonesian National History Conference (which he attended a year after he graduated from his first degree), another of the writers who defined history for two generations of Indonesians has died.Īlthough he was almost totally blind by the late 1980s, Sartono’s teaching and commentary continued to influence Indonesian history up until the present day. In the early hours of the morning of 7 December Yogyakarta time, Indonesia’s greatest historian of the twentieth century, Professor Dr Aloysius Sartono Kartodirdjo, died at the age of 86.
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