Australia’s first peacekeepers deployed to the Netherlands East Indies (present day Indonesia) in 1947. They served as observers along a line between Dutch troops seeking to re-establish colonial control, and republicans fighting for independence after centuries of colonial rule and the brutal years of Japanese occupation.

Of the value of their own presence and the prospects for a peaceful resolution, the Australians reported that the republicans’ refusal to accept the Dutch-imposed frontier meant ‘no umpire can function effectively’. Nor could ‘an observer’s safety … be guaranteed by either side in any area … it would be a simple matter for a determined agent to murder any observer’.’1 None of the sixty Australians who served in the Netherlands East Indies met this fate and all returned home safely before the republicans achieved independence in 1949. But as the following pages suggest, their experience foreshadowed much that has become familiar to generations of Australian peacekeepers.

• 1. P. Londey, Wartime, No. 1, November 1997, p. 55.