In Memoriam: Merle Calvin Ricklefs (1943–2019)

Merle Calvin Ricklefs (1943–2019), who died on December 29, 2019, after a long battle with prostate cancer, was one of the most brilliant post-War historians of Java. Born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, on July 17, 1943, Merle graduated from Colorado College in 1965 with a magna cum laude bachelor’s degree in history, and went on to earn his doctorate from Cornell University in 1970. His thesis was subsequently published in 1974 as Jogjakarta under Sultan Mangkubumi, 1749–1792—A History of the Division of Java.¹ During his long and distinguished academic career, Merle taught at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (1969–79), Monash University (1980–93), the Australian National University (1993–98), and the University of Melbourne (1998–2005), where he was, respectively, director of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (ANU) and foundation director of the Melbourne Institute of Asian Languages and Societies. Along the way he was also visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford (1983), and visiting professor of Southeast Asian History at the National University of Singapore (2006–11).

Fluent in Dutch, German, French, and Javanese as well as Indonesian, Merle set the benchmark for historical studies of pre-colonial (1200–1800) and colonial (1800–1942) Java. He was best known for his frequently republished History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200, and his meticulously researched trilogy on Indonesian Islam: Mystic Synthesis in Java; A History of Islamisation from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries; Polarising Javanese Society—Islamic and Other Visions (c. 1830–1930); and Islamisation and its Opponents in Java: A Political, Social, Cultural and Religious History (c. 1830 to the Present), the last two of which were ably seen through NUS Press by Paul Kratoska.² The latter, Islamisation and its Opponents in Java, won the George McT Kahin Prize in 2012 for “Best Book” on Southeast Asia. Merle’s panoramic vision encompassed a seven-hundred-year sweep of the history of the Islamization of Java beginning in the fourteenth century and bringing the story right up to the present day with the rise of identity politics and the process of religious transformation in Indonesia that followed the fall of General Suharto’s New Order regime on May 21, 1998. His last book in the trilogy was described by one reviewer as ”the most masterful ever written on religion and politics in Indonesia.”³

Merle will also be remembered for his commitment to education for indigenous (Aboriginal) Australians, which grew out of his deep personal opposition to racism “in all its forms and fruits.”⁴ Shortly after his arrival in Monash in 1980, he began working with Eve Fesi, Senior Elder of the Gubbi-Gubbi people (matrilineal) and the first indigenous Australian to receive a doctorate from an Australian university, to establish the Monash Orientation Scheme for Aborigines (MOSA, 1984–99). This was the first bridging program for indigenous Australians in any Australian university, and its year-long program prepared indigenous Australians—who, historically, suffered great educational disadvantages—for university study. By the time Merle left Monash to take up his post as director of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at ANU in 1993, more than a dozen indigenous Australians had earned doctorates at Monash, and many who now hold senior academic government and high-level business positions trace their success back to this pioneering scheme that Merle and Eve Fesi established.

At the time he was co-founding MOSA, Merle entered Australia’s “immigration debate” with University of Melbourne historian Professor Geoffrey Blainey who argued that Australia should limit Asian immigration. Working closely with his Monash colleague, Professor Andrew Markus, Pratt Foundation Research Professor of Jewish Civilisation, Merle co-edited a forceful critique of Blainey’s views, entitled Surrender Australia? Essays in the Study and Uses of History.⁵ Merle’s intervention in this immigration debate, his bridging program at Monash for indigenous Australians, and his contributions to Indonesian studies in Australia, all contributed to the high regard in which he was held in his adopted country. It was thus no surprise when...