Peter McCawley, who passed away recently, was a passionate and influential practitioner of economic development, a renowned scholar and thinker, and a generous friend and colleague to the many people in Australia and Asia fortunate to have known him. He was a major player in Australia’s engagement with Asia, as a teacher, researcher, senior policymaker, and public intellectual. In important respects, Indonesia was the centre of his world. His affection for, and commitment to, that country was a constant for over 50 years. He combined these intellectual and practical interests with a strong commitment to social democracy in Australia and to overcoming poverty and inequality globally. At a personal level, he was forthright, inspirational, engaging, totally unpretentious, loyal, occasionally argumentative if provoked, and deeply caring for those who needed a hand. In 2019, he was recognised for his many achievements with the appointment as a Member of the Order of Australia (AM).
Graduating with a first-class honours degree from the University of Queensland (UQ), Peter was recruited by Professor Heinz Arndt as his first PhD student to work on the Indonesian economy. These were heady and idealistic days. With Sir John Crawford’s support, and with little prior knowledge of the country, Heinz had decided that the newly established Department of Economics in the then Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University (ANU) would focus heavily on Indonesia. This was an audacious—some at the time even said reckless—initiative in the late Sukarno era given the country’s political turmoil and economic collapse. But under the Soeharto regime from 1966, economics was to occupy centre stage as the country re-engaged with the global community. Heinz had begun visiting Indonesia regularly and bravely established this Bulletin. He then recruited PhD students to develop a base for serious scholarship on the country, sending them into the country for extended periods of fieldwork, to gain first-hand familiarity and in part because the secondary database was very weak.
Peter took up the challenge with enthusiasm and was undeterred by the challenging research environment. With characteristic humour, in a short memoir written in 2018, he observed that:
In retrospect, the idea of sending a naïve neophyte into the field in Indonesia at that time was quite reckless. But this didn’t seem to worry Heinz. … A total of 12 months difficult fieldwork followed in 1969 and 1970 in Jakarta. Jakarta was something of a huge kampung with very little electricity, few telephones, and almost no photocopy facilities. Fieldwork consisted of endless attempts to arrange interviews (I visited Professor Sadli’s office a total of 11 times before I was able to deliver a personal letter from Heinz) and much note-taking by hand in hot offices from official documents. … By current standards, the whole activity was more akin to a study in bureaucratic anthropology than in modern economics.
Peter’s description of his work was unduly modest. With persistence, an eye on the big picture, and forensic empirical work—all features of his subsequent career—he completed a fine dissertation on the Indonesian electricity industry, and published papers from it. The research set up a lifelong interest in Asian economic development and public policy.
On graduation in 1972, Peter and his family moved to Yogyakarta where he took up a position as a visiting lecturer at Gadjah Mada University, funded by an Australian university exchange program. Refined, socially stratified and Javanese-speaking, Yogya was a very different world from chaotic, sprawling Jakarta. He threw himself into teaching, mainly in a newly established master program for young Indonesian academics sent from throughout the archipelago. He developed very close relations with the senior academics there. These included the agricultural economist Mubyarto (with whom he relished the opportunity to undertake field trips (masuk lapangan) in rural and small-town Java); Dean Sukadji (later the rector and director general of higher education); and Boediono (later the vice president and much else, with whom he edited a valuable collection of economic writings for Indonesian students).
In 1974, events in Canberra intervened. Peter’s close friend from his UQ days, Bill Hayden, was appointed federal treasurer in the Whitlam Labor government, and he asked Peter to become his principal economic advisor. For Peter, this was an offer too good to refuse, and so the family (now including two young children) returned to Canberra. In some respects, given that government’s ambivalent approach to orthodox economics, this position was just as daunting a challenge as plunging into Jakarta fieldwork a few years earlier. Almost 20 years later, he took on a similar position for another well-regarded federal treasurer, his close friend John Kerin. This was a further indication of the high regard for Peter’s economic credentials in the Labor Party and senior policy circles.
After the fall of the Whitlam government, in early 1976 Peter returned to his old department at ANU as a faculty member. This was a research appointment, and it was to be the period of his greatest academic productivity. He embarked on various projects, mainly Indonesia-centred. The most important was an Oxford University Press volume, The Indonesian Economy during the Soeharto Era (1981), co-edited with his close colleague Anne Booth, the first major academic study of the economy under Soeharto in English. He also wrote several Surveys for this Bulletin, while for the World Bank Jakarta office he completed a major study on industrial licensing and regulation. This was one volume of a controversial but influential five-volume World Bank study that never formally saw the light of day but was widely read at the time and anticipated the sweeping (and successful) economic policy reforms that were introduced during the 1980s. On campus, Peter re-energized Indonesian studies, with many collaborative research, teaching and public outreach activities, including with Jamie Mackie, who joined the faculty in 1978. In addition, he began to publish actively on various aspects of national and global affairs in the quality national press.
At the end of the decade, Heinz Arndt retired and Peter took over and formalised what has been known ever since as the Indonesia Project. Assisted by Heinz and Jamie, he secured funding from the then Department of Foreign Affairs for a range of public affairs activities. Among these was the inaugural Indonesia Update conference in 1983, considered by many to be a one-off event, which became a major campus activity and is widely viewed as the most important public event of its kind outside Indonesia. Forty years later, the event is in vigorous good health, featuring broad political and economic updates to attract a general audience, and various topical thematic issues of the day. Since 1988, a proceedings volume has been published annually. The Update format has since been emulated by several other country-centred groups at ANU.
It appeared at the time that this was to be Peter’s lifelong professional calling. However, events took a different course. With Heinz’s departure, departmental research interests began to change. Also, at that time the dynamic Helen Hughes was appointed to head the university’s then Development Studies Centre, and Peter was attracted to Helen’s mix of academic research and very active public policy engagement. They were part of a team that wrote the influential 1984 Jackson Report on Australian development assistance, which argued for a more analytical focus in the program. In some respects, Peter was becoming somewhat less attracted to the quiet scholarly life of the ANU Coombs Building. In fact, this was a very difficult period for him, both personally and professionally. Partly in response, he developed an interest in Buddhist philosophy and thinking, which remained a part of his life.
Shortly thereafter Peter was offered the position of deputy director general of the then Australian International Development Assistance Bureau (AIDAB). This was a surprise for some of his friends—he had occasionally been a trenchant critic of the bureaucracy—but he approached his new work with great enthusiasm. He welcomed the opportunity to broaden his geographic interests, to learn more about the inner workings of the Canberra bureaucracy, and to inject greater analytical expertise into the work of the aid program. As with all his major assignments, he became a tireless public proselytiser for the work, in the process lifting the quality and public profile of development assistance issues in Australia. In all, Peter was to spend a decade working for the agency, based in Canberra but with extensive international travel.
Sandwiched between two five-year stints was another appointment that was to become a central preoccupation of Peter’s last three decades: from 1992 to 1996, he was appointed an executive director of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), representing Australia and seven other (mainly Pacific Island) countries. He was broadly familiar with the work of international development agencies, including occasional consultancies. But this opened up a new world for him, especially but not only for the developing countries he represented, and it was one that he greatly enjoyed.
Peter and the ADB were natural bedfellows. He liked the way the ADB operates and what it stands for: disbursing funds for ‘practical development’, building things, especially infrastructure (in some respects, a case of his PhD revisited), its regional engagement, and its low-key modus operandi. In fact, he often contrasted the ADB operating style with that of the Washington-based institutions, which in his view tended to ‘lecture’ developing countries too much.
The affection was evidently mutual. In 2003, Peter was invited to take up the position of dean (equivalent in rank to vice president) of the Tokyo-based ADB Institute, an institution designed to undertake longer-term teaching and research. He held this position, almost always occupied before and subsequently by a senior Japanese academic or Ministry of Finance official, for four years. His time in Tokyo reinforced his appreciation of Japan and its worldview, in particular its engagement with developing Asian countries. Although he travelled extensively and lived in several countries, Indonesia and Japan were the two countries with which he developed the strongest affinity.
His association with the ADB continued beyond his Tokyo term. On several occasions he was asked to lead the Bank’s replenishment of its concessional window, the Asian Development Fund. This was followed by an invitation to author the Bank’s official 50-year history, published as Banking on the Future of Asia and the Pacific (2017). He spent the better part of two years living in Manila, working very closely with then president Nakao, who on Peter’s passing issued the following statement:
I am so shocked and saddened by the sudden news that my friend Peter McCawley passed away. He made great contribution to the ADB. … How many hours did I spend with him to plan, prepare and compile this ADB history book of more than 500 pages. … I really appreciate his writing talent and relentless efforts to make the book informative, insightful and interesting.
In ‘retirement’ the wheel turned full circle back to Indonesia for Peter with two research and publishing assignments. Both were a by-product of the ADB history volume. The first was a history of 50 years of the ADB in Indonesia. The second, which fully absorbed Peter for the best part of two years, was the official history of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Jakarta, published as 50 Years of CSIS: Ideas and Policy in Indonesia (2021). The invitation came from a friend and former student, the renowned Indonesian economist and former minister, Mari Pangestu. Peter was familiar with the work of the CSIS but had never been particularly close to it. Here therefore was an opportunity to look inside and engage with many of its staff. He particularly enjoyed the interaction with some of its colourful, larger-than-life founders Jusuf Wanandi and Harry Tjan. The volume gave voice to one of the most important and influential Indonesian think tanks.
So much for Peter’s distinguished and varied professional life. It is best viewed through the prism of his background and personality. The only child of his fine parents Leo and Rena, he grew up in a comfortable if modest household in which politics and thinking about the state of the world featured prominently. Imbued with this spirit, Peter developed a strong social conscience and concern for the underdog. To quote from his memoir: ‘I was worried by the huge gaps between rich and poor countries. They seemed to me then—as they still seem to me now—a key global issue’. This explains his lifelong attachment to the Labor Party (warts and all as he was the first to admit) and arguably, as a product of the Vietnam War protest generation, his decision to work on neighbouring Southeast Asian economies.
Outside his family and wide circle of friends, he read voraciously and enjoyed nothing more than a vigorous exchange of views over a simple but spicy meal, often accompanied by an equally robust shiraz. Discussions with Peter weren’t always for the faint-hearted, but they were always stimulating, mostly instructive and never malicious. (And if they ever got really heated, there would often be a friendly phone call the next day.) In fact, he never hesitated to take forthright positions on controversial issues that he thought were being misunderstood. For example, he was annoyed when critics of Soeharto-era human rights abuses and Indonesia’s troubled intervention in East Timor failed to recognise the dramatic improvements in Indonesian living standards over this period. More recently, he thought that critics of the fossil fuel industry overlooked developing Asia’s acute ‘energy poverty’.
Peter’s reading interests were eclectic. Top of the list were Shakespeare (he read the entire works, and he could do a decent theatrical rendition of some of the plays, as his son Patrick brilliantly reminded us at the funeral) and international development issues. On a daily basis, he would immerse himself in international newspapers and, in more recent years, websites, and he had little time left for television and radio. Perhaps his favourite source was the Indonesian daily Kompas. As he had more time in later years, he would regularly distribute links of what he considered important pieces to a wide circle of friends, often with a pithy commentary. In fact, on occasion, his comments would evoke a response from one of his extended circle of ‘frenemies’, which not infrequently would trigger vigorous, sometimes colourful ‘debates’ that might continue for days or even weeks. And then there was Wikipedia, which Peter took to with gusto. He especially enjoyed writing the entries for prominent Indonesians who he felt had not received the international attention they deserved.
While Peter was ‘Australian’ in character and personality in most respects, his daughter Rachel reminded us at the funeral that there was one significant exception—a total lack of interest in sport! She also noted that there was one exception, the Olympic marathon, and his interest in this endeavour told us quite a bit about Peter and his worldview: the marathon was held only once every four years (so it is not too much of a distraction from other more important interests), the event symbolises one dimension of the human spirit and struggle, and the winner was invariably from a poor African country.
Peter genuinely enjoyed the simple things in life. If he had a spare day in Jakarta, he might be found wandering around its iconic port, Tanjung Priok, followed by a simple street meal in Glodok, the city’s Chinatown, where his open disposition and fluency in Bahasa Indonesia often attracted a local crowd. With friends, he enjoyed vacations simply travelling around Java, observing the daily rhythm of life. Modern high-rise Asia had its place, but he worried that visitors who mainly frequent its fancy hotels and malls were getting a distorted picture of reality. In fact, as Ian Anderson has reminded us, visitors to the modern ADB facilities who arrived along Manila’s main thoroughfare EDSA, ringed by high-rise buildings, would sometimes be taken by Peter on a tour of the nearby Pasig River to see life for the majority of Filipinos.
That is how his friends will remember him, as somebody who lived a full and generous life, who tried hard to make a difference and was invariably available to help people and causes he felt were deserving of assistance.