Strangers Next Door? steps back and takes stock. The book’s contributors, mostly academics, generally avoid hyperbole, but all think opportunities to improve relations are being missed. The editors say they want to explore ‘why the relationship is important, why it is so often in crisis, and what might be done to improve relations’.

Indonesia’s importance to Australia is placed here in the context of the ‘Asian Century’. A country the length of Europe, bordering both the Indian and Pacific oceans, Indonesia straddles strategically vital sea lanes. Intelligence, security, and bureaucratic cooperation with it are essential in countering regional maladies. A G20 member and ASEAN’s lynchpin, with an increasingly assertive foreign policy, Indonesia is already a key player in fluid Asian geopolitics. With 270 million people, it is projected to become the world’s fourth-largest economy before 2050, which would turn it into a major Asian power. Australia’s importance to Indonesia is less obvious. Richard Woolcott’s chapter says Australian policies to Indonesia should be seen as part of efforts to ‘accommodate rising powers’.

The last decade has seen deterioration in government relations. High-handed actions by Australian politicians deserve much blame, though Indonesian élites are also playing politics with the relationship. Negative popular attitudes also constrain relations. Opinion polling, Dave McRae and Diane Zhang demonstrate, shows Australians are ‘ignorant’ of and ‘ill-disposed’ toward Indonesia. The Suharto regime’s outrages in East Timor, including the Australian deaths at Balibo, soured Australian perceptions. Yet Suharto’s fall, and the rise of an Indonesian democracy, has given no respite. Jihadist terrorism and Islamophobia, travails of Australians in Bali, and Indonesia’s status as transit-point for asylum seekers continue to foster Australian ideas of the archipelago as sinister. In Indonesian eyes, Australia remains a ‘white’ country. Because the Indonesian Republic was born in a revolution against European colonialism and its racial hierarchies, perceived Australian arrogance takes on an extra edge.

Is there behind recent Australian political tactlessness something cultural, an ingrained unwillingness to treat Indonesia as an equal? Evi Fitriani outlines Australian dealings with former Indonesian President Yudhoyono. Despite Yudhoyono’s goodwill to Australia, Canberra persisted with boat turnbacks and other provocations, and tapped Yudhoyono’s and his wife’s phones, with no apology ever made. Fitriani sees in this an ingrained ‘culture of domination and control’. Indonesians saw ‘Australia trans- gress[ing] the limits of acceptable behaviour’, ‘t[aking] advantage’, and in the 2014 presidential election both candidates promised a tougher line with Canberra.

The frequent narrowness of Australian conceptions of Indonesia and visions of how cooperation with it might look − the poverty of imagination inherent in the ‘beef-boats-Bali-bombs’ prism − is displayed vividly in Greg Fealy’s chapter. After the 2002 Bali bombing, Canberra launched a far-sighted program to aid Indonesian Islamic institutions, especially educational ones. The goal was to mitigate extremism by strengthening Indonesian pluralism and democracy. But nobody dared tell the Australian public this, instead presenting the program as a means of halting terrorist attacks. Indeed, key politicians themselves often appeared unable to see beyond terrorism. One Indonesian said: ‘There’s so many other things about Islam that I’d like to talk about but they’re not interested.’ Australian ministers’ condescending or ignorant statements also caused irritation. After several years, funding was cut, redirected to narrower security objectives. The approach, Fealy writes, ‘does little justice’ to Indonesian Islam’s ‘richness and diversity’.

Generally, the contributions in Strangers Next Door? bolster the argument Keating advanced, that Australia’s Asian engagement hinges in part on domestic and cultural change. Several contributors argue that Australia’s closeness to America and support for its military interventions constitute a roadblock. John McCarthy suggests that Australia’s reputation in Indonesia can be improved with more cultural awareness from Canberra’s political class, plus policies less unilateralist and closer to the values and international norms Australia says it supports. Predictably, Australian monolingualism is identified as a priority.

Given continuing negotiations over an Indonesia–Australia trade agreement and handwringing about Australia’s paltry business investment in Indonesia, chapters on economic relations should attract attention. Matthew Busch reminds us that there are real obstacles, an unreliable legal system and rampant protectionism, to doing business in Indonesia. He thinks Indonesia must further reform before expecting greater foreign investment. Yet other countries are investing in Indonesia significantly. Debnath Guharoy argues that in Indonesia’s drives for infrastructure and human development, and its expanding consumer market, space exists for cooperative partnerships navigating Indonesian nationalism’s shoals while giving foreign partners profits. He emphasises Indonesia’s domestic food industry plus new tourism ventures as opportunities. Though calling for a rethinking of conventional approaches, Guharoy has little to say about liberalised entry of Indonesian workers into Australia, a key Jakarta priority.

Australia has often taken a transactional approach to Asia; people-to-people connections described here, established with less thought to material gain, are instructive. A chapter on youth organisations theorises how such bodies can be run to facilitate deep rather than superficial intercultural relationships. Youth programs usually involve university students – it is suggested broadening them to vocational exchanges. Another chapter describes Australian and Indonesian artists establishing ‘cross-cultural collaboration … driven by artistic curiosity’. To expand such links it is suggested an Australian Cultural Centre be established in Indonesia. ‘[C]oming together can create something quite special,’ one artist is quoted as saying. To convince more people of that – with the cultural shift it requires – remains the challenge, and opportunity. This book soberly makes the case for closer Indonesia–Australia ties, and offers constructive ideas for how they might be achieved.