Mid North Coast Pioneers - Newcastle to Lismore and beyond

Harold Robert Gregory's second daughter, Betty, married Jan Walandouw at Randwick on 5 May 1945. He was an Indonesian serving in the Dutch Navy during World War II. After the war, Dutch refugees from Indonesia were permitted to stay in A ustralia as they were "white" while all non-Europeans, induding Jan Walandouw, were repatriated/ deported to whence they had come, even if they had Australian wives and children. Despite being married to an Australian citizen and having a son born in Australia in 1946, Jan Walandouw was deported to Indonesia in 1947. At that time, the Dutch were losing the struggle to regain control after the proclamation of the Indonesian Republic by Sukamo in August 1945. Betty and her young son, Gregory Walandouw, travelled to Indonesia in an attempt to find Jan but were advised to return to Australia because of the dangerous political situation. After formal independence in 1949, Sukamo attempted to remain politically unaligned between east and west. But the growing Russian influence in Indonesia prompted the CIA to take an interest in ousting him.

After returning to Indonesia, Jan Walandouw became involved in Indonesian Army politics. In the 1950s he was active in seeking the financial support of right wing Japanese businessmen and the support of the CIA for the anti-Sukamo forces which staged a rebellion against Sukarno in 1958. While Sukarno was on an overseas visit, the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia was proclaimed, drawing its principal support from military units in Sumatra and Sulawesi. Whatever commitments may have been made via Jan Walandouw to the rebels, no useful assistance was forthcoming from the CIA. The rebellion was putdown by forces loyal to Sukamo.

By the early 1960s, the growing influence of the Communist Party in Indonesia was a concern to the United States which was then committing its forces to the anti-communist struggle in Vietnam. Between 1958 and 1965, Jan appears to have been the CIA's contact man with the Suharto faction in the Indonesian Army. One interpretation of the the 1965 coup in Indonesia is that the CIA and Suharto created the situation in which the communists would kill pro-Sukarno generals, thus giving the pretext for the Suharto faction to unleash a massacre of the communists and seize power themselves. Whatever the truth of this interpretation [or conspiracy theory], Jan Walandouw prospered under the Suharto regime. There is evidence that he used his contacts with Japanese businessmen and leading figures in the Suharto Government to facilitate Japanese investment in Indonesian development projects. He was elected to the Suharto dominated Indonesian parliament and developed his own business interests in textiles, shipping [Surunta Waya Line] and wood chipping. His Australian born son, Gregory Walandouw, finally managed to track his father with the assistance of the Uniting Church, but arrived in Indonesia just after his father died in 1990. As his father, Jan had remarried twice, Greg found an extensive family connection in Indonesia.