- Description
- About the Author
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Not many British schoolgirls have grown up to become revolutionary heroes of distant, eastern nations but Muriel Stewart Walker did just that. Under a multitude of different names – ‘K’tut Tantri’ and ‘Surabaya Sue’ being the best know – she joined in the struggle for Indonesian independence after the Second World War and broadcast its revolutionary message to the world on Rebel Radio. But she did more and smuggled arms, and probably drugs, to help finance the new Republic and experienced bloody battle in the British attack on Surabaya that some have seen as a war crime. She went on to become an intimate of the revolutionary leaders and finally lived to see Indonesia take its place amongst the free nations of the world.
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Nigel Barley was born in Kingston upon Thames in 1947. He gained his bachelor's degree in modern languages at Cambridge University, and his doctorate in social anthropology at Oxford University. He worked for some years as an academic at London University and then served from 1980 to 2003 as an assistant keeper of Ethnography at the British Museum.
Barley's first travel book, The Innocent Anthropologist (1983), gave a popular account of anthropological fieldwork among the Dowayo people of Cameroon. Barley then worked as an anthropologist in Indonesia. His first book based on his time there was the humorous Not a Hazardous Sport (1989) describing his anthropological experiences in Tana Toraja in the mountains of central Sulawesi.
Barley has written on many other subjects including Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, and Sir James Brooke, the "white rajah" of Sarawak. He has been twice nominated for the Travelex Writer of the Year Award. In 2002, he won the Foreign Press Association prize for travel writing.
Cover Type: Paperback
Page Count: 224
Year Published: 2017