Gareth Evans once said that 'no two neighbours anywhere in the world are as comprehensively unlike' as Australia and Indonesia. It sometimes seems that the gulf between Australian perceptions of Indonesia and the reality of that country is just as wide.
To be sure, much of the old hostility is gone. The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, coming as it did soon after the Bali bombings and the East Timor transition, was a circuit breaker for the relationship. The Howard Government responded quickly, effectively and with Opposition support. Australian people gave generously. Australian aid workers and experts were well represented in the massive, multinational recovery effort which followed.
But the old stereotypes still break through. Take a Liberal campaign ad that this year attempted to rekindle old fears of invasion from the north. In it, a red arrow labelled 'Indonesia' points menacingly at the heart of Australia, together with other arrows labeled 'Sri Lanka', 'Iran', 'Iraq' and 'Afghanistan'. The voiceover from Tony Abbott: 'We've got to take stronger measures now' to 'stop illegal immigration'.
Crass, puerile but also telling. How many other nations could Australia's alternative government so offensively depict? How many foreign heads of state could be depicted in a cartoon in an Australian newspaper, as Indonesian President Yudhoyono was, in an act of sodomy?
And for all the decent reporting that's regularly done, Indonesia tends to appear in the tabloid press and on commercial TV in the most unflattering of lights: as a source of a 'flood' of asylum seekers arriving by boat; as a hotbed of Islamic extremism and terrorism; and as a state which imposes heavy sentences, including the death penalty, on Australians convicted of drugs charges.
It creates an unbalanced impression. Australians will know about the bombing tragedies but probably not about the sustained success of Indonesia's counter-terrorism program. Nor the fact that violent extremists are a small, shunned minority.
One Indonesian, a professional in his 30s, told me how much he hates terrorism, because it wrecks lives in Indonesia and shames his country. Does anyone seriously believe this is not the view of the vast majority? The reality is that Indonesia is no better represented by a grinning zealot like Amrozi than America would be by