(1957) born in Brisbane, Australia. In 1984 he received his Ph.D. at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London with the thesis 'Jakarta in the Indonesian revolution, 1945-1949'. From 1990 to 2003 he taught Southeast Asian history at the University of Queensland. Since then he has been Senior Fellow at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies of the Australian National University. In 1993 he was visiting lecturer at the college Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia and Oceania at the University of Leiden and in 1988 and 1989 Fellow-in-Residence at NIAS (the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies) in Wassenaar. Within the research programme 'From Dutch East Indies to Indonesia' he is responsible for the study into New Orders carried out by the NIOD in Amsterdam.