Tony and Yohanni Johns Lecture 2026

The Tony and Yohanni Johns Lecture 2026 will be delivered by Dr Intan Paramaditha - an author and Senior Lecturer in Media and Film Studies at Macquarie University.

This lecture is anchored in Sekolah Pemikiran Perempuan (SPP)'s manifesto on Waris (inheritance) to discuss feminist dialogue across islands in Indonesia and how they reconstruct severed feminist lineages as a foundation for contemporary political action. SPP, or The School of Women's Thought, is a trans-archipelagic feminist collective that interrogates colonial, capitalist, and heteropatriarchal knowledge production by centring women in the Global South as thinkers and producers of knowledge. Dr Paramaditha will reflect on how her activism within SPP informs her exploration of decolonial feminism in Indonesia as well as her creative practice.

What does it mean, from a feminist perspective, to inherit unresolved violence, wounds, silences, and erasures? What histories are transmitted to us, what is hidden, and what do we want to pass on? The SPP manifesto holds two inheritances at once: Bandung in 1955, which gave the global majority a vocabulary for anti-colonial solidarity, and the US-backed purge of 1965, which killed over a million people and destroyed Indonesia's largest women's movement. Waris is linked to gravedigging, the method used by Indonesian feminist historians and archivists to excavate what has been buried, excluded, or forgotten. Drawing on key ideas that grew from our collective knowledge exchange in SPP, Dr Paramaditha will trace how these questions shape both her scholarship and fiction.

Intan Paramaditha is an author, scholar, and feminist activist whose work spans literary fiction, decolonial feminist thought, and collective organising. She is the author of Apple and Knife, part of the Vintage Classics Weird Girls series, and The Wandering, winner of the PEN Translates Award and longlisted for the Stella Prize. Her fiction has been translated into Italian, Polish, and Japanese, among other languages, and her new novel, Night of a Thousand Hells, will be published by Europa Editions in October 2026. She is the co-founder of the trans-archipelagic feminist collective Sekolah Pemikiran Perempuan. She has held a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship and is a 2026–2027 fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. 

This lecture honours both Tony and Yohanni Johns's enduring legacies on Indonesian teaching in ANU and all across Australia, which started when the late Tony was made inaugural professor Indonesian languages and literature at ANU in 1963. It is made possible by the generosity of late the late Emeritus Professor Anthony Reid, as well as Tony and Yohanni's friends and family.

Agenda 

• Reception 5.30-6pm

• Lecture 6-7pm 

Click here to join our mailing list.