Thirty years before the Australian career criminal Gregory David Roberts travelled to Bombay and sought to make for himself, in the words of critic Peter Pierce, ‘a good Asian life’, another socially alienated Australian pursued such a life, in Indonesia, one which in its own way was as remarkable as that novelised by Roberts in Shantaram (2003).

Clive Williams went to Java in 1951, at the age of thirty, as a Jehovah’s Witness missionary. After three years of puritanical proselytising, with little success, he was ‘disfellowshipped’, a form of shunning and the strongest censure the JWs can impose on a member of their flock. Why? A number of possible reasons can be canvassed but one probably doesn’t need to look past Williams’s homosexuality.

Williams successfully sought help from his local parliamentary member, back in Geelong, to enable him to continue living in Indonesia. In agreeably unregulated medical environs, he set up a chiropody practice, in Semarang. He also began to teach English: almost inevitably, it seems, given the surging demand for this language.