A Time of Normalcy

Abstract

This article explores the idyllic portrait of a colonial estate depictedin the life narratives of former Javanese estate workers. The recollections of former workers do not reflect the existing narratives of plantation life and work on Sumatra’s colonial plantations, but provide a different perspective on the colonial estate. The memories of estate life in the late colonial period recorded here provide an opening to explore how and why these elderly narrators engage the colonial past