THE RAFTERS of the elegant Balai Kartini at the Indonesian Embassy shook last night as “Indonesian Idol” sensation, Michael Jakarimilena entertained a Canberra audience aged four to 80 with sentimental love ballads, patriotic Indonesian songs and oldies but goodies from his home province of West Papua.

This canny exercise in cultural diplomacy, put together by Balai Bahasa Indonesia in Perth, the Australia-Indonesia Institute and the embassy, was part of a wider program that has seen Jakarimilena singing and joking with school kids in Perth, Adelaide and Canberra.

Also known as Michael J, Mickey J or simply Michael Idol, he was born in Jayapura, but now lives in Jakarta, where he’s been under the spotlight in “Indonesian Idol” since 2004. Still single, as he later points out to the audience with a laugh, he’s been far too busy, travelling to places like Ethiopia, India, Singapore the US to sing — “The key is not only the voice but the feeling,” he says.

Before the concert Jakarimilena told “CityNews” that he’d never been to Canberra before. He had, he said, been in Melbourne during 2008 and in 2013 he had been  a guest of Perth’s Indonesian Film Festival.

In 2006 ‘Michael J’ performed in “Denias” and “Senandung di atas Awan”, both concerning the struggles of Papuan tribal children to achieve an education. In a 2008 movie, he played a soccer team member — he indicated the torn leg muscles, telling “CityNews” how football was one of his great passions.

It was in Perth that he made his Australian connections, cemented at a conference in Bali during 2015.

With those connection he devised an ‘immersion’ concert for school kids, where he performed pop, rock, dangdut, reggae and hip-hop, while  song lyrics in in Indonesian were thrown up on the big screen.

The audience had a taste of that last night as Michael J. and his guitarist Tony Brillianto led them in song and enticed the Indonesian ambassador Nadjib Riphat Kesoema to perform a number. Against the odds, they had the mixed crowd boot-scooting before the night was out. A small group of West Papuan students joined him on stage with a song from their province.

A smooth operator with an engaging smile and a way of communicating across language, he’s come a long way since 2004, but as Jakarimilena told “CityNews”, he started out by singing in his family’s Protestant church in Jayapura.

“First and foremost,” he said, “I sing for God…I started in the church and then my friends and told me said, no, you should be singing more widely.” He did. His second objective, he said, was to sing the praises of his home province’s beauty and richness of culture. During 2015 Jakarimilena joined the band Pacenogei, proceeds of whose first album “Ini Papua” went to education and children’s health in Papua.

Michael J is not a political figure, but he did perform on the compilation album for “Wonderful Indonesia 2014” and last night sang songs of national unity (“I sing for the success of Indonesia, we are all the same”) while also styling himself as an example for his “brothers and sisters at the very far eastern end of our country.”

Children in remote provinces such as West Papua, so far from the centre in Jakarta, often find it hard to believe that they can be successful, he says.

“I want to sing with them, I want to say to them, ‘let’s do this’.”