When the lights fade on Australia's most disturbing reality television show, after this week's Sydney funerals for Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, it would be tempting to write-off Joko Widodo's Indonesia. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and her diplomats worked tirelessly to shift the Indonesian president from his merciless course. They mobilised a lobbying effort that was unprecedented in breadth, intensity and sophistication. And all that emotional energy which helped to power (and was powered by) an Australian media frenzy, has proved futile.

Distorted perceptions are already setting hard, as if the messy and undignified executions of two repentant Australian drug smugglers should define the Indonesian president and his huge and unwieldy young democracy. One emerging view is that Jokowi's gratuitous disregard for international opinion in a globalised world has shown him to be incompetent. Another is that he is the puppet of Megawati Sukarnoputri, heir of the Sukarno dynasty, and he has been desperately using the executions of foreigners to cloak his servility in a tough theatrical guise. A third theory is that Jokowi has revealed himself to be a Mahathir-like figure who simply revels in making life miserable for Australia.

A painting by Bali nine ringleader Myuran Sukumaran of Indonesian President Jokowi Widodo. Credit:Zul Edoardo

Any one of these diagnoses, if correct, would be disastrous for Australia, which depends on Indonesian co-operation for all of its most pressing security challenges. All have been circulating not only within the Australian media but also in the Indonesian sections of Australian universities and at the highest levels of government in Canberra.

But perhaps they reveal less about the objective state of play in Jokowi's Indonesia than the national pathologies that tint perceptions on both sides of the Java Sea. Put simply, neither Indonesia nor Australia have ever quite managed to see each other as the serious countries they imagine themselves to be.