Heather Amanda Sutherland is an Australian historian and former professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She specialised in the history of Indonesia, and also researched that of other Southeast Asian countries.
Sutherland was born in 1943. She took up Asian studies at the Australian National University in Canberra, obtaining an M.A. in 1967. Her dissertation was on the literary intellectuals of Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies. In 1970, she started her academic profession as a history teacher at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Learning of her research interest, Lance Castles from the University of Melbourne who had recently enrolled for PhD under the supervision of Harry J. Benda at Yale University asked his supervisor to invite Sutherland to join their team.
In 1974, Sutherland joined the faculty of the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Non-Western Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam as a “lector”. She was officially inducted into the teaching position on 22 October 1976 as she delivered her inaugural lecture.
She is the long-term partner of British actress Miriam Margolyes. Miriam has had a partner since 1968, Heather Sutherland, who is from Australia. They met a couple of years after Miriam began acting.
The pair met in 1967 and have been together ever since. They don’t live together but they spend sporadic time in London, Tuscany and Australia.
Miriam has said the beauty of the pair’s long last relationship is “not living together” according to the Express.