After five months jail in an Indonesian prison, Australian academic Lesley McCulloch has been finally been released. The British-born McCulloch was sentenced to five months prison for visa violations in Indonesia's rebel Aceh province. She was detained on September 10 with American nurse Joy Lee Sadler. Indonesian prosecutors accused the women of spying, threatening them with espionage charges – charges they both denied, saying the documents related to victims of the Aceh conflict.

Presenter/Interviewer: Linda LoPresti

Speakers: Lesley McCulloch, speaking on a mobile phone from Bangkok on her first

McCulloch: It feels fantastic, yesterday I didn't really have time to take in the fact that I was released and that I was free, but today it feels ... I've been shopping a little bit already and I went on a frenzy in Bangkok and so it feels as though I'm free at last and it feels great.

Lopresti: So what are your plans now, what do you intend to do?

McCulloch: Well I'm in Bangkok for two days and then I'm off to London and Scotland to visit friends and family there and I've been very afraid and find this whole five months quite traumatic so I thought I'd go back and spend some time with them. And then I'll be coming to Australia around the beginning of March.

Lopresti: Speaking about your detention, there's been a lot in the press about your incarceration, but can you tell us what it was like? Where were you imprisoned and how were you treated?

McCulloch: Well I'm sure that everyone knows the story, that when we were arrested on the 10th of September in ? Aceh at a military checkpoint, we were assaulted by the Indonesian military. And then we were put through a fairly taxing interrogation process where there was a lot of intimidation and harassment for several days, before we were transported to North Sumatra and then finally up to Banda Aceh where we spent three months ... in a small room with no windows. And again quite a high level of intimidation before being finally transferred to the local Banda Aceh jail where our living conditions, our difficult living conditions were actually much worse.

Lopresti: When you speak about intimidation were you physically abused?

McCulloch: Apart from the initial assault at the army checkpoint and then I experienced sexual harassment while being transported from south Aceh to Medan, which took two days in a convoy of 10 police trucks. Apart from that we were never physically harmed, but there was a lot of taunts about espionage related charges and perhaps sent to jail in Jakarta for a long time. Most of the staff at the holder station were not Acehenese, they were Javanese, and so there was no sympathy at all for the problems of Aceh. Whereas at the prison, the staff were local Acehanese and there was a lot of sympathy towards the plight of the Acehanese.

Lopresti: How do you see the future for Aceh? I mean there's been a peace pact in place now between the rebels and the Indonesian military since December, do you find that hopeful, and also are you going to continue your research into Aceh?

McCulloch: I will continue my research into Aceh because I've been writing on Aceh for the past four years and so I've seen Aceh through the bad times and I want my work to continue through what will hopefully be the good times and actually become a safer place. The peace agreement has been in place since the 9th of December and in many places in Aceh the locals report that they do feel the situation is much safer. But in many of the villages the situation has little changed. Since the peace agreement on the 9th of December, 12 civilians have been killed, nine members of the separatist movement and four members of the Indonesian military. In fact, the figure is probably much higher, but there has still been disappearances and there's still intimidation, harassment of the local Acehenese population.

Lopresti: Lesley your American companion Joy Sadler as you said she did go on a hunger strike in Aceh and she had many serious health problems. Where is she now and will you keep in touch with her?

McCulloch: Joy is in the US but when she returned home, she had been on a hunger strike for 40 days and she had some serious health problems and the fact that the hospitals in Aceh were unwilling to start an IV for her, that she so badly needed and her veins collapsed. But the news from Joy was that she was a little bit healthier, she was out of hospital, she wants to come back to Aceh but whether she can or not because of her health, her ongoing health problems is another story.

Lopresti: Then what about you Lesley, any plans to return to Indonesia?

McCulloch: I'd like to return, of course I want to return to Aceh but I'm just not sure when.

Lopresti: So you haven't been deterred by your ordeal?

McCulloch: Absolutely not, I mean it was a pretty horrendous experience but it was also a very interesting experience because of course we've all heard stories of police brutality, Joy and I experienced that first hand. I'm much rather that it hadn't happened because it was traumatic but I have gathered a lot of information and I can speak about these issues from a very personal perspective now.