The world was still recoiling from the impact of the attacks in Paris last Monday when a group of Australian businesspeople sat down for a dinner from another dimension - steak and red wine from Australia in the cultural heart of the world's biggest Muslim nation.
And this wasn't in a fortified five-star hotel in Jakarta but the ancestral home of the Sultan of Yogyakarta. 
Keraton Ngayogyakarta Hadiningrat, as the 250-year-old building is formally known, is the most significant remaining link to the syncretic blend of Islam and earlier religious cultures which prevailed in much of modern Indonesia before Dutch colonialism.
There have been rising concerns about growing religious intolerance in Indonesia in recent years -- not to mention shocking bombings -- as the more austere modern Islamic faith exported by Saudi Arabia has spread across the country.
But the dinner hosted by Sultan Hamengkubuwono X for the Indonesia Australia Business Council (IABC) was a subtle reminder of Australia's place in the world as it embarks on yet another round of repairing relations with Indonesia. It is still fortunate to be alongside the country that provides the most comprehensive alternative national role model for Muslims around the world to the so-called Islamic State - even if the food and wine was provided by an Australian exporter.
Hamengkubuwono is more businessman, moderate reformer and provincial governor as traditional ruler these days: so the dinner may have just been good marketing when he wants to form a sister state relationship with Victoria to enhance Yogyakarta's status as a place of education and innovation.
But arriving IABC members were also greeted by newspaper reports that a young local government leader in West Java - a hotbed of religious intolerance - had taken the courageous step of issuing a regulation guaranteeing freedom of religion, a step that national leaders have recently tended to shy away from.
What does all this mean for Australians considering taking up trade minister Andrew Robb's challenge of quadrupling the number of Australian businesses in Indonesia to 1000 as part of a new bilateral trade deal?
The country remains one where there are big differences between form and substance - in both negative and positive ways.
President Joko Widodo, also known as Jokowi, is probably seen by most Australians as a slightly hapless practitioner of the death penalty these days. But amid the ructions over executions earlier this year, Widodo has been steadily assembling a majority in the legislature and weaning incompetents from his ministry.
"Jokowi is really adept at reaching out to new players," says consultant Kevin Evans, who thinks he is laying the basis for a more stable government than most foreign observers argue.
Then there is the always nascent economic nationalism which has seen growth sapping trade restrictions in the past year such as the Australian live cattle export quota cuts which have undermined growth.
But young entrepreneur Jimmy Halim is pushing ahead with a path breaking plan for an environmentally sustainable, fully integrated food business in Sulawesi with Australian equity investment to help provide a steady stream of live cattle for his feedlot.
While high profile government officials still want more cattle bred in Indonesia rather than imported, he says bluntly: "Breeding is almost certainly a money losing business."
Hamengkubuwono's plugging of Yogyakarta as an innovation base in Indonesia underlined how much decision making power over business regulation has shifted to the provincial or local government level in what is a still evolving system. This makes the country harder to navigate but opens up new opportunities.
One of Jokowi's economic advisers Sri Adiningsih told some of the Australian business visitors this week: "Our economy is not centralised in Jakarta and Bali but is at the borders."
The arrival of more than 300 Australians on the business mission seems to have surprised Indonesian officials after a couple of cool diplomatic years unhelped by a thin commercial relationship.
This is not the first time governments have talked up the idea of businesses providing the ballast to see through spats like the execution row. But a report by the Australia Indonesia Center released this week suggests that for the first there may now be a real economic logic to more joint ventures.