Someone Else's Country: Living In Suharto's Indonesia

Someone Else’s Country

OTHER PUBLICATIONS BY SHIRLEY FENTON HUIE And the Second Prize is … Across Australia by Bus (1989) Tiger Lilies: Women Adventurers of the South Pacific (1990) The Forgotten Ones: Women and Children Under Nippon (also in Dutch and Japanese) (1992) Dancing with Unicorns (1999) Twenty-One Days in Japan (1999) Ships Belles: History of the WRANS 1941–1985 (2000)

Someone Else’s Country LIVING IN SUHARTO’S INDONESIA

SHIRLEY FENTON HUIE

Pandanus Books Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies The Australian National University

Cover: Houses in Barus Jahe, Karo Batak, Sumatra. Kartika of Indonesia, daughter of the late Bapak Affandi. © Pandanus Books 2003

www.pandanusbooks.com.au This book is copyright in all countries subscribing to the Berne convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher. Typeset in Goudy 11pt on 13.5pt and printed by CanPrint, Canberra

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Fenton-Huie, Shirley Someone Else’s Country: living in Suharto’s Indonesia ISBN 1 74076 037 9 1. Huie, Shirley Fenton. 2. Women authors, Australian — New South Wales — Biography. I. Title.

A821.3092

Editorial inquiries please contact Pandanus Books on 02 6125 3269 Published by Pandanus Books, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200 Australia Pandanus Books are distributed by UNIREPS, University of New South Wales, Sydney NSW 2052 Telephone 02 9664 0999 Fax 02 9664 5420 Editor: Jan Borrie Production: Ian Templeman, Duncan Beard, Emily Brissenden

This book is for Edward Fenton, USMC Ret. who made the great adventure possible.

Contents

Acknowledgements

viii

Part One Borneo/ Kalimantan

1

Part Two Java

99

Part Three Bali

187

A short biography

251

Acknowledgements As this story covers a period of 10 years and was 20 years in the writing, it is impossible for me to thank all the people who helped me along the way. I would, however, like to thank the National Utility Helicopter pilots who put me straight on the lingo for the flying stories; Kartika, who taught me so much about Indonesia; Milly Ganda, who was there when I needed help; Hans Mochtar, my little brother who saved me from jail; my children Hereward and Gina, who survived with me; my dear lost husband Ed, who gave us this adventure; and finally Jan Borrie, who made it all fit to read.

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Part One Borneo/Kalimantan

B

orneo is the third-largest island in the world. It is divided in two politically between Malaysia and Indonesia, with the latter occupying the larger portion. Some people believe Borneo is Yavadvipa, the land of gold and silver referred to in the Hindu epic, The Ramayana. The Indonesian name for the island is Pulau Kalimantan (‘kali’ means river, ‘mantan’ means big). Mention the name Borneo and many people will instantly think of head-hunters. Head-hunting and black magic have long been associated with the Dyak people of Borneo. The Dutch believed they wiped out both some time early last century, but black magic survives, as do the left-over skulls from the head-hunting days. Most Dyak villages have a skull collection and who is to say whether they are antique or freshly garnered?

A new life I came to Balikpapan, the oil capital of East Kalimantan, for an age-old wifely reason: to shore up my faltering marriage. For the first time in our married life, my husband Ed and I had been living apart and some frightening cracks were beginning to appear in our relationship. After 15 years living together in remote parts of the world, Ed had spent the previous 12 months working in Indonesia while I remained in Sydney so our children could attend normal, English-speaking schools. Ed was a helicopter pilot and we had spent most of our marriage in foreign countries: Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, the United States, New Zealand, Singapore and Korea. Our two younger children, Gina and Hereward, were 11 and 14, an age at which they needed to live in civilised conditions and go to civilised schools. My two older children from my first marriage,

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Ceilidh and Tom, had finished school and were doing tertiary studies. For Gina and Hereward’s sake, I had taken a stand and decided to remain in Sydney until their schooling was over, but things were not working out as well as I had hoped. We were accustomed to life on the road together and there were problems now that we were separated. Ed was based in Balikpapan, a wild frontier town on the east coast of Indonesian Borneo. And, while we had met in Singapore twice for school holidays and had a great time, I could see that, as a family, we were drifting further and further apart. We were not sharing the experiences of Ed’s dramatic and often dangerous life as we had always done. In South America and the other places, where we were all together, we were able to appreciate the work he did, comfort him in times of stress, laugh with him in good times and share his adventures and his highly developed sense of humour. My fondest memories of him are those of laughter. He used to call us ‘the Team’ and taught us his old Canton, Ohio, school football song Fight the Team, which we would sing with gusto at the drop of a hat. ‘Fight the team’ was a phrase of encouragement the family used whenever anyone was down-hearted or in need of a bit of a push. In times of extreme desperation, it was also used as a lullaby. As Ed was tone-deaf, the singing of this ditty had a dirge-like quality but it was our song and we loved it. In spite of the fun we had during our visits to Singapore, it wasn’t the same as our days together in the wilds. We didn’t seem to be ‘the Team’ anymore. We met in the luxury of Singapore’s hotels and didn’t even know what conditions were like where Ed worked in the jungles and swamps of Kalimantan. He told us he had two pet orang-utans called Hereward and Gina and showed us photos of them, but it wasn’t the real thing. In Colombia we had enjoyed playing with our own pets, such as an armadillo and a guacamayo, a giant rainbow-coloured bird with tail feathers about one-metre long. And there were always our pet dogs and monkeys. Photos of pets were no substitute for the real thing. One of our greatest joys in some countries, particularly Korea, had been joy-riding in the helicopter. We used to regard it

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as our own flying sports car. We probably saw more of South Korea from the air than many a military general. Sometimes we landed in villages where the people had never seen European women and children and they stared at us as though we were creatures from outer space. Once we dropped in on a Buddhist temple, hidden away in a remote valley that would otherwise have taken days of trekking to reach. There was no one about and we might have been the first people to visit it in years. Life with Ed was always an adventure. Sitting around the hotel pool in Singapore one day, I knew it was time to take action. I raised with Ed the possibility of myself and the two younger children going to live with him in Kalimantan. He had some reservations about how we would tolerate the somewhat primitive living conditions and the extreme heat, so he suggested I visit the helicopter camp for a week to see if I was willing to live in Balikpapan. ‘It’s not that great, you know,’ he said. ‘And it’s very, very hot — I’m warning you.’ The kids were packed off back to school in Australia and I joined Ed at Singapore’s Payar Lebar Airport for the 5am flight to Balikpapan on the company Volpar, an ancient, pre-war aeroplane. The 10-seater Volpar would take us out over the South China Sea to the west coast of Kalimantan. It was not a luxury flight and there were no toilet facilities. Part of the passageway and some of the seats were stacked with cargo and spare parts, and helicopter rotor blades were stowed on the floor along the length of the plane. The other passengers — pilots and engineers — slept the whole way, some of them stretched out along what was left of the passage floor and all suffering from that well-known disease, Floppybonus tropicanus, caused by an over-indulgence of all things during leave. It’s a condition where the bones turn to jelly, they told me, and are incapable of holding up the fleshy parts of the body. But my mind was fixed far away from the appointments of the Volpar and on what I was going to find when we arrived in Borneo. My eyes were glued to the window, although there was nothing to see but a wide expanse of ocean.

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We refuelled at Pontianak, our first sight of land on the west coast of Borneo. The plane circled the town several times to alert the refueller that he was needed at the airport, and it was not until he was spotted speeding along the dusty road that the Volpar came in to land. The airport ‘facilities’ were at the back of the corrugated iron hangar and could be detected by the nose as soon as one alighted from the aircraft. As Kev Kennedy, one of the engineers, remarked, ‘There’s nothing like the smell of the Pontianak toilets for clearing out your sinuses.’ As I was the only woman on board, I was shown down the road to a small house and the ‘bathroom’ — at least I guessed that was what it was. I didn’t know what to do in the concreted room which had nothing except one narrow window set high in one wall. Eventually, I found a small hole about 5mm in diameter just above floor level in one wall. This must be the toilet. It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen but, desperate by now, I made use of it as best as I could and made my way back to the Volpar. Packs of wild dogs were devouring the unused lunchpacks — which had been discarded out the door of the plane — plastic wrappings and all! Was this a taste of things to come? But we were not to get out of Pontianak so lightly. My passport was being inspected by an immigration official and it was discovered that I did not have plague and cholera injections entered on my health card. When one travelled only between Singapore and Sydney such things were not necessary and I had forgotten all about Indonesian health regulations. In spite of my protests, we were informed that the plane could not continue until I was innoculated. The thought of the probable lack of ideal hygiene conditions at the airport filled me with dread but I had to submit or wait a day in Pontianak (in the iron shed with the sinus-clearing facilities) for the return flight to Singapore. ‘Go on,’ said Ed. ‘You’ll survive. You can always have a good check-up when you get back to Sydney.’ Ed always had a fairly cavalier approach to health matters, which I suppose is the way of the true adventurer. If you were going to worry about dangers to your body all the time, you would never go anywhere.

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When we first met and knew we were made for each other, Ed took me to Watsons Bay in Sydney where there was a big cliff (not The Gap, but another vertical lump of rock that looked quite daunting). ‘Now, before we go any further,’ he said, ‘I want to see if you can climb that cliff. If you are going to live with me for the rest of your life you are going to have to do a lot of dangerous things.’ I went up it, of course. Who wouldn’t, with a challenge like that? It was my first step in the quest for the great adventure. Health regulations complied with, we eventually took off and, after circling the town once more, apparently to say thank you, we headed eastwards across a sea of green, which was the jungle-clad island of Kalimantan. Nursing my sore arm, I kept my eyes glued to the window, seeing nothing to relieve the unending green save the occasional flash of red or white as a giant flowering tree forced its way up through the forest mantle. At one point we passed over a brick-red river, curving like a snake in countless s-bends on its way towards the sea. Of human habitation there was no sign. ——————— Almost five hours after leaving Singapore, the eastern coastline of Kalimantan appeared on the jungle horizon and, as we flew low over the town built around the borders of a wide bay, I had my first glimpse of Balikpapan, my possible future home. Buildings and huts in what looked like the main part of the town were clustered along the northern bank of a narrow estuary and, further north, bordering the coastline, was a succession of huge storage tanks and a number of ships anchored offshore. This was the fomer Shell oil refinery and storage depot left over from pre-war Dutch days and now run by the Indonesian Government as Pertamina. An Australian assault force landed successfully here towards the end of World War II and I wondered if the aerial view differed much from that time.

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The airport at Sepinggan was 10km north of the town and, after some circling to get clearance, we came in for a happy landing. There were aeroplanes of all shapes and sizes parked everywhere: DC3s, Trislanders, Islanders, Cherokees, Aztecs, Pilatus Porters, French, Japanese, British and American helicopters. Jeeps and trucks scudded about like ants. We climbed out of the Volpar to meet a blinding blast of hot air and entered a large building to face customs and immigration officers. Ed was hailed by just about everyone and seemed to be a popular figure. My appearance was a curiosity, as European women were a rarity and were seen only when a company aeroplane landed. I was introduced to an Indonesian called Situju who assured me he would do ‘everything’ for me. Later Ed whispered, ‘He’s a bit of a blow-hard but he’ll probably be useful if you decide to stay. He knows everyone and can get anything.’ Once we had been cleared by customs, the company jeep drove us the short distance to the National Utility Helicopter (NUH) camp on the fringes of the aerodrome. The camp had its own hangar and office building and a line of motellike rooms, fringed by a covered verandah. It was right on the waterfront, with only 90m or so separating it from the beach. In the centre was the ablutions block, with toilets and showers, and at the hangar end was the kitchen, the dining room, a large lounge or recreation room and a bar. As a courtesy to my gender and unexpected arrival, Ed and I were given a two-bed room to ourselves and I was given a very warm welcome from the pilots and engineers. Their wives and families lived in Singapore and rarely, if ever, came to Kalimantan. Most of the engineers and some of the pilots were Australians, two or three were French while the rest were American, some of them fresh from Vietnam where the war was still raging. There was a lot of talk about them being ex-Air America pilots. A lot of people at the time regarded Air America as an arm of the American Central Intelligence Agency and hardened bush pilots like Ed saw them as rather spoiled brats. Their work in Vietnam was more on the spy level than actual combat and they were paid exceptionally high salaries, far above that of ordinary serving airmen. As a

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consequence, many of them had amassed a great deal of money and invested it in real estate in California: blocks of flats, seaside residences, rented shops, etc., to the envy of the ordinary bush pilots. It didn’t go down very well with the NUH regulars, who felt underpaid and overworked for what they did and the risks they took. I really enjoyed my week in Balikpapan, as everyone was so friendly. The food in the NUH mess was good, although the workers all complained about it as people always do when living in an institution. The steaks, which were large and plentiful, were flown in from the United States and there was an endless supply of apple pies. Ed took me up to ‘the Ridge’, the Union Oil (US) housing complex at Pasir Ridge, which overlooked the whole area. As well as boasting curbed and guttered streets, it had beautiful American-style bungalows, fully air-conditioned and each with two bathrooms. There was an Olympic-size swimming pool, a six-lane bowling alley, a club dining room, a supermarket, a theatre and two schools — one for the children of American employees and the other for teaching English to Indonesian employees. The whole complex was surrounded by a high barbedwire fence and patrolled by security guards and dogs. A special pass was needed to gain entry. The extravagance of it all made one gasp. One of the pilots joked that the Americans flew out of Dallas, Texas, landed in Balikpapan, drove in an air-conditioned car to the Ridge, moved into their air-conditioned bungalows and never noticed they had left Texas. There was no need for them ever to venture into the town of Kebun Sayur because the Ridge provided everything they needed. Ed and I did venture out of the NUH camp and had a good meal at the Chinese-run Atomic Restaurant. As it was dark, I didn’t get a good look at the town but it seemed to be just a string of shops side by side, all run by Chinese and all selling the same things. Ed had been right about the weather — it was very, very hot and not just ordinary hot, but wet, oily hot. Balikpapan was very close to the Equator so when you were outside, it was best

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to move slowly, as any fast movement brought the sweat out immediately. Even though I dislike air-conditioning, I could see that unless you could spend some part of the day in the coolness, you would soon become quite enervated. The night before I was due to fly back to Singapore, Ed and I had a long talk and decided that it would be best if I went home to Australia, found someone to run my Sydney art gallery, The Rocks Gallery, packed up the things we needed and came back with the kids as soon as possible. We discussed schooling and decided that the local Pertamina Oil school would be good as it would give the kids a chance to learn the language quickly and get to know the people. Ed said he knew about a house further along the beach that we could probably rent, but in the meantime there was temporary accommodation available at a modest Dutch housing complex called Decorient. It was all looking great. And then the bomb dropped. We were just about to go to sleep when Ed said, ‘There’s one other thing I haven’t told you.’ I yawned and suggested it could wait until tomorrow. Of course there would be other things to talk about but we could fix up such details when I returned. ‘I think you’d better listen to this,’ Ed said. He sounded so serious that I sat up and gave him my full attention. Quite dramatically, I thought, he cleared his throat and began. ‘You remember last year when I had that crash in the Mahakam River?’ He had written to me about the crash while recovering in hospital in Jakarta. The Bell 205 he was flying with eight passengers had a tail-rotor failure and came down in the Mahakam Delta. The machine immediately turned turtle, trapping everyone inside. Somehow, Ed managed to get a door open and, after repeated dives, got everyone out and on to a sandbank. Once the passengers were out and counted, he made extra dives to recover their briefcases. The Japanese survivors were duly impressed by this gallant gesture and wrote letters of recommendation to the company.

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‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Is it something about your back? You said it was still giving you a bit of trouble.’ ‘No, it’s not my back. Just listen and I’ll tell you. After I got out of hospital, I took a couple of weeks leave in Jakarta before going back to work. After I’d seen all the movies in town I started going to a particular girlie bar that I’d heard about. They were very nice to me in there and I went a lot. There was one girl in particular. She became my girl. I came back to work and, six months later, when I was in Jakarta again for work permits, I went back to the bar and here was the girl pregnant and crying. She swore the baby was mine and said her brothers were very angry with me. I knew what went on in these bars and it didn’t seem likely that I was definitely the father so I said I’d come back when the baby was born and have a look at it. I did that and, sure enough, it did look as though it might be halfEuropean. I was at her house and her brothers were there too and they started to heavy me. They said if I didn’t marry their sister I’d be killed. So I did.’ ‘You did what?’ ‘I married her.’ ‘You married her? But you can’t do that! It’s illegal! It’s a crime.’ ‘Well, I did. And now she wants to come here and live with us. I told her about you and she said she would help you in the house. She’s quite a nice little thing. I think you’d like her.’ Men often say they don’t understand women, but I could definitely say I don’t think any woman could understand what my husband was telling me. Why hadn’t he said anything about this before? How had his whole attitude towards us as a family changed so radically in one year? We were the Team. We’d been through all sorts of tough times together, as well as joyful ones. How could this be happening? I couldn’t speak and just lay there with my head on fire, unable to think of anything to say. This couldn’t be the same man I loved and had been living with for 20 years. This couldn’t be the man I had been having such a great and loving time with for the past week, the man who I was planning to join, along with our children, in this hot hell-hole of a place called Balikpapan. It must be a nightmare.

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It was impossible to sleep and, after lying in silence for a while, I got my voice back and sat up. We started to discuss what to do. For me to go back to Australia and forget the whole idea of moving to Kalimantan was, of course, a sure-fire way of dissolving the marriage. I decided against that. The next step was to decide what to do about the second wife and child. She could not live with us. Such an idea might have been all right in a Muslim context, but it was so alien to our Western way of life it would have destroyed the family. I suggested that the only thing Ed could do was send her a decent sum of money and hope that would be the end of it. There was no proof that he was the father and the marriage was not legal, but a price had to be paid for the illicit joys of the girlie bar. Ed agreed that was the best idea and said he wished he had thought of it before. The money would be a small fortune to such a poor person living in Jakarta and would, he hoped, act as a deterrent to the murdering brothers. I didn’t sleep that night and, in fact, after returning to Singapore and Sydney, I hardly slept at all for several weeks. As soon as I closed my eyes this terrible newsreel of events came on, revolving and revolving, until I felt I was going mad. But I had decided on a course of action and my marriage to Ed was worth saving so I threw myself into all the arrangements necessary for the move. I said nothing to anyone about the girl in Jakarta, not even to my mother. There was no way of explaining it to the children and hopefully the matter would now rest. I decided to forget about it and act as though it had never happened.

Pay, pack and follow The family was about to hit the road again in a familiar scenario: the man sets off and finds a new place while the wife has to pay, pack and follow. Back in Sydney, the two younger children were very excited about moving to Indonesia to join their dad. The two older children, Ceilidh and Tom, would possibly join us for holidays.

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Packing up for a change of countries had always been part of our life. I was lucky to find a manager for my art gallery and set about sorting out which things were to go into storage and which were to go with us. Favourite possessions, books and ornaments were to accompany us, of course, as well as three paintings that had been hung on the walls of all the places where we had lived. They always put the stamp of home on our new place no matter what part of the world we were in. A much-loved one, a Picasso print of a pink clown on a horse, was the first thing we hung up on arrival. ‘There!’ we would say. ‘Now we’re home.’ After saying goodbye to my mother and the rest of the family, we were off on the next chapter of our great adventure.

Balikpapan In the early 1970s, Balikpapan was a boom town. The oil fields, discovered by the Dutch and exploited under Japanese occupation, had been reopened and the entire region was expanding rapidly as foreign explorers poured in men, money and equipment. There was construction under way everywhere. American, French and Japanese companies were building oil rigs offshore and offices, warehouses and accommodation for the workers and expatriate technicians and their families shot up like mushrooms. The timber industry was also being re-established and was experiencing boom conditions. Business was flourishing under President Suharto’s regime. Foreign companies did anything required to get a job done quickly. They paid, without quibble, the asking price for machinery, spare parts and food, driving up prices and causing raging inflation. Everything was brought in by sea to provide for this burgeoning population. Ships, their holds loaded with machinery, rice, meat and vegetables, ploughed their way up the Macassar Straits, bringing in the produce of rich Java. Very little grows in Kalimantan except trees, so nearly all foodstuffs were imported. The ships carried human cargo as well, for word had spread to crowded Java and beyond that there was work in

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Kalimantan. Workers came from all the islands of Indonesia: Java, Sumatra, Bali, Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores, Timor, Irian Jaya, Sulawesi and Ambon. There was a great feeling of excitement about the place, as wages were high and everyone was optimistic about the future. Ed had found temporary accommodation for us at Decorient and took us to see the more permanent place he was hoping to get on the beach, past the airport at Sepinggan. The house had been uninhabited for many years and itinerant traders had sometimes camped in it, cooking on open charcoal fires, leaving all the walls and ceilings blackened. Many planks had also been removed from the walls, probably to feed the fires. The site itself, however, well away from the town and yet not far from the airport, was good, so we decided to take it and make it fit to live in. Ed had been right about the heat. It was incredibly hot, although the temperature was not much more than 30°C. The dark green jungle crowded in on all sides and the air felt like a warm, damp and slightly oily blanket. Clothes were wet almost as soon as you put them on. Moving as slowly as possible seemed the only way of dealing with it. There was an oiliness to one’s sweat that I had never experienced before. I knew it would be good when we moved to the house on the beach as, hopefully, there would be sea breezes and even the sound of the lapping waves to make it feel cooler. We were about 12km out of town and driving in there to shop was like entering hell. Kebun Sayur (which means ‘vegetable garden’!), where most of the shops were, was one huge slum. You could smell it long before you got there, as the streets and drains were used for every kind of refuse: boxes, papers, rotten fruit, bad fish and sewage. To enter a shop you had to cross a wooden boardwalk which spanned a gutter of green, festering, vile-smelling ooze. When it rained it was even worse, as everything rose up and flooded over the boards. The temptations of the Western world were very strong, and everywhere there were young boys on motorbikes, wearing high-heeled boots, fur-lined leather jackets and tight jeans. In that climate!

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There was an official brothel run by the army called Lembah Harapan (the Valley of Hope). Girls were brought in on yearly contracts, mainly from Java and Sulawesi. There were also many private girlie establishments such as the Bahtera, Blue Sky and Sweet Sixteen. Men paid to dance with the girls but were not allowed to take them outside. Ed took me along to have a look one night and I saw the girls waiting to be chosen, sitting in a room called the Fishbowl. They were viewed by prospective customers through a large plate-glass window and, while waiting to be selected, they watched TV or did embroidery. They were very young. One of the places had a sign at the entrance: ‘Touching and feeling all over but not other thing.’ The girlie bars were run by the Chinese who, in fact, seemed to run everything: shops, nightclubs and restaurants. Chinese schools, the Chinese language and newspapers had been banned by Suharto’s New Order in the 1960s, after the coup which overthrew founding President Sukarno. Chinese writing outside shops was also forbidden. At our favourite Atomic Restaurant, there used to be a large gold decorative Chinese symbol on the wall — for good luck, I was told. One day, a group of soldiers removed it. The army was very much in evidence. I suppose we noticed it because we never saw the army in Australia, unless there was some official celebration. There were Kommando units in every block and a political prison behind the post office. The prisoners had been there since the failed communist coup in 1963 and they were not allowed to read or write or even garden. This inside information came from the driver who took us in to town to do the shopping. He seemed to want me to know about Suharto’s Indonesia. The children were taking our new location in their stride, as usual, but with the holiday over it was time to look at their schooling. The Pertamina Oil school we had decided on had good buildings and, when we went for an interview, they told us we were the first foreigners to have applied. They were pleased. During the interview an army officer stood behind the headmaster — the army was in evidence everywhere it seemed.

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In order to maximise the use of school buildings, they explained, the student body was divided into two parts, the younger ones going to school in the morning and the older ones in the afternoon. As my children straddled the borderline in age, it meant two return trips to the school daily, for a six-day school week. It would involve a lot of driving but as we had a new VW station-wagon, it would not be too difficult. There were three sets of school uniforms to be made: blue and white, alternating each day with red and white, on weekdays, and scout and guide uniforms for Saturdays. Nothing was ready-made so the materials had to be bought and dressmakers found, all of which took several weeks. Eventually, the two children were all togged up and ready for their first day at school. They took to it very philosophically but it eventually proved to be a disaster. The cultural differences were just too great. They told me there was no discipline at all in class and the children jumped around all the time shouting and playing up. Teachers appeared only occasionally and my children didn’t use the toilets as they were so smelly. The shock of a European in class was just too much for one teacher and he always addressed Hereward as ‘Sir’. In our temporary home at Decorient, I engaged a young girl to do the washing and help with the house. She was from Menado in North Sulawesi and her natural language was Minahassa. Her name was Taksi, so calling her was always a great joke: ‘Taksi! Taksi!’ I was trying to learn Bahasa Indonesia but it was proving quite difficult as everyone seemed to speak a different language. Indonesians themselves were only just beginning to learn their new universal language and still communicated with one another in the languages of their home islands. With people from all over the country coming to work in Balikpapan, the place was a linguistic Tower of Babel. Taksi’s main problem was her fascination with taps. She had never seen them before and once she got the hang of how they worked, she turned them all on as soon as she arrived in the morning. They would flow all day unless I noticed and turned them off. I later discovered the reason for this strange behaviour.

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In her village, water came from a spring on the hillside, so she thought this was the same never-ending supply.

Monkeys It was while we were living at Decorient that we acquired a monkey. This was the first animal of what was later to become a large collection, known as the Fenton Zoo. He was a tiny brown macaque monkey with green eyes, brought back by Ed from a jungle job. We called him Sam, in honour of the president of the helicopter company. The poor wee thing was terrified when he first arrived at the house and immediately sprang up to the picture rail in order to distance himself from us as far as possible. It was only hunger and thirst that finally brought him down and from then on we were able to control him by his stomach. He had a great personality and became a favourite in the helicopter-camp mess. Everyone liked to have a go at the boss via his namesake, the monkey. Sam enjoyed a small beer and, from infancy, knew instinctively the very worst thing to do — not only to grab cigarettes, but to dunk them in a glass of beer. His sexual development also came very early. Having discovered his penis, he was constantly trying to jab it into any orifice that presented itself — eye, ear, nose — it didn’t matter where. He was frantic in his hopeless attempts to stick the wretched thing into some hole or other. His worst escapade in those early days was when we went out one day and left him locked in the bathroom, tied to a tap. Little did we realise that a rope around the waist was small cheese to the great escape artist, Houdini Sam. He soon untied the knot and got loose and, when we returned, the bathroom was a shambles. He had squeezed out all the toothpaste tubes and eaten the contents; he had tried shampoos and conditioners and tossed them away. He then turned on the taps so that the whole place was a gigantic bubble bath. Worst of all, he had opened my five bottles of Oroxine thyroid tablets and eaten the lot. Disaster! As I have no thyroid gland, I needed three of these tablets daily, and they were unobtainable in Indonesia.

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The government telegraph service to Singapore was unreliable so we had to use the helicopter company’s short-wave radio to get a message through via amateur radio operators, otherwise known as HAMs. The message was to find a doctor in Singapore willing to issue more pills without a prescription, even though Singapore was even stricter on these matters than most countries. A HAM operator somewhere in the world picked up our desperate call for help and the message was relayed to a doctor in Singapore, who took pity on us and new pills arrived on an oil company charter flight within a few days. Meanwhile, Sam appeared to suffer no ill effects. He did, however, grow up to be the Al Capone of monkeys.

The beach house Ed decided it was time for us to make plans to move down to the beach house he had found, which we could rent cheaply from the airport manager. We drove down to have another look at it and were pleased from the moment we saw it. Certainly, it needed a lot of work, but the location was excellent. It was further north than the airport and a long way from school and shops, but all this was compensated for by its beach frontage. The idea of sea breezes sounded like the breath of heaven. It was time to call on Situju, the man I had met at the airport on my arrival in Balikpapan — the man who could get anything. We wanted a carpenter to work on the beach house. ‘My nephew,’ Situju said immediately. ‘I will bring him along.’ The next day, he introduced us to a slight young man — more boy than man — whose name was Mansur. ‘He is from my family and a very good Bugis carpenter,’ Situju said. ‘He has worked for the Koreans on Pasir Ridge. He can make anything you want. He must work hard for you, otherwise I will send him back to Sulawesi.’ Mansur was obviously in great fear of his uncle and hung his head as Situju talked. He looked very thin and unhealthy and had many tropical ulcers, but he was strongly recommended, so we took him on.

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Situju came to the house when Mansur began working and won my heart when he presented us with a house-warming gift. He had painted it himself and was very proud of it. It was a sign about 30cm square and declared in bold letters: ‘KEEP UOT!’ He told us we must build a fence around the house before we started work. ‘I hate fences,’ I said. ‘Let’s just leave the bush as it is.’ ‘No, nyonya [ma’am].’ He was adamant. ‘Mansur will build a fence. If a bad man comes to steal we can chase him away. But if we have a fence, and he comes inside, then we can kill him. That is the law. So you see, we must have a fence.’ On this pronouncement, he raised his shoulders, his palms up, in that gesture that implies, if you don’t understand that, you don’t understand anything! So we built a fence out of tapioca (cassava) sticks and, before long, it took root and we had a hedge. Mansur and I went to the timber yards, buying materials needed to make the house habitable. After fixing the walls and the windows, we decided to re-do the roof with sirap. This is a dark-brown shingle cut to about 400mm long, 100mm wide and pointed at one end. Sirap is hand-cut from Kalimantan ironwood by Dyaks. At its point of origin, it is a relatively cheap and attractive roofing material. The Korean architects incorporated it into their grandly designed houses on Pasir Ridge. Once all the materials were delivered, Mansur went to work. Situju hung around for a while, giving orders and calling out, ‘Mansuuuur!’, to assert his domination of his lowly relative. He gave up after a while and Mansur and I managed quite well on our own. Bugis people are very family oriented and I found out later that Mansur was required to share his wages with those family members without a job. His cousin, Pudding, came to work for us for a while and was always without money for this reason — it all went into the communal pot. Mansur did everything by hand, as we had no electricity at the beach. I watched him saw up a log with a handsaw, then, out of the planks, make small strips of wood for the windowframes and even smaller ones to hold the fly-screens. Our communication was mostly by hand signals as my Bahasa

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Indonesia was minimal at that time. I copied him when he spoke and, before long, with the help of a dictionary, we were able to converse quite well. Much later, I learned to my dismay that he was just as new to Bahasa Indonesia as I was. I had presumed that all Indonesians spoke the same language. So the blind led the blind and it was only when I met some educated Javanese that I learned I was speaking a very strange language: very bad Bahasa Indonesia mixed with Bugis, Macassar and Minahassa words. While Mansur was working for me, he told me about his life in his halting English. As he and his family came to live in Kalimantan by one route, so my family came by another. Our routes were different but our reasons were the same: we came for work. From very different backgrounds, our first impressions of Kalimantan were necessarily at variance but as time went by, our close association with one another taught us many things about one another’s culture. Eventually, we came to the universal conclusion that the more we are different, the more we are the same. Mansur’s story I am a Bugis, born in Bone in Sulawesi. My father was once a rich and powerful man. He had 18 wives. I am the only child of his last wife. She died before I can remember but my old father is still alive. He is now a poor man and all his wives are dead. He is 104 years old and sits in a chair all day long. He has more than 100 children and sometimes they send money to him. As I am the youngest, he often asks me to send him money. I send it when I can; it is an obligation. Long ago, the Bugis were a strong nation. Bugis people have their own language. My father used to keep the books written in Bugis but they were all burned when I was a small boy. There was a big war in Macassar. I remember it clearly. When the noise was over and the fires had burned out, we went down to the harbour which had big red flowering trees planted all along the shore as far as you can see. Every tree had a dead body hanging from it. Was it like that in your country, too?

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(This sort of question is quite common in Indonesia. People who grow up without newspapers or TV often think that events taking place in their time are the same for those in other parts of the world.) I think it was soldiers from Java who killed the people. This was the time when my father lost all his possessions and became a poor man. They took away all his Bugis books and burned them. They also took his land and buffaloes. They left him a small house on a hill near Bone. Although he is poor, the local people still treat him like an important man. They bring him food and consult with him on important matters. He has very strong powers. He can tell long beforehand if a thunderstorm is coming. Fishermen come to him for advice; he also knows when there will be plenty of fish in the sea. He knows when visitors will arrive long before they are seen and also when someone has died in a distant place. He can cure people of sickness but some of his powers have been lost since they burned his books. He speaks in the Bugis language and has never learned Bahasa Indonesia. He was more than 40 years old when he first married and, at the same time, he was suddenly able to speak Arabic, Chinese and Russian. He is a very devout Muslim. When my mother died, I was sent to live with relatives in Ujung Pandang. That is the only place I remember as home. I grew up in the village of Kowilhan and went to school for two or three years but I don’t remember learning anything, except how to count, but not to read and write. When I was about 12, I went to work for the Chinese in a carpentry shop. They did not pay money but gave me rice to eat twice a day, sometimes with vegetables on top. I worked every day of the week sawing up logs with a handsaw. It was hard work and I ran away two or three times but always came back because I was hungry. They did not like me because I was Muslim. I think they were either Christian or Catholic; I’m not sure which. (This confusion over ‘Christian’ and ‘Catholic’ is quite common in Indonesia. In many people’s eyes, they are quite separate religions.) One day, when I was about 15, I came home from work and went to the river to bathe, as usual. On the way there, in the trees,

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I passed a young girl coming back from the river. She was very pretty but I didn’t think about her very much as I was so tired. My cousins lived in a Bugis house on stilts and underneath was space for goats and chickens. We all slept upstairs on the wooden floor. My sleeping place was near the table. There were about 20 of us altogether, as they had eight children and there were some other cousins. I don’t know how we were related as they were all called saudara, which means ‘of my family’. At night, they would light a kerosene lamp and the men and boys would sit around it and talk. Bugis people love talking. I already knew that it was better to be a boy than a girl. I had more freedom. Every day was the same. Wake up. Go outside for private business. Walk to work. Come home. Bathe in the river. Eat and talk around the lamp. Go to sleep again. I didn’t ever think about all this until years later when I met the foreigners. I didn’t question anything. That was how life was. Although the days were the same, one time of the year was different. This was Ramadan. It was part of our Muslim religion and lasted for a month. The test was to see if you could last through the hours of sunlight without eating or drinking. Boys like me thought it was a lot of fun as we tried to beat one another, but I could never last for more than a week because of all the heavy work I did sawing up logs. My cousin said it didn’t matter as long as I tried. At the end of Ramadan there was a great celebration called Hari Raya Idul Fitri. I didn’t go to work on that day and we had a great feast at home. Not the sort of feasts I would see later with the foreigners but there was plenty to eat — bananas, papayas, lots of rice, fish and little pink and green cakes. One of the days when I wasn’t working, because the Chinese were having their holiday called Hari Natal (Christmas), I went chasing monkeys with some of my cousins. Suddenly, the monkeys started chasing us, and me in particular. I took off through the trees and jumped into a big pond, thinking I could get away from them, but they came right in after me. Until then, I didn’t know that monkeys could swim. They jumped all over me and bit me on the neck and back. I still have the scars today. My friends ran off and left me and, by the time the monkeys had finished, I was very bloody.

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When I got home, my cousin and his wife were very angry because I couldn’t go to work for a week. They got the dukun baik (Bugis doctor) over to see me and he treated my wounds with green leaves and other things he boiled up in a pot. I really hated monkeys after that. I didn’t know that later I would become a monkey-keeper with the foreigners. Not long after I’d seen the pretty girl coming back from the river, a very strange thing happened. I came home from work, went to the river as usual and then, when I returned to the house, I saw that there was a lot of good food set out on the mat: fruit and rice and the little pink and green cakes we usually saw only at Idul Fitri. I said, ‘What’s all this about? It’s not Hari Raya!’ ‘No, it’s not,’ said my cousin. ‘It’s just a celebration for one of the children.’ Suddenly, two of the men grabbed me and started dressing me in a white shirt, tie and dark coat like the ones the men wear to the mosque. I was quite frightened, as they didn’t say anything but just forced me into these clothes. When I was fully dressed, they took me to the far side of the room and sat me in a high-backed chair I hadn’t seen in the house before. There was an identical chair beside it, and I noticed that all the women were wearing their best kain-kebaya and the men all had on their clean clothes. No one spoke to me and I had no idea what was happening. Then up the stairs came another group of people I didn’t recognise, carrying a girl. A pretty girl. She was dressed in really good clothes and had flowers in her hair and all sorts of glittering gold things. These people were half laughing and half serious and they carried her over and placed her in the chair beside me. It was the girl I’d seen on my way to the river a few months before. Then the whole thing became clear to me: I was going to be married. The girl was as terrified as I was because we had never spoken to one another, but we both knew what was happening. We sat there, not saying anything, while everyone else talked and looked at us. They talked and talked and talked. Two old people, who I guessed were the girl’s parents, sat on the floor with my cousins and they talked and made signs.

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It was very hot sitting there in all those heavy clothes, as there were now about 40 people in the room. For a while I was worried that the house would fall down. Two little girls, giggling all the time, came and sat near us. They had fans and it was good when they fanned us and I began to relax a little. I turned to the girl beside me but she looked away immediately. So I just sat there, feeling uncomfortable, knowing there was nothing I could do about it. Finally, all the talking stopped and the head Muslim man said a lot of things in Arabic. I was nearly asleep with fatigue and heat and can’t remember much more. Then they gave us a drink of sweet pink coconut milk and some food and everyone else started to eat and drink, too. The next thing that happened was that we were both lifted up and carried to a curtained-off area in the back of the room and left there with the curtain pulled. There was a tikar (rush mat) on the floor and two pillows. Both of us were so stunned and terrified that we didn’t say anything to one another all night. We just lay there until morning when the men came in and lifted us up and carried us down the steps and away through the trees to another village. We were put in chairs again and after more eating, talking and drinking we were put into another curtained-off area. We still didn’t say or do anything as every time I looked at the girl she turned away. Finally, I whispered, ‘My name is Mansur. What’s yours?’ There was no reply. It was arranged that I was to go to work as usual but in the evening I was to come back to this second house. The next day, when I went to the Chinese, they said they didn’t want me anymore as I had missed several days’ work. So I came back to my bride’s house and decided I had to at least find out what her name was. ‘Please tell me what your name is,’ I pleaded. ‘My name is Mansur.’ After a few hours of this one-sided conversation, she finally looked up at me and, with a husky voice, muttered, ‘My name is Intan.’ So at last we were getting somewhere. The word Intan means ‘diamond’ and I thought it suited her perfectly. She had very

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pale skin and was tall and slim and had long, lustrous black hair. But it was at least a month before we actually relaxed with one another. One of our main problems was that she was Macassarese, from South Sulawesi, and spoke only the Macassan language and I was Bugis, with only my own language. What a strange way to start a marriage! Intan was the only child of very old parents and the idea, apparently, was that I was to be the new, young, strong man in the family. I don’t know what deals were done between the elders to arrange this, but it was probably something to do with property. The mother was deaf and the father was almost blind but he still managed to work for a fisherman. He didn’t get any wages but the fisherman gave him rice to take home and a fish, if there was a good catch. As time went by and the three of them kept looking to me for support, I saw that I would have to do something desperate. There was no work to be had in Ujung Pandang. The Chinese wouldn’t have me back and by now my beautiful Intan was pregnant. How was I going to look after these three people and a possible fourth? One day, when I was visiting one of my cousins, he told me he’d heard there was a lot of work on another island called Kalimantan. It took about five days to get there in an open boat. He said a lot of people had gone there and hadn’t come back, so it must be all right. I walked into Ujung Pandang — about an hour’s walk — and went to the port area. ‘Are there any boats going to Kalimantan?’ I asked. ‘Yes, there is one going next week,’ a man told me. ‘The fare is R.2000 and bring your own food for five days.’ I had no money at all but I had to go to this place. I decided to ask my father for help. As I was the youngest, he always seemed to be fond of me. After telling Intan and her parents what I intended to do, I set out on the long walk to my father’s house in Bone on the east coast of Sulawesi. Going by mountain tracks and scavenging food such as fallen coconuts and papaya, I got to Bone in about two days. When I walked up the steps of my father’s little house, he greeted me from his chair near the door. ‘Salaam aleikum.’ ‘Aleikum salaam,’ I replied.

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This is an obligatory greeting for all Muslim people. We are taught to do this from our earliest days. It means ‘peace be to thee’ and the response means ‘to thee be peace’. My father gave me a long lecture. Before he would help me, he said I must listen to him tell many stories about the Bugis people and our Muslim traditions. He was more than 90 years old and it was hard for me to be patient through all this. He spoke very slowly. For nearly a week, he shared his rice and vegetables with me and taught me many things about our family, the Bugis people and Islam. He gave me the money I needed and I walked back to Ujung Pandang and booked my passage on the boat. I will never forget that journey. It was the first time I had been to sea and I was sick almost from the beginning. It was an open boat built in Bugis style with a huge lug sail. There were 25 passengers, which gave us all room to sit but not to lie down. We all carried our own drinking water and rice, but the sea was calm enough for us to cook only a couple of times. Most of us didn’t feel like eating anyway, we were so seasick. We were wet most of the time as waves often broke right into the boat. Maybe people didn’t come back from Kalimantan because they couldn’t face the journey! They gave us each a plastic pillow, to hold on to if we were washed overboard. We passed some islands and a few other Bugis boats. Some were carrying people, all looking very miserable when we waved to them. Other boats had a cargo of round river-washed stones being taken from Sulawesi to Kalimantan. A man said they were to build roads because there were no stones on the island we were heading for. No one on my boat had ever met any foreigners and this was to be a new experience for all of us. We sailed into the big wide bay at Balikpapan early one morning. It looked the same as Ujung Pandang, the town we had left in Sulawesi, except for all the tall towers on the north side. They were surrounded by clusters of mushroom-like tanks. Someone said this was the oil refinery, whatever that was. Our boat ran up on to the muddy shoreline, which was thick with broken bottles, plastic bags and other rubbish, and we all scrambled out. None of us knew where to go or what we were going to do. But we were so happy to be out of that boat.

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One of the men with me had a cousin living in this town so we set off together to walk to Kebun Sayur. It was a big town and seemed much more crowded than Ujung Pandang. There were a lot more cars and trucks and motorbikes and hundreds of shops selling clothes and hardware. And many restaurants. But the streets were very narrow and muddy, not like Ujung Pandang, with its big wide streets all planted with red flamboyant trees. We were looking for an address in Guning Sari and asked some people where it was, but they only laughed and made rude signs with their fingers. They spoke a different language. Finally, we found someone who understood Bugis language and who gave us the right directions. I had never seen so many cars and trucks going so fast in all directions. My friend and I must have looked like people from the jungle as we walked along the road with our eyes wide open, staring left and right as the traffic rushed by. We moved into a house occupied by about 30 Bugis people on the side of a hill. They told us that some foreigners called Koreans were looking for carpenters and within a week I had a good job — sawing up logs again! But it was a good job. The Koreans, who looked like Chinese but had a different language, paid us money as well as giving us rice so I began to feel very rich. I planned to save as much as I could and, when I had enough, send for my beautiful Intan. I worked for about six months then Intan came to join me. She made the dangerous journey with our newborn son, who I named Khadir. Mansur’s life then changed dramatically. Through the good offices of his uncle Situju, Mansur came to work for us permanently and, with his wife and children, became our dear friend in Borneo and, later, in Java.

The art of the helicopter I was reminded of the dangerous nature of Ed’s job by a serious helicopter accident in which the pilot and engineer were badly injured. I sat in the local hospital with them until a special

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plane arrived to take them to hospital in Singapore. The pilot had a broken thigh and the engineer had concussion and a broken ankle. I felt so sorry for them, as the care in Balikpapan was not good. There was great difficulty getting them on the plane when it arrived; the doorway was too narrow for the stretchers and they had to twist the pilot’s body to get him inside. He was screaming with the pain. A month later there was a near-accident at Sorong in Irian Jaya. Engineers and pilots were divided as to where the blame lay. Bad maintenance or pilot error. The pay rates, for the risks taken and the working conditions, were not good. Helicopter people knew that even unskilled workers on the oil rigs were earning more than them and getting more time off, which was salt in the wound. It was probably exacerbated by an over-supply of helicopter personnel after the end of the Vietnam War. It was incredible to watch a helicopter move an oil rig. Piece by piece, like undoing a Meccano set, they lifted it from one position and reassembled it in the new location, maybe kilometres away. Weight judgement had to be accurate and it required a team effort from the pilot, engineer and loadmaster.

Life at the beach By the time Mansur had finished our house, it looked great — white and sparkling on the sea’s edge, fringed by coconut palms and with its very smart sirap roof. I planted 12 additional coconut palms and a dozen avocado trees. Through the Koreans, I acquired a reject bath tub and wash basin. The bath was unacceptable to the Americans on the Ridge because it had a small chip in the enamel! Nearly all our ‘extras’ came from friends in construction and on the oil rigs. There was such an excess of material in Balikpapan all you had to do was go into the Atomic Restaurant in Kebun Sayur and let it be known among the expats that you needed a pump, some drums, a stove or paint and someone would offer it. There was a marvellous frontier camaraderie about the place. It was a good feeling.

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The Americans, mainly Southerners, living in their crystal palaces on the Ridge, were amazed at our Aussie family, which was living down on the beach without water or electricity. Those who didn’t write us off as hippies did all they could to help. The differences in lifestyle and qualities of living between those on the Ridge and those on the beach were illustrated aptly by a very nice man from Dallas who visited us regularly for our popular barbecues. ‘Don’t think we’ve got it so good on the Ridge,’ he said. ‘My wife and I have been here for six months now. Do you know, we haven’t got a floor light in our closet yet!’ Such were the hardships of Texans in Indonesia. It was a great day when we finally moved into the beach house. All our lighting and cooking was powered by Avgas, a type of kerosene used as helicopter fuel. Any remaining Avgas was drained out of the helicopters each night, as it was never re-used in the craft. This fuel powered our lamps, kerosene fridge and cooker. Our water supply came from four 44-gallon drums of fresh water on a tank stand, which were filled by a tanker once a week. We really were right on the beach: high tide came to within two metres of the house. Low tide, however, was about half a kilometre out over a coral reef. The reef became a marvellous source of food providing such things as crabs, mussels and seaweed. Meanwhile, we had coconuts, avocados, tapioca and vegetables planted right beside the house. Everything grew well except the vegetables. There was something lacking in the soil, as was the case all over the ancient land mass of Kalimantan. Many government-sponsored plans for mass migration foundered because of this. Flowers grew abundantly, however, and soon our little paradise on the beach was a magnet for those on the Ridge who wanted to rough it up a little and swim in unchlorinated water. Mansur built a fine wire house for Sam, the monkey, with a sirap roof and we were soon looking around for some mates for him. First came Chica, a small grey spider monkey, who repeated the word ‘Wozzeck!’ continually. Then someone gave us a neurotic monkey called Lisa, who had been attacked

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by wild monkeys. She never recovered from this experience but seemed happy enough living in her new home with Sam and Chica. Sam acted like a true oriental potentate and ruled his wives with a rod of iron. He grabbed all the food and the girls had to make do with what he dropped. Monkeys have a storage sack in their neck and can pack away an incredible amount of peanuts and bananas, to be regurgitated and eaten later. Needless to say, Sam’s sack was always full to overflowing. He was a great lord in the females’ eyes, however, as he devoted most of his time to trying to organise a mass breakout. He would spend hours fiddling with the lock and trying to turn the key. His green eyes turned to heaven, he would sit on the inside of the door, his hand around the frame, trying to disengage the lock. When this failed, his next plan was to encourage Chica to squeeze her small body through the holes in the wire. She got halfway through a couple of times and had to be rescued when her screams of ‘Wozzeck! Wozzeck!’ alerted us to the impending escape. Our method of combating this wily scheme was to pour in the food until Chica got too fat to squeeze through. But Sam was undaunted. When the next cry of ‘mass breakout!’ went out Sam and Chica had escaped but poor frightened Lisa cowered in a corner. Sam had chewed a hole in the sirap roof and was sitting grinning on top of the tank stand. As soon as we spotted him, he bared his teeth, trying to look fierce, and proceeded to pee in all four drums of fresh water. He always knew the very worst thing to do. Mansur was changing his attitude toward monkeys as he learned they could be fun and he became chief Sam catcher. Greed always got Sam in the end. Mansur would hold up a banana, Sam would grab it, staying well out of reach, then Mansur would hold up another and another until Sam had so many bananas tucked under his arms and in his mouth he became confused and was grabbed. I don’t think he ever wanted to go anywhere when he escaped; he just wanted to prove he could outwit humans. We also had a dog called Fred Bowser, a part German Shepherd, who belonged to one of the pilots, Mike. Mike had

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found him on the streets in Saigon during the Vietnam War. We looked after Bowser for Mike, and Hereward often took off in the dog’s company to explore the nearby jungle. Human habitation is strictly on the fringes of Kalimantan’s immense primary jungle, clinging to a narrow strip at the sea’s edge. But the jungle stands there menacingly, ready to push human habitation into the sea at the slightest opportunity. On these rambles with Bowser, Hereward reported seeing great groups of monkeys gliding gracefully through the trees. ‘I think I’ll take Sam out next time,’ he said one day. ‘He might like to go back and live there.’ But Sam knew on which side his bread was buttered. On the walk, he clung to Hereward like a limpet and, on the first sighting of his jungle brothers, covered his eyes with his hands. After a few horrified peeps at the gliders, he buried his head in Hereward’s neck and stayed immobile and in a state of shock until they left the jungle. Feeding Bowser caused a problem for Mansur. A dog is regarded as a very low form of life by Muslims and it really went against the grain to give a plateful of meat and bones to a dog. We always had plenty of scraps from the company mess so Bowser ate very well. But for Mansur, to see a dog devouring big pieces of steak when all his life meat had been a luxury, was a hurdle. Foreigners were hard to understand. Mansur himself now ate all the meat he wanted, but he still felt it was wrong to give meat to a dog. ‘If a dog eats well,’ we explained, ‘he stays healthy and is a good guard.’ ‘But I am the guard,’ said Mansur. ‘I am Bugis. Everyone knows I am Bugis and no one will come here to steal. They know Bugis carry a knife. They will not come here.’ It was quite true — people from other islands were afraid of the Bugis. Sometimes it caused trouble on the oil rigs and shore stations. Their philosophy was to use the knife first and ask questions later. Honour was paramount to them and they were generally feared. After we had been in the beach house for a few weeks, I asked Mansur if he would like to live with us and become our

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handyman as I needed things such as bookshelves, a coffee table and cupboards, etc. He was also such a good person to have around. We were communicating much better in our BugisBahasa mixture and we found he had a great sense of humour: the same zany sort of humour as our family. He considered my suggestion for a while and then said quietly, ‘Yes, nyonya. I would like to stay here. But can I bring my wife and child?’ ‘Of course you can bring them. But where would you live?’ I asked. ‘I will build a small house,’ he said. And so, within a few days, he had built a small oneroomed house using left-over timber and sirap. He was a man of action so we went off to collect his family, who were living in the Bugis community called Gunung Sari, built on the side of a hill in Balikpapan. Mansur asked us to wait in the car, as the way down the hill was very rough. Before long, they appeared over the crest and, with his natural dignity and courtesy, Mansur introduced us to Intan and his two-year-old son, Khadir. He explained that Intan spoke only Macassarese so now we had a new language barrier. Intan was very pale and not very healthy-looking, but she had very beautiful features. Khadir was naked and dark with enormous brown eyes. His thin arms and legs were covered in sores. Intan was carrying a small wooden box about the size of a school suitcase. I asked, ‘Where are the rest of your things?’ She turned to Mansur for a reply and he said quietly, ‘This is all we have. All the things we own are in this box.’ They showed me their only possessions: two kains (sarongs), two coconut shell dishes, one spoon, one knife, an old towel, soap, a black cooking pot and a cloth wallet containing identity papers. As we drove the 32km back to the beach, I asked Mansur if Intan could help me in the house with the washing and cooking. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Excuse me, nyonya, but I do not want my wife to work. I take care of my wife and child.’ As things turned out, however, Intan took delight in helping about the house and was a very quick learner of Western-

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style cooking. Although she couldn’t read or write, she had an excellent memory and had only to be shown something once; the next day, she would prepare the dish better than I could. She even added extra little flourishes that showed a gourmet touch. Explaining the wonders of kerosene refrigeration was a hurdle. I used to buy meat, vegetables and bread sufficient for several days from the camp store and stow them in the fridge. When Mansur’s family arrived I found that, after just one day, all the food was gone. My first, thoughtless Western reaction was to suspect that they were taking it. There was no way we could have eaten all that food. ‘Mansur and Intan, where has all the food gone?’ I asked. ‘The fridge is empty.’ They looked at each other with puzzled frowns, uncomprehending. Mansur said, ‘When you and tuan [Ed, ‘the boss’] and the children had finished eating, we ate what we could and then gave the rest to the people in the house up at the back.’ Living all their lives in hot tropical conditions they knew that, for health reasons, food must never be kept over until the next day. The idea of it being safe in a kolkas (cold cupboard) was beyond their understanding. Day by day, we learned from one another and eventually things began to flow smoothly. Intan showed me how to grate white coconut meat, soak it in warm water and squeeze out the delicious milk. It made an excellent base for curries and sauces. She also taught me to use the cobek, a large curved dish made of stone used with a stone grinder. When the stone pestle is used in a circular motion, it grinds hot chillies, lemon juice, tomatoes and garlic to make a delicious sambal sauce. It is also used for grinding freshly roasted peanuts for satay sauce. We were amazed at the large quantities of plain boiled rice Mansur’s family ate. Three times a day, they had a large soup-plate full, sometimes with green snake beans and tomatoes on top and always with the hot sambal sauce. Sometimes, they also added dried fish. Intan complained one day about the high price of fish at the little kampong market near us. I said to Mansur, ‘Why don’t

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you go out front and catch some fish? There are plenty there. I see other people catching them.’ ‘No, nyonya,’ he said solemnly, ‘I am a carpenter — a tukang kayu. I make things with wood. The fishermen catch fish. If I catch my own fish, how will they make their living? When the fisherman needs a carpenter, he comes to me. When I need fish I go to him. Is that not right?’ Mansur’s understanding of life was a revelation to us.

The Fenton zoo Our zoo began to grow. People on the Ridge heard about these odd Australians living on the beach with a monkey collection and began to bring us animals they didn’t want or found hard to care for. Our next addition, after the monkeys, was Charlie, a yellow-crested white cockatoo, who belonged to a family working for Huffington Drilling Company who were returning to the United States. Charlie had only a small vocabulary, but he had a great personality. He said, ‘Hullo, Charlie’ and ‘banyak’ (meaning ‘plenty’). Every night, he would hear Ed’s car approaching and, before it was even in sight, he would start a great racket, jumping about and screaming ‘Banyak! Banyak!’, over and over. Charlie lived free, mostly at the back of the house near where the kitchen scraps were discarded, but when Ed arrived in the evening and sat on the front verandah to have his ritual gin and tonic, Charlie would begin his long walk, inches at a time, to the front of the house. His tiny body swaying from side to side, he would swing in through the palms and papayas with tiny steps. Reaching Ed’s foot, he would give a gentle peck and, standing on his human lift, would be raised to the balustrade. Once up, he would proffer a few ‘Hullo, Charlies’ then take his sip of gin and tonic. He always insisted on his share of cheese crackers and gave the signal ‘Banyak! Banyak!’ if they were slow in arriving. Charlie’s wings had been clipped for years so he had become just a walking parrot. But, because his wings were now

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as long as a normal bird’s, Ed decided it was time to teach him to fly. Every night, Mansur would climb the tank stand with Charlie and, on Ed’s command, hurl him down while instructions were shouted from below: ‘Flap your wings, Charlie! Flap ’em! Now glide. Yes! No! More flap. Flap for God’s sake! Dammit! What a bird! Try again.’ Ed caught him every time, but poor Charlie never learned to fly. We also discovered that monkeys like to swim. When the tide was in, we carried them all out to an anchored raft and they took the greatest delight in diving overboard, paddling around and climbing back on board again. Sam and Lisa swam like humans but Chica always swam underwater. An English friend, David Tong, visiting us one evening made the remark, ‘My wife will never believe this. When I write to her and say I’ve been with some people who are teaching a bird to fly and taking monkeys for a swim, she will think I’ve gone troppo.’ Our next pets were a family: a mother, father and baby pangolin. Pholidota are armoured ant-eaters which, when fully grown, measure about one metre from snout to tail. A salesman brought them to us one day in a bag so we paid the price and put them all together in a cage. The baby always sat on his mother’s back at the base of her spine. We fed them on insect-infested rotten wood but the father pangolin was very upset at the imprisonment. Every night, we would hear him hurling his body against the wire, trying to break it and set his family free. After a week or so of this, we felt so sorry for him we opened the cage doors. With great dignity, he proceeded outside, followed by his stately wife and the baby sitting happily on her back. We hoped the family would find a safe place to live in the jungle but were very upset when the same salesman returned a few weeks later with one large pangolin in his bag. We said a firm no this time and hoped it was not the brave father recaptured. Someone brought us a baby crocodile but I couldn’t say he was much fun as a pet. He was small — about 60cm long — and his jaws were half the length of his body. We kept him tied with wire in a muddy ditch, but it was always scary going out at night and forgetting the torch; those trap-like jaws were a nightmare in the dark.

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We also had a beautiful python, named Santana. He was about 3.5m long and, for a while, he lived in a box in Gina’s room. Mansur and Intan never took to Santana and, I suspect, poked him with sticks when we were absent. Mansur built him a big cage where he could glide around and make lovely rounded pools with his body. We used to buy him live chickens once a week as he refused all other food, such as eggs or frogs. Then Mansur, who was an inventive genius with things mechanical, decided on a new idea. He thought it was crazy to buy chickens for a snake and invented a rat-trap. It was a box with a spring-loaded door. Bait, in the form of fresh coconut pieces, was placed inside and, when a rat ran in to snatch the tempting morsels, the door snapped shut and we had a tasty fresh, live meal for Santana. Watching Santana feed became a regular weekend entertainment for our visitors. When the rat was tipped into the cage, Santana would lift his head and calmly observe the terrified creature for a few minutes as it frantically scurried around looking for a way out. Then, suddenly, with a flashing movement too fast for the eye to follow, Santana would strike. He was deadly. Holding the luckless rat in his jaws, he made a sort of elbow with his body and tucked the rodent into it, holding it firm. The coils then encircled the creature, squeezing its bones and crushing out life. He then inserted the lifeless body, head first, into his hinged jaws and, with a succession of muscle spasms, drew the victim down through his body to about the halfway mark. It remained an obvious bulge there for quite a while until the gastric juices went to work and dissolved it. It was an unpleasant sight to see Santana at dinner but fascinating, in a perverse way. Pythons grow to more than 12m long in the jungles of Kalimantan and we heard a story about a petrol thief who was grabbed by one at the Batak oil fields. Fortunately, his loud screams for help alerted someone and he was dragged to safety before any bones were broken but his body was marked with the serpent’s diamond patterns. A watch-snake, par excellence! When our time came to leave Kalimantan, we donated Santana to the local zoo, which was run by army veterans and staffed by ‘trustworthy’ political prisoners. He was put into a cage

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already inhabited by a huge 5m python, its body as thick as a man’s thigh. The big one just blinked his narrow eyes as Santana cuddled up alongside in perfect harmony — his own kind, at last. Clouded leopards are another of the rare species inhabiting the island of Borneo and one day an excavating team, clearing jungle for oil installations, killed a mother leopard hiding in a gully. Fortunately, they were able to save her cub. The wild-cat baby was brought to us and we had our first experience of living with a true creature of the wild. We named him Nimrod and Gina was the best handler. To all appearances, he was just like a fat tabby cat but with one major difference: he didn’t purr, he only growled. We fed him the things cats normally like — milk and eggs — but this baby refused everything except raw meat. Feeding Nimrod was a dangerous procedure: he would take meat only from your hand, never from a plate, and several times he included my thumb in his mouthful. His little teeth were razor-sharp and we all lost skin when feeding him. Gina was able to nurse him but he wouldn’t have a bar of the rest of us. He found his own cosy place to sleep, under the kerosene fridge, near the flame. As he grew bigger, his teeth became sharper and his growls louder and we began to think about what we would do with him when he was fully grown. Gina had visions of taking him to Singapore and parading down Orchard Road with him on a leash. She would be able to go anywhere, down any dark alley with such a companion. But his future was decided in a sad way. One day, he suddenly started to throw a fit, running round in circles, and then dropped dead. Maybe he was bitten by a centipede or scorpion, but we lost poor Nimrod. It was a sad day. Soon after, Fred Bowser, who was a very handsome dog, fell in love. We found out about his romance after he had been missing from home for several days. We finally found him at Decorient, our former accommodation, with his sweetheart, a very plain, thin and unattractive wild dog, one of many roaming the area. When we found him, he hadn’t eaten for days and he bounded up to the car, barking with joy. His lady love stood back in the bush, watching to see what he would do.

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We opened the back door and he leaped in. His sweetheart let out a piercing wail and he looked back at her and then at us, with great indecision. What was more important, he seemed to be thinking — food or love? He got in and out of the car several times, but his ugly little lady continued howling. Finally, his stomach got the better of him and he settled for the car. We took him home for a great steak lunch. Later that day, his real master, Mike Foster, came to the house with the news that he was returning to the US and would take Bowser with him to Philadelphia the next morning. So we lost Bowser, but we knew he was going to a better life. His sweetheart, however — a Madam Butterfly of dogs, if ever there was one — never forgot her true love. For weeks she sat at the gate of the helicopter camp, howling for her lost love. A few months later, we woke one morning to find a litter of newborn pups on our front doorstep. The deserted mother had brought her babies to us because she was too thin and weak to feed them herself. All skin and bones, head and tail drooping, she lifted her pathetic face and with pleading eyes asked for our help. There were six pups and we fed them and their mother until, after a week, she was able to feed them a little herself. The puppies were beautiful, all showing signs of their handsome father. It was easy to find homes for them but we kept one and called her Worthington. So Fred Bowser, the great lover, ex-Saigon street dweller, now Philadelphia dog of leisure, lives on today through his offspring in Kalimantan. Worthington herself later had a total of 24 pups, but she was a hopeless mother. She was a great favourite of the beachboy dogs so we had to treat her with a lotion that made her sexually unattractive to males. This nearly broke her heart as she didn’t understand why she was suddenly persona non grata to the opposite sex. She took her disappointment out on Mansur and Hereward by sitting in the middle of the ping-pong table whenever they started to have a game, making it impossible for them to play.

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Our most beautiful pet was Cassius, a black-faced gibbon. He was a gift from an Indonesian pilot called Bambang Irawan and he came from the inland area of Muaratewi on the Barito River. He was a baby when he came to us, as his mother had been shot. Cassius was the very essence of nobility and dignity. He was an ape, belonging to the same primate group as orang-utans, siamangs, gorillas and humans. His arms were twice as long as his legs, and large and muscly and he held them high above his head to keep his balance when he walked. While sitting peacefully in my arms, he seemed to view the monkeys with disdain, as if to say, ‘What disgusting behaviour! How illmannered and rude! What awful creatures!’ On the rare occasions when Sam was introduced to company, he never lasted longer than a few minutes. He grabbed everything in his reach — beads, bracelets, sunglasses, pens — and did his best to destroy it. As everyone rushed to protect their possessions and drinks and cigarettes, Sam would be hustled back to his cage, protesting and behaving obnoxiously. Cassius, on the other hand, had elegant tea-party manners. He would view the mayhem caused by Sam and, once the malcontent had been removed, sighed, as if to say, ‘I told you so. You can’t mix socially with creatures like that.’ Sitting on my lap, he would examine my necklace, lifting it gently with his long black fingers, replacing it equally as gently. He nibbled daintily on biscuits, savouring the flavour and wiping the crumbs from his mouth with his tiny red tongue. Unlike the monkeys, who had storage sacks in their necks for excess food, Cassius ate as we did, until his stomach was satisfied. His greatest delight was to be tickled on the chest. He demanded constant attention to this pleasure and if you were slow to comply, or forgot momentarily, he would nip you gently on the arm. Cassius lived freely about the house and liked to hang from the rafters and survey the domestic scene. Walking towards my bed in the mornings for his tea and biscuits and earlymorning tickle, he presented a comic sight. He would first poke his head around the door to see if I was awake and then lope

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towards the bed with a sailor’s gait, his arms held high. With his marvellous black face and white flashing grin, he was always a welcome sight. I think Ed was a bit jealous of Cassius because he seemed so human. When we went away to East Indonesia, Sumba and Timor for two months, we left instructions for Cassius to be treated as usual. When we returned, however, he was dead. Mansur, thinking he was lonely without us, put him in the cage with the monkeys. He established his position of authority with them well enough but after a while he stopped eating and died. I believe he pined to death as a human child might if denied the love and companionship of his peers. Dear Cassius, rest in peace. An American friend Jim Carson, returning to the US, asked us to help find a home for his two pet bears. They were sun bears (Helarctos malayensis), known locally as bruang, and weighed about 45kg each. The Carsons reared them from babies and they were now fully grown and about 1.5m tall. We were too afraid of them to include them in our zoo, as they are quite fierce animals when aroused. There was a story going around the helicopter base about a pilot in Sumatra who had one as a pet. He always took the bear in the jeep with him and one day, when he came to a sudden stop, the bear was thrown forward and bumped his nose against the windscreen. In a rage at this indignity he turned on his master and, grabbing him by the ribs with his powerful claws, split his torso wide open. It may have been a helicopter tall tale, but we decided against the bears. Jim would go freely into the cage with these two and hand-feed them, but I couldn’t see myself doing that. On a later visit to Australia, I tried to find a home for them there by ringing all the zoos in the state capitals. In every case, however, the answer was a firm no. They said they could not accept bears that had been reared by humans as they were always neurotic and caused too many problems. I could see what they meant. Jim’s bears both sucked their thumbs continually and their digestive juices had worn away all the hair on their arms. Jim finally found a home for them in the Balikpapan Zoo.

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Although we didn’t ever own an orang-utan, we were on visiting terms with an American called Tom from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who had two orang-utans, Bob and Betty. They lived in the high trees but loved being visited and always came swooping down for a kiss and a dance when we arrived. A kiss from an orang-utan is a unique experience — their lips are very soft and malleable and they purse them to a point as though rolling bubblegum, homing in on their object of desire and getting very smoochy. Their great, solid-brown eyes filled with love, they give adoring looks as if to say, ‘I know that my podbody, covered with thin straggly red hair, is ugly, but there is a lovely me inside.’ Hanging from a rope, they would do pirouettes for us, up on their toes, trying to look dainty. Like gibbons, orang-utans are very gregarious animals, and sometimes Tom would bring them to visit us at the beach house. On these occasions, they were always smartly dressed in caps, T-shirts and jeans. But Tom never got them into sneakers. The name orang-utan means ‘jungle man’ and they are not liked by village people. As they have a human appearance, they are often blamed for kidnapping women. (It is easier to put the blame on them if a naughty wife absconds.) They are also blamed for unexpected pregnancies.

The rules of the game At the old golf course near the area known as Banana Town, there was a white edifice at the gate which looked like a cenotaph. There was nothing written on it so I made some inquiries. An ‘oily’ friend told me that a few years previously, a party of Australian ex-servicemen who had taken part in the Balikpapan landing in World War II came back for a reunion. They brought with them scholarships for local students to study in Australia and offers of medical treatment for especially urgent cases. The local military put on a great welcome for them, with much drinking and feasting and the giving of presents. They were housed in the best quarters and, as a mark of respect to

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their dead comrades, the Australians built the cenotaph and placed a copper plaque on it recording the service and the event. Everything went well until the time came to leave. When the last celebration was over, the local army presented the Australians with a bill for all their food and drink, all the gifts they had been given, all their accommodation and everyone else’s as well. The figure was so exorbitant that, after paying the incredible bill, the Australians marched in formation to the cenotaph, removed the plaque and took it home with them. In Suharto’s Indonesia the army was all powerful and beyond reproach. Some might say it was also beyond belief. I also heard a similar story about a golf competition. It was suggested to the Union Oil Company by Pertamina (Indonesia’s national oil company), that, as everyone liked playing golf, Union should put on a special competition: Americans versus Indonesians. The conditions were as follows: (1) Union would pay the rent of the course for five days; (2) Union would do all the organising; (3) Union would provide the celebration dinner at the end; (4) Union would donate all the prizes; and (5) only Indonesians would win prizes. To many people’s surprise, Union Oil accepted the bizarre conditions and the competition was duly held. At the concluding dinner, a thank you speech was made by the Pertamina captain and finished with, ‘It has been a great week’s golf. Next year, when the competition is held again, we all hope that the Americans can play a little better, and try a little harder, and then maybe they can win some prizes, too.’ These tales may or may not be true, but they are typical of expatriate gossip. The army in Indonesia was powerful in all things.

A thirst for knowledge During our last year in Kalimantan, Ed’s job was to train Indonesian pilots how to work with a helicopter. They came to him fully trained as licensed pilots, but he had to teach them how to use the machine as a tool; how to lift and carry cargo and

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generally service the oil rigs working in the area. The company was not over-enthusiastic about using these young Indonesian pilots but it was obliged to train them under its contract with the Government, as one of the conditions for working in Indonesia. This clause applied to most operators, the idea being that Indonesians would eventually be able to do everything the foreigners did and run all operations themselves. Similarly, Garuda, the national airline, was staffed by local pilots and engineers originally trained by the Dutch airline, KLM. In many cases, it worked well and the young pilots who came to us from the school in Jakarta were keen and enthusiastic and we did all we could to show them Western ways. The English language is of prime importance to pilots, as it is the official language of international aviation. I got a job teaching English at the Union Oil complex on Pasir Ridge. It was a comprehensive school and included kindergarten and primary grades up to sixth grade for foreign children, and a special Indonesian section for employees of the oil company. Subjects taught were English, accountancy, bookkeeping and general business principles. There was a staff of 12, with eight classrooms and a lot of very expensive equipment and teaching aids. There were copying machines, projectors, textbooks galore and whiteboards. It had everything a teacher could dream of. My class of 15 were all beginners in English and were easy to teach as there were no bad habits to eliminate. They were a very enthusiastic group — half girls, half boys, all from different islands of Indonesia, who had come to Balikpapan looking for work. Union Oil was a good employer and most of my students were educated to high-school standard.

A lifeline to the world It was so hot in Balikpapan, I would never criticise air-conditioning again. Pilots and engineers were quitting daily. Most were ex-Air America pilots used to high wages and not used to hard bush flying. The children hated the Indonesian oil company school and I knew I would have to find another solution. Everything

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was at least 10 times harder in Balikpapan than anywhere else I had lived. Every task was an effort because of the climate and everthing was outrageously expensive. Amid the difficulties of life in such an isolated outpost, I had a real lifeline to the outside world in Radio Australia, which I was able to pick up clearly, and which included such familiar and informative programs as AM and PM. Radio Australia was popular with most of the local inhabitants, chiefly for the quality of its light music programs. (I later found out that Radio Australia was also broadcast daily in English and Indonesian, as well as in Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, French, Thai, Japanese and Pidgin.) It was through this valuable link to the world beyond Borneo that I learned of some startling and shocking events back home in Australia. It was November and, as I was waiting for the Union Oil car to collect me for work, I was listening to Radio Australia, which was being broadcast live from Canberra. As I listened through the crackling static, I was aware that something quite extraordinary was happening away to the south and I was torn between staying glued to the radio and the responsibility to my students waiting for me at the Ridge. Here I was, deep in the jungles of Indonesian Borneo, listening to a minute-by-minute description of events that were to have far-reaching effects on Australia. Because it had a majority in the Senate, the Liberal Opposition was able to block the Labor Government’s Supply Bill, thus denying money to the Federal Government. The Labor Party could not continue to govern under such conditions, so the Opposition Leader, Malcolm Fraser, paid a visit to the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr. The Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, and his Labor Government were dismissed and the Liberals took over. Malcolm Fraser was appointed Prime Minister by order of the Queen’s representative, Governor-General Kerr. Radio Australia’s coverage of these events was perhaps its finest hour, but, in the jungles of Borneo, it was difficult to believe this had really happened. Australia was a democracy, with the people’s will supreme, how could we, the flag bearer

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of democracy in Asia, be victims of a coup? Australia wasn’t Indonesia or the Philippines or Vietnam — we had a Westminster system of government! How could we go to bed with one government and wake up the next morning with another, without an election? Living in Asia, where such events were commonplace, I was shattered. What could I do? The next morning at school, I was greeted by amused jibes from the other teachers, who were all Americans: ‘We thought Australia was a democracy!’ ‘Will the Queen chop off Gough’s head?’ ‘Don’t you have elections in your country?’ ‘You need a Boston Tea Party — how about a Vegemite Tea Party?!’ Although their teasing was not intended to be unkind, I felt a great sense of shame and anger. I felt my country was in great danger and, fortunately, the headmaster understood and granted me two weeks leave so I could fly home. One had to be outside Australia at that time to fully understand the impact of these events on Australians living abroad. When you live in an expatriate community — as I did, with Americans, English, Dutch, French, Germans and Canadians — a friendly cultural rivalry develops. Living together in an alien environment, you take sides to defend your way of life, your manners and customs. It’s only a game, but it becomes a protective device with which one can better weather the petty frustrations and uncomfortable situations that develop when you live and work in someone else’s country. You make a big deal of longing for things at home which, in fact, you might never think twice about if you were there. My devotion to Vegemite was not genuine; it was something I used socially when I found myself in a group extolling the virtues of cornbread, gumbo or prime Texas beef-steaks. So there I was, a lone Australian in a sea of Southern ‘oilies’, defending my Vegemite and pie floaters and now also trying to defend our parliamentary democracy. I booked a Union Oil flight to Singapore, with a Qantas connection to Sydney. With an eye for the dramatic, as part of

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my hastily packed baggage, I took along a Dyak blow-gun and a bamboo case of poisoned darts. I had visions of a grand entry to Mascot Airport, with a crowd of reporters, where I would publicly declare, ‘As my country has reverted to the law of the jungle, I have brought along my own jungle weaponry.’ But, of course, it was not to be. The blow-gun was confiscated in Singapore and was carried on board the Sydney flight by security officers, who placed it in the cockpit under the captain’s watchful eye. Then Australian customs held the gun in Sydney for several weeks. My plans thwarted, I spent my two weeks staying with friends Ruby and Col Madigan in North Sydney, and the revolution I had feared never came. With the Madigans, I helped distribute pamphlets at a polling booth on election day and then sat with them that night watching the election coverage on TV. It was a grim night and we did not speak: Gough Whitlam was tossed out and the usurper, Malcolm Fraser, was officially elected Prime Minister. So much for proud expatriates and their delusions of grandeur. Realising there was nothing I could do, I returned to Borneo, where my head was never held so high again. It was hard to continue boasting about Pavlovas and Vegemite. Australia lost out after those sad events: we were still a colony of Old England. At school, they took to calling me Colonial Shirl.

Mansur’s new life Just as Intan was enthusiastic about learning Western cooking, so Mansur was thirsty for information of all kinds. He sat on the beach with Hereward in the evenings and they talked about the world — his and ours — and the stars and the universe. He was fascinated with the idea that the Earth revolved around the sun and that the stars were in constant motion and an infinite distance away. He believed the sun and moon drowned in the sea at night and emerged from the Earth the next day. ‘Some old men in Ujung Pandang said that a man has gone to the moon. Is that true?’ he asked. ‘Yes. Americans — orang Amerika serikat.’

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‘And they brought back a piece of the moon?’ ‘Yes. Many pieces.’ ‘And they put them in a museum and they are growing bigger and bigger. And soon they will be bigger than a mountain?’ ‘No. They are still the same size.’ We had visited the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC, and had a photograph of a moon rock held in a vice. Mansur loved this photo and spent a great deal of time studying it. He was torn between the wisdom of his elders and this new information from his Australian friends. Schooling for Gina and Hereward at Pertamina became impossible. The language and cultural differences were too difficult, so it was decided that Gina would go to live in Amherst, Massachusetts, with Ed’s brother, and Hereward would stay with us but be enrolled in the NSW Correspondence School. Gina went on to complete high school in Amherst and came to us on holiday visits. The correspondence school was excellent and, even though we lived in a remote area, corrections to lessons were returned within two weeks. The courses were well presented and Hereward was able to study on his own with very little help. A personal relationship built up between teacher and student by the exchange of photos, letters, birthday and Christmas cards. Once he got over the hurdle of realising there was no teacher standing behind him, Hereward developed his own study patterns. Sometimes he would spend a whole day on one subject if he found it difficult or especially interesting. But essentially he worked at his own pace and his only discipline was to see that all exercises were correctly collated, stapled together and put in an envelope for posting each Friday. We paid $A75 dollars a term and the school paid postage from their end. It was a remarkably good school and gave Hereward one great ability: he learned how to learn. One day, he said to me, ‘We must teach Mansur to read and write,’ and so we did. Because Mansur was a good carpenter, he knew his numbers well but for some reason he was terrified of writing —

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even the idea of it. We gave him lessons in the evenings and, with shaking hand, he would copy pages of letters, with sweat pouring from his forehead. We never found out why he was so afraid but he was determined to conquer it and came back for more, night after night. Once he had learned the alphabet and could associate shapes with sounds, we started with some Bugis words which were most familiar to him: ‘Aga kareba?’ (‘How are you?’); ‘Kareba medechi.’ (‘Very well, thank you.’) He treasured his exercise books and filled dozens of them, however, his hand still shook as he wrote words, although never when writing numbers. Visitors to our house admired Mansur’s carpentry and soon asked if he could make tables, bookshelves and beds for them. There was plenty of good wood available in Balikpapan, such as mercoban and meranti, types of cedar, so he was soon able to set up in business and earn extra money. Mansur’s job with us was as gardener, general handyman and lamp-lighter. Living without electricity meant that every morning the kerosene lamps had to be taken down, the glass cleaned and the lamps refilled. We had more than a dozen lamps, so it was an important job. Living on the Equator meant that the sun set every evening at 6.20. There was no twilight; suddenly, the light was gone and it was dark. If the lamps weren’t ready, there was great confusion. Keeper of the lamps was an important job. Kerosene also had to be pumped for the cooker and the fridge, there were animals to be fed, the garden watered and, as things were always breaking down, the role of odd-job man was itself a full-time one. There was, however, time for Mansur to make furniture for our friends and, as the orders began coming in, I decided to teach him some business skills. We bought an order book for quotes and another for accounts and costing. As it was mainly figures, he learned very quickly and kept his books well for more than a year. He made good extra money and was able to buy himself a tape-recorder, and improved its tone by building his own speakers. It ran on batteries so he collected discarded ones from the pilots and set them up, a dozen at a time, on a board.

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After sunning them for several days, he joined them up and was able to get all the power he needed free of charge. Learning to read maps was another exciting experience for Mansur. When first shown a map of Indonesia, he was baffled. We pointed out his home town of Ujung Pandang, shown as a dot, and the Straits of Macassar he had crossed in a boat, then another dot which was his present home, Balikpapan. He found it impossible to visualise that the dot represented the city. He could see Balikpapan only as the whole island of Kalimantan. He glued the map to the wall of his room and studied it for several weeks. Using his newly acquired reading talent and observing it carefully from all angles, he was finally able to grasp its meaning. An American, Jim Cavanagh, and his Cambodian wife Kani, came to stay with us for a while. Jim was tall and handsome, like a young Gary Cooper, and Kani was an exotic Asian flower. They had been married for seven years and Kani spoke English with a cute Cambodian accent. She always left out the final consonant in her words, corresponding with her own language. She would say: ‘No slee’ la’ nigh’ [no sleep last night].’ ‘A mow’ in the how [a mouse in the house].’ Apart from these minor mispronunciations, her English was fluent and one day a puzzled Mansur asked me, ‘How is it that Kani can speak such good English when her skin is the same colour as mine?’ Mansur’s health and appearance, as well as Intan’s and Khadir’s, had improved dramatically. The good diet was fattening them up and all the tropical ulcers had disappeared. Intan was pregnant and we all fussed around her, making sure she had plenty of orange juice and extra-nourishing food. We had organised for her to go to the local hospital in Balikpapan for the birth. This would be a new experience for her but she agreed to try it. Back in Sulawesi babies were always born at home. Intan and Mansur had many Bugis friends and relatives in town so she went to stay there for the last week. When news of the baby’s birth came, we all went to the hospital to greet the new arrival — a girl.

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The hospital, large and rambling with seemingly endless walkways and corridors, was not clean by Western standards but certainly a better place than the crowded kampongs in which to have a baby. There were 20 beds in Intan’s ward and she sat there shyly, holding her new baby. She had to provide her own kain (sarong) for covering the baby and her family came each day to bring her food and water as these essentials were not provided by the hospital. The atmosphere, however, was warm and friendly and the nurses seemed kind. Staff and patients were surprised to see Western visitors and a crowd gathered around the iron bed when we arrived with fruit and presents. It was stiflingly hot, as there were only tiny windows high on the walls and no fans, but Mansur and Intan were happy with it all and proud that their second child was born in a rumah sakit (hospital). One distressing thing for us to see when the baby came home was that a safety pin had been stuck through each tiny ear. There were signs of infection and the poor wee thing was crying a lot. We tried not to interfere with what was obviously a Bugis custom but we were allowed to dab on some Dettol to stop the inflammation. Two weeks later, the safety pins were replaced with tiny gold rings and the infection cleared up. The buying of gold for Indonesians and most Asians is the rough equivalent of using a savings bank. When you have spare money, such as Mansur now had from his carpentry business, you buy gold with it: rings, earrings, bracelets, necklaces or pendants. Big towns have hundreds of gold shops, all together in rows, and even small hamlets will have one or two. The system is to buy the gold item which comes with a receipt, showing how many grams the item weighs and how many carats it contains, as well as a guarantee that the shop will buy it back from you at the current gold price. Then, when you have more spare money, you take the item plus the receipt back to the shop, where it is weighed and verified. You then add more money to its value and buy a bigger piece and get a new receipt. As the price of gold rises, so your savings increase. When Westerners comment on jewellery they say, ‘Isn’t that a pretty ring! Where did you buy it?’ But an Indonesian will

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say, ‘How many grams? How many carats? How much did you pay?’ They are always testing the market and looking for rises and falls.

The christening One day, 20 of Mansur’s relatives arrived without warning. After they had chatted for a while, we were invited to join them. A fire of twigs, built on layers of green banana leaves, was burning in the middle of their room. The senior person, Ismail, an uncle of Mansur’s, wearing a black peci songkok (the Muslim rimless hat), was sitting cross-legged before the fire. Intan was beside him, holding the baby. We took a place on the floor among the women and children and watched as certain rituals were performed. Intoning prayers in Bugis, Ismail springled water and salt alternately on the fire, which spluttered and crackled, sending out showers of tiny sparks. The smallest children were wide-eyed and edged away, grabbing their mothers each time this happened. Ismail’s hand moved back and forth over the flames and then, quite suddenly, he took the baby from Intan and, holding it carefully in his arms, turned to Ed and said, ‘What is the baby’s name?’ Ed was startled, as we thought we had been invited merely as a courtesy. We had no idea we were to be participants. We looked anxiously at one another and, after a hurried conference, decided on the name Liana, the name given to our recently born grandchild in Australia. ‘Lee-ah-na, Lee-ah-na,’ Ismail said the name a few times and then turned to the assembled group. They repeated it to one another, rolling the sound over. Approval was given by nods. It apparently had a pleasant sound to their ears and was in harmony with their language. So the baby was named Liana and, after more prayers, was handed back to shy Intan and everyone burst into smiles and giggles. A special type of short three-cornered yellow banana was then passed around and we ate together, apparently blessing

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the baby and her new name. She grew into an exquisitely beautiful child and was adored by her brother Khadir. Before her arrival, Khadir was possibly the most spoiled child we had ever seen. He was given everything he asked for and was never reprimanded. We gave Mansur a small radio-cassette player, bought in Singapore on one of our visa trips, and Khadir immediately wanted it. He dragged it round the garden and along the beach and banged it against trees, but he was never reprimanded. After about a week, he tired of the game and left it lying under a palm. Intan retrieved it carefully and put it away on a high shelf. Although the carrying case was wrecked, it still worked well. Once Mansur was sawing up wood on a cross-bench and Khadir wanted to saw. Mansur let him go ahead and he sawed straight towards himself to within inches of his little penis. He also played with broken glass but there was never a ‘No, don’t do that!’ We expected terrible jealousy on his part when the baby arrived, but he adored her from the moment he saw her. As she grew, he gave in to her every whim and, in fact, spoiled her in the way he had been spoiled by his parents.

Spirit signals When Liana was about six months old, Mansur came to me and said, ‘Intan is sick. She is worried about her parents.’ She did look pale and was not eating well so we decided to send her home to Ujung Pandang for a visit. There was a daily Bouraq flight from Balikpapan so we bought her a return ticket. Flying was an unimaginable experience for Intan. Mansur was confident, however, and said goodbye to his wife and children with great dignity. She took gifts of material for a blouse for her mother and a sarong for her father and some fruit. About six weeks later, I was giving Mansur English lessons when a startled look appeared on his face. He interrupted my lesson with a loud ‘shhh!’. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘Shhh!’ he repeated and, clenching his fist into a ball, he blew into it. He then held the fist to his ear. He repeated this

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several times and appeared to be listening intently, as though on the telephone. After a few more puffs and more listening he nodded his head. ‘What is it, Mansur?’ I was very puzzled. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘It’s a message from Intan. She’s coming back soon. There’s a message for me at Gunung Sari.’ ‘Come on now!’ I said disbelievingly. He frowned and said, ‘Don’t you get messages like that?’ ‘No,’ I laughed. ‘Not exactly like that.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Of course.’ He thought for a while and then added, ‘But then you don’t need it, I suppose. You have telephones and telegrams and radios. So that’s why you don’t get the messages.’ He then enlarged on the subject and asked, ‘Do you get those itchy spots which give messages?’ ‘Itchy spots?’ ‘Like an itchy feeling on your leg or your arm or your back?’ ‘No. What do they mean?’ ‘The itch in the middle of your back means you will be leaving where you are living and moving somewhere else. The one on your left arm means someone is trying to get in touch with you. The one on your right arm means be careful because danger is coming. If you get it in your right leg, it means something good will happen. In your left leg …’ ‘Yes, we do have one,’ I interrupted. ‘If you get an itchy palm, we say money is coming.’ ‘That’s right!’ He was excited. ‘You see, you do get them but you don’t notice them any more. It’s because of all your electrical things.’ He recited a whole list of itchy spots and their significance. He had learned all this from his father and for him it was a splendid method of communication. The next day, he set off on the 32km trip to Balikpapan and, sure enough, came home that night with a letter from Intan saying when she would be returning. She arrived home several days later, fully recovered from her malaise, but now she

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needed domestic help herself. A cousin, Hasni, was hired to help with her children and our household grew. Kani and Jim Cavanagh moved into the two spare rooms at the northern end of our house and, with Kani’s expertise, the rooms were very soon transformed into a wonderland of her Cambodian imagination: circular doorways, drifting white gauze curtains and masses of greenery, Buddhas in prominent places and a kitsch, carved hand with fingers holding a mad collection of exotic rings. Although she was Cambodian, Kani also spoke Vietnamese and was very friendly with the girls from that country who were married to other construction workers. They often came out to the beach and spent the day cooking Vietnamese food and chatting. Watching them talk to one another in their own language was a unique experience. They all sat in slightly off- centre positions and did not talk directly to one another, and all appeared to be talking at the same time as they chopped the many varieties of mint which is the basic herb used in their cooking. Every now and then, the continuous hubbub would stop as though on command and they would all burst into laughter. Their food was very delicious and different from anything I had tasted. Meat and fish were mixed together for one dish, rolled in tissue-thin rice paper and fried. Sometimes, there would be a run of tiny red jellyfish in the sea out the front and Kani would get very excited at the prospect of cooking this delicacy. She had a huge catching device made from mosquito netting and, wading out into the sea, scooped up several nets full. When the jellyfish were dried in the sun, she fried them with lots of mint and garlic and we all shared in this unusual dish. One day, after Jim had gone to work, Kani came to see me, very distressed, and showed me some strange marks on her neck. She said that, after Jim had left for work, locking the door from the inside as usual, a strange man had appeared at the bedside and had bitten her on the neck. She woke in fright and he disappeared. The imprint of his body, however, was still plainly visible on the bottom half of the bed. She asked Intan and Hasni if they had seen anyone, but the answer was no.

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Several times during the next week, she was bitten again, this time on the arms and legs, and Jim decided it was centipedes, so he set the legs of the bed in tins of kerosene. But still the bites continued. The doctor at the Union Oil hospital diagnosed them as insect bites of a virulent nature and told her to be careful. The bites were bad and Kani was in an awful state. Her explanation of the phenomenon was that certain spirits who used to live on the grass verges where the house was built had been displaced by the foundations. They were so angry at losing their natural habitat that they were biting her. With Jim’s help, she ordered a whole batch of new Buddhas from Thailand and, when they were all set in place around the bed and on the windowsills, the bitings stopped. Many strange things happened around that house and it wasn’t until some time later that we found out why it had been uninhabited for so long and was dubbed the rumah hantu, or haunted house of Sepinggan. Not long after the centipede affair, Intan and Hasni developed flu-like symptoms with aching bones, extreme listlessness and a faint yellow discoloration of the skin. Hasni had it badly and also complained that she couldn’t sleep because small grinning yellow men were around her bed at night, laughing and pointing at her. I suggested she go to her kampong in Gunung Sari for a while until she felt better. The day she left, I was at the helicopter base camp telling a group of pilots and engineers about this strange illness. There was a visitor among them and, after hearing my story, he introduced himself. His name was Jody Robinson, he was a doctor and one of the interesting travellers who often found their way to Balikpapan via the aircraft hitch-hike system, which worked well for those in the know. The network spread north to the Philippines and west to Malaysia and brought us many unexpected visitors. I explained the symptoms and Jody offered to examine Hasni, saying it sounded like hepatitis. For our family’s sake, he suggested a good diagnosis would be wise. We drove to the hillside kampong of Gunung Sari with Mansur, who was to show us the way.

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The Bugis-style house, built on stilts, was in semi-darkness with only one kerosene lamp burning. There were about 30 people inside, all sitting on grass mats and eyeing us with suspicion. Introductions were made to the elders by Mansur and formalities were exchanged. The Bugis are a very courteous people, with a highly developed sense of decorum. We asked to see Hasni and were led to a screen in a corner. Behind it, in his best general practitioner’s way and using me as interpreter, Jody took Hasni’s pulse and listened to her heart with his stethoscope. All OK. The elders were watching the whole time. Then Jody asked, ‘How many times has she urinated? What was the colour?’ This was a hopeless question to ask someone living in such conditions, but it was correct medical procedure, so we continued. ‘What was the consistency of her stool? What colour?’ The questioning was getting worse so I pleaded my inadequacy in Bahasa Indonesia. Living 30 to a room without sanitation, the disposal of faeces was something one did hurriedly behind a bush and got away from as quickly as possible. You didn’t stop to inspect it. Jody did the best he could and then said, ‘I don’t think it’s hepatitis, but she should rest for a few days and she’ll probably get better naturally. Drink lots of boiled water.’ I translated this to the elders and they all nodded politely and told me that this was exactly what the Bugis dukun baik (good doctor) had said earlier in the day. To this, however, the dukun had added an explanation of how the condition came about. According to the dukun, who had never been to our house in Sepinggan, Hasni lived in a house which was overshadowed by an extremely large tree. This tree, he said, was inhabited by small yellow spirits. They were unhappy because the house had been built without the usual polite offerings being made to them. This must be done in the form of cooked rice on banana leaves, rose petals and the burning of incense. As an added precaution, he suggested planting cactus by the doorway so they couldn’t enter. They were benign creatures but expected

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the common courtesies. Hasni had turned yellow because the spirits were yellow and, in their invisible state, they often bumped into her. He had divined all this information by staring into a bowl of clean water. This water he later gave to Hasni, saying that if she drank it her yellowness would disappear. Her recovery came about as predicted by her Western and Bugis doctors. Two different paths led to the same conclusion and a complete cure was effected in a few days. We also heard stories that our house was haunted because the big tree at the back had been used as a hanging tree by the Japanese during World War II. People said that sometimes you could hear the voices of the victims calling ‘Tolong! Tolong!’ (‘Help! Help!’), as their spirits drifted through the leaves.

Brides with a difference Bride shops were something I had never encountered before. They did not sell bridal clothes, cakes or flowers, or print wedding invitations. They sold brides. Balikpapan’s bride-shop district was known as Banana Town and had a small harbour where the local banana boats came in to unload their cargo. Fringing the waterfront were a dozen small bars with bamboo chairs and tables for the customers and a display of brides. Coming mainly from Menado in Sulawesi, they were Christian and were brought to Kalimantan by the marriage brokers who were all, so I was told, well-respected Christian women. The girls lived upstairs above the bar and, during the day, they sat at the tables, waiting for prospective bridegrooms to come by for a beer or a 7-UP. If a customer came several times and showed an interest in a particular girl and decided to marry her, the housemistress arranged the wedding. When all was completed, she took her percentage and deducted the cost of the girl’s travelling ticket, board and lodgings to cover her expenses. Most of the girls were in their middle teens and all were genuinely interested in finding a husband. Balikpapan had a preponderance of males to females at a ratio of about 10 to one, so brides were hard to come

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by for the workers. The broking business prospered, as the young oil and timber workers were sure of finding a wife of more lasting value than the girls working in the Valley of Hope or in the fishbowls in the girlie bars. One day, Ed and I called in to one of the shops for a Coke and there was a great flutter of excitement among the girls. ‘Orang tua! Orang tua [Parents! Parents]!’ they yelled. They gathered around us, all smiles and giggles. The proprietor introduced herself and explained that she came from Ujung Pandang, in Sulawesi, and was a Christian. Her real home was inland at Rantepao in Toraja, an area to which the Torajans had fled when their coasts were invaded by the Muslims. ‘I have a picture of my house in Toraja. Would you like to see it?’ she asked. She showed us a most unusual picture: not a snapshot, as I had expected, but a carved piece of wood about 30cm square, with the shape of a house incised on it and the grooves coloured in with red, black and white paint. The roof was fluted, resembling a ship in full sail, and the windows were set at an angle like those at the stern of a Spanish galleon. A ladder led up to the house, which stood on wooden stilts. The whole form was stylised and the result made a charming woodblock. Framing the picture were designs in triangle and lozengeshape patterns, which were age-old Torajan motifs, and which were used inside the house as decorations. ‘It’s a lovely picture,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you like it. I was born there and my family still live in it. When my business here is finished, I will return to Rantepao to live.’ ‘Is your business going well?’ ‘Very well. I have so many good girls here. We don’t have any trouble. They are like my children. When they marry, they always keep in touch and send me pictures of their babies. The men here earn good wages so the girls are very lucky.’ She gave me the picture of her house, as the girls were so happy to see orang tua. They were lonely for their parents.

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The lost helicopter It was 1975. Mike Foster, owner of Fred Bowser, crashed a 205 helicopter at the Pamaguen drill site. It was a complete wreck but Mike suffered only a few scratches. Two days later, another pilot picked it up in another 205 to sling it back to base for repairs. About 80km on, and at 366ft, he accidentally dropped it in the jungle; exact location unknown. Ed had been working to the south looking for two big helicopters lost in the Barito River, so he was called north to search for the 205. He found it and said it looked like a pancake. The insurance man, Jake Pearman, arrived and offered to let Hereward go with him while he assessed the damage. Ed flew in with Jake, Hereward and two helpers. They couldn’t land near the wreck as there was no clear ground, but they found an open space about half a kilometre away. Jake was confident he could cut his way through this small area, particularly as he had a brand-new compass watch recently bought in Singapore which he was very proud of. Ed left them in the clearing and said he would pick them up after lunch. Hereward recounted the day’s events to me. It was about 8am when we started to cut a track towards the wreck. Mr Pearman was taking bearings all the time with his watch. You can’t believe how thick that jungle was. We had to cut branches and vines for every step we took. We came to great fallen logs and had to cut steps to get over them and clear away branches and tangles all the time. There was no ground, it was all leaves and squelchy mud. We couldn’t see the sky. No sign of life anywhere. No spiders, snakes or any of those things you see in the movies. Only ants. They were everywhere. We kept on cutting and creeping forward and by about midday we still hadn’t come to the wreck. We’d been going for four hours. We had a drink and something to eat and then went on again, slashing and scrambling. Mr Pearman kept checking his watch and compass and, at 2pm, he said, ‘I think we’re lost. Your dad will be looking for us. We’d better make a fire.’ It was hard to get it going, as everything was so wet. We finally made some smoke and it drifted up through the huge trees. After a while, we heard the helicopter but it was far away.

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We decided to move on and try to find a more open space. In about half an hour, we could actually see some blue sky so we made another fire. This time the helicopter circled us and Dad indicated, with hand signals, that only a short distance to the right there was space enough to land. An hour later, we got into the clearing and Dad explained what had gone wrong. Instead of following a straight line, we had gone round in a 180-degree circle and were now at least three kilometres from the wreck. Mr Pearman took off his watch and jumped on it.

Into the wilderness One day our friend Les Smith took us for a trip into the wilderness. We took the Russian Road to Tanggarong, the old Kutai capital north of Samarinda. The road got its name because it was begun in President Sukarno’s time, when the Russians were giving aid to Indonesia. When Sukarno was overthrown and Russian aid withdrawn, the road was continued with Japanese war reparation funds, but the old name stuck. For the first hour or so, the road was bitumen, but it then deteriorated into a muddy track strewn with stones and boulders, sometimes passing through bogs. The old Holden Les had borrowed from the police chief stuck it out very well, although we had to do a lot of pushing. It was primary jungle on both sides of the track and there were no signs of human habitation. When the road was finished, it would link Balikpapan with the capital, Samarinda. At that time nearly all transport was by boat or air. We reached Tanggarong at lunch-time and drove up to the old Sultan’s Palace. As we swung into the forecourt, a great swarm of people descended on us. They didn’t often see tourists up there. We were given VIP treatment from the curator, who showed us a marvellous display of old Chinese ceramics, gifts to the Sultan from visiting potentates in times past. It had been turned into a museum but, even so, visitors were rare. On the journey back, we saw a hair-raising method of transporting timber: boys rode bicycles with four six-metre long logs strapped to the handlebars and seat. They pushed the bikes up the hills and when they reached the top, they jumped up on to

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the logs and free-wheeled downhill as far as they could. Because of the weight of the logs, they reached very high speeds and all passed us on the downhill sections. They shouted and waved as they tore past, giving that great flashing Indonesian smile. They had no control, except the steering. It may have been a cheap way to move logs but it was a suicidal way to earn a living. ——————— I saw President Suharto in December 1975. He flew in to Balikpapan to open a new project and I joined the crowds of Indonesians waiting to get a glimpse of him, all dressed in their best. The pilots were puzzled as to why I was going, but I wanted to see what power looked like, in the flesh. I wanted to see the man who controlled the life and destiny of 140 million people, the reality of such a person. Flags were everywhere and a huge sign draped across the terminal proclaimed ‘Selamat datang, Bapak’ (‘Welcome, Sir’). When Suharto left the plane, followed by a retinue of aides, I was surprised by his appearance. He looked so small and normal and unimpressive — just a nice, smiling man. They called him the Smiling General. What was the reality, I wondered.

Into Dyak country Apart from slinging mud to the rigs, dropping dynamite to drillers and relocating rigs, another job for the company pilots was to carry visiting scientists to remote areas in the jungle. These boffins were usually in a hurry and were flown in by helicopter when problems arose. John Heidenrigg was a pilot and a bit of a loner and it was on one of these trips that he made his first flight deep into Dyak country. A Dutch geologist with the unlikely name of Scheite Kerke, cruelly corrupted by the pilots and engineers to Shitty Cock, chartered a small helicopter, the Bell 47G4, for an emergency run to see a seismic party working about 64km up a tributary of the Mahakam River. In the briefing room at base camp, the geologist pointed out the area to Heidenrigg on a map.

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‘I want go somewhere, hier,’ he said in his thick accent. ‘Do you know which bend in the river it is?’ John asked, because rivers in Kalimantan twist and turn like demented snakes and every bend looks the same from the air, unless there is some prominent landmark. ‘I zink it is ziz one,’ Kerke pointed. ‘Will we be able to land? Is there a pad? I will radio. Zay will cut one.’ John decided to put floats on in case there was no pad and to follow the river all the way, just in case. If the landing pad was unsafe, he could always land on the river. They set off from Balikpapan and headed for the provincial capital, Samarinda. There were two ways of making this first leg of the journey: flying along the coast to the delta of the Mahakam River and fixing on the small port of Handal Dua, or following the Russian Road through the jungle. A helicopter is an inherently unstable machine with innumerable moving parts and there is always the chance that one of them will fail and induce a sudden stop. So helicopter pilots always try to follow roads, railways, rivers or beaches, even if total flying time is increased, so they have some visual navigation and the possibility of a safe landing if something goes wrong. John decided on the Russian Road route as it was shorter than the coastal route and easy to follow. The road cut a swathe through the high forest like an angry red and yellow scar. ‘Good road,’ said Shitty Cock over the intercom. ‘Sure is. Easy to see. Easy to follow.’ Eventually the Mahakam River appeared below them with its small riverine villages, and then the city of Samarinda, with its port facilities, wharves, mosques and air-control tower. Samarinda was an important trading centre for east Kalimantan as well as being the seat of government. Having noted his position, checked with the control tower and given details of his direction and estimated time of arrival, Heidenrigg turned west and began following the river through its tributaries and winding circumlocutions. After going across several bends in the river, they saw below them the river town of Tanggarong. The intercom crackled to life. ‘Vot is dat big white building?’ Shitty Cock asked excitedly.

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‘It’s the old palace of the Sultan of Kutai. I’ll fly around so you can get a good look.’ They circled and could see clearly the courtyards and gardens surrounding the main building. Set back from the river, it looked resplendent in the bright sunshine. Its forecourt was a wide open space the size of a football ground. ‘Like to go down and have a look?’ John asked. He knew the rules of the helicopter game. Shitty Cock was that very important personage, the customer, and he must be pleased at all costs. It was an unwritten company rule. ‘Yes. Vee haf plenty of time. I want to look.’ After checking for overhead wires and other obstructions, John brought the machine lower and lower until it landed gently in the centre of the forecourt. Then all hell broke loose. As though an ant’s nest had been kicked, the formerly deserted area suddenly sprang to life as hundreds of children and adults poured in, all wearing excited grins. Like whirling dervishes, they raced round and round the machine, getting closer and closer until John and his passenger had to leap out and warn them to stay clear of the still-turning blades. The small tail-rotor blade presented the greatest danger as it spins vertically and, when in motion, is all but invisible to the unwary. ‘Hope it’s OK to land here,’ John said. He was a bit troubled but relaxed when the crowd parted and a small smiling man in khaki uniform came forward, hand outstretched in welcome. ‘Selamat datang, tuan. Welcome.’ He made a polite bow. ‘Have you just come from America?’ The Dutchman smiled, catching the innocent humour. ‘Not exactly,’ said John. ‘But I am an American. My friend here is from Holland.’ ‘From Holland?’ The official then burst into a torrent of Dutch, which startled the geologist. A legacy from the old colonial days of Dutch rule meant that many older people in Indonesia still spoke Dutch. After a lengthy conversation in Dutch, the geologist turned to John and said, ‘The palace and museum are closed but

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they will make an exception for us, as we dropped in so unexpectedly. Shall we go in?’ Followed by a crowd of excited children and adults, they walked towards the white building. It was explained that the Sultan now lived in an ordinary house in Tanggarong, and used the palace only for state occasions, which were rare. The visitors were shown the royal throne, with its yellow silk draperies and gilded woodwork and canopy, and the royal bedroom. The bed, which was decorated with dangling beads, trailing silks and tassels, was huge and looked capable of accommodating a very fat sultan and numerous wives. Off the bedroom was a hidden staircase, which led to a room below. During the Japanese occupation, the Sultan’s treasure was hidden there. The aerial tourists could not elicit a straightforward explanation for the original purpose of the hidden staircase, only a wink from the official, which indicated some sort of hanky-panky. Back in the throne room, they were shown a mosaic portrait of the second-last Sultan, which had been smashed, according to the guide, by the communists. No one was quite sure exactly when this had happened but everyone in Tanggarong was sad because, when the portrait was put together again, so many of the tiles were missing that the Sultan’s face had taken on a mean, sneering expression. Artists could not correct it, even after many attempts. Beyond the throne room lay the museum proper. It housed a fine collection of Chinese porcelain. Some of the oldest pieces, dating from the 14th century, were gifts and payments to the various incumbent sultans in exchange for pepper, camphor, bird’s nests, tortoiseshell and shark-fin, in the great trading deals of those centuries. There was a beautifully carved reclining chair, a gift from the Emperor of Thailand to the Sultan of Kutai more than a century before, given in response to a trade and friendship agreement concluded at that time. John had never taken much interest in old things before but as he observed the mounting excitement in the eyes of the geologist, examining one treasure after the other, he began to take note.

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‘You find all this old stuff interesting, Mr Shitty Cock?’ ‘It is incredible. Incredible! Always I have been interested in antique porcelain. I have my own collection in Amsterdam in my house. But all this is very old. Very good. Look at the beautiful colour of this vase. It is the famous blue and white from the Wan-li period which might date from the 15th century.’ He indicated a vase about one metre high, decorated with sprays of peonies and medallions with storks standing onelegged in a lotus pool. ‘It is pair to this plate. Very, very beautiful. From at least 300 years old. Many treasures here.’ He lowered his head and continued to devour with his eyes everything he saw. He showed John blue and white plates and pots, green celadon dishes covered in thick apple-green glaze dating from the Yuan and Sung dynasties, blanc-de-chine vases and figurines from the 15th century, and Sawankoloke and Sukhothai pots from Annam and Thailand. As part of his daily job of flying men and materials around the jungles of Borneo, Heidenrigg was getting a crash course in antique oriental pottery. The opportunity was not lost on him. He listened intently to everything Shitty Cock said. He learned that Chinese ceramics had always been acknowledged as a high art form, that the word porcelain came from the Portuguese word for seashell, porcellana, early explorers from Europe believing the glaze on the pots was made from crushed shells. He also learned that European collectors were very interested in acquiring good pieces. To him, it was like finding traces of gold in a riverbed. In his life as a helicopter pilot, this day at Tanggarong became a watershed. He saw that he was in a unique position to collect things from remote parts of Borneo that people in Europe and America would be prepared to pay high prices for. Big money. He didn’t yet know how he would go about it. It wouldn’t be by robbing museums or anything outrageous like that. But if all these antiques were here, in the upper reaches of the Mahakam River, then the odds were there was more of this kind of thing around. He filed all this away for future reference.

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He was shocked back to reality by an explosive exclamation from the geologist. ‘My Gott! Look at this!’ He was pointing to a large pottery urn decorated with dragons and covered with a deep-chocolate glaze. ‘Fantastic!’ The exclamations continued over small Sawankoloke and Sukhothai plates and some ginger jars, which he said were Annamese. John had already seen enough to fire his interest so he felt it was time to call a halt to the grand tour. ‘Excuse me, Doc,’ he said, as the geologist adjusted his spectacles to inspect a small rice bowl in pale apple-green glaze. ‘I think we’d better be moving off. We have to locate that seismic pad and leave plenty of time to get back to Balikpapan. Weather is very uncertain in this area. We could easily get clagged in. Have to allow plenty of time out here. No weather reports. Just guess and go.’ ‘Of course, of course,’ muttered the geologist. ‘Stupid of me. I am just so astonished to see all these treasures hidden away in the jungle. For a moment, I forgot why I am here in the first place. Amazing!’ They said their thanks to the curator and made their way back to the helicopter. Then, to the delight of the crowd, which had by now doubled in size and which must have included every inhabitant of Tanggarong, John started up the engine and lifted off. He circled the town, acknowledging the waves and wild cheering of the crowd. ‘We are like film stars,’ said the geologist, waving back gaily. ‘Iz always like zis? People so excited?’ ‘Always, and not only in remote areas either,’ John said. ‘I’ve seen crowds like this in New Zealand and California. There seems to be something about a chopper that drives people wild.’ They continued west, following the course of the river but flying directly and cutting across the endless sweeping s-bends that the river made in its tortuous journey towards the sea. There was plenty of small craft on the river and also an endless trail of logged timber being floated down to its collection point

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at Samarinda. Riverine villages grew in little clumps every four or five kilometres, each one clustered around a silver-domed mosque. This was still Muslim country. The people here came originally from Indo-Malaysia, Java, Bugis and Butung. Mainly subsistence farmers and fishermen, they also provided casual labour for the timber companies which had been working there for years. There were no roads or even tracks, except for those bordering the river and into the plantations of cassava, bananas and coconuts around the villages. The river was the road and the only means of long-distance travel and communication. The river itself was brown and muddy, like all the rivers in that part of the world. They flew across a large, shallow lake which appeared, from their altitude, to be full of greenish, stagnant water. It looked positively rank and fetid, but clustered at one end was a village with all the houses built on stilts over this dank, unhealthy-looking water. There was no land. No cultivation. Nothing but green, marshy swamp. The villagers’ only contact with the river was through this marshland. They continued to fly west and at a point where a tributary from the north-east flowed in to join the Mahakam, the villages with the silver domes ceased and gave way to quite a different type of habitation. There were cultivated gardens surrounded by long shed-like buildings, running in rows, parallel to the river and raised above the ground on thick piles. ‘Dyak country,’ said John over the intercom. ‘Yes, yes!’ The geologist perked up. ‘Very interesting. We must be quite near the seismic pad. They are not far into Dyak territory.’ John consulted his map again and started counting the s-bends from the junction of the rivers. According to the map, there were six more bends to go and they should pass a high hill on the right. But maybe it would be on the left. Maps were often wrong in these parts. He flew on, counting the curves and passing over more Dyak villages. At the sixth bend, he circled a small promontory jutting out into the river and looked for some sign of human

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activity. There was none. The expected mountain had not turned up on either side of the river but they were, at least, at the required distance from the junction. ‘See anything down there, Doc?’ ‘No. Nothing. Are you sure this is the place?’ ‘It’s where you showed me on the map. Do they know to light a fire? So we can see the smoke? ‘Of course, of course. They are experienced bushmen.’ They both strained their eyes looking in all directions but could see nothing except the endless expanse of thick, impenetrable jungle, not even a village. ‘I’ll go back to the fork in the river,’ John said. ‘People there are bound to know where the party is. They’ve probably supplied labour to cut the trails. And also, let’s hope, felled trees for the chopper pad.’ Not far from the junction, there was a cleared area near an abandoned timber camp. As the helicopter landed, it raised a storm of fine red dust, which the beating blades caused to swirl and envelop the eager spectators who had gathered, alerted by the preliminary circling. This crowd, however, was more restrained than the mad clowns at Tanggarong. When the dust settled and the blades had stopped, a dignified man, obviously in charge and with a commanding personality, came forward to greet the arrivals. The crowd, under his instructions, stayed well away, looking on politely. ‘Good morning Sir,’ he said in English. ‘What do you want?’ John eased himself out of the machine and, shaking the proffered hand, said, ‘We’re looking for the white men with the wires and the box that makes a big bang.’ ‘Do you mean the seismic party?’ ‘Yeh, that’s right. They’re supposed to be working somewhere near here.’ ‘I do not know, for sure,’ said the man, in his careful and precise English, ‘but please come to my village. There are people who will give you directions.’ So, with the headman, and followed by a small group of leaping children, they made their way along the riverbank. The

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path led through groves of bananas and coconuts, then vegetable gardens and small patches of corn and tapioca. Finally, around a bend in the river, the longhouse came into view. It was a ridge-roofed building raised high above the ground on hardwood piles. Pigs were scuttling and squealing among the children, dogs and chickens near the entrance. Dyaks, unlike the Muslim Malays, eat pork and also indulge in other nonMuslim pastimes such as the drinking of intoxicating liquor. The inside of the longhouse was divided in half: a long corridor on one side and the other partitioned into family living compartments. Shy female faces peeped from the doorways of these cubicles. Children giggled. The atmosphere was warm and friendly. The headman invited the visitors to sit on tikars in the centre of the corridor. In the corners were piled fish traps, oars, paddles, baskets, other utensils and something which made John’s eyes pop open with surprise: a collection of large blue, green and chocolate-coloured Chinese ceramic pots, in different shapes and sizes. As he had suspected in Tanggarong, there was plenty of this old stuff around. Some of it must have been sitting there since the days of the earliest Chinese traders. The headman, wearing his rattan cap, brought in one by one a group of men, apparently his councillors, and introduced them to the visitors. With polite bows of acknowledgement, they took their seats, cross-legged, on the floor. Once all introductions had been made, two women came in with rattan bowls of ripe bananas. Next they brought a tray set with cups made from coconut shells, each filled with a greenish liquid. ‘Oops! Not for me, thanks, baby. I’m flying!’ John had heard about the Dyak firewater before. He declined with a shake of his head, muttering something about flying regulations and safety precautions. The Dutchman, however, was quite swept away with the unusual experience and, with one eye on the pile of blow-pipes leaning against the wall behind the headman, and a darting glance at what looked like shrunken heads hanging in the halflight above them, he took a cup of the viscous liquid. As John dutifully chewed on his banana, the headman and his councillors downed their drinks with gusto. The geologist took a

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tentative sip. Then another. Finally, he took a good Dutch-sized swig. ‘Iz goot!’ he announced appreciatively. ‘Iz very goot. Bols. Something like Bols. You know Bols?’ turning to John. ‘Balls to you too, buddy. Take it easy around these Dyaks. They seem to understand more than you think. Might get the wrong idea.’ But their hosts took the remarks as complete approval and, calling for another round of drinks, were preparing to settle down to a steady day’s drinking. Within easy retching distance of each member of the party were the famous vomit holes always cut into the floor of Dyak houses. The more you vomit, the more you can drink and it all goes down below to be gobbled up by the pigs. Most people knew of the prodigious drinking prowess of the Dyaks and the holes were an important part of the game. After a couple of rounds with the coconut cups, with everyone smiling and trying out their English phrases, John interrupted with a smile, ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse us, chief. We can’t stay any longer. Can you tell us where the seismic party is? This man with me is a doctor and he has to find his party today.’ At the mention of the word ‘doctor’, the councillors pricked up their ears and the headman began to explain all the illnesses, sores, cuts and abrasions of the members of the longhouse. A man on a rattan stretcher was carried in and the headman explained, over the groans of the patient, that he had fallen out of a tree and broken some ribs. The traditional Dyak cure for such a condition was for a number of people to sit on the injured person, pressing on his chest until they had squeezed out all the pain. This had already been applied to the man and, by the greenish tinge of his face, he looked as though he wouldn’t survive the day. The geologist, hearing the story, was shocked and donated the packet of aspirin he was carrying in his pocket. At least that might ease the man’s journey into oblivion. The bearers were pleased with the doctor’s medicine and carried the victim out to administer it and, no doubt, continue squeezing his poor pain-racked body.

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Hospitality having been extended and courtesies returned by the medical service, the headman began his explanation of the location of the seismic party. They had indeed found the correct branch of the river but the position of the mountain was out by about 10km. They would need to fly further up-river. ‘Go now,’ said the headman, seeming almost to dismiss them. ‘But please come back. You are welcome in my house. Please come back and stay as long as you like. We have many sick people and need your help.’ With the doctor descending unsteadily from the longhouse, they made their way back to the helicopter. To the usual fluttering of hands and swirling of dust, they took off to retrace their flight up the main river. Almost 15km further on, they saw the wispy trail of smoke towards the midday sun. A small clearing had been made in the jungle and a rough but secure landing pad constructed from felled trees. With little difficulty, John set the machine down in the middle of the clearing. No wild cheering here: just the four sweaty, wearylooking faces of the European seismic crew and the shy, respectful faces of the six Dyak workers, whose artificially elongated ears dangled down to their shoulders in traditional fashion. Their heads and bodies were swathed in a weird assortment of brightly coloured rags and sarongs. Shitty Cock greeted the two senior men in Dutch and they immediately fell into a deep discussion about whatever their particular problem was. The other two were rough and ready Australians and they chattered on, discussing the hazards of life on the seismic trail as opposed to life as a helicopter pilot, and about the joys of nightlife back in Balikpapan as opposed to nights in the jungle. In spite of the discomforts of the job, they agreed it was worth it to have a pocket full of money when they went on leave to Singapore, Bangkok or Bali. John kept up a desultory conversation with the two young drillers but the ceramic pots kept intruding into his mind. There had to be money in it, he was sure. But how could he get his hands on them, and how could he realise a profit? It kept his mind occupied as he sipped coffee and shared dry cake, biscuits

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and jam with the party. The Dyak cook served up quite a tasty stew of corned beef and boiled cassava with hot chillies sprinkled on top. The Dutchmen were still deep in conversation and John never found out exactly what their problem was. By about two o’clock, he decided it was time they left. It was at least three hours flying time back to base and there were often cloud build-ups in the afternoon which might necessitate a more circuitous route. ‘Excuse me, Doc. I think we’d better get moving. Long way back and we wasted a lot of time this morning.’ ‘Yes. Of course,’ Shitty Cock nodded to his companion. After saying farewell to the rather forlorn group, standing knee-deep in the undergrowth, they took off and headed east. They passed over and waved to the Dyak village of their morning visit and were half an hour on their way to the first checkpoint, Samarinda, when an ominous bank of dark clouds appeared on the horizon, directly in their path. There were several gaps in it, however, and John was not unduly worried. Following the course of the river was no longer possible, as the cloudbank was particularly black in that direction, so he decided to bear off to the right and head for a break in the clouds that appeared safer. Cutting across the trackless jungle below, he flew on for a further 15 minutes and then noticed with dismay that the gap, with its promise of bright light behind, was rapidly closing. His top speed was not more than 80 knots and he could see that he would not make the gap before it closed. He looked back to the left-hand edge of the cloudbank and saw with relief that it was breaking up in that direction. The whole storm pattern now appeared to be moving south. This meant he could change direction and pass through it on the trailing edge. The rain flurries that had spotted the windscreen bubble tailed off and, although the sky was dark, he could see quite clearly. The jungles of Kalimantan have few variations of light. Except in the early mornings and just before sunset, the tones are all a murky, hazy greenish-grey. It is a monochromatic landscape, except for the very occasional flash of red or white from a giant flowering tree, a seemingly bottomless green ocean of leaves.

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As he made a 90-degree turn to the left, John called the Samarinda control tower. ‘Hello Samarinda! Samarinda. This is Uniform Hotel Poppa. Do you read me? Over.’ He made several repetitions of the standard phrases before there was a crackling reply. ‘Uniform Hotel Poppa. This is Samarinda. Go ahead.’ ‘Samarinda from Poppa. Maintaining 1800ft. Estimate one hour’s flying time from Samarinda. Due to bad weather, present position now 16km south of Long Bleh. Proceeding north to avoid bad weather. Will call again in 15 to 30 minutes. Over.’ ‘Poppa from Samarinda. Wind one three zero. Twenty knots. Overcast 300 metres. Visibility one and a half kilometres. Light rain. Call five minutes out. Over.’ ‘Pretty typical, I suppose,’ thought John. ‘I get all sorts of unrequested information but at least they heard me.’ The information seemed to indicate that the front was moving south, and he would possibly have no difficulty making it through as long as he moved north. ‘Samarinda from Poppa. Thank you. Over and out.’ But there was a small niggling at the back of his mind. Did they understand what he had said? Putting the doubt aside, he flew north for about 20 minutes, looking for the clearing in the break-up of the front. But search as he might, even further to the north, the expected break did not happen. Light flurries of rain began to sprinkle the bubble again and he noticed a distinct wind change. ‘God, no!’ he thought. ‘The damn front’s changed direction!’ It had, in fact, made a 180degree turn and was now racing north. It was not a common occurrence in Kalimantan, but it happened often enough to be a source of worry to all pilots, not just helicopter pilots. Longdistance jets, on occasion, had to abort flights and return to base because of the inconsistent behaviour of these errant fronts. Checking his fuel gauge, John saw that he would soon have to make a decision. Flashes of lightning in the thick black cloud ahead of him hastened the decision.

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‘Samarinda, Samarinda! Samarinda! This is Uniform Hotel Poppa!’ He made several calls, but there was no reply. ‘Damn idiots,’ he thought. ‘They’ve probably gone off to play cards or soccer, not expecting anything from me for an hour or so.’ He called again and again. The bubble now began to blur up with the increasing rain and the sky became darker and darker. Then, suddenly, through the crackles, came a very faint reply, ‘Uniform Hotel Poppa. This is Bouraq flight 187 to Balikpapan. Give me your message and I will relay it to Samarinda.’ Great! The scheduled Bouraq passenger flight had picked up his signal, so a message direct to Balikpapan would be a better idea. The Samarinda tower usually shut down early anyway, regardless of the weather conditions and any aircraft flying in the area. ‘Bouraq from Poppa. Please inform helicopter base Balikpapan unable to return to base. Returning to seismic pad up-river from Long Bleh. Send fuel for return journey. Over.’ ‘Message received and understood. Will relay to Balikpapan. Good luck. Over and out.’ It was a lucky break for John, but now they really were on their own and had to find their way back to the jungle pad. It was getting darker by the minute, with the lightning increasing, so it was a relief to turn west and leave the rain and turbulence of the storm behind. John called his passenger on the intercom. ‘Sorry about all that, Doc. But I suppose you could see what was happening.’ ‘Of course, yes. But where do we go now?’ ‘We’re going back west and will have to stay overnight and wait till they send us more fuel tomorrow. All that racing up and down has left us very short. We have enough to get back to Long Bleh.’ ‘Maybe we can stay the night in the Dyak village?’ Remembering the discomfort of the seismic pad and the friendly longhouse and the hospitality there, the decision was easy for John.

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‘You’re right, Doc. We’ll stay in that village. But watch yourself on that jungle juice. Got to get you home safe and sound.’ The Dutchman chuckled. ‘Don’t worry. We Dutchmen can handle anything. Very strong!’ After 30 minutes they were well back along the course of the Mahakam, past the silver-domed village mosques, and they looked eagerly for signs that they were in Dyak land again. Finally, the familiar village came into view. It was only an hour before sunset and quite late enough to be flying around in the jungle. As they circled prior to landing they could still see, away to the east, the huge heap of black thunderclouds racing north, dark and ominous and relentlessly closed against any escape while, to the west, there was already the beginning of a golden glow of the sunset soon to come. The serene yellow light in the great arch of the sky unfolded above the heavy green and silent sea of the jungle. Their return caused great excitement in the village and the headman, whose name was Joseph, said he knew they were coming back. Preparations were already under way for a big celebration. The news brightened the Dutchman’s eyes, but John groaned inwardly. He was not a strong drinker and he knew he would have to brace himself for the coming evening. He would have to accept as much hospitality as he could as, according to the stories he had heard, it was bad form to do otherwise in Dyak territory. Not only bad form but dangerous. One story he had heard concerned a young driller who stayed overnight in a longhouse. As well as copious drinking, the village put on a group of dancers who capered around to the beat of drums and bamboo flutes. Full of Dyak juice, the driller applauded wildly and called for a repeat performance. They asked him which girl was the best dancer. According to him they were all good, or bad, depending on your state of inebriation. But he selected one and she did a solo dance. To his great consternation and dismay, he was informed by the smiling chief that the act of choosing one girl was in fact a proposal of marriage. Sobering up the next day, he managed to buy his way out of the arrangement. But in order to do so, and to smooth the

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hurt feelings of all concerned, it cost him all his rupiahs and everything of value he owned, including his torch, ballpoint pen, belt, cap, camera, watch, penknife and even his last cigarette. Joseph led John and Shitty Cock along the path and they were surrounded as before by a swirling crowd of smiling and excited children. There had been a European missionary in the area some years before, so everyone was able to converse quite easily in English. Joseph explained that one of his dearest wishes was to get an outboard motor for his canoe. He had seen them being used by the logging contractors and oil explorers and was quick to see their tremendous advantage over wooden paddles. ‘I just might be able to help you there, Joseph,’ said John. Plans were already forming in his mind and he was waiting for the right opportunity to put them into action. It was hard to establish just which branch of the many Dyak tribes these people belonged to. Shitty Cock was curious, however, and began asking questions. If the geologist asked, ‘Which tribe are you from? Is it Iban, Kenyah, Kayan or Punan?’, the answer would come back with a smile, ‘Yes, Iban, Kenyah, Kayan and Punan’. ‘But which one?’ ‘Yes, which one.’ No matter how the question was phrased, the reply always came with a rising inflection and a smile that seemed to imply, ‘I hope you like my answer. I want you to be happy.’ The visitors never found out which particular tribe these Dyaks belonged to, only that they were extremely hospitable and kind. The longhouse was full and bustling with activity when they arrived. People were running up and down the steps and in and out of doors. The house, which was about 60m long, seemed like a village street, which in fact, is essentially what it was. At the end of the day, when work on the tapioca, rice paddies or the river was over, villagers returned to the longhouse as a city dweller would return to his street. About 30 families lived in this longhouse. Mothers, lolling by their doorways, carried babies on their backs in hand-

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woven baskets, attractively decorated with coloured beads, shells and glass. They were a small people, mostly about one and a half metres tall, with powdery cinnamon-coloured skin, quite different from the bright, shiny tan of the Bugis and Javanese. Everyone settled down on the tikars and the food was brought in. Served on leaves, placed like lace doilies in handwoven dishes, was a surprisingly wide choice: fried tapioca cakes, rice mash flavoured with fish, river shellfish boiled whole and sticky rice cakes flavoured with ginger, cloves and pepper. There were bananas, of course, and several other fruits the visitors hadn’t seen before. One was a yellowish-green colour, with fluted sides in a star pattern. It had a slightly sour lemon taste but was delicious when taken with fatty pork. Another looked like unwashed button potatoes, but the skin peeled from them easily and they had delicately flavoured sectioned flesh inside. There was also the pear-shaped salat, which they knew. It was covered with an easily peeled, crisp, brown skin patterned like snake scales. The flesh was sectioned, hard and tart, and had the surprising flavour of strawberries. Then came the rice wine. As more and more wine was served, the party began to pick up pace. Every now and then, one of the men would rise to his feet and begin a long declamatory monologue, to the accompaniment of gong music played by women in the background. Everyone applauded wildly at the end and there was a fresh round of drinks — not to mention a few bouts of wild vomiting into the prescribed holes. It was all part of the fun. Joseph sat beside John and said, ‘You are not drinking, my friend. Don’t you like my party?’ ‘Sorry, Joe. Yeh. It’s really a swell party. But I’m thinking about other things. That outboard motor for your canoe. You really want that, don’t you? How much would it cost? Have you any ideas on that?’ ‘Eight hundred thousand rupiahs [$A1,600].’ Joseph’s reply was immediate and John was startled at the accuracy. Considering Long Bleh was more than five days journey by boat from Samarinda, the price Joseph suggested was very close to that being asked in Balikpapan. (John had been

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pricing them recently with a friend.) His plan was taking shape. Leaning forward in conspiratorial fashion, he whispered, ‘Joe, see those pots over there?’ He indicated the collection in the corner. ‘Do you know how much they’re worth? If you want to sell them, that is.’ ‘You are a clever bird man,’ said the headman, nodding in approval. ‘Those pots are worth just about the same amount as the motor.’ John admitted to himself, sheepishly, that he had been set up by the chief, and not vice versa. Very canny, these Dyaks. But it would come to the same thing in the end. ‘But not the price in Samarinda,’ Joseph continued. ‘They are thieves down there. Those Chinese think we Dyaks are stupid, but we know the prices, too. Over the mountains,’ he indicated the distant hills to the west. ‘Over there are more of our people. We have ways of talking to them. They know the prices in Malaysia and Singapore. The true price. ‘Perhaps you could take these pots to Singapore and sell them for me. Then, with the money, buy the motor and send it to me here.’ ‘Yes, I can do that,’ John said. He felt he had been given a prize on a plate. He didn’t have to outlay any money, just fly out tomorrow with the pots on board and send the motor to the chief later on. If the pots were as genuine as Shitty Cock said, they were worth a great deal more than the cost of an outboard motor — a great deal more. ‘I have a young friend in Balikpapan,’ Joseph said. ‘He will come to see you. You will give him the money and he will buy the motor there and bring it to me.’ Speaking slowly and deliberately, the headman stroked the glaze on one of the pots lovingly and added, ‘These are my family treasure. They have been here since before anyone can remember.’ ‘Then why are you willing to sell them?’ John asked. ‘We have learned that times change. If people will pay money for our treasures, we can have a better way of life. We can catch more fish with motors. We can go to Samarinda and trade things. We can get medicine and help for our old and sick people. All this we have learned from the loggers and seismic

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people. Malaria and typhus are taking a great toll on our people. So, maybe our treasures can help us. It is quite simple.’ Further conversation became impossible as the gong music had increased in volume and the declamations doubled in strength, and to this wild melee of sound was added the belching, groaning and laughing of the vomiters and their cheerleaders. Under the house, chickens were squawking, dogs barking and pigs squealing. It would be hard to imagine an evening more hilarious and fulfilled. It was surreal. From the smallest baby to the ugliest old man, everyone participated. Even the humblest of village creatures, the pigs below, profited from the regurgitations of the participants above. There was no discrimination against women and, although it was hard to be sure, there appeared to be a great deal of sexual promiscuity, with giggling and heavy breathing coming from the darker corners and cubicles. But no one got angry and there were no fights; laughter was the key to the evening. At mid-morning the next day the relief helicopter carrying the extra fuel arrived. Before the fuel transfer was made, Joseph came to the clearing with the precious pots all ready for travelling. They were bundled up in rotan baskets and packed on all sides with banana-trash straw. John tied them securely to the racks on each side of the helicopter, which were specially designed for cargo. He explained to the geologist that they were just some cheap gifts from the villagers in return for the joy-rides he had given the previous day. After warm handshakes with every member of the longhouse, they took off about noon and, within three hours, were coming in for a landing at home base, Balikpapan. Shitty Cock was particularly happy about the trip as, just before leaving, the chief had presented him with a blow-gun and a bamboo carrying-case full of poison darts — his reward for being a good drinker. ‘You see, John,’ he chortled. ‘You should have been drinking like me. See what you could have had.’ John was happy. He knew what he had. A week later, John went to Singapore on crew change and took the pots with him. Checking the antique shops in

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Orchard Road, he found that, as suspected, they were worth more than double the price put on them by the Dyak. And that was in Asia. What would they be worth in New York or Paris? The dealers were pressing on the sale, however, and John decided to take the ready cash. He took the best offer by the most pressing dealer and walked out of the shop with the equivalent of about $A2,300. While on leave, he was called to the company office in Seletar and told he was to be transferred to Sumatra instead of returning to Balikpapan. He thought of Joseph and the money, the outboard motor and his handsome profit. There was nothing he could do about it for the moment. Time was nothing to these people. The opportunity to complete the deal would come along some time. He certainly wasn’t going to risk sending the money. Before long, he had completely talked himself out of taking any action on the matter. It could wait. In Sumatra, John became involved in a small way in some deals with watches and dress materials. Although it was only small-time and an activity a lot of expats became involved in, he made the mistake of using company mail bags and was caught. The Singapore office was informed of their pilot’s irregular behaviour and he was fired after just six months in Sumatra. After two months he landed a job with another helicopter company in Sorong, in west Irian Jaya. His first trip was a fairly simple lift job from one drill site to another. The weather was clear, the trees were not high and the load was light. On take-off, however, he failed to get lift and flew directly into some low scrub. The aircraft was totalled and he was killed instantly. No mechanical failure was found and it was put down to a case of pilot error. This type of explanation is accepted by engineers and despised by pilots. In this case, there seemed no other possible reason. As far as everyone was concerned, that would have been the end of the story if it had not been for an odd encounter I had about a year later. Ming was what you would call an unsavoury character. He had long black, stringy hair dangling down to his shoulders, which always appeared in need of a good shampoo. His manner was sly and obsequious and he had a reputation for giving wrong

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change to foreigners unused to the currency. Above all, the thing that turned people off him was the length of his fingernails. With the exception of one or two broken ones, they were two inches long and curled over. There was something revolting about this nail fetish in conjunction with his sly manner and flashy dressing. He wore tight jeans, a leather jacket and white patent-leather shoes with four-inch heels. A dealer in antique pots, he was always hanging around the helicopter camp or the houses of foreign families living in the vicinity. The prices he asked for his chipped and broken plates were outrageous but occasionally he came up with a good, genuine piece of real value. This was why the pilots and engineers interested in collecting were willing to put up with his ingratiating behaviour. He was generally known as the Ming Pot Salesman or Ming the Merciless. One evening, I was visiting the company’s operations manager, Jim Wittman, and his wife, Elaine. About 6.30, we were on the verandah sipping our gin and tonics when Ming appeared. Elaine and I were always interested to see what he had to offer but, before we could get a glimpse of his offerings, Jim spoke harshly. ‘Get out of here!’ he thundered, which was quite unlike him, we thought. ‘Get out and don’t come around here anymore! Do you hear?’ Elaine and I protested mildly but Jim would have none of it. ‘Can’t stand that little bastard. If he wants to sell things to the guys in the camp, OK. But I won’t have him around my house.’ Over our protests, Ming gathered his bags about him and slunk off. We were disappointed but it was Jim’s house, after all, and he had the right to have who he wanted on his stoop. We joked a bit and then forgot all about it. Two days later, at my own house on the beach, I looked through the coconut palms as the dogs announced a visitor in their usual friendly way. Ming the Merciless came towards me with a plaintive look on his face. I motioned him in. ‘Selamat pagi, Irawan [Good morning, Irawan],’ I said.

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‘Hello, Missus.’ He was obviously apprehensive. ‘I come to say sorry. I know why Tuan Wittman no let me in he house. I know. He think I kill John Heidenrigg.’ Suddenly, all thoughts of pots vanished from my mind. What had he said? Kill John Heidenrigg! Who was killed? What was he talking about? ‘Tuan think I kill him. But Irawan no kill. Never. Not ever kill. My Dyak friend, he kill John. Betul, betul [It is true, it is true]!’ ‘Come in and sit down, Irawan. Tell me about it.’ He sat on the edge of the couch and blurted out his story. ‘Truly, Miss, I no kill John. Mister Jim think I kill. That why he no let me in he house to sell pots. But I only friend of Dyak man. I try to get money for Dyak man. I try many time but cannot get. Write many letter. Send message with friend to Singapore. But money not come.’ ‘What money?’ I asked. ‘Money from John, Miss. He take my Dyak friend pot, many pot. Take to Singapore. He sell so my friend can buy motor. Long time my friend wait. No money come. Three month. Six month. Then nine month. My friend cannot wait more time. He make magic, strong magic. He kill John. But not Irawan, Miss. Betul [truly] only my Dyak friend kill. He very angry. You tell Mister Jim?’ ‘Yes, I’ll tell him. Of course.’ It was a curious story. Dyak magic carrying far beyond the shores of Kalimantan, even to another country. It gave me a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. Had John really been killed exactly nine months after leaving Kalimantan? With the Wittmans’ help, I pieced the story together and found out exactly what had happened that day, up the Mahakam River. Shitty Cock himself was in Balikpapan again and we’d played bridge with him a few times. He told us the whole story and was intrigued to hear our endpiece to the affair. He hadn’t heard of John since that time. The nine months was correct, almost to the day.

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Samarinda A man called Tom Ross visited the Union Oil school one day. He was head of the English language department at the University of Mulawarman in Samarinda and he had known our linguist, Wayne Bougas, when they worked together in the Peace Corps in Thailand and Malaysia. Tom was from the northern United States and had worked in South-East Asia for six years. He spoke Mandarin, Thai and Indonesian and had married an Indonesian woman the previous year. ‘Tom stayed a night with us at the beach house and during a conversation he asked me if I had ever been to Samarinda. When I shook my head he said, ‘Then why don’t you come back with me tomorrow morning? We go by bus and boat and I’ll show you round the campus. You can meet my wife and have lunch and I’ll show you the sights: the Chinese temple, the weaving factories, the waterfront and all that. There’s a Skyvan about four in the afternoon, so you’ll be back in Balik by five. How about it?’ ‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’d love to go.’ The trip to Samarinda would take about four hours: two by microbus to Handal Dua on the Mahakam River and then two hours up the river by speedboat. We set out about 6.30 the next morning to avoid travelling during the hottest part of the day. Even at that early hour, all the buses were full. One after the other, the Colts and Mitsubishis, packed with people, packages, children and livestock, flashed by us in a whirl of dust. Carrying a hand-written destination sign on the front windscreen, they seemed incapable of travelling at an intermediate speed: it was either full speed ahead or stop. When passing through villages, the drivers paid no deference to local inhabitants, children or animals. As they approached the outskirts, the drivers pressed their hands on the horn and, blaring away, cut swathes through children and chickens like a speedboat. It was bad luck or plain stupidity not to move out of the way when the Colt horn blew. Locals were so conditioned that, unless a driver blew the horn, they just strolled along in the middle of the road with their backs to the oncoming traffic. It was

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an unnerving experience for a European trained to use the horn only in emergencies. But you learned fast when you drove there: left hand for steering, right hand for the horn. We waited at the roadside and, after about half an hour, a Colt with seats to spare appeared. ‘Ke Handal Dua [To Handal Dua]?’ we asked. ‘Ja! Naik [Yes! Jump in]!’ the driver said. There was a brief pause to let us scramble in, and ‘Sudah siap [Ready]?’, and we were off at break-neck speed from a standing start. Falling over our neighbours’ packages, children, bananas, chickens and whatever else was rolling round, we hurtled along in this jet-propelled four-wheeled contraption, driven by some latterday Evel Knievel. Our fellow passengers appeared to be quite unperturbed about the whole madness and continued the breastfeeding of their babies and making polite conversation with us. Once we had crossed the Manggar new bridge and terrorised half a dozen or so coastal villages, the road swung inland and, as houses and dwellings were left behind, the speed of the Colt decreased. Now we were travelling at a reasonable speed through secondarygrowth jungle and scrubby swampland. Tom had made the trip many times, so his composure and lack of concern had a calming effect on me. He was a very big man — not so much in height as in girth — but he was a black belt in karate and Number One in East Kalimantan. Our fellow passengers looked at him in admiration; fatness was a sign of wealth. Only the poor were thin. We passed through a hilly, wooded region and then hurtled through the old towns of Samboja and Sangatta. Reasonable quantities of oil were still being produced there from pre-World War II wells, which flowed through a jungle pipeline to the refineries at Balikpapan. The road veered towards the coast again and we passed plantations of coconuts and bananas and extensive cultivation of the ubiquitous sencon, or tapioca plant. This tuber, which has many other names such as ubi kayu and cassava, thrives in areas where very little else will grow and is a staple in the local diet. It is properly called Manihot esculenta, or bitter cassava, and it is

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a semi-shrubby perennial, with large, fleshy, tapering cylindrical roots up to 30cm long and 7–10cm in diameter. The food value is mainly in its starch content and the roots are eaten boiled and mashed with sugar, or boiled and fried with salt. The stem, about 1.5m high at maturity, is cut into segments and replanted, so the cycle repeats itself. After skirting a large bay where the French oil company, Total, was building a giant oil-loading jetty and a sizeable town for its employees, the road continued northward into the southern waterways of the Mahakam River Delta. Most of the small channels were fringed with thick banks of nipa palms and, threading its way through this maze, the road finally ran into the small river town of Handal Dua. It was a mini-port of small river craft, home to everything from dugout canoes to ferryboats and high-powered speedboats. The jetty was crowded with passengers and food and drink vendors were doing a roaring trade. Little warungs (shops) in lean-to shacks sold ‘bisquits’, pink cakes and a great variety of the many packaged snack foods for which Indonesia was renowned. Fried chickens’ intestines were a great favourite. Besides the sticky rice cakes, there were all sorts of mysterious little packages wrapped in fresh green banana leaves. We bought a small selection for our journey up-river. As we made our way down to the jetty a swarm of ragged children crowded around us, crying ‘Belanda! Belanda!’. This is the Indonesian word for a Dutch person, but it is used to refer to foreigners generally. We were further besieged by boat-owners offering all sorts of deals and craft. Tom, being an old hand, went straight to the Chris-Craft owners. In his excellent Indonesian, he quickly made a deal for the next stage of our trip. We had time to quench our thirst with a bottle of warm Green Spot and then we were off. This time speed was a delight. At 9.30 in the morning, it was already quite hot in the steamy delta and, as the boat picked up speed, the breeze on our faces felt cool and fresh. The Mahakam River is very fast-flowing and the speedboat needed all its power to make headway upstream. Two hours later, we saw the old port of the ancient Kutai kingdom ahead of us on the right-hand bank. Samarinda was

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once near the sea, but the continual silting-up of the delta had left it a long way inland. ‘There she is! My home town!’ Tom said with pride. ‘It’s quite a port, isn’t it?’ I was surprised at the amount of shipping and the number of large ocean-going cargo boats lying at anchor, as it didn’t seem that the river was deep enough for such big ships. Tom retrieved his motorbike from a cafe across the road from the jetty and I clambered on behind. ‘Road’s pretty rough,’ he cautioned over the clatter of the engine. ‘Hold on tight. We’ll be hitting plenty of bumps!’ Encircling Tom’s mammoth waist with my arms was impossible, so I dug my heels in, pressed with my knees and grasped as much of his torso as I could. I reasoned that at least I would be well-padded if there was a spill. We roared through the narrow streets of Samarinda, drawing stares and shouts from the populace. Tom and another English teacher were the only foreign residents at the time, so the sight of a foreign woman caused great interest and excitement. Shouts of ‘Hello, Mister Tom!’ followed us until we arrived at his house. It was the tiniest house I had ever seen; it seemed little more than a large doll’s house. Tom entered the door sideways and introduced me to his wife, Dini. When all three of us sat down, the room was full. Dini was a Dyak and had met Tom on campus. She was small and chunky and, like many Dyaks, a Christian. She served us a delicious cool drink made from young coconut water, coconut jelly, condensed milk and ice. After the long, hot journey it was nectar. The other Englishman, Trevor, poked his head round the door to say he had the use of the university jeep and would be happy to take us to see the sights. It was touching to see the warm affection Tom and Trevor had for the place and its people. They showed me the Chinese temple and we burned incense sticks and had our fortune told. We went to several cottage factories to see the beautiful hand-woven pure-silk sarongs for which Samarinda was famous. We went to a craft shop and bought a two-metre long blow-pipe with a case of poisoned darts

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to match, as well as a traditional conical Dyak hat, decorated with a patchwork of materials. A long-stemmed posy of bamboo fronds sprouted from the top, which bobbed up and down when you walked. Over lunch in a Chinese cafe, I heard the story of Peter, a logger friend of Tom’s, who worked deep in the interior, upriver from Samarinda. Peter made only infrequent trips to the capital when he needed supplies but always called on Tom and Trevor for a chat. He was happy with his job but was sometimes lonely. His friends worried about his monastic life and on one visit they suggested he should find a wife. He was a very shy man and they could see he would never make a big decision like that without help. Dini and her friend Ira came up with a splendid idea. Ira took him aside and said, ‘If you will come to Surabaya with me the next time you have some leave, I will help you find a charming wife. I have many friends there and I know we will be able to find someone suitable.’ Peter’s protestations were quickly quelled by his friends and, after some urging, he reluctantly agreed to the plan. Bookings were made and tickets bought, and the next time he came down-river he set off for Surabaya with Ira. She took him to a bride shop and he was introduced to several girls of marriageable age. It was all very proper and above board — no funny business — and the girls all came from good, respectable families. After several evenings, and under Ira’s watchful eye, Peter mentioned that he liked one of the girls. Ira suggested he should take her to the movies. The girl was even shyer than he was, but they laughed together and enjoyed the outing. Ira then took him to meet the girl’s parents and after he had been thoroughly vetted by them it was agreed that he and the girl could be married. The conditions were explained to him. He was to return to Kalimantan while Ira stayed behind to make the arrangements. The amount of money involved would be about half a million rupiahs, about $1,000. This would cover the wedding reception in Samarinda, official papers and documents, and

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airline tickets for the bride and her family who would fly to Samarinda for the wedding. Peter paid the necessary amount and flew back to Samarinda. Two months later, on the appointed day, he went to the airport with Tom, Trevor and Dini to meet his bride. The Bouraq flight landed and he watched eagerly as the passengers came down the steps. He couldn’t see his bride but there certainly seemed to be a wedding party; women in their best kain-kebaya, men in suitcoats and sarongs and many wicker suitcases and bundles of fruit and flowers. As the group walked across the tarmac towards Peter and his waiting friends, Tom nudged him, ‘Which one is she, Peter? Which one?’ ‘I, ah, I don’t know,’ muttered Peter. The group came closer but still he could see no sign of his bride. ‘Come on! Don’t be shy,’ Trevor pressed. ‘Which girl? Which one?’ They were all keyed up with curiosity. The group was almost upon them when they saw Ira moving towards the front. Peter searched the faces of the wedding party in panic. He didn’t recognise any of them. ‘I don’t know any of these people,’ he said desperately. ‘Maybe you’ve forgotten what they looked like. Smile, Peter! Smile!’ ‘Peter!’ Ira said, noticing his blank, terrified face. ‘Why are you looking so gloomy? Here is your bride and your new family-in-law. Please come and greet them.’ She motioned forward a shy young girl from behind the older people and said, ‘This is Christina. Your bride.’ Peter’s jaw dropped. He had never seen the girl before in his life. It was not the girl he had chosen in Surabaya. It was not the girl he had taken to the movies, whose parents he had met. ‘Don’t be so sad, Peter,’ Ira said hurriedly. ‘Don’t worry. I see your problem. This is not Siti, who you met in Surabaya. But don’t worry. Everything is all right. This is Christina. After you left, we realised that, as Siti was a Muslim and you are a Christian, it would not be suitable, so we found Christina. She is a good Christian girl from a good Christian family. Much more

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suitable for you. She even looks like Siti, too. Now come and greet your parents-in-law and your new brothers and sisters. Aren’t you glad we made the change? Just saved you in time, didn’t we?’ Peter’s jaw fell open even wider. It was not the girl of his choice, but everything was prepared and under way for the wedding reception. He turned to Tom and Trevor and bridesmaid Dini. ‘What am I to do? It’s not the right girl.’ Tom and Trevor, all geared up to fill their roles as best man and groomsman, looked at Christina and then at Peter. Tom said, ‘She’s very pretty, Peter. And everything’s ready. I think you should go ahead.’ Ira, who always had difficulty understanding some of the strange ways of foreigners, took charge and said brightly, ‘Come along now, everyone. Let’s get going. Into the van. We have many papers to sign and the wedding breakfast is waiting. Come along, Peter. Off you go.’ The wedding took place and the breakfast was held in the Chinese cafe in which we were having lunch. Trevor showed me a booklet of colour photos of the wedding. Everyone looked so happy and the bride was beautiful. All this had happened more than a year before and as we looked at the photos Tom said what a happy couple they were. They lived in the logging camp way up-river and made only occasional trips to Samarinda. Peter was no longer melancholy and Christina was even prettier than before.

East Timor At the end of 1974, my daughter Ceilidh wrote to me from her new teaching post on an Aboriginal mission station in Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory. She suggested I drop in on my way home to Sydney for Christmas. It was a great idea and Ed and Hereward would follow later and join me in Sydney. Gina would be spending Christmas in Massachussetts. There was a TAA service between Darwin and East Timor, so that seemed the best way to go. I flew into Bali on the

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company Volpar and, after spending the night in the then still largely undeveloped Kuta Beach, took a bemo to Ngurah Rai Airport in plenty of time for the 8am Zamrud Airlines flight to Dili, the capital of Portuguese East Timor. The word ‘zamrud’ means emerald and a green-painted plane was soon wheeled on to the tarmac to take on 10 expectant passengers. I was the only European, except for a tall young man wearing moleskin trousers and an Outback hat. He looked like an Australian ‘bushie’ and stood out among the small Indonesian men, all wearing crisp white shirts, sarongs wrapped tightly round their narrow hips and peci songkoks, the black Muslim rimless hat. In Balikpapan, none of the pilots or engineers had known much about Zamrud Airlines, although they said there were tales that the airfields of Nusa Tenggara (the eastern archipelago of Indonesia) were littered with the hulks of Zamrud aircraft that had failed to make safe landings. Oh well, I thought, the prize of a visit to my daughter was enticement enough to give it a try. It was only a short flight across the Lombok Straits to Mataram, on the island of Lombok, and a smooth landing gave me confidence for the rest of the journey. We island-hopped our way along the archipelago but, sure enough, the rotting remains of old Zamrud planes lay on the edges of some of the airstrips. We finally arrived in Kupang, the capital of Indonesian West Timor and, with several hours to kill before the departure of the Dili connection on a smaller aeroplane, I had a look around the town. It was a dismal sort of place, with much of the untidiness and ugliness often apparent in remote Indonesian settlements. In the days of early European exploration of the South Seas, Kupang had been an important haven for mariners but little of its charm remained, if it had ever existed. It looked to me like a very unenlightened sort of place and I was glad when the time came to board the Twin Otter for the flight to Dili. The terrain below was largely mountainous and arrival at the small Dili airport was a surprise. All signs were in Portuguese and most of the airport staff were Portuguese nationals. A smartly uniformed woman greeted our small group

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of eight warmly in Portuguese then, realising we did not understand, switched quickly to French, which some of us understood. She was all smiles and hoped we would have a wonderful holiday in Portuguese East Timor. No one, it appeared, understood Bahasa Indonesia. It was strange to be welcomed in this way, and very European, and made such a contrast to arrivals in small airports in remote parts of Indonesia where one was lucky to be welcomed at all. We went through immigration and were shepherded into a minibus which took us the 10km into Dili. At the airline office, we were given the bad news that, instead of going straight on to Bacau, where the international airport was, to make the connecting TAA flight to Darwin, we would have to stay in Dili, as the Australian airline had gone on strike and no one knew when the flight ban would be lifted. ‘Il faut rester ici [You will have to wait here],’ was all the Portuguese hostess could say, with a smile and a shrug of her shoulders. So we rested. ‘Peut-etre demain [Maybe tomorrow]’ there would be a plane. With the Indonesian passengers gone their separate ways, John the ‘bushie’ and I were joined by two English couples, travelling on the cheap and not anxious to spend any more money than was absolutely necessary, and another Australian traveller, Peter, a teacher on holiday. The English group went off to try the cheap accommodation on the waterfront and Peter, John and I plumped for the Hotel Tropical in the centre of town. It was basic and asked far too many escudos for strictly basic rooms but we hoped we wouldn’t have to stay long. We changed some money and went looking for something to eat and drink. The main street, Rua Dr Antonio Cavalho, was wide and almost empty of traffic. It had a lovely fresh feeling about it, bordered by huge red flame trees in bloom and large, white colonial-type buildings with cool colonnades and arched verandahs. There were several sidewalk cafes along the colonnades, their tables set with white tablecloths, each dressed with a vase of flowers and, most surprising of all, a carafe of red wine. What had we come upon here? It made us think we were on

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another planet or, at least, in Europe. In one short aeroplane hop, we had left the Islamic world of Indonesia behind and made a quantum leap into what appeared to be a European society. The waiters understood our fractured French and brought us fresh croissants and coffee. We were definitely in another world. We then explored the town and walked along the jetty, which seemed to be the main port facility. It was a very pretty little place and we agreed we could have been stranded in a far worse location. Groups of pretty children looked at us shyly and giggled: we were the circus come to town. Back at the airline office, they had no further news for us but suggested we do some sightseeing. There were various buses running to outlying towns and villages we were told, so, after inspecting the map, the three of us decided on a trip to Maubisse. One look at the ‘bus’, however, immediately put the idea out of my head. It was a lorry with a flat tray at the back and passengers brought their own sacks of rice to sit on. There was no cover and it was clear that, when the town asphalt ended, the road would be dusty and corrugated. ‘Not for me,’ I said. ‘I’ll take a look at the church and the cemetery and see you back here later in the afternoon.’ The church of Santa Cruz (Holy Cross) was intriguing, with shades of history seeming to rise in the spiralling smoke wisps drifting from nearby cottages. The gravestones, many of them leaning this way and that, promised all sorts of stories for those able to read the barely legible script. I wandered around the extensive graveyard, pondering all the Portuguese and Timorese who had been buried there over hundreds of years. So many of them had died young, most probably from malaria and other tropical diseases. Back at the Tropical, the manager gave me a little book on the history of the place, which he kept for English-speaking visitors. I was surprised to learn that English-speaking tourists were not uncommon in East Timor. He said many people from Darwin came there for their holidays, as it was much cheaper for them than flying all the way south to Sydney and Melbourne. From the manager’s little book, I learned that the Portuguese first landed in Timor in 1520, ostensibly to gather

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sandalwood. A hundred years later, they were chased out by the Dutch and the struggle for control between the two European powers lasted for another 100 years. An agreement was reached between them and a treaty was signed in 1859 giving Portugal full control of East Timor, as well as the enclave of Oecusse and the two offshore islands of Atauro and Jaco. During World War II, East Timor was overrun by the Japanese, who tortured, imprisoned and killed thousands of East Timorese, suspecting them of giving aid and comfort to the Australian troops of Sparrow Force hiding in the hills. The colony was devastated by the Japanese occupation and most of the main towns and villages were destroyed in bombing raids. About 60,000 East Timorese — one in five of the population — lost their lives during that time. Under the regime of Portugal’s dictator, António Salazar, the Timorese people were left in a state of neglect until his overthrow in 1968. Portugal’s colonies in Africa struggled to free themselves, but it was not until April 1974 that the ‘flower revolution’ of young officers in Lisbon took power in Portugal and East Timor for the first time found itself with some degree of political freedom. This was the state of East Timor at the time of my visit. Everyone wanted to talk politics. The hotel manager leaned across his desk and began by telling me about the different groups and factions that were at work in Dili. The Apodeti, who wanted union with Indonesia; the UDT, who wanted to stay with Portugal; and the Fretilin, who wanted a free and independent East Timor. As he talked, other Timorese gathered and, by the time John and Peter returned, we had quite a largescale meeting in progress. The days began to pass and still there was no news of a resumption of airline services. We went to the beach, went for pony rides, ate in all the cafes, tried all the drinks and bought everything buyable from the markets, as well as talking politics and daily moving our allegiance. After five days of this leisurely life, I realised that if we didn’t move soon I would be out of money. The Tropical was not cheap and I had brought only enough traveller’s cheques for the

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quick flight to Australia and home to Sydney. On advice from the hotel, we exchanged our traveller’s cheques with the Chinese in the barber’s shop, instead of at the bank, for a very good rate — nearly double the official one. But it was still not going to last for much longer. Almost down to my last few hundred escudos, I decided to try to sell my watch and who should I run into at the barber’s shop but the two English couples doing the same thing. They had let their heads go buying lots of woven cloth and carvings and were now strapped for cash. Off came their watches, belts, sunglasses and cameras, as they turned their valuables into money. The Chinese ran most of the businesses in Dili but they knew that their future in the colony would be limited if there was a revolution and their store of escudos would be worthless, so they were more than anxious to exchange local currency for foreign traveller’s cheques or transportable goods. I don’t think much haircutting went on in that barber’s shop, as the proprietors were too busy doing deals. It was dark and gloomy inside the shop, with the door kept shut, and we sat around a low bamboo table waiting to be attended to. Even here, the talk was about politics. The Chinese didn’t want the Indonesians to resume control, as they remembered only too well the number of times there had been massacres of Chinese traders in Jakarta. They didn’t like the Fretilin either, with their communist ideas of sharing wealth, so most of them were in favour of the UDT and the status quo. ‘Better we go to your country, Australia,’ one of them said to me while the exchange was going on. ‘Chinese people more money than Timorese. More clever. You know Aditla? People say East Timor can be part of Australia. We bring money to Australia. Aditla say that.’ I found out later that Aditla was another political party, which was working for Timorese integration into the Australian Commonwealth. There was no denying the fact that Australia stood in very high esteem with Timorese people of all backgrounds. Memories of the soldiers of Sparrow Force during the Japanese occupation were strong among all the people

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I talked to, and to this was added the good impression made in Dili by holiday-makers from Darwin and the Northern Territory. We three Aussies were on a good wicket in Dili. Even though there was a language barrier, the Timorese seemed to feel much more of an affinity for Australians than for their Muslim neighbours at the Indonesian end of Timor. The only one of us who seemed to have enough money was John. He had been working in an advisory capacity in Indonesia on a joint-venture cattle property and was on his way home to the Northern Territory. Peter the teacher, however, was as short of money as I was and was also reduced to selling his watch. At the end of the week, we had just about exhausted our money and were wondering if we might have to sell ourselves when, on the advice of the airline office, we decided to move on to Bacau to be as near to the airport as possible when the strike was lifted. We would have to catch a bus to Bacau, something I was not looking forward to. Dutifully, our group of seven met at the specified street with our bags some time before 8am the next morning. Interesting as Timor was, we were all looking forward to reaching Australia. There was no bus in the street at 8am, but other people waiting assured us it would come. We waited in the shade of the only tree and at 9am were relieved and then horrified to see a big truck coming towards us. This was it, although it was not as bad as the flat-top ‘bus’ to Maubisse. This one at least had shade cover and five wooden benches anchored to the sides. We swung ourselves on board along with Timorese men, women, children, babies, ducks, chickens, fish, vegetables and boxes, eventually taking off about 9.30am. It was an unforgettable trip. Our fellow passengers were very friendly, sharing their food with us and singing hymns and other songs in their own language. They laughed all the time, particularly when the truck hit a bump and we all nearly fell off. There were no bridges so, when we came to a riverbed, we had to get off while the truck crossed without our added weight. Fortunately, the monsoon had not broken and there was no water in the rivers.

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Blessed rest for our sore bottoms came when we rolled into Manatuto, a small town with a distinctly Portuguese air about it. All these little towns reminded me of places I had travelled through in South America, which had also been colonised by the Portuguese and Spanish. There was nothing like it in other parts of Indonesia; it was a totally different style of architecture making it hard to believe one was in Asia. In Manatuto, we had about an hour’s respite, with time to eat and drink in the local cafe — empanadas and coffee, with politics, of course. Then it was back on the truck and on to Bacau, a surprisingly pretty town built on a cliff top, with some ruined buildings still unrepaired from the bombings of World War II. Without even asking the price, we fell into the first hotel we saw, which was the aptly named Pearl of the Orient. There were cold showers, beds with sheets and wine — what more could we have asked for? The next morning, we awoke to find a horse market taking place in front of the hotel in the ruins of a building whose roof and walls had gone, leaving only broken pillars as a reminder of its former glory. The horses were Timor ponies and the owners and buyers were all dressed Timor fashion, in turbans and hand-woven cloaks, and all were carrying machetes. It looked to me like Medellin, Colombia, all over again. There were also fruit and vegetable sellers, the whole scene making a colourful and dramatic tableau against the broken Greek columns and blue sea beyond. There was a better hotel than the Pearl further down the road but, although we were too tired to move, we gratefully accepted their offer to use the swimming pool later in the day. Two days later, news came through that the strike was over and our group gratefully boarded the TAA flight to Darwin. The Timorese had left a warm spot in our hearts with their friendliness, earnest political discussions and amazing optimism. It was December 18, 1974. After the two-hour flight, we arrived in Darwin where John, who lived on a property near Katherine, offered us a lift southwards in his ute. So we all set off with him only days before

Borneo/Kalimantan

the devastating Cyclone Tracy, which took so many lives and left Darwin for ever different from the city we had been in just a week before. Little did we know that Portuguese East Timor would also suffer devastation, at the hands of invading Indonesians, before many months had passed.

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Part Two Java

T

he island of Java is a Garden of Eden, with rich soil and frequent rain. It is also one of the most densely populated areas of the world, home to about 110 million people, more than half the total population of the Republic of Indonesia. The land area of Java is roughly the same as that of the Australian state of Victoria. The cities of Yogyakarta and Solo in Central Java (Jawa Tengah) are the corner-stones of Indonesia’s cultural life and are home to the palaces of Indonesia’s two royal families. Rice, coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco and rubber grow in abundance in Java and, despite its Equatorial location, it has a pleasant climate with frequent thunderstorms bringing cooling showers of rain at the end of each day. Most Javanese live in village communities and even the big cities are, in fact, collections of villages.

The move to Java Not long after my return to Balikpapan from Australia, the helicopter company, NUH, decided to enlarge the training school for young Indonesian pilots, which Ed had been running in Balikpapan. Balilkpapan Airport had become the second-busiest in Indonesia after Jakarta and was creating difficulties in time and space for the training program, so alternative locations were being considered. The first and very popular suggestion was Ngurah Rai Airport on the island of Bali. This airport on the holiday island was suitable in most respects: the traffic was light, accommodation was plentiful and the weather conditions were close to

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perfect. But the Big Wheels at the company’s California headquarters thought differently. It was too good. Already several expat pilots and engineers had ‘gone missing’ while on leave in Bali and were never heard from again. They didn’t even come back for their pay. Therefore, they reasoned, Bali was most unsuitable and, to the moans of all concerned, including us, the Bali plan was scrapped and a decision was made to set up the new school at Achmad Yani Airport in Semarang, in Central Java. Our move from Borneo to Java was executed in the company DC3, a remarkable aeroplane built in the 1930s and one of the most reliable and safest ever designed. Loaded to capacity with our furniture and luggage, plus Hereward, Mansur, Intan, Khadir, Liana, Worthingon the dog and her puppy Misty, and the three monkeys, Sam, Chika and Lisa, it just managed to stagger off the ground en route to Java. We flew down the east coast of Borneo and out across the Java Sea, passing over the island of Maselembo, which our helicopters used as a refuelling stop, and the Karimanjawa group. One of the company’s helicopters had been lost at Karimanjawa during the previous year. Its crew was based in Semarang and their contract was to service the oil rig to the north of the islands. One evening, relaxing in their hotel, pilot John Schine and engineer Graham Tadgell received an urgent radio message from the rig. An Indonesian worker had been killed in a knife fight and the ‘Tool Pusher’ (boss of the rig) wanted the body removed immediately as riot conditions were developing. Night flying was not usual, but John decided to comply with the request. The customer must be pleased whenever possible. He and Tadge drove out to Achmad Yani Airport, fuelled up and set off into the night. Flying directly north for about an hour they sighted the rig, lit up like a Christmas tree, just before midnight. They picked up the body and took off for the flight back to Java. During their absence, however, storm clouds had built up and, directly ahead and to the south, there was a black area

Java

with lightning flashes. John decided to fly east for a while to avoid it, but the storm, errant as they often are, changed direction and moved east as well. Things were beginning to look difficult so John changed direction again and flew west, but there was a new build-up in that direction also. After a brief consultation with Tadge they decided to fly back to the rig and wait for daylight. The storm and rain was upon them by now and John was having difficulty seeing through the windshield. More difficult, however, was trying to judge altitude. The altimeter was faulty and visibility was almost nil. Suddenly, with no warning, they hit the sea. The great blades thrashed the water creating a maelstrom. The craft turned over and began to sink. John managed to scramble out the door, fighting against the inrushing water. Tadgell said later that he was sucked out, even out of his stillconnected seat belt. In the pitch darkness with thunder, lightning and driving rain, they moved along the side of the fuselage as the machine began to go down nose-first. When only the tail section was left above the water, a miracle happened: an air bubble developed in the aft section, leaving it sticking up out of the water and giving the men hope of salvation. The force of the crash had stripped them of their clothes and their watches. They hung there together in the dark and rain, shouting words of encouragement to one another and wondering how long it would be before the air bubble perforated and their last hope was gone. About two hours later the rain stopped, but the waves were still breaking over them as the first grey light of dawn appeared in the east. They could see now that as well as losing their clothes they had lost all their body hair, burned off by the fuel in the water. Two hours after dawn they were beginning to feel the effects of the sun when a gaff-rigged native fishing boat loomed up beside them.

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‘Hai tuan-tuan. Selamat pagi. Mau kemana?’ The darkskinned fisherman was saying good morning politely and asking them where they were going. ‘Selamat pagi,’ Tadgell managed to gasp. ‘Please help! Tolong! Tolong! Helicopter rusak [broken]!’ The fisherman dropped his sail and paddled over. He was obviously suspicious because the tail section, which was upside down, didn’t look anything like a helicopter — or perhaps he didn’t even know what a helicopter was. In the universal tradition of seamen, however, he pulled the men on board his prau and took them to his island. The people were friendly and gave them sarongs to wear but they had no radio connection with the mainland, so for three days John and Graham searched the sky for aircraft. Tadge finally had the bright idea of writing the word ‘help’ in the sand to attract someone’s attention. Three days later the message was spotted by the pilot of a fixed-wing aircraft, who signalled his sighting by circling the island and waggling the plane’s wings. That afternoon a rescue helicopter arrived and a report was made: ‘Big helicopter lost. Dead body lost. Pilot and engineer safe.’ Once this made it back to company HQ, an order was immediately issued to all bases: ‘There will be no uplifting of dead bodies during the hours of darkness.’ ——————— The move to Semarang was a complete change of lifestyle for us all. Balikpapan had been frontier living with its difficulties but also with its camaraderie. The great northern port of Semarang was the capital of Central Java, a Chinese businessmen’s town with few cultural values but a significant gateway for trade. It represented civilisation, with the comforts of electricity and communication, but also with the frustrations of living in a community of expatriates with too much time to spare and too many parties. The women played bridge and mahjong and talked endlessly about their servant problems, while the men played golf every afternoon and, in the evenings, went to the discos and massage parlours which operated profusely in every part of the city.

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The state of Central Java is the intellectual nerve centre of Indonesia and is rich in art, music, drama and poetry, thus providing some compensation for the shallowness and pleasureseeking way of life in the expatriate community of Semarang.

Semarang We touched down in Semarang at Achmad Yani Airport, named for the leading general killed in Suharto’s coup of 1965, which overthrew President Sukarno and instituted the ‘New Order’. Thousands of Communist Party members, some people say as many as one million, were killed and a very dangerous period began for the new Republic of Indonesia. Balikpapan’s roads had been full of jeeps and motorbikes, but Semarang was swarming with becaks or pedicabs, which came in waves from all directions. There were taxis of a sort at the airport, mostly 30-year-old Mercedes and Oldsmobiles, so we hired the best-looking one and asked to be taken to the Hotel Telemoyo in Gajah Mada Street. It was to be our home for the next three months.

Saleh After much searching we moved into a house of our own in Candi (pronounced Chundee), a lovely hillside area overlooking the city. It was an old colonial house with high ceilings, lots of bedrooms, a large garden and even a verandah dormitory, which was just what we needed to accommodate the young Indonesian pilots. They came to us six at a time and I got to know them well as I was appointed their English-language teacher. Many salesmen came by our house selling everything from flowers and vegetables to old Chinese ceramics and boats. The latter were sold by Saleh, a slight, very intelligent man, who made beautiful, fully rigged, model sailing boats out of wood. They were precise in every detail and works of art in their own right. I bought several boats from Mohammed Saleh and always enjoyed talking to him as he spoke good English. When I asked him how he had learned his art, he told me his astonishing life story.

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I was born in the town of Kudus near Semarang in Central Java. I was clever at school but the school itself was not good so it was easy to be clever. My father worked for the Dutch tobacco company and I went to a Dutch country school for a few years. This was where I learned to speak Dutch. My father taught me the forms of the Javanese language. They are distinct and we had to be very careful about which one to use. A lower-class person must always address a higher-class person in high Javanese and vice versa. The high speaks to the low in low Javanese and the low to the high in high Javanese. It was not like that in the Dutch school; we all spoke the same way. I also learned the new language, Bahasa Indonesia, so, in total, I spoke four languages. Later I learned to speak English. When I was 17 I got a job as a clerk in the Dibya Puri Hotel in Semarang. At this time the Japanese were everywhere. Their officers lived in the hotel. When they first came to Java we thought they would help us to get free as they had defeated the Dutch and put them in prison. With other clerks and employees, I joined the part-time military training course that the Japanese had urged on us. Although my religion was Islam I was not against this training as people were talking about how we could have our own republic. The Dutch were defeated but now we would have to learn how to defend ourselves militarily. It was while I was doing this course that I first became interested in politics and the ideas of the Communist Party. One member of our group had books and I took great pleasure in reading them with all their new and exciting ideas. It seemed to me that religion was holding people back and that these new ideas would be good for our country. At this time, as well as working in the hotel and soldiering, I read everything I could. Our attitude to the Japanese was changing as they had begun to treat some of our people very harshly. I lived in a kampong called Kali Langseng and one day they came there, collected all the young men who didn’t have jobs, bundled them into trucks and took them away to the docks. We never heard what happened to them but people said they went to Japan. None came back. When the war was ending, although we were supposed to be on the Japanese side, we decided to fight against them. We had many

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opportunities to attack them around the hotel. I don’t think we ever killed any of them but there was a lot of shooting. We also blew up trucks and equipment. Some of my friends, country people, had fought them with sticks and parangs (machetes). After the Japanese left, we had to deal with the British, who had landed and occupied Semarang. My group had learned a lot about fighting and now we were members of the Communist Party. Our main aim was to give land to the farmers and set up a communist state in Indonesia. It was a very exciting time and, as I wasn’t working, there was plenty of time for reading and discussing sabotage exploits against the foreigners, the British and Dutch. When the British bombed Semarang, one bomb fell on my kampong and six people were killed. Although I didn’t take part in it, there was a big battle against the British in the south at Ambarawa and it was a victory for us. There were other groups of Indonesians, who were not in the party, operating in our area. As far as we were concerned, they were all collaborators — with the Dutch and the Japanese — so we tried to blow up their equipment also. They supported Sukarno and Hatta. Our directions were coming from a man called Musso who had been living in exile and had now returned. Our main problem was lack of communication, but we received frequent handbills and instructions by couriers. The couriers had a dangerous job as they had to travel through areas controlled by our opponents. The Muslims and the Christians had different goals but we were instructed to cooperate with them both for the time being. When the war against the Dutch was over in 1949, I got my job back at the Dibya Puri Hotel and, because of my war service, was promoted to front reception. As I was good at figures I did well in the job and when nominations for a union position came up I was elected General Secretary of the Hotel Employees’ Federation. Books were now more readily available and I read all I could. Our party was growing in strength and numbers, with the brains in the city and the muscle in the country. We all believed that eventually Java would become a new communist state. At Madiun, however, we had one bad disaster when we were betrayed and many of our members were slaughtered. Although our opponents were gaining

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some ground, we knew that we also were strong militarily, and we were very confident. Some time after this I was voted delegate to the Trades Union Congress and for the first time came into contact with the intellectuals of the party. I met formally PKI (Patai Kommunis Indonesia) leaders like Dipa Aidit, Njoto and Lukman. We had many people in important positions in the country but they kept a low profile and did not declare publicly their membership of the party. Our instructions were to work with Sukarno and the religious groups until such time as we could take over totally. This period was very enlightening for me as I was beginning to get a clear picture of what was happening all over Java. Communication had always been our main problem and was the cause of many mistakes. It had been difficult to get coordination among all the groups. Now I could see the whole pattern. Listening to this amazing story I was getting a quick lesson on post-war Indonesian history, which I had previously known little about. Saleh was a good reporter and seemed pleased that I was interested in listening to him. What I wanted to know, of course, was how, after such a high-profile job as a young man, he had been reduced to selling model ships door-todoor. The explanation was more surprising than I could have imagined. Some of our duties were to instruct the farmers in the use of military weapons, as we had already learned that fighting with parangs and sticks would never be successful against modern weapons. I had nothing to do with this training personally but it was my duty to see that it was carried out. Although the army was officially opposed to the PKI, quite a large number of officers were members and they were the ones we used to train the farmers. Under President Sukarno, inflation was beginning to run wild and life for the country people was very hard. As well as having to cope with economic problems, there were persistent crop failures and drought. Starvation became a real problem. We firmly believed that Sukarno and those in power were being paid and supported by the British and the US but our instructions

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were to carry on as usual and cooperate with all groups until the time was ripe for us to take over. In 1965, when news came through that seven generals had been murdered in Jakarta and their bodies thrown down the crocodile hole, the army officers who had been working with us took control in Semarang with little opposition. I took no part in this as I was no longer in the military section. My activities were totally confined to trade-union matters. This situation, however, did not last long. The right-wing branch of the military came to Semarang in force and retook the city from our supporters. Although later the party was accused of trying to overthrow the Government at this time, such action was never mentioned or suggested in any of the instructions we received in Semarang. In fact, the events of 1965 came as a complete surprise to us. We were cooperating with all groups as instructed. So great was our surprise that we felt in no danger at all and made no attempt to hide, set up defences or plan attacks. No one fled to the countryside where we could have been assured of support. When the mass arrests began, all the members of the party were going about their daily business — working in our offices, teaching in school, manning party rooms, etc. — and, in fact, were quite unaware of the horror that was to come. I was very interested in this part of Saleh’s story as I knew about the generals being thrown down the crocodile hole, but I had never understood why the Communist Party members had been captured so easily and killed, why they had not escaped and gone into hiding. I was arrested in the hotel and, after a rough beating and interrogation, taken to an old Dutch jail in Ambarawa. For the next seven years I was held there and in other jails like the one at Bawen and totally cut off from any news of what was happening on the outside. The only news we got was from new prisoners and it was from one of them that I learned that I was one of the lucky few in my group who had not been killed. I was apparently of more use alive as they hoped that, through me, they could get information about undetected PKI members.

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Under interrogation I suffered many terrible beatings. On one occasion the two front legs of a chair were placed on my feet and the officers jumped on the chair until my toes were smashed. Another time I was beaten on the neck with a piece of wood and left on the floor for dead. A doctor, who was also a prisoner, nursed me back to health. He has a practice now in Semarang and although he has many rich patients he never charges the poor people in the kampong. I think my larynx was damaged at that time as I have not spoken normally since then. In spite of the many beatings I suffered I never disclosed the names or addresses of any PKI members. It is believed that up to a million people were killed during this period. While I was a prisoner one of my three sons died and I was allowed out to go to his funeral. During the time of my imprisonment my wife survived by working in the Princess Elizabeth Hospital as a seamstress. When I was finally released a special number was written after my name on my identity card to show that I had been a political prisoner. Because of this I have always been unable to find work. No one is brave enough to employ tapols (tahanan politik — political prisoners). So I now do the only thing I learned in jail. I make sailing boats, fully rigged, out of bamboo, as you have seen. I go from door to door selling them and the best luck I have had is from the foreigners living up here in Candi. I was so impressed with Saleh’s boats as well as his story that I urged many of the other expats to buy boats from him. I admired his determination to succeed against the odds. Once we were set up properly in the house, with the six pilots and necessary house staff, I suggested to Ed that we should give Saleh a job as bookkeeper. He knew the ropes from his time at the Dibya Puri Hotel and could be a great help to us. By employing him we were also able to help him get back into society in spite of being a tapol. Working for us was his first step back into the Rakyat, normal society. ——————— Our new house was home to 18 people: six Indonesian student pilots, Mansur and Intan and their two children, Karmila the

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cook from the local kampong, Amir the nightwatchman, Yantho the driver and Saleh, who took care of customs and visas as well as bookkeeping. It was like running a hotel. We installed a badminton court on the back lawn, table tennis on the verandah and darts and chess in the sunroom. It was more like a country club than a helicopter training camp. Indonesian food takes a lot of preparation. Every time I went into the kitchen something was being chopped or pounded. Initially, I did all the shopping but I soon left it to Karmila. Prices were always higher at the market for me so even though I’m sure she made a bit on the side, it came to the same thing in the end. Karmila was a tiny, thin woman, who weighed less than 40kg, but who could carry on her back a basket of vegetables I couldn’t even lift off the ground. Local women carried everything on their backs and, by the time they were old, they were permanently bent forward. Apart from Saleh and his boats, among the many hawkers who came to our door were those selling squeaky balloons and cut-out wayang figures on sticks, vegetable and fruit saleswomen, antiques salesmen, rotan chair and table makers, charity collectors (mostly spurious), and the beggars. The latter were very sad and pathetic-looking, mostly women in rags with babies in their arms. They were the so-called professional beggars from villages east of Semarang, where there was a permanent drought. Everyone gave them money as it was an obligatory custom of Islam to give alms. To ensure his place in heaven a Muslim must give alms to the poor, pray five times a day, go to the mosque on Friday, fast at Ramadan and make the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Indonesian student pilots living with us came from different parts of the republic. Four were Muslims from Java and the island of Bintang. The other two were Christians from Ujung Pandang and Menado, both in Sulawesi. Saleh proved a success as a bookkeeper and with his customs duty and he was good at mixing drinks when we had a party. All the expats liked him and he was able to make extra money by working as a barman for them at their parties.

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The circumcision Saleh’s home village was the kampong of Kali Langseng, which was in the valley below our house. One day the village’s headman or lurah paid me a visit with an invitation to attend his son’s circumcision. It was a great honour and I was only too delighted to accept. Advice from Karmila was that I should attend about 1pm, one hour after the near-relatives had visited and the actual circumcision was over. ‘Should I take a present?’ I asked her. ‘Some money in an envelope,’ she said. Watching from our verandah, I saw some beautifully dressed ladies arrive and daintily pick their way down the track to the village. Their thick, lustrous black hair beautifully coiffed, wearing their tightly fitting kebayas (blouses), their traditional kains (sarongs) tightly wrapped to form a skirt and the customary backless high-heeled shoes, they floated like exotic butterflies down the hill. In my ordinary dress and sensible shoes for the rough path, I felt a very plain Jane at the party, but everyone was most courteous to me and made me feel welcome. Even Javanese from a kampong such as this one had a degree of culture and refinement, which was found in all levels of society. Refinement is a Javanese trait. We were served the customary orange juice as trays of dainty sweetmeats were passed around: rice balls, bright pink and green cakes and two-tone jellies wrapped in leaves, which were called Angels in Heaven. Later I was taken into a room to meet the boy who had been circumcised. He lay on a long rotan chair, dressed in his best clothes and wrapped in a blanket. ‘Isn’t he brave? Such a good boy!’ the ladies clucked over him. I shook his hand and complimented him on his bravery. ‘Berani sekali!’ I think everyone was relieved when I left but it was probably a notch in the lurah’s belt to have had an orang asing

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(foreign person) at his son’s circumcision. The celebrations, however, were not over yet. In the evening, once it was dark, the wayang performance began. Earlier I had seen the orchestra arriving in a truck — gongs and stands, all heavily carved and painted in gold, red and black, were carried down the path. The players themselves were in traditional dress and wearing scarf hats. A theatre was set up in an open-sided thatched building outside the lurah’s office. Chairs for about 100 people were placed on one side of a large white sheet hanging from the roof. A large banana trunk was laid on the ground behind the sheet and in it were stuck the leather wayang kulit puppets — the good characters on the right, the baddies on the left. A kerosene lamp was set up behind the sheet and the puppets were manipulated as shadow figures once the performance began. The dalang or speaker of the story sat behind the sheet, cross-legged, manipulating the figures and narrating the action, as well as playing all the parts. On this occasion it was the story of the Mahabarata, an age-old story of good versus evil, originating in India. Everyone had seen it performed hundreds of times, but the familiarity was what they loved. After watching the beginning, I went home about 10pm, but the performance continued all through the night, finishing just before dawn. So that no one could miss it, the whole show was amplified on loudspeakers throughout the valley. As we lived above, the sound carried beautifully up to us and could be heard clearly throughout the house all night. We went to sleep to the sound of crashing gongs, high-pitched dialogue and crazy laughter. Everyone was delighted.

Censorship Censorship under President Suharto’s regime was heavy. I don’t think our mail was censored, but most overseas newspapers and magazines were. I bought the Singapore Straits Times and it was so badly cut about with articles having been deleted, that when I opened it, it was like a Christmas streamer. The American magazines, Time and Newsweek, often had entire pages blacked

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out with indelible ink. Another method employed to prevent people reading certain things was to glue pieces of paper over the offending script, which was impossible to remove. We all tried soaking it off with no luck. When Newsweek was banned altogether, we were keen to know what was so offensive so some church friends smuggled in an issue from Singapore and copies were handed around the expat community. The apparently offending article was an exposé of the business connections of the Suharto family, particularly Mrs Tien Suharto, the President’s wife. Most Indonesians we talked to already knew the details, so we wondered why there was such a flap. President Suharto had complete control. Our Indonesian friends were never pleased to discuss politics with us and always nervously watched the windows whenever politcal subjects came up. There had been such great loss of life when Suharto came to power that even Europeans living in Indonesia preferred to leave political discussions alone. Tom Burnett, who was part of an English team installing new telephones and exchanges, was known as the ‘Mole of Semarang’. The army supervised all his team’s work and he told us there was a lot of bugging. He said our new phone was probably bugged. Radio Australia was also interfered with, especially at news time; a garbled bagpipe sound came on every time anything was mentioned about Indonesia or East Timor. As well as the censorship of Time and Newsweek, local Germans told us that Der Spiegel got the same treatment. What an organisation they must have had in Jakarta to read and censor all these publications — a fully staffed office block, at least, of multilingual speakers, all armed with scissors, glue and black ink.

Helicopter picnic Going for a picnic in a helicopter is a unique experience and we often enjoyed a day’s outing to the seaside east of Semarang, near the wood-carving village of Jepara. Away on the horizon lay an island which always tantalised us, and one day Ed decided he would fly us there on his next day off.

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A few kilometres east of Semarang, the coastline turns abruptly north. We flew along it and cut across the promontory and its large, extinct volcano, over our favourite picnic beach and then out to sea towards the island which had so beguiled us. The ocean was petalled with the white butterfly sails of the fishing fleet. From the air we could see that the island was uninhabited, covered by a large forest of trees in the interior and fringed with white sandy beaches and coral reefs. Ed settled the machine on a sandy spit covered with a flowering grassy weed and we were alone on our island of desire. We put on our masks, snorkels and flippers and set off to explore the reef. For about half an hour we were in heaven. Then the serenity was gone. All the gaff-rigged fishing boats working in the area began to converge on the island and, before long, 10 of them had landed on the beach and the fishermen were scrambling out and rushing towards us yelling excitedly in Indonesian. ‘Where are you from? Which kampong do you belong to? How did you get here? What are you looking for?’ They fought and struggled to get near us, firing one question after the other. Standing waist-deep in the water and wearing our odd, snorkelling head gear, we must have presented a strange sight to these hard-working people. They showed no fear or surprise, however, only an aggressive curiosity. ‘Why are you in the water? What sort of fish are you looking for? What sort of fish are near this island? What do you know that we don’t know?’ Because they made their living from the sea and went into it only when searching for food, they could not believe that anyone would enter the water for any other reason. ‘We’re just having fun,’ we said. ‘We’re on holiday. Hari Raya.’ ‘If you are on holiday then why are you going into the sea? What are you looking for? You must tell us!’ They were becoming quite angry because we wouldn’t tell them the real reason for our visit to the island. They were sure we were hiding something from them and nothing would convince them that we were there just to have a picnic.

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Realising that some other explanation was necessary, we told them we were looking for goldfish. ‘Ikan mas [goldfish]!’ A great roar went up from the crowd, which had doubled in size as more sailboats converged on the island. ‘They want ikan mas!’ ‘I have some.’ ‘And so have I!’ Several fishermen came running forward with small plastic bags, each filled with goldfish and other species of tropical fish. We had to buy them all; it was an obligation. They told us they were really fishing for big fish but when they netted goldfish they kept them aside to sell in the market at Surabaya. Java had a population of more than a 100 million people and it overflowed even into the sea. How could we have been so foolish as to think we could find an island to ourselves? Hundreds of boats were converging on the island so we gave away everything we had in our picnic basket: all our cigarettes, chewing gum and peanuts. Loaded to the cargo racks with goldfish, we said our farewells and took off in a whirl of sand to fly home. In retrospect, the most extraordinary thing about the event was the fishermen’s lack of interest or curiosity in our mode of transport, the helicopter itself. They no doubt had never seen one at close quarters and it is a very odd-looking machine, even to sophisticated eyes. The only thing that interested them was the possibility of finding some new fish, something to eat or something to sell.

The disappearing children As part of the Indonesian pilots’ training, Ed had to teach them how to lift and drop cargo using hooks and nets. Ed selected a remote area in a dry riverbed to carry out these exercises. As he was flying over a river upstream, all the villagers fled in terror, grabbing their children, leaving their washing on the rocks and diving under their houses. The next week this story appeared in the local newspaper:

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‘Children kidnapped by nets from the air ‘Villagers in the Kecematan of Kedi, Kelurahan Padi, have petitioned the Camat [district chief] that a helicopter has been terrorising their village and attempting to scoop up their children with nets and carry them away to sell on the slave market. Already many children are missing. The Camat is investigating.’ It took a full-scale apology and explanation to settle this with the village chief. The missing children were later found further up-river playing hookey.

Beggars in Semarang I made a vow to myself never to return to the big market in Pasar Johar. It was so awful. I could not understand how people could find it fascinating. There were so many poor people, ragged and dirty, beggars and cripples and little girls asking for money. How had the Government allowed people to become like that? There were no marked prices and everything had to be bargained for. The traders had a price, however, and that was what you had to discover. ‘How much are these tomatoes?’ ‘Three hundred rupees a kilo, nyonya.’ ‘Three hundred! Too expensive!’ ‘How much would you like?’ ‘One hundred.’ ‘One hundred! Saya rugi! I will go bankrupt!’ ‘Oh well. I don’t really want the tomatoes.’ ‘You can have them for 250.’ ‘I’ll pay 150.’ ‘OK. 150.’ The real price was arrived at and the deal was made. Then you had to move on to the lettuce and the whole thing began again, trying to find the right price. It was exhausting, particularly if you wanted 10 different things. The salespeople were so poor that to argue over a few rupiahs seemed heartless and insulting, but it had to be done. No one would

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have it any other way. To buy at the first price would deprive the sellers of the thrill of bargaining. I was always surrounded at the market by a group of ragged children. Their tragic, expectant eyes were on my purse whenever I paid out the small coins. Their thin little hands would reach out to me, their eyes big and pleading, ‘Give money nyonya! Give money!’ There were so many of them, beseeching, imploring and tugging at my arms and clothes. I couldn’t bear it. Co, a Dutch pastor, told me there were 3000 ‘street dwellers’ in Semarang alone. ‘They are very dangerous people,’ he told me. ‘Very dangerous. We must be careful.’ He was a man full of compassion for the suffering of this world and he tried to explain to me how the anguish of poverty robbed people of their humanity. He said they were dangerous because of the condition they had been reduced to. ‘They are dangerous because they have no house. No money, no possessions. And they are hungry. We cannot expect them to be nice people.’ Until then I had not realised so clearly that abject poverty was brutal, barbaric and evil. In the main street of Semarang, Jalan Pemuda, there was one old lady who was very nice. She had mahogany legs — two thick stumps strapped to her knees where her legs ended — and she used crutches to walk. ‘Hello darling!’ she would call. ‘Bagaimana kabar [How are you]?’ She was so cheerful, it was embarrassing. I always stopped to chat with her and marvelled at her smile and cheerful disposition in the face of such hardship. One day she told me, ‘I am the lucky one, nyonya, because of my legs. People feel sorry for me and give me money. People who have real legs can’t get money from begging. No one feels sorry for them. I am lucky to have these legs. Like my friend over there.’ She pointed to another old regular in the street, Karmila. One of her feet was huge, about 45cm long with no small toes, just one large toe which hung off in a sharp right-

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angle at the tip. She dragged this great foot behind her and it had developed great crusty calluses. Mahogany Legs was right. Karmila did well at begging, too. No one could pass her by. The third regular in the street was not as cheerful. She had lost all her fingers and toes to leprosy and held out her stumps in supplication. People passed her by — I suppose they were afraid to approach her for fear of catching the disease — and she didn’t do as well as the other two. Other streets in down town Semarang were occupied by naked mad people. Sometimes we had to dodge them when we were driving as they liked to disport in the middle of the road. One otherwise naked man always had his private parts carefully wrapped in garbage — paper, string and curls of orange peel. On top of the hill there was often a young woman lying naked in the middle of the road. All the cars drove round her but no one did anything to help her. Hair matted and screaming gibberish, she lay there, kicking her feet in the air. I asked some educated Indonesians about these people and they said, ‘They are taken care of by the village people. Someone always gives them food. People believe they are possessed by devils. So, in a way, they are holy.’ I was in Gajah Mada Street one day collecting photos from the Kodak shop when I smelled something bad and saw what looked like a huge crab crawling through the door. It was a man in an old army uniform who was pulling himself along by his hands. His torso was on the floor and his legs pushed from behind in little stabbing movements. The foul smell came from him. ‘Who is that?’ I whispered to the girl behind the counter. ‘Oh, he’s a war hero,’ she said blandly and, reaching into the cash register, took out a few small coins and dropped them in front of the man. He scrabbled them up with his claw-like fingers and, stuffing them into his jacket pocket, swung his body around and scuttled out through the door. It was hard to believe he was a human being. The girls behind the counter held tiny handkerchiefs to their noses and looked at me with embarrassment. Then they turned away. He was a war hero.

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People have eyes to see, but sometimes the mind does not register what the eyes have seen. At the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, the sidewalks of Semarang were crowded with salesmen, squatting along the verges and displaying an endless array of hand made toys and decorations. The hand-crafted toys showed great skill and ingenuity. There were trumpets made from cigarette cartons and little boats made from sardine tins, powered by a wick set in coconut oil which, when set in motion, emitted a put-put sound exactly like that of a motor boat. There was a doll’s house filled with furniture, and trucks, vans and buses made from scrap; pottery money-boxes in the shape of pigs, ducks, chickens, temples and birds, all painted in lurid colours, and artificial flowers made from cigarette boxes and soft drink tins. Most remarkable were the topeng topeng or face masks. ^ in the form of lions, tigers, They were made from papier maché frogs, donkeys, dogs and pigs. Well formed, they were painted theatrically and fitted perfectly over one’s head to sit on the shoulders, with openings for the eyes and for breathing. Hereward, Gina (who was home on holidays) and I were in the car with Yantho driving, so I bought a frog, a lion, a tiger and a Chinese mask and we put them on and drove home slowly through the crowded streets. Passers-by and people in other cars which pulled up beside us at the traffic lights peered in, took note and then looked away. No one laughed or said anything or dug their neighbours in the ribs. We evoked no reaction whatsoever. Not a laugh or a giggle. The more this indifference to our odd appearance continued, the more we laughed inside our masks and the more determined we became to elicit some sort of reaction. We stuck our heads out the windows and laughed hysterically, but still no reaction. We had become invisible because we didn’t fit the normal pattern. Was it because so many things, such as poverty, ugliness, pain and misery, had to be ignored in cities like that, that people had an automatic cut-out? In order to survive, things that don’t have a safe and known explanation must be blanked out.

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Maybe everyone in cities like this is wearing a mask. Masks for survival, to protect against those things that are too terrible to accept, but which cannot be changed. I suppose we all do it wherever we live. Survival is, after all, mainly an ability to adjust.

Mansur the engineer Mansur was learning to drive. Yantho took him out in the car whenever he had time and gave him lessons. While he was having no trouble driving, we could see he would have trouble with the written part of the driver’s licence test. We had been teaching him to read and write but he was still very slow and ponderous, as well as being terrified. He was a very determined student, however, and sat at his exercise books every night, practising. Mansur was also a natural engineer with a streak of genius. If he had had the luck to be born in Australia, with all the advantages of proper schooling, he would probably already have had his own engineering business. When our fridge broke down, we had to load it on to a truck and take it to the tukang who fixes such things. It was brought back in a week and, after running for a few days, broke down again. Back to the tukang. After another week it was brought back only to break down once more. It had already cost us about $100 so Mansur asked if he could try — he fixed it and it worked perfectly thereafter. As the town water supply was available for only a few hours each day, we had to use a pump to draw in the maximum amount. And, since this was what everyone else was doing at the same time, it was a daily battle with the neighbours. Ed bought a pump and lengths of hose and all sorts of valves in a plan to draw water up the hill using power from the generator. It was to be quite a complicated affair so he said he would work on it when the weekend came. On the Friday, however, Mansur took a look at the collected material and decided he could do it himself. It took him several hours and when Ed came home the job was done — more efficiently and better than Ed had planned. All this from a kampong boy who had grown up carrying water in buckets from the river.

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Communication I began teaching English to the dean and lecturers in the engineering faculty of the University of Diponegoro twice a week. They were a very enthusiastic group. The dean, Mr Nisiamhura, would collect me for work in the faculty jeep so he could maximise his English practice. On one occasion he asked me how to write a letter to the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, thanking them for some technical magazines and books they had donated to the library. ‘That’s easy,’ I said. ‘Just say Dear Mr Smith, thank you very much for the books you so kindly donated to our university. They will be most beneficial to my staff and students. We look forward to your visit some time in the future, yours sincerely, Mr Nisiamhura.’ His mouth fell open in disbelief. ‘Is that all?’ ‘Yes,’ I assured him. ‘It’s polite and shows your appreciation.’ ‘How simple! If I had to write such a letter in Bahasa Indonesia or Javanese it would take about two pages. First I would have to introduce myself and my staff. Then inquire about the Australian department making the donation and make proper statements of appreciation and assure him that we were duly grateful for the great honour. I would say it many ways in different forms so they would know how greatly their generosity was appreciated. Two pages at least!’ Indonesian and Javanese are very formal languages and one of the difficulties for people working in such an exacting science as engineering was learning to communicate simply and succinctly in English.

The nation’s food bowl In Borneo we ate mostly American food, but in Semarang I began to develop a taste for the local cuisine. Semarang’s bakeries offered the most delicious and tempting pastries, iced cakes and cheesy wonders. They delighted the eye as well as the tastebuds. Among the skills the Dutch colonists left behind, surely their baking prowess would rate the highest.

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Java was also the salad bowl of Indonesia, growing almost every type of fruit and vegetable. They even grew apples on the mountains near Malang. Apparently, because the climate was never cold enough for the apple trees to lose their leaves, the ingenious orchardists brought in teams of workers at the appropriate time to hand-strip the trees of all their foliage. The trees, presumably, assumed winter had arrived and began the process of developing flowers and fruit. I tasted these apples and they were sweet, juicy and enormous – almost the size of a large grapefruit. Ayam goreng (fried chicken) of Yogyakarta was another culinary delight. We sometimes drove to Yogya for a day’s shopping and always ate at one of the ayam goreng restaurants in Jalan Malioboro. The chicken pieces appeared to be marinated in a thick, spicy sauce and then fried. The dish was crisp and delicious. Yogya was also famous for a type of ratatouille called gudeg, which incorporated the flesh of the nangka or jackfruit with coconut cream. Nangka is an enormous fruit about 60cm long and 30cm wide. It hangs like a giant teat from the thick trunk of the nangka tree as it is too heavy to hang from the branches. The flesh is bright yellow and sectioned like a custard apple. When cooked it turns grey and resembles meat. It may not sound very appetising, but it is. Street stalls sold rice, coconut and tapioca drinks in hectic colours. I enjoyed one called kopior, which was freshly scraped young coconut jelly mixed with sarsaparilla. There were also markisa or passionfruit drinks and tapioca drinks with tiny balls of boiled tapioca dyed bright green. Indonesian snack food is the best in the world — I could have lived on street food if there hadn’t been that certain element of danger. Good, healthy antibodies were a must and I was glad mine seemed to be in good shape. Just about every type of food you could imagine was sold in airtight packages, from fried bananas, goat meat strips, sliced tapioca root and seeds, to pork crackling, prawn wafers and chicken intestines, crispy fried. (The latter went particularly well with cold beer.)

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I loved the people in Java — they were warm and friendly and went miles out of their way to help you. There was a great feeling of excitement day and night, a feeling that something marvellous was about to happen. People didn’t get angry when a car pulled out in front of them or they were bumped by parcels or becaks. In cities such as Semarang, Solo and Yogya, in spite of their many problems, it seemed everyone was having fun.

Pelantungan, the women’s political prison Just before Christmas 1975, the Dutch pastor Co telephoned me to ask if I would like to visit the prison for women political prisoners at Pelantungan in the mountains west of Semarang. There was to be a Christmas party and he was unable to go himself because of prior commitments. I would travel by car with his wife, Phia, and another woman. Co had special privileges regarding prisons, as his main work was helping released tapols adjust to civilian life. Phia collected me at 3.30pm on the Wednesday before Christmas and we drove to the Catholic seminary, which was run by a Dutch priest who had lived in Indonesia for 40 years. He offered us liqueur chocolates while we waited for our companion. A man of compassion, his unusual manner and giggling way of talking was apparently the method he used to cope with the difficulties of life in Indonesia. Our travelling companion was a Dutch nursing sister called Truus, who was teaching nursing at a city hospital. She had a special interest in visiting the prison because, as a child of 11, she had been imprisoned with her mother and younger sister in Ambarawa during the Japanese occupation of World War II. We set off about 4.30pm in Truus’ car with a driver. The giggly Father promised to meet us at the prison with his singing group of 10 young people. We drove west from Semarang, following the coastline. We passed through the sugar towns of Kendal and Cepiring, then turned south at Weleri and headed towards the volcanoes, which rose like giant boils across the spine of Java. For about an

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hour we drove through rice paddies, sugar cane and tobacco fields until, as the altitude increased, the farms gave way to great jati (teak) forests. Passing through mountain villages, we eventually had to turn off the good road and, for the next 10km, the road became progressively worse. There were many people walking carrying poles, wood, cabbages, parcels and huge bundles of grass for goats and other animals. There were a few push-bikes and an occasional van or jeep. We had expected the area near the prison to be deserted, but it was normal farm land. In the middle of a small village of six houses, the car began to groan and squeal and the driver said he could go no further. It was a rough rock road and impossible for the little Datsun. We would have to walk the rest of the way. From this point on, the road was downhill. In our ‘wrong’ shoes (we should have been wearing mountain boots), we started the slide-walk down the rocky road. People looked at us curiously, but responded politely when we greeted them. We were looking for the prison but there were only cottages and children and curious adults coming uphill towards us. We came across a group of small, wiry, barefoot men carrying telephone poles on their shoulders. Although the evening air in the mountains was cool, they sweated as they strained up the 45degree slope, their bare feet gripping the sharp pointed stones that our leather shoes were slipping on. One kilometre on, we saw, at the bottom of the hill, a small white church with a slim blue cross on its gabled front. The road levelled off and, opposite the church, we came to an official-looking building. As we approached, a young man came out to greet us neatly dressed in dark trousers, a white shirt and a blue tie. Everyone else we had seen had been wearing traditional clothes. The man greeted us in Indonesian and ushered us into the building. The front room had long benches and a few rotan chairs. He asked us to make ourselves comfortable and left. We sat in silence after attempting, without success, to make conversation with two men already seated there. Was this the prison? Were these men the guards?

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We were offered cold tea and drank it in silence. Various women passed through and nodded to us shyly. Some were carrying folded bundles of laundry. Were they prisoners? Phia and Truus and I whispered a few words to one another. We were vaguely uneasy. We sat there for a further 25 minutes when there was a flurry of excitement outside and we saw the giggling Father approaching. He was in full safari outfit and followed by a group of 10 boys and girls, who were going to sing Christmas carols for the prisoners. ‘I came here last year,’ one young girl whispered to me. ‘It is very sad. Sometimes they [the prisoners] die. So far from their families.’ The young man who had met us returned and explained that he was the officer in charge of the 40 delinquent boys who were also prisoners there. He invited us to his house for a meal. At the officer’s house, we were welcomed by his wife and children. It was a Catholic household, with crucifixes and coloured pictures of the Virgin the only decorations. We were offered toilet facilities, which turned out to be very basic. To reach them, we passed through the kitchen where there were many children and cats and several little coke stoves with pots and pans on them, all on the floor. Chickens wandered around, squawking noisily, as they were hunted off the plates and utensils. We waited in a queue behind the choir in the midst of this confusion. When our turn came it was worse than expected. There was no electricity, just the smoky, gloomy light from hurricane lamps. We pushed the door through the murky haze and were just able to make out the vile, dark-looking sluggish stream of water which gurgled through a crack in the rocks. Two planks were laid across this stream and that was the full extent of the ‘facility’. If this was how the jailor lived, what of the jailed themselves? Dinner was served, buffet-style, with the usual green snake beans, kankong (native spinach), hot chillied scraps of meat, bean curd and mountains of rice.

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It was noticed that I ate little and some remarks were made about foreigners not liking Indonesian food, but it was kindly. We were all Christians together. Before leaving Semarang we had discussed what we could bring in the way of Christmas presents for the prisoners — soap, talcum powder, biscuits perhaps — but the Father had explained that this would not be allowed by the Kommandant. He suggested, however, that we should buy the inmates’ handiwork. Some of it was shown to us after the meal and it was all very beautiful: exquisitely embroidered sheets and pillowcases with drawn-thread designs and hand-finished embroideries on all seams and hems. There were fine needlepoint pictures and table mats. We assumed the money would go to the prisoners and bought as much as we could. This over, we were led outside again and to a large barracks-type hall, surrounded by kampong-style cottages, which looked quite attractive in the half light. Kerosene lights stood in the windows, which were draped by curtains. ‘This is where the prisoners live,’ we were told. We entered the hall, which was packed with row upon row of women on benches, all their faces turned expectantly towards us. We were told there were only 350 women inmates as 50 had recently been released. Every eye in that closely packed audience turned to watch us as we walked in. The women were dressed in the traditional kain-kebaya and had their hair dressed in the traditional manner — swept back tightly from the forehead and arranged into a large bun at the nape of the neck. Exceptions were among the young prisoners, apparently in their twenties, who wore white blouses with dark accordian-pleated skirts and had their hair bobbed, European-style. We were led to the front row and seated on rotan armchairs, facing the stage. We were to witness a Christmas concert and prayer meeting. The stage was decorated with a Christmas tree with flashing coloured lights and a replica of the Nativity scene. Cutout letters in red and green were hung across the top of the stage with the trditional words Selamat Hari Natal — Selamat Tahun Baru (Merry Christmas — Happy New Year).

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Phia, Truus and I turned in our seats to look at the ranks of prisoners, hoping to greet them personally, but found that two rows of quite different women separated them from us. These were the wives of the guards, most of them holding babies on their laps. We kept turning and smiling at the captive women, trying to pass on our thoughts. They all smiled back. The cheerful smiles had a devastating effect on me and, shedding a tear, I had to turn away for shame. The program began with opening prayers. Then the young girls in the white blouses stood up and, with a conductor, a tuning fork and no other accompaniment, began to sing a most complicated choral composition in five parts. It was the most perfect rendering of this type of music I had ever heard. We changed our front-row seats, so we could look directly at the prisoners, although from a greater distance. The three of us were deeply moved as we looked at these beautifully composed and dignified faces. There is no way to explain how the three of us felt. All thoughts of politics and religion aside, we had one great quality in common: we were women. As I sat there, watching the charade on the stage, I felt a violent cramp in my stomach. I assumed it was a reaction to the food we had just had and that it would soon pass. But the pains increased until I was forced to lie down on the bench. Finally, realising my stomach was about to reject the troublesome matter, I whispered to Phia, ‘I’m going to vomit! Can you get me outside?’ ‘I don’t think you can,’ she was apprehensive. ‘I don’t think they will let you out.’ She pointed to a group of prisoners behind a grille at the door, waiting their turn to go on stage. Guards in civilian dress stood by them and it was obvious that no personal contact with the prisoners was allowed. ‘I’ll have to go out! Now!’ I struggled up and lurched towards the door, hand over mouth, desperate. ‘Cepat! Cepat! Mau muntah [Quickly! I’m going to be sick]!’ Startled, the guards gave way and I just made it to the gutter running along the edge of the verandah. In seconds I lost the full contents of my complaining stomach. The convulsions stopped and I felt a cool, firm hand holding my forehead.

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‘Mau minum?’ It was a soft female voice offering me a glass of water. Murmuring thanks, I sipped the cool water, wiping the sour taste from my mouth. I sat there for a while with this kind woman in attendance. Then the officer, in whose house we had eaten, approached and said, ‘You must return to my house and rest.’ ‘No, no!’ I said, frightened. ‘I don’t want to be separated from my friends.’ ‘But you must lie down. You can’t stay here.’ I protested again and he said, ‘Then you must come into this next building and lie down there. It is where my delinquent boys sleep.’ Grudgingly I agreed to move and, with the kind woman holding my arm and accompanied by two guards, I was led into a long room. It was furnished barely, with 10 wooden, doublebunk beds. Three or four boys, aged about 12, sat about reading or just staring at the ceiling. I was led to a bed in the centre of the room. With the guards in attendance, the kind woman settled me down and fussed over me gently. She rubbed my feet and took my pulse and offered me more water. She asked the usual nursing questions in Indonesian as the guards and the boys looked on. Finally, apparently satisfied that all was in order, the guards had a brief word with the boys and left. A boy with a comic book moved nearer and sat on the next bed. No sooner had the guards withdrawn than the woman said to me in perfect English, ‘Are you feeling better now? Is there anything more I can do to help you?’ I was astonished and said, ‘You speak English! Are you a nurse here?’ ‘Yes, I am a nurse, but I am also a prisoner.’ I glanced at the boy who had obviously been sent to overhear our conversation. ‘It’s quite all right,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t understand English.’ ‘Is he one of the anak nakal [delinquent boys]?’ I asked.

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‘Anak nakal?’ she said, looking at him tenderly. ‘No, not an anak nakal. He is an anak negara. A child of the state. A child of Indonesia.’ ‘What crimes are they sent here for?’ ‘Oh, all sorts of crimes. They are thieves, vagrants, runaways, dope peddlers, pimps for their sisters. Some of them are murderers. They come from Yogyakarta. Life is hard for the poor. They are victims of circumstance.’ As the boy continued to stare intently at the comic book, the woman spoke to me in more detail and asked me about myself. I told her that I was spending a lonely Christmas that year as all four of my children were in other parts of the world. ‘I too have four children,’ she said. ‘We must be much of an age. I have not seen or heard of them for 11 years. The army came in and I was arrested in 1965 while working as a nurse in the Bandung Hospital. I have not seen my husband or children since that time. Through some prisoners I heard that [my husband] was killed.’ ‘Was he a communist?’ ‘No, but he was a trade unionist. I don’t know why I was arrested. I have never belonged to anything. I am a nurse. I think they must have arrested me because of my husband.’ She told me that she had been confined in a jail in Jakarta for five years then moved to Pelantungan six years ago. She had not been charged with any crime, never given counsel nor brought to trial. She thought her children were probably in the care of her brother. The oldest one would have been 23 and the youngest 16. In the previous year, due to some relaxation of government restrictions, she had received two stereotyped postcards purporting to come from her family and she was allowed to reply in the same restricted manner. She felt no confidence that the postcards had been delivered. She told me there were more than 300 women in the prison, ranging in age from 11 to 70 years. The 11-year-old was in utero when her mother was arrested. Several other children were being breast-fed at the time of their mother’s arrest. These

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children had spent their entire lives in prison, because they had chosen to stay with their mothers. The inmates were all well-educated. There were doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses and technicians. Until recently there had been two doctors in Pelantungan but they were removed, supposedly for release. This was doubtful, however, as Co spoke of an intake at Bulu Prison in Semarang at the same time, including two doctors. Conditions at Bulu were worse than at Pelantungan as the climate was hot and steamy and there were no provisions for gardening. The removal of the doctors had put a great strain on the nursing skills of my new friend. ‘I am the only fully trained person left here now,’ she said. ‘I have trained several young girls who work well but we have so many to look after. More than 300 prisoners, the 40 boys, the Kommandant’s wife and family and the guards and their families.’ The guards returned twice to the room during our conversation and on each occasion the nurse reverted quickly and easily to trivia in Indonesian. A nod from the comicreading boy satisfied the guards that all was well. ‘We are afraid of the guards,’ she said after the second check. ‘We are all afraid of the guards.’ ‘Do they ill-treat you? Hit you?’ ‘Yes, of course. But it’s not that. That is nothing. What we are afraid of are their reports. If they give us a bad report we will never be able to go home. We are not supposed to say we are afraid of them. That too will give us a bad report.’ ‘I was told you live in those cottages opposite with the lamps in the windows,’ I said. ‘Oh no. That is where the guards and their families live. Our place is much further down, and behind the hill. The rooms are like this one we are in now. But smaller. Much smaller.’ ‘How many people to a room?’ ‘Fifty.’ ‘How do you sleep?’ ‘We have double bunks like these, but a little bigger. We sleep five people to a bed. The doors are locked from the outside. We may not lock the doors on the inside.’

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A typical day began at 4.30am with the prisoners scrubbing and polishing their own and the guards’ quarters. ‘When our cleaning is finished we eat rice and then go to our work, sewing or gardening. Some prisoners are allowed to go to the nearest market and sell their vegetables. They use the money to buy things for us such as tea, sugar and dried fish. Guards always go with them and, of course, they have to be paid.’ I guessed that only a small proportion of this extra food reached the prisoners as their general health appeared to be well below that of the guards’ plump wives. They were all much thinner and had an exhausted appearance. In spite of their brown skin tones, their faces showed a bluish tinge below the eyes. The group of prisoners who particularly interested me were those in the choir, most of whom seemed to be in their twenties and looked too young to have been arrested in 1965. They were all bouncy and alert and looked much healthier than the long-term prisoners. I asked my friend about them and she said they had been imprisoned for only a few years. She didn’t know why they were there. New regulations allowed the inmates to listen to the radio — no news reports, just music — which was very welcome. ‘Do you know what has happened in the world since 1965?’ I asked. ‘No. What has happened?’ ‘The war in Vietnam is over.’ ‘What war?’ She was puzzled. How could I explain it to her? It now seemed so long ago. I told her of the moon explorers, satellites, the new American president, the death of Mao Tse Tung, but there really was no way to talk of these matters to a woman cut off from family, friends and the world for more than a decade. ‘Have you visited other prisons like this?’ she asked. ‘Have you been to Buru?’ I hadn’t, but I repeated what I had heard about the prison island in the Moluccas. One of Indonesia’s most famous writers, Pramoedya Toer, had been imprisoned on Buru with hundreds of others for many years, without books or paper and

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condemned to hard physical labour. These mainly intellectual men had been forced to clear the jungle and grow their own food. Remembering the political prisoners I had seen in Balikpapan, it seemed to me that there were political prisons throughout Indonesia that we in the West knew little about. ‘I am going to Jakarta in a few days,’ I told the nurse. ‘Tell me where you think your children are and I will visit them and tell them you are all right.’ She considered this seriously for a while and then said, ‘No. I don’t want you to go there. I don’t want my children to be hurt. I want them to have a happy life. I want a good report. I want to go home. I’m afraid that if you go there I may get a bad report. Then I will never go home.’ This was the second time she had said that: maybe I will never go home. Every other consideration was secondary to this intense mother’s desire. To go home to her children. On my left wrist I wore a number of bangles, mementos of different places I had visited. Sliding one from my arm, I said, ‘What you have told me is very disturbing. But please know that there are people in the outside world who know that you are here. People in England, Europe, America and Australia. They are trying to get you out of here. They are trying, but they are not trying hard enough. Next week I am going to Australia and I will tell them about you. We will all try much harder to get you out of here. We want you to be back with your children.’ I wanted to reassure her. I didn’t want her to lose hope. I gave her the bangle and asked her to wear it until she was released. I asked her to hold it whenever she felt there was no light at the end of the tunnel, as something tangible to remind her that she had not been forgotten by the world. In ordinary jails, a prisoner sentenced to a certain number of years at least knows when his incarceration will end. He can count the months and days. But for these women there was nothing to aim for, no point in time on which to fix hope; just interminable incarceration, old age, sickness and death. Many women had died in the prison, the nurse told me. They died and were buried far from family and relatives, alone and forgotten.

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She was about to take the bangle when the guards returned. Terrified, she slipped it under her leg. I felt her fear and trembling as she laid her hand on my already cooled forehead. The guards looked suspiciously at us and questioningly at the boy. He shrugged his shoulders and this appeared to satisfy them. They suggested perhaps I was well enough to return to the concert. I begged another glass of water and said I would go back soon. When they had gone my friend quickly slipped the bangle up her arm and under her tightly fitted kebaya. I told her my name and address, which she traced carefully on the bed sheet with her finger. I wanted her to know that if she was ever released, she could come to me. Could I write to her or send a parcel? ‘Of course,’ she said simply. ‘But I will never get your letter or parcel. The Kommandant will keep them. He will keep anything you send here. We have no paper or pencils. We cannot write.’ This was a great cruelty for educated people. ‘Now you must go back,’ she said firmly. ‘They will be suspicious.’ She rubbed the bangle, now under her flowered sleeve, and pressed my hand warmly. I then asked a stupid question, ‘Doesn’t anyone ever try to escape?’ ‘Oh no,’ she smiled. ‘Why don’t we escape? Because there is nowhere to escape to. We could not endanger our family and friends. There is nowhere to go. We must just wait. Wait and hope for a good report. A good report. I am just a victim of circumstance. That is all.’ I returned to the hall and watched the last hour of the concert. The Kommandant’s wife motioned me to sit beside her. She was a fat, jolly woman with 11 children. I told her how kind the nurse had been to me. ‘Yes. She is a good nurse. She looks after me and my family very well.’ There were several young children performing on the stage so I asked, ‘Are any of these your children?’ ‘No. They are all prisoners.’

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She glanced at the rows of women behind, watching the play, just like mothers all over the world at the end-of-term school concert. I had seen those same indulgent expressions so many times at the end of a school year. ‘Yes. They are all prisoners. The ibu ibu.’ This was a most polite way of referring to them as ladies. There was shame in her voice and on her face as she looked at them. She was a mother. She knew. The performance came to an end and the prison pastor, with a butch haircut, tight-pressed lips and looking uncomfortable in civilian clothes, gave the final benediction. The prisoners began to file out to return to their quarters. Phia, Truus and I stood by the door and shook hands with them as they left. Every one of them passed by us, just to grasp our hands, one by one, and smile, sometimes murmuring their name, hoping we would remember. ‘Selamat jalan [Go safely],’ they whispered. ‘Selamat tinggal [Stay safely],’ we replied. We left in the rain for the long drive back to Semarang.

The ways of the Javanese Javanese society is very formal at all levels, so I made a list of some dos and don’ts for living there. 1. Don’t point with your finger at anyone or anything. It’s regarded as one of the rudest things you can do. If you must point at something, use your chin. 2. Don’t pass anything to anyone with your left hand. The same applies to shaking hands in greeting. Indonesians use the right hand for all these actions, including eating. The left hand is used exclusively for the lavatory. 3. Don’t touch anyone on the head. The head is a sacred part of the body. Foreigners are forgiven, but NEVER tousle a child’s hair. 4. Don’t have a dog in the house if entertaining Javanese Muslims. If a dog should lick such a visitor’s hand, the hand would have to be washed immediately.

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5. Don’t talk to Javanese when they are eating. Eating is a private and personal affair and is done in silence. They do eat together in warungs and at parties. This is different. Saleh always took his food to a corner and turned his back at meal time. 6. Don’t begin your conversation with the matter at hand. Start off with pleasantries, inquiring about family members, etc. 7. Don’t say you have no religion. A religion of some sort is compulsory. If you don’t have one you must be a communist. 8. Don’t forget to bathe in the early evening. A typical greeting about 6pm is ‘Selamat sore, pak. Sudah mandi [Good evening, Sir. Have you bathed]?’. 9. Don’t flinch when greeted with a resounding sniff on each cheek. This is a warm form of greeting. 10. Do ask if you should remove your shoes before entering a house. 11. Do use rubber thongs when going into the bathroom. 12. Don’t expect to be introduced by name. It is customary to just nod politely and say, ‘Ibu. Pak [Madam. Sir].’ 13. Do wash your hands before eating in a Muslim restaurant. There is usually a wash basin in the corner. It is polite to do so. 14. Don’t be surprised if, after holding a lengthy conversation in Bahasa Indonesia with new friends, they say to you, ‘Do you speak Indonesian?’

The wedding Accepting a Javanese point of view or behaviour is one thing. Understanding it is another. All of us face similar problems in life, but our way of coping is so different from the Javanese way that we could be from different planets. They have a fatalistic attitude to life and a flexibility we might envy. If we could bend with the wind as they do, we might have less recourse to psychiatrists, childguidance counsellors and even courts of law. They see reason and kindness where we would find annoyance and frustration. Karmila, the cook, came to me with the news that her eldest son, Juari, was to be married. Twenty years old, he worked

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as a night watchman in Jakarta. His bride to be, Tuti, also worked in Jakarta and they planned to be married near her home town of Pacitan, on the south coast of Central Java. Karmila asked if she could have the day off to attend the wedding. As the day approached, I thought it would be a great opportunity for me to see a Javanese village wedding so I asked if I could go along. Karmila was delighted. ‘How do we get to Pacitan?’ I asked. ‘By bus, nyonya. It takes only a few hours and we will be back in the evening.’ ‘If I come with you, we can go in my car. How about that?’ I asked how many people would be going. ‘My kakak [elder sister], Kasmina, my nephew, Sabtu. Also Amin, too, if there is room.’ That meant six in the car, including the driver, Yantho. The boot of the car was filled with presents and Karmila also had the wedding cake, which she had made. With three women in the back seat and the men in the front, we set off at 7.30 in the morning. It was only a few hours’ drive, they said, so we should be back home in the evening. We drove for two hours on a good road south to the ancient capital of Solo, also known as Sala and Surakarta. All three names were used variously on signposts. Once the capital of the ancient kingdom of Mataram, it is now a centre of culture and batik production. The royal family had fallen on hard times and was selling its antiques to tourists. We turned east at a signpost reading ‘Madiun, 120km’. This town was written into Indonesian history as the site of an abortive communist uprising in 1948. We sped through village after village and it was midday by the time we rolled into Madiun and a service station. Directions were sought as the tank was being filled and we were told to turn south on the road to Ponorogo. The road was not very good and after an hour Yantho pulled to the side and stopped. ‘What’s up? Something wrong?’ ‘It’s time to eat, nyonya.’

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Karmila had prepared lunch with even some bread and butter for me. They ate their sticky rice, hot chillies and fried tahu and we drank hot tea from a Thermos. Refreshed, we set off again. It couldn’t be far now. ‘Very close, nyonya. Very close,’ Yantho said. We passed through Ponorogo, the road began to descend and soon entered a gorge. The road plunged down, forcing us through a series of s-bends, twisting and turning like an erratic corkscrew. We held our breath every time Yantho braked and changed down a gear. The cliffs above and below us were sheer and, at times, the road passed under overhangs of rock that seemed about to crash on top of us, casting us into the torrent below. The river was Kali Grindulu, which flowed from the high plains down to the Indian Ocean, forcing its way angrily through the inhospitable and desolate landscape. There were no people or villages, just the occasional tattered cassava patch, clinging for dear life to the scarred and barren hillsides. After one particularly nasty stretch of s-bends we passed a huge rock with large black letters written on its flat side. Translated, it read, ‘Any driver who has survived to this point deserves a medal. He is a hero.’ Our driver Yantho was such a brave man. Berani sekali! Pahlawan! A hero. We all cheered. It was almost four o’clock when we emerged from the gorge and found ourselves on a flat, cultivated plain running to the sea. We asked a farmer where to find the village of Gedung Sari. ‘Not here. Further on perhaps,’ he said. All inquiries met with negative replies. No one had heard of Gedung Sari. Finally we came into the neat, tree-lined seaside town of Pacitan. We made further inquiries and were directed to take a road leading out of town to the west. ‘A boy from Semarang marrying a girl from Pacitan? Yes, it’s on that road. You can’t miss it.’ The road was badly pot-holed and we proceeded slowly until we saw ahead of us a gathering of people, becaks and

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general commotion. Definitely a celebration. But it was Asem Sari, not Gedung Sari and it was a wedding, but the wrong one. We returned to the centre of town and asked again. ‘Yes. It’s at Bangun Sari. Out that way.’ They pointed east so we drove and drove, but it was wrong again. By now it was 6pm and almost dark. It was time to take drastic action. Over everyone’s horrified protests I said we must go to the police. Everyone said Indonesia was a police state so I figured the police would know where their villages were and who was getting married in them. ‘To the police station Yantho! Langsung [forthwith]! It’s our last chance before dark!’ Reluctantly, the car was turned round and, with everyone except me wearing a glum expression, we headed for the office of law and order. To our pleasant surprise, they were courteous and polite and the sergeant confirmed our address was wrong. He knew about the wedding, but it was at Rego Sari. He offered to show us the way and squeezed himself into the car. We set off with relief for our true destination, but it was not to be. There was a wedding, yes, but it was the wrong one again. By now it was dark and we all agreed we would never find Gedung Sari. Even the policeman agreed it was time to quit. He directed us to the only losmen (boarding house) in town, called Pengi Napan. We decided to stay overnight and return home the next day. No one could face the thought of a journey back through the gorge in the dark. Pengi Napan was clean enough and not expensive at 1000 rupiahs (about $A2) for an apartment or unit. There were two rooms, a bathroom and a verandah. The furnishings were one three-quarter bed in the back room and, in the front room, a couch, two chairs and a table. We decided Karmila, Kasmina and I would sleep in the bed, Yantho on the couch and Amin and Sabtu in the car. We were a strange group that evening, strolling up-town and inspecting the few dull shops. We decided on a visit to the cinema. The cost was 100 rupiahs each and the entertainment was in keeping with the price charged. It turned out to be parts of several films spliced together to make up one surrealistic whole.

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Beginning in German, it was a story about gangsters and helicopters. Suddenly it switched to covered wagons and bonneted ladies speaking American English. The last sequence was part of the war movie Night of the Generals. The audience was not worried by the odd jumble and all muttered positive comments on the way out. We returned to our losmen and prepared for sleep. Karmila and Kasmina insisted I go to bed first. I resisted for a while because the bedroom was hot and airless, but I finally went in and lay down. I probably wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway, I thought. I lay there alone for a while, but then decided it was stupid. The others were sitting outside in the cool, so I got up and joined them. The men had wandered off, but the two women were sitting on the verandah chewing away at their sirih (betel nut). ‘We wanted you to sleep first,’ said Karmila shyly, ‘because we thought you might not like us to eat sirih.’ The preparing and sharing of sirih is a formal affair with Indonesian women. It induces a mild euphoria, but also reddens the teeth if not cleaned off quickly. ‘Can I have some, too, please?’ I asked. They were delighted to share their nut, leaf and lime with me and laughed at my clumsy attempts to roll it with the tobacco. Once I got the knack I could see why they enjoyed it. It gave me a nice drowsy feeling. Later we went to bed and they insisted on giving me a really good pidgit or massage. I drifted off into a dreamless sleep. Morning comes early in hard and crowded beds and we were all wide awake at first light. At bath-time I committed an error of etiquette: I had not brought rubber thongs to wear into the bathroom. The ladies exchanged horrified glances as if to say, ‘How awful! Fancy coming without her thongs!’ Most courteously, however, I was lent a pair and decency was seen to prevail. The losmen included early morning tea in its charges and, as we sat drinking the pale fluid, served in tall glasses, Karmila had the brilliant idea of breaking out the wedding cake. There was no sense wasting a good cake. Fresh tea and wedding cake at six in the morning is a breakfast never to be forgotten.

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With eight or nine hours of driving ahead of us, we set off on an alternative route home, which would take us west then north to Wonogiri and Solo. Everyone was in a good mood in spite of the fact that the car was still packed with unpresented wedding gifts. Karmila was sad but brave. Beyond Pacitan we passed through wild, rugged country with only sparse vegetation. It was a devil’s playground of jagged limestone hills and giant rocks pitted with caves scattered across the terrain in haphazard fashion. I remembered from my guide book that this was the area where the hero, Diponegoro, hid for a time during his struggle against the Dutch in the previous century. One of the refuge caves is called Gua Tabahan and we made a small diversion to inspect it. Huge and cathedral-like, the vast cave was hung with oil lamps which illuminated, in eerie fashion, the stalagtites which hung all about like obscene testicles. We were told the stalagtites made a gong-like sound when struck with a rock and they could be played like a traditional gong orchestra. The guides who performed this were not available, however, so we missed this treat. Enjoying our tour and all thoughts of the missed wedding forgotten, we arrived in Donorejo and then Wonogiri. Having left the desolate southland behind, we were once more among the familiar rice paddies and coconut groves. It was five o’clock on Sunday evening when we arrived home in Semarang. My fellow travellers went straight to their kampongs and the next morning I was surprised to see a happy and smiling Karmila turn up for work early. She was beaming and so were the others. ‘Such lovely news, nyonya!’ she said. ‘Two boys from the kampong went to the wedding by bus and came home late last night.’ ‘They went to the wedding?’ I asked. ‘Yes. They were there. The bride was pretty and my son was handsome.’ ‘They actually found Gedung Sari?’ ‘You see, nyonya. This is what happened. My son gave me the wrong address. But it was not an accident. He did it on purpose. The real name is Gedung Asem. He said Gedung Sari so I could not find it.’

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‘He deliberately gave you the wrong address?’ ‘Yes. Isn’t he a fine boy? The path to Gedung Asem is over high hills and across a river. There is no road and he did not want me, his mother, to make the difficult journey on foot. He gave me the wrong address so I could not find it. What a beautiful boy to do that for his mother.’ Everyone nodded in agreement. A splendid and considerate son. They all smiled at me so I smiled and shared in their happiness at this bizarre explanation. We had driven for 16 hours and covered a distance of 500km. We had eaten the wedding cake for breakfast and brought all the wedding presents home, yet everyone was happy. Not just happy, but delighted. ‘What a fine boy,’ I repeated, shaking my head. This was Java, once again providing a great learning curve for foreigners.

The business of pleasure There was a great camaraderie between the expat wives in Semarang. We all came from different countries but we had the same problems to cope with: food, climate, language and shopping. The one big general store in town, where the change hung on wires and was shot up to the cashier in her eyrie high above the counters, was called Meliora, but was generally referred to by foreigners as Smelliora. Mahjong was a popular pastime several times a week, alternating with bridge, golf and tennis. We all shared our letters from home and talked a lot to one another and many women developed a fine talent for story-telling. All our secrets came out and, for many of the women, it was the first time they had shared such tales with a group of friends. For our husbands, however, the entertainment opportunities were limitless. Semarang, being a Chinese businessmen’s town, was flush with the pleasure business. There were bars, massage parlours, billiard saloons and discos everywhere. One of the milder joints was called the Mona Lisa. It was in an area known as the Zoo.

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To assuage my curiosity, Ed took me there one night. There was a bar in the foyer and then the ‘fishbowl’ where the girls were on display behind glass. They sat in rows, about a dozen or so, watching TV and doing crochet. The customer looked them over, made his choice, paid the cashier and the girl was led out. Together they proceeded to the dance floor where disco music played and strobe lights flickered. It was very dark, so the men’s identities were safe from prying eyes. During dance breaks the couples retired to booths surrounding the floor. According to informants, nothing went on there except tickle and giggle. Anything beyond that needed further negotiation. In fact, it was against the rules of the establishment. At closing time bodyguards were on hand to escort the girls home and make sure they had not arranged any after-hours appointments. If the girls made money on the sly, the owners would get no percentage, and percentage was the name of the game. Bruce Carlson from Canadian Pacific, who was an advisor to Indonesian Railways, explained to me the price structure for the ‘real thing’. Up on the hill, towards Gombel, there were some very pricey girls who charged 25,000 rupiahs or more. Prices descended on a graduated scale towards sea level, where the girls who hung around the fence at the railway yards charged a mere 300 rupiahs. Most of the girls came from country villages and saved their money to take home to help their families. As long as they did this they were not looked down on by society. It was only when they spent their money on their own pleasures that they became perempuan nakal or bad girls. If they had the bad luck to fall pregnant they had few choices. It was either take up the profession full-time or set themselves up as concubines to Chinese merchants or foreigners. A foreigner was a lucky catch in Semarang and several of the girls ended up getting married and going off to live in the US. They would not be accepted back in the village with an unwanted child, so a foreign man was one way out of a life of misery. With virginity lost, girls who didn’t care to go on the town had one other alternative: they could become medicine sellers. Often very young and beautiful, they squatted along the

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roadside with a basket of bottles on their backs. They had remedies for all sorts of ills such as rheumatism, headache, influenza or masuk angin (flu), bad back, nausea or loss of virility. The potions were cooked-up in the kampongs and the ‘good’ girls took to the streets with them and were able to scrape a living selling their products by the glass. On a more business-like level were the herbal drug companies, which produced the same sort of remedies in a more scientific, sophisticated and hygienic way. The three largest in the country operated out of Central Java. Nyonya Meneer, Jamu Djago and Air Mancur were rich companies and their products were sold throughout Indonesia. Indonesians have great faith in jamu, the herbal remedies. One company put out a product for those suffering from lack of virility called ‘Sek-Hot’. I inquired about the ingredients and learned they included bark and leaves from Kalimantan, ground buffalo horn and snake juice. Other establishments for those seeking sexual pleasure were the billiard parlours. When you paid for a game of snooker, you were provided with a pretty girl as your opponent. The girls were all excellent players and could usually out-play any but the most skilled. After the game, drinks were taken and arrangements made for more sensual experiences out the back. Massage parlours also abounded in Semarang offering plain, medium or full massages and there were many large discos with floor shows and strippers. My only personal experience of such an enterprise came about by accident. One night, between Christmas and New Year, we were partying at the Carlsons’ house. Bruce’s wife, Carmen, was a French Canadian and had a temperament to match. We were all feeling rather jaded after several weeks of parties and, just to cause a stir, Carmen suddenly said to Bruce, ‘Someone told me that you are a shareholder in a brothel in Candi Baru.’ ‘Really! Who said that?’ ‘Your friend Hadi, the banker.’ Hadi was a sharp operator, the owner of a small private bank, who often visited the Carlsons but never brought his wife along. Carmen was irritated by this and told him he was no longer welcome unless he sometimes brought is wife, but he

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continued to keep her at home. He said that was her place as an Indonesian wife. ‘Hadi!’ said Bruce. ‘I don’t believe you, Carmen. Why would he say that?’ ‘Because you have something going together. All those private talks you have. And going out in the evening. It’s that place called the Town House in Sultan Agung Street. Just near the other one where the Japanese girls are. The driver told me.’ It was a challenge and Bruce took it up directly. ‘OK. It’s now midnight. If you want to prove the point, we’ll go there now. And you can ask the owner if I’m a shareholder.’ Carmen looked at me and said, ‘Shall we go?’ I agreed so we got in the car and drove along Jalan Kawi, past the Princess Elizabeth Hospital and pulled into the driveway of an old Dutch colonial house. Twin gates were opened by an attendant and we drove into a huge, dark garage. Once inside, the great door clanged shut behind us. ‘I suppose they hide the cars in here so they won’t be recognised,’ Carmen whispered. We entered the house through a shabby foyer, decorated with half-dead pot plants, which joined a large drawing room with bay windows. Seated in the bays, on tattered cushions, were girls in pretty dresses chatting to one another. Along the hall, seated on a bench, were some Indonesian boys. We took a seat at one of the four tables and waited to see what would happen. A thin, middle-aged woman approached us and asked what we would like to drink. We ordered beer and were brought four bottles on a tray with glasses. Bruce and Ed said nothing but observed Carmen and me in a way I remember as seemingly supercilious but amused. We started to drink, feeling embarrassed and searching for something to talk about. The girls and boys glanced at us every now and then and giggled. After an interval, the woman returned and, ignoring the men, addressed Carmen and me. ‘Have you been long in Semarang?’ ‘No. Not long. About a year.’ ‘And what is your work?’

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‘I’m a teacher,’ I said and Carmen said she was a cook. We realised, without a word being spoken, that the woman thought we were in Indonesia on our own and that Ed and Bruce were pick-ups. No man would bring his wife to such an establishment. Glancing at the young boys sitting along the wall, I asked, ‘The boys over there, are they bodyguards?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they are bodyguards but they are also available.’ Then, looking at both of us directly, she assumed a businesslike attitude and said, ‘Which one would you like? They are all available.’ I was suprised, shocked and embarrassed. The men, talking dully to one another at the far end of the table, heard this exchange, but said nothing. Carmen looked at me and decided to be daring. She wanted to sting Bruce into some sort of reaction. She was a very sparky lady and, to my surprise, she leaned across the table and said in a loud voice, ‘I like that one at the end.’ ‘Of course,’ said the woman. ‘His name in Sunni. Sunni! Come!’ The boy, who looked about 18 years old, came and sat beside Carmen. Speaking practically no Indonesian, she offered him a glass of beer and looked to me for conversational help. We found out that he came from a village and liked working there. He was, in fact, 18 and had many brothers and sisters. His answers were monosyllabic and every now and then he looked nervously at the woman in charge. The girls in the bay window whispered to one another. All eyes were on us with the exception of those of Bruce and Ed. They ignored the whole scene and were obviously putting us to the test. Although no linguist, Carmen was a natural communicator and before long she and the boy were laughing together as though they had just met at a party. The woman turned to me and said, ‘And you, nyonya. Which one would you like? They are all good boys.’ Things were developing in a way we hadn’t planned. The game was getting serious. I said, ‘The one in the middle. Who is the one in the middle?’

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‘His name is Budi.’ She motioned him across and now I had my own companion. Budi was from Wonosobo near the Dieng Mountains. When he learned that I was Australian he told me that our former Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, had visited Wonosobo with President Suharto. It was a big news story, as they had gone together into a secret cave never previously entered by foreigners. ‘Budi is very popular here,’ said the woman. ‘He’s a clever boy and is studying motorbike repair in the day-time.’ The whole affair was being conducted with great politeness and decorum. The woman was an artist. We could have been interviewing the young men to take part in a film or as prospective immigrants to Australia. With her next question I knew we had reached the point of no return. ‘For Budi and Sunni the price is the same: 15,000 rupiahs [$A30]. Is that satisfactory?’ The men continued to ignore us, probably wondering how far we would go, but offering no help whatsoever or showing the slightest interest. The woman was obviously now sure we had no personal connection with them. ‘If you agree to the price,’ she pressed home her offer, ‘I will show you to the room.’ Carmen’s eyes were round like saucers. She would never give in. Nor would I. We wouldn’t let the men’s aggressive passivity defeat us. We would stick together and beat them at their own game. In a dull dream, I was led away by the woman with Budi following. We went down a long corridor and into a bedroom with two beds and a wash basin. It was simply furnished and clean, with one chair. The chair was indicated for me and the woman and the boy sat on one of the beds. She was cool, calm and businesslike, the boy was shaking with fear. I felt sorrier for him than I did for myself and wondered how I was going to get out of this awful mess. The fun had gone from the game. ‘We have settled on the price, nyonya, but not the time,’ the woman said. ‘It is R.15,000 for the first hour, R.7,000 for the second and R.3,000 for the third. Or, if you prefer a flat rate for the whole night, it is R.30,000.’

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I was in a nightmare, being sucked along in that slow, relentless, forward movement you experience in dreams. Where were the men? Where was Carmen? What was I doing with this woman and this terrified boy? I wanted to cry ‘help’ but my tongue was glued to the roof of my mouth. ‘The time, nyonya?’ The woman was insistent. I tried to speak and tell her it was all a joke, that our husbands were outside, that we were just having a game. But she fixed me with her keen eyes and repeated with impatience, ‘I must know the time! How long do you want?’ At that instant, like the shriek of an alarm clock that saves you from the ultimate horror in a dream, there was a piercing scream from the room down the hall. It was Carmen, and her voice in full Gallic panic echoed around the walls. ‘My friend! She’s in trouble! I must go to her!’ I fled down the corridor, back to the room we’d left and there was Carmen yelling her head off. ‘Bruce! Bruce!’ I understood her garbled words now. ‘He’s gone off with one of those girls. Bruce!’ She yelled louder. Her former self assurance had vanished. I noticed that Ed had disappeared also and that the girls and boys were all crowded into the bay window, looking in dismay at the pandemonium. The woman entered and spoke angrily. ‘Be quiet! Please be quiet! This is a respectable house. We can’t have any trouble here. The police will come. Please tell your friend to be quiet.’ Carmen was quite hysterical by now. I managed to calm her down but not before there was a loud rap at the door and two police officers came in. They spoke in Javanese to the woman and appeared to be discussing this unforgiveable foreign behaviour. Beer was served to the police and the woman gestured toward the girls, apparently offering them, on the house, by way of pacification. Then Bruce and Ed came through the door and Bruce said, ‘What’s the matter Carmen? What’s all this racket about?’ ‘Where did you go?’ Her voice was rising dangerously again.

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‘We went to the lavatory,’ he said. We wanted to leave immediately but the woman insisted we stay and buy beer for the police as we had damaged her reputation. The woman said to me, ‘I’m sorry things have been spoiled for you, nyonya. Maybe you will come again another night. Give me your phone number. I can look after you.’ We finished our beers, nodded to the police and left. Several days later I returned to Australia on a month’s leave. When I came back I had not been in the house more than an hour when the phone rang. Ed answered it and, slightly puzzled, said, ‘It’s for you. An Indonesian. Must be from the Fakultas where you teach.’ Something told me it wasn’t the Fakultas but something I didn’t want anything to do with. My instinct was correct. ‘Hello nyonya,’ said a soft, snaky voice. ‘This is Colonel Sudono. Would you like to come to the Town House for a drink tonight?’ ‘I’m sorry. I’m very busy. I’m going to Jakarta.’ ‘Kasian [I’m sorry], nyonya, I am so anxious to meet you. I will call again later.’ Hanging up in relief, I turned to Ed, ‘It wasn’t the Fakultas. It was a man from the Town House.’ ‘What rubbish,’ he said. ‘As if they’d ring here and ask for you.’ ‘It was Colonel Sudono.’ ‘Don’t be stupid. You imagined it.’ He refused to believe me, so I asked him, ‘Why don’t you believe it? Don’t you know that those places are just looking for business wherever they can find it? Money is money. It’s only a business enterprise. If they can make money out of women customers it’s the same thing as making it out of men. That woman probably sold my phone number to the colonel for a nice profit.’ It was months before the colonel gave up calling.

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Trouble in Timor Achmad Yani Airport, where Ed kept the helicopter, seemed to become a staging post for army helicopters on their way to and from East Timor. Every week or so a flight came in and the repair shop would be very busy. Saleh told me that the political prison in Semarang had recently taken in 60 new prisoners. He visited his old mates there and said the new prisoners were all army personnel from East Timor, who had refused to obey orders. He didn’t know what action they had refused to participate in. From news reports on Radio Australia of mass killings of women and children and the massacre of several hundred people on a jetty in Dili, one could only guess why those men may have mutinied. There was very little in the local newspapers or on the radio about East Timor, apart from occasional reports about the Indonesian Liberation Army being welcomed by crowds of Timorese. A pilot friend from Balikpapan, Bambang Irawan, dropped in for a visit on his way back to Jakarta from East Timor. He was the only Indonesian captain working for our helicopter company and he had been sent to East Timor on cargo duty as the island was prohibited to foreign pilots. I asked him what the job was like. ‘Very dangerous!’ he said quickly. ‘We are taking supplies from Dili to the other side of the island. People are shooting at us from the ground all the time. So what we do is take off, fly straight to 5,000 feet, continue at this altitude and then straight down to land when we arrive at our destination.’ ‘You never fly low?’ ‘No! Never! It is too dangerous. As well as shooting, they throw things like spanners and hammers up at the blades. Anything they can get their hands on. Even bunches of bananas! We stay in Dili or Bacau. They are the only safe places.’ This story of Bambang’s did not tally with local newspaper reports, which spoke of the total pacification of the island. There was obviously a lot going on in East Timor that we knew nothing about.

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The emptiness of foreigners When Saleh’s son Katria was married in Kali Langseng, we were invited to the wedding. Indonesian weddings were mysterious affairs for Westerners. Apart from the long speeches, nothing much seemed to happen and everyone would sit around listlessly. Saleh was pleased that we went and introduced us while the bride and groom sat stiffly in their wedding chairs, wearing formal Javanese wedding garments — all black velvet and gold. We gave the bridal couple money as a present and also the traditional set of drinking glasses. Saleh was looking so much bettter than when he first came to us. As well as eating better he regained his dignity as a human being after so many years in jail and suffering the dispiriting indignity of being unable to find a job because of his tapol status. Although he had been a pragmatic communist for many years, Saleh’s Javanese beliefs were deeply embedded. A popular Javanese legend concerned Ngai Loro Kidul, the Goddess of the South Seas. According to the story, 900 years ago, during the first Mataram Empire, Ngai Loro Kidul came out of the sea at Parangtritis on Java’s south coast and married the Sultan, Senopati. She was immortal and lived with her children, court and armies beneath the waves, and continued as consort to all subsequent sultans, even to the present day. Some of the world’s deepest ocean trenches lie off the southern coast of Java and the beach at Parangtritis is grey and windswept and full of foreboding. The surf is dangerous with rips and currents running every which way and local tradition warns visitors that the Goddess is partial to young men wearing green shirts. Several foolhardy tourists were reported drowned there during our time in Java. We were told there was an underground tunnel from the Sultan’s palace in Yogyakarta, which led directly to the sea at Parangtritis, 20km away. I had seen the entrance to this tunnel in the Water Palace in Yogya and was able to walk in for a few metres. It is now sealed, I am told, because it became unsafe. According to the story of Ngai Loro Kidul, once a year the Sultan made a ceremonial journey down to the sea to give

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offerings to the Goddess. Flowers, coconuts and incense were cast into the waves and the Sultan would enter the sea to spend time with his watery wife. In former days, he made the journey under the waves in a horse-drawn carriage but now he used a Mercedes Benz. ‘But how does the car go through the water?’ I asked Saleh. ‘The sea opens up and there is a good dry road all the way,’ he told me. Ngai Loro Kidul, who could also fly, came to the aid of the Sultan and his people in times of stress. The last recorded rescue mission was during the war against the Dutch when the Sultan and his forces were beseiged in the palace. The Goddess came from the sea and encouraged the Sultan to make his bold and defiant challenge to the Dutch army surrounding him. On instructions from the Goddess he issued an ultimatum: ‘We will never surrender. Destroy the palace with your guns if you wish, but we will never surrender.’ The Dutch turned away from the confrontation and no shots were fired at the beleagured garrison. Yogyakarta remains to this day a separate city state within the boundaries of Central Java. One day the local radio reported the following news story: Three men were hunting for crabs on the beach at Parangtritis when suddenly they were engulfed by a huge wave. Two of them managed to struggle back to safety but the third was lost. After hours of fruitless searching the man was presumed drowned. In the afternoon the man’s wife came to the beach to make offerings of coconuts and flowers. As the mourning party was preparing to return to Yogya, the lost man came out of the sea towards them. He was dazed but unharmed. He was unable to explain where he had been or what had happened to him. We were all listening to the news on the radio in the kitchen and I wondered if I had understood correctly. ‘Was that a news story? A real event?’ I asked Saleh and the others. ‘Yes. It happened yesterday.’ They were all interested but not surprised. It was then that Sal told me the whole story of Ngai Loro Kidul.

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‘Do you believe that the Sultan really goes into the sea in his car?’ I asked Saleh. He looked at me for a moment and, choosing his words very carefully, said, ‘I wouldn’t say that I believe it. But then I wouldn’t say that I disbelieve it.’ ‘Sal, you are an educated man. You know a car can’t go under the water and then drive off.’ ‘No. It can’t. I agree with that.’ ‘Then if you don’t disbelieve it, what do you think happens?’ ‘I don’t know, because I have never seen it happen. If I could see it then maybe there would be an explanation.’ ‘Has anyone seen it happen?’ ‘Many people. I’ve met people who have seen it.’ ‘Has it been filmed?’ ‘No. But it has been reported on the radio.’ ‘Tell me the truth, Sal. I don’t mean the truth as seen by the village people. What do you, Mohammed Saleh, think happens. Is it true?’ Saleh looked at me with his keen intelligent eyes and thought deeply for a few moments. I could see he was struggling with his inborn Javanese sensibilities and his learned knowledge of the world, with his early indoctrination in Islam and his later indoctrination in the pragmatic theories of Marxist communism. ‘Nyonya, all I can say is that there are certain things in Java for which there is no logical explanation. You will never understand because, like all foreigners, you are empty.’ He didn’t mean this as an insult but as a statement of fact. He bowed politely to me and left the room. That was the first time a Javanese told me I was empty. It was not to be the last.

Kartika and the Affandi family In 1977 we spent a weekend in Yogyakarta, where I made a marvellous new friend, Kartika.

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We had visited all the sights in Yogya — the Sultan’s Palace, the Water Palace, the silver and batik factories — and then we drove up to Kaliurang for the night. Kaliurang was a cool mountain resort on the slopes of the active volcano, Merapi. It was used as a recreation area by the colonial Dutch and had many delightful chalets which offered accommodation. From our chalet, it was a pleasant walk to Plawungan, from where we had a clear view of the volcano which was smoking lazily and appeared placid but had at times caused great destruction. On the chalet’s terrace the next morning we enjoyed a traditional Javanese breakfast: warm tea, thick, black and sweet coffee, bread spread with butter and chocolate chips, hardboiled eggs and bananas. It was here that we met the other guests: Don, an American, and his Indonesian companion, Kartika. She was the daughter of Indonesia’s most famous painter, Affandi, and his wife Maryati. Although he denied it, and said he just painted pictures, Affandi was regarded by art experts as an expressionist painter and enjoyed a high reputation in Europe and America. He was also a Hero of the Republic of Indonesia, revered at all levels of society. From peasant to President, he was a much-loved person. His early paintings recorded the revolution and its heroes, and from that time he always painted the life and hard times of the ordinary people of Indonesia. In the 1930s he supported his wife and child by painting the lurid canvas hoarding posters for movies, which are still seen outside movie houses throughout Indonesia. For a while, when Kartika was a child, the family lived on a tennis court in Surabaya, under a tent formed by the hoardings leaning against the high netting. They cooked, ate and slept there while Affandi honed his painting talent. After World War II, they moved to India on a grant sponsored by Gurkha officers in the British Forces of Occupation in Indonesia, who recognised Affandi’s brilliance. When Kartika was 16 they moved to London and it was there that she met up with a young Indonesian painter, Sapto

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Hudojo, who was a protégé of Affandi. Sapto asked for Kartika’s hand in marriage and they were wed at London’s Indonesian Embassy in a full Muslim ceremony. Her art studies at the London Polytechnic were interrupted by the birth of her first child, Helfi. It was a prolific marriage, giving Kartika little time to paint. She had seven children before she was 30. Sapto took a second wife and Kartika said it didn’t worry her unduly at the time as she was in that vegetable-like state women fall into when they have a lot of small children. She also enjoyed the help of wife number two. They were living in Yogya and, as the children emerged from the baby stage, Kartika was able to go back to her painting and take more interest in what was going on around her — in particular, what the handsome Sapto was up to. Her secretary was pregnant as was one of the kitchen girls. She suspected that Sapto was the father. Having inherited her father’s strong streak of independence and having experienced life abroad, she decided it was time to put her foot down. But she came to this decision a bit too late. Wife number two, who had produced no children, had moved out and had her marriage annulled and it was at this critical moment that Sapto announced that he wanted to marry again. He asked Kartika’s permission, according to Muslim law, and was told, ‘No! I don’t give you permission. I am your wife and mother of your seven children. I don’t give you permission!’ ‘But I love you as my wife. And I love this young girl, too.’ ‘Then take her as your mistress.’ ‘She won’t agree to that. I have to marry her.’ ‘Then I will divorce you.’ This was an unheard-of declaration for a Muslim woman. Sapto said, ‘You can’t do that!’ ‘I can and I will.’ ‘All right. But you won’t win.’ He went ahead and married the girl and Kartika proceeded. As their marriage was a Muslim one, she appealed to the Religious Court (it was a religious, not a civil matter).

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For two years she argued her case and presented her opinions and reasons for such a drastic decision. Such actions were unheard of in Indonesia at the time and caused much notoriety. In spite of her high social standing as daughter of a hero of the Republic, Kartika was snubbed and cut off from the society of her peers. She was regarded as a scarlet woman, without morals, a renegade and disturber of family life. When the court finally gave its decision and agreed to terminate the marriage, she became a leading figure in the women’s liberation movement. She was the first woman in Indonesia to be granted a divorce by the Religious Court. Magazines everywhere clamoured for her story and her photograph appeared in publications all over the country. She was a striking beauty, mother of seven, a talented artist and daughter of an Indonesian hero. It was great copy. It was a victory for her, but not the sort of victory a Western woman would have been pleased to accept. The Islamic Court awarded her a divorce, freedom to marry again, custody of the children, but no money. Not one rupiah. It was a bitter victory, but she took up the challenge and flung herself into the struggle to survive. She painted everything, everyone, everywhere. She tried her hand at commerce, buying antique kebayas and batiks to sell to the Americans. She turned the front of her house into a shop and displayed wayang puppet figures for sale to collectors along with her fine collection of Irian Jaya artefacts. Having adopted an orphan, she now had eight children to support and, when I met her at Kaliurang, she was struggling to survive. Kartika was the one Indonesian friend I made who had the same world view as my own. She was a link between East and West and had an understanding of both cultures. Even though her parents were Muslim and hadji, having been twice to Mecca, her attitudes to life were the product of their deeply held compassion for the human race and her own experience of being a woman in a Muslim society.

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Artists are held in high esteem in Indonesia. Affandi travelled for free on the national airline Garuda when he went abroad. That was one of the many contradictions of the complex Indonesian society: the Indonesia of President Suharto was generally regarded as a military dictatorship, which it undoubtedly was, but artists were highly respected. Many of Affandi’s paintings depicted the life of the ordinary people of Indonesia — the beggars, the becak drivers, the cripples, the little people. He painted a view of Indonesia one would have thought the Government would not have been happy to have exposed to the world. Kartika, although not having attained the status of her father, was granted special dispensation when she travelled on domestic airlines and this was in spite of her notoriety as the flag-carrier for the rights of women. Although he was a millionaire, his paintings commanding the highest prices at home and abroad, Affandi still spent much of his time with the poor, the rejected, the most desperate of his fellow Indonesians. He spoke with people on their own level. He was just as happy, even in his seventies, to spend the night under an awning with ragged becak drivers, smoking clove cigarettes, drinking tea and discussing their views of life, as he was in the grand salons of France, Germany or Belgium. More so, he told me. A self-taught painter, Affandi exhibited in India, America, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels, Rome, Milan, Venice, Sao Paulo, Cairo, all over Asia and in Australia. His honours included a gold medal from the Indonesian Government, a Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Singapore and the 1977 Dag Hamarskjold Prix International in Italy. He remained a simple man and his paintings have been described as not only works of art in the physical sense, but with a spirit behind them which uplifts all of mankind. His marriage to Maryati was in sharp contrast with Kartika’s to Sapto Hudoyo and her modern view on the subject of marriage itself. When Maryati was about 40 and their only child was Kartika, adored by both, she said to Affandi, ‘You are still a

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strong and virile man. We have only one child but I think you should have more. As I do not want to bear any more children I think you should take a second wife.’ Affandi agreed, so Maryati searched for a suitable girl and Affandi was married for the second time to a woman of his first wife’s choosing. The second wife bore him several children and they lived in their own house not far from Maryati’s. Affandi called his house his banana leaf in the sky and the second family was well cared for, but Maryati remained the true number-one wife and the one who accompanied him to official functions and on trips abroad. They were a most devoted couple and a joy to be with. This was a way of life Kartika could not accept. For her, Sapto was her husband and there was no room for wife number two. She said to me, ‘I couldn’t understand my mother doing that. I couldn’t.’

The Chinese in Semarang Kapok trees grow prolifically in Java. They are huge trees, bigger than oaks and when their seed pods burst, a white fluff showers the ground like freshly fallen snow. It’s a strange sight in such a hot and steamy country. I decided to make eight batik-covered cushions for the floor so the students could lounge around while they were watching TV. They were all addicts, particularly for the 9pm news in English followed by Adventures in Paradise, Hawaii Five-O or Kojak. The best stuffing for the floor cushions was kapok so, after hunting around, I found there was a street where mattresses and pillows were made and kapok could be bought by the kilo. The shop I chose was down a back alley off Jalan Pinggir. My knock was answered by a Chinese woman who opened the door to a room filled with floating wisps of white down. Young girls were sitting in heaps of kapok, stuffing it into mattress bags. Most of them were coughing and wiping their eyes. ‘This is terrible,’ I said. ‘They are breathing all this kapok into their lungs. Surely they should be wearing masks?’

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The woman turned a blank, expressionless face to me. ‘They are used to it,’ she said. ‘They are used to it.’ There were often stories in the local paper about the behaviour and attitudes of foreigners living in Indonesia. When I read them I thought they were referring to us, the expatriates, but it seemed the foreigners in question were the Chinese. Although they had been living in Indonesia for generations, many of them did not have Indonesian citizenship. They numbered in the millions and were stateless as they could not return to China. Chinese people are very hard to get to know and the only one I had any sort of conversation with was our doctor, Dr Bong. He was a good doctor and loved by all. We began a friendship with a Chinese lawyer and his wife, who was a doctor, but it petered out. They seemed afraid to be friendly with us. Although they were professional people, they owned and ran an electrical appliance shop. They said they were saving all their money so they could emigrate to the US. The man, Haris, said, ‘There is no place for us in Indonesia any more. They don’t like us and they don’t want us here. There is no way we can progress.’ Our landlord, Mr Poo, was Chinese. He was also a dealer in clove cigarettes and second-hand cars. He asked me one day, ‘How much do you pay your servants?’ It was a pushy question but I answered, ‘We pay above the average wage. They get R.12,000 [$A24] a month.’ ‘And rice?’ ‘All the food they want.’ He laughed scornfully and said, ‘You foreigners are foolish. I pay only R.4,000 [$A8] a month plus rice. And they get time off only once a year.’ He walked off laughing. Chinese, called Tionghoa (pronounced Tiong-wha) in Indonesia, had easily recognisable names, just as many Jewish people did in Europe, with their Green, Gold and Silver prefixes. Like the Jews they were often regarded as outsiders. My dentist, for example, was Dr Damarwi, which was a typical Chinese/Indonesian name. Other Chinese/Indonesian names

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were Limanto, Sutanto, Tanzil, Sutandiyo and Halim. The key was the introduction of ethnic Chinese names such as Wi, Lim and Tan, which were added to Indonesian stems. Damarwi was a good dentist but thought we Europeans were cowards for wanting pain-killing injections. He said to me one day, ‘I have Indonesians in the next room here, all having their teeth drilled, some of them even having the wrong teeth drilled, all without painkillers, and none of them are complaining. I think for foreigners it would probably be better to give you a general anaesthetic.’

Bataks and the mystic woman Although I had visited much of the eastern and central parts of Indonesia, the one place I had never been was the big island of Sumatra, so I was thrilled when Kartika asked if I would like to accompany her there on a painting expedition. I jumped at the opportunity as travelling with her was always an adventure. She knew all the people in the art world and was always welcomed wherever she went. It was a chance to get to know people in Sumatra in a way impossible for an ordinary tourist. The trip turned out to be more than an art expedition, however, as once more I was to experience that inexplicable and arcane level of communication which is an elemental factor in Indonesian daily life: speaking with the dead. Our daughter Gina had returned to Australia and was attending art school in Sydney while boarding with friends. Hereward had settled into the International School in Jakarta and was boarding with an English family. The family came from near Newcastle in England and spoke with that lilting Geordie accent which was so attractive. He was enjoying the change of being back in a classroom again after three years in the correspondence school. With the children happily settled in, I was ready when Kartika arrived in Semarang with her painting gear and we flew to Jakarta to make direct connection with a Merpati flight to Medan at the northern end of Sumatra, just across the Malacca

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Straits from Penang in Malaysia. It was a long flight, mostly over jungle, and on the way Kartika explained her plans. We would stay in the Artists’ Colony for the first few days as the accommodation was very cheap and she would be able to make contact with other artists and gallery owners. After that we would set off for Karo Batak and Toba Batak country, where she proposed to make a number of paintings. On this trip I was able to observe her very businesslike approach to her art. No airy-fairy dreamer, she was a good manager as well as a good artist and was also a great help to her father in the management of his affairs. She kept an eye on his accounts to make sure he didn’t give too much money away to over-enthusiastic and sometimes voracious family members. She told me that he probably supported about 60 relatives who had trouble finding enough money for themselves and their families. As I had learned in Balikpapan, this was the Indonesian way. For the first time since her divorce from Sapto Hudojo, Kartika had decided to use colour in her paintings. For three or four years after the break-up, which for her was a grieving period, she had painted only in black and white and, while many of the paintings were quite dramatic, particularly her selfportrait and a series on Dyak life on the Mahakam River in Kalimantan, colour was so much a part of her personality I was glad I would be seeing her in action with a polychromatic pallette. After three days in the Artists’ Colony, we set off for Berastagi by bus, although this town was not our final destination. We were travelling into Batak country, inhabited by two different tribal groups, the Toba Bataks and the Karo Bataks. The origin of these people is obscure but the common belief is that they came to Sumatra from somewhere over the sea, possibly India, and made their homes in their stranded ships, roofing them with thatch. It was a fanciful story but quite charming, as the houses I had seen on postcards certainly resembled boats. Kartika had heard that in Barus Jahe (ginger village), there were four intact and inhabited 100-year-old thatched-roof

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boat-houses and she wanted to paint them before they were lost. Arriving in Berastagi, we found there was no normal bus service to Barus Jahe but if there were enough prospective passengers, a bus-taxi would take us there. A bus-taxi in Batak country is like something out of a Mad Max movie. The one we found was a 30-year-old Chevvy with the wings, stars, blazons and the wide body typical of the 1950s vintage, still retaining, in patches, some of its original bright-blue and silver duco. But, sadly for us, it was full. ‘Mari! Mari [Come along]!’ said the driver. ‘Lagi dua bisa [We can take two more].’ We were aghast as there was no room for any more. We shook our heads in disbelief but, undaunted, the driver whipped around the back of the car and opened the boot, pointing triumphantly to its gaping mouth. ‘Naik! Cepat! Mobil ini yang terahir [Hop in quickly. This is the last taxi tonight].’ We threw our bags on to the boot lid, using them as cushions, while the driver tied the lid firmly to the rear bumper with a stout rope ‘Endak mau hilang penumpang [I don’t want to lose any passengers],’ he muttered. We appreciated his thoughtfulness and felt less apprehensive, remembering that the driver was paid only at the end of the trip, so he had a vested interest in seeing that we arrived at our destination. After a heavy, grinding start, we took off, gradually picking up speed and, as we bumped along the heavily pot-holed road, we marvelled at the ingenuity of the Americans who had designed such machines years ago and at the fact that they were still in use. It grew dark and we hung on grimly every time the car gave a great lurch and swivelled sideways in the mud. About 9pm the car came to a halt and the driver shouted, ‘Barus Jahe!’ We had arrived. I can’t remember now but I think the fare was about $2. They should have paid us for our endurance. Kartika had an introduction to the lurah or mayor of Barus Jahe. The very old, but still upright and alert man was

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Raja Sibaak Pansiun, the fifth Raja of Barus Jahe and the last living Batak Raja. He welcomed us warmly into his house, offering hot coffee from a Thermos. He was quite famous and we had heard about him in the Artists’ Colony in Medan. Little is known about the Batak people, as the neighbouring Muslims from Aceh failed to make conversions to Islam from their ranks and, due to their violent armed resistance, the Dutch moved into their territory only in 1910. The Rajah was quite a charmer and, at 92, was still able to read without glasses. He told us some of his story. He was 18 years old when the Dutch arrived and they sent him to school in Berastagi where he proudly maintained his traditional waist-long hair and the thick silver bracelets on his right forearm, which were traditionally used as a weapon. (The heavy bracelets were laced with silver balls, which were used to strike a blow to an opponent’s head in hand-to-hand fighting.) He was the only Rajah in Batak country who was not executed by the Pemuda (youth brigades) in the 1946 revolution. The other Rajas died violently, accused of collaboration with the Dutch. Unlike many a bureaucrat, he had not sought merely to feather his own nest during a lifetime of service, but had worked faithfully to raise the living standards of the people in his village. He had opened a school and encouraged the people to learn reading and writing as well as the new language, Bahasa Indonesia. Once he had learned to read and write Dutch, the Raja used the knowledge he was able to glean from books and changed his whole attitude to the people of his village and his responsibility as a Raja. He sought peace rather than war and converted to Christianity, encouraging others to take up this new religion, with due deference to the best features of their own animist beliefs. He built a water-reticulation system for the village so people did not have to spend a high percentage of their time carting water from the river, which was 5km away. He built a public bathhouse and had regular clean-up campaigns. He built fences around the houses to keep pigs in their own terrain and banned the burying of living people under new house supports.

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The Dutch put in a clinic and provided regular visits from doctors and nurses. The Raja gave his own land for the building of a church and was gradually able to change many of the dangerous and unhealthy practices in the traditional animist way of life. The old way of marriage was for all girls to be married when they reached the age of 14 and boys the age of 18. If a girl reached the age of 20 and was still unmarried, she was expected to commit suicide. This custom was banned, leaving young people to choose their own time for marriage or not marry at all if they preferred. Tooth filing at the age of 16 was another animist tradition, which was done not with the help of trance and drugs as in Bali, but by bashing the teeth off with stones to halve their length. The Raja did not ban these practices outright but said, ‘Go ahead and do that if it is what you want but it is not necessary as far as God is concerned.’ Tooth filing gradually died out of its own accord. At the time of our visit, the village was divided equally between Christians and animists. After more talk and coffee, this time accompanied by boiled bananas, we were shown to our sleeping quarters in a small room with one double bed covered, thank goodness, with a mosquito net. Our host gave us a jam tin which he carefully filled with water from a jug. ‘Hati hati dengan air [Be careful with the water],’ he said apologetically. ‘Pipa sudah rusak [The pipe is broken].’ The tin of water would have to serve all our needs — bathing, cleaning teeth, washing clothing and also for use in the lavatory. He was trying to get money from the Government to fix the pipe as the people in the village were suffering from the deprivation. The next day the Raja directed us to the animists’ most sacred pusakas (objects) in a thick bamboo jungle on the outskirts of the village. The objects were four stones, two pointed and two round, about a foot high and clearly phallic. These sacred objects were unprotected by a fence and the Raja explained that when danger threatened, the stones rattled and

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the people would come to pray and make offerings of cigarettes. A two-foot-long bamboo pole was stuck in the ground and a lighted cigarette inserted in a slit at the top. The fire end of the cigarette was turned away from the stones. In times of drought water was sprinkled on the stones and freely about the village. Even in the middle of the dry season the rains always came after such offerings. In Barus Jahe, marriage within the immediate family was not permitted and people were encouraged to find marriage partners from other Karo Batak villages. During the Japanese occupation in World War II, the Japanese came once to the village and took everything of value including the silver bracelets and sacred kris (wavy-bladed daggers believed to have magic powers). They killed many villagers and left a gun behind when it ran out of bullets. The gun is now a sacred object and holds the spirits or souls of the dead. During Merdeka, the struggle for indepenence against the Dutch, the other Batak Rajas were killed as they were considered to be representatives of feudalism. Our Raja was in Medan at the time and was spared the slaughter as his reputation was held in such high esteem by the revolutionaries. He continued to receive tribute in the form of grain and vegetables from the villagers, but the splendour of the old days was gone. He could not walk because of a broken knee and moved about in a wheelchair. He had only one wife and five children. A much-loved person, he was judge and jury in all disputes over theft, family troubles and even murder. Before the Dutch came, there was no such thing as a jail. People were punished for their crimes by common consensus. Punishments were light, with murder attracting only two or three years’ servitude. Many anthropologists came to study the customs and language of this village. After our visit to the sacred stones, Kartika made a survey of the village and was excited at the prospect of painting the enormous boat-houses, which stood in a row in the centre of the village. As was her custom, she spent half an hour or so walking round the houses and observing them from all angles

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until she decided on the best position to place her easel and set up painting camp. When she settled down on her folding stool, with paints and a small pot of precious water at her side, she was already surrounded by a crowd of men, women and children, all waiting for the great show to begin. Such events did not take place often in Barus Jahe. Before beginning the painting, Kartika stared for a long time at the object of her desire, seeming to imprint it on her inner eye. And then she began. Applying the colour directly from the tubes, she made grand sweeping strokes to set the skeleton of the painting, then rubbed smudges of colour into fantastic patterns with the tips of her fingers and the ball of her palm. As taught by her father, she used no brushes and let the paint flow, urged on by her hands. As her assistant, I sat behind, passing specific colours to her as she called for them. It was exciting to be part of the creative process and to see a marvellous art work beginning to appear before my eyes. At the end of two hours the painting was finished, with the first great grey house in the foreground leading the line of three receding behind. A great flurry of pink clouds from Kartika’s imagination crested high over the centre of the painting, with a bright blue sky framing the back-drop. It was an inspired painting and captured the mood and spirit of the antique village. She brought it to life by drawing in, with a fine-line tube of black paint, some browsing chickens, lumbering sway-backed pigs, multi-coloured washing drying on a line and curious children and adults standing about. In the next three days she did two more paintings and we were invited to inspect the interiors of the boat-houses, each one home to 10 or 15 families. Each house stood on poles above the ground, providing space below for livestock, with a flight of five steps leading up to the entrance at one end. Inside it was very dark and smoky as each family had a cooking place within its own area. The lower walls sloped outwards, holding bunks for sleeping, which were laid up towards very small windows or portholes. The ceiling soared away to a great

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height, disappearing into the gloom of the horned roof and it was easy to see why people called them boat-houses. The feeling inside was very much that of being below decks in an old sailing ship. In conversation with the local people we learned that, although they were nominally Christians, there were still powerful magicians around and a medium who, when in a trance, was able to communicate with the dead. We related this intelligence to a young German traveller who had come in on the midday car-bus and he asked to go along with us if we could arrange a meeting. The Raja’s assistant, Susilo, organised a meeting with the medium that afternoon and he took us to her workplace in a ramshackle grass and bamboo shed filled with bags of potatoes. Like the boat-houses, it was very dark inside and when we entered we only barely discerned her presence back in the gloom. As our eyes became accustomed to the dark, we saw that she was about 40 years old with long black wavy hair, fine features and very beautiful, dark, penetrating eyes. She spoke no English, of course, nor even Bahasa Indonesia, so her communications in Karo Batak had to be translated for us by Susilo. There was no money payment to be made but we were asked to provide kretek (clove) cigarettes, and sirih, the betel nut, lime and leaf mixture. She observed us through veiled eyelids as she prepared the sirih and, after drawing heavily on several cigarettes together with the sirih, she looked to Susilo to see what we wanted. The German decided to go first and in his broken English, aided by my broken German, he told Kartika of his request. She then translated it into Bahasa Indonesia for Susilo, who translated it into Karo Batak for the Mystic Woman. It was a roundabout and tortuous route, but we got through eventually. The German wanted to speak to his dead father and ask him a specific question. Puffing away, chewing the sirih and spitting red saliva, the Mystic Woman appeared to be going into a trance, her eyes rolling and her voice taking on a gutteral quality of a quite masculine timbre. Down the language chain, the answer came back.

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‘Your father is very far away. I cannot understand what he is saying. It is very faint.’ ‘Please try again,’ urged the German, who was now sitting on the edge of his potato sack. ‘Yes! Yes! I’ve got him on the line,’ the woman said, spitting out another great gob of red spittle. It sounds so trite now when translated into modern English, but this is what came through to us on the translation chain. ‘What do you want to say to him?’ ‘I want to ask him why I am his only child. Why I have no brothers and sisters. I am lonely and wish I had more members of my own family.’ The Mystic Woman muttered away again and seemed almost startled as she spoke the answer. ‘Your father says you must remember that he himself had only one sister and no brothers. When your grandfather died and left a will, there was such a terrible fight between him and your aunt over the money that they never spoke to each other again. He therefore decided to have only one child so that such a terrible thing would not happen again.’ It was all so complicated I couldn’t believe it was possible to translate such a story, but when the German received it, he was so overcome with emotion he burst into tears. ‘It is exactly right,’ he said. ‘I remember the bitterness from when I was a small child. My father is now talking to me through this mystic. He is here with me. I am overcome.’ Tears were running down his cheeks. The woman began speaking again, still in gutteral tones, and it translated as, ‘Your father says he is watching you, and that while you study in your room, you must always light an incense taper, as it will help you pass your exams. It will bring him closer to you.’ I was amazed at this because it sounded more like the advice from an Indonesian father than from a father in far away Europe. But I was wrong. The German was more overcome than ever and, turning to Kartika and me, he said ‘I cannot believe this. I always keep incense in my room back in Stuttgart, but I mostly forget to light it. How does my father know?’

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He asked the question and the woman started to laugh, saying that surely the German realised his father was watching over him and knew everything he was doing. ‘You are his Eigenkind. His only child. You can do anything. He says he must go now as the long line is too difficult to maintain but keep studying hard and burning the incense and you will have a happy life.’ The connection was cut and the woman returned to her normal appearance and held out her hand for more cigarettes. The German was glassy-eyed with amazement and kept shaking his head, saying he didn’t believe it but it must be true because she had used the very words his father had always used to him. ‘You are my only child and you can succeed in anything you want to do.’ Kartika and I were equally amazed, particularly because of the circuitous route the translation had taken through four languages. There had to be something in it. Now it was Kartika’s turn. She said she didn’t want to talk to the dead, but to get help as to whether she should marry the man she was currently spending time with. After the requisite puffs and spits, the Mystic Woman started to laugh uproariously. In between bursts of laughter she said, ‘The trouble with you is that you can’t make up your mind because you have so many boyfriends. Settle on one and then come back and ask me.’ More chuckles. Kartika was slightly mortified but agreed reluctantly that the woman was right and perhaps she wasn’t ready yet to marry again. It was now my turn, so I decided to be courageous and ask if the mystic could explain why Ed had been acting so coolly of late and why he seemed to have lost interest in me and his children. Once again the woman puffed and chewed and then said to me that the man was too far away, over the water. Did I have any garment belonging to him, a sock or a handkerchief perhaps? Of course I didn’t, but I did have a note he had written to me and I showed her that. She fingered it all over and then said abruptly, ‘Your daughter. She is the one who can help him. He is very troubled but only your daughter can help him. She must talk to him.’

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‘I’m afraid this is impossible,’ I said. ‘My daughter is not in Indonesia. She is living in Australia, which is far, far away. Over the sea.’ ‘Then you must set a place for her at the table every time you sit down to eat. Her spirit will come and sit in the place you have set for her. The spirit will communicate with your husband and find out what is troubling him. Next time you come, bring me something of your husband’s and I will tell you more. He is deeply troubled. Big changes are coming in your life.’ What she told me that day was not explained until more than two years later, but I never forgot her prediction and I set the extra place at the table as she had suggested. That was all. The session was over and the woman returned to her normal pretty appearance. The paintings of Barus Jahe were finished, too, so the next day we set off for Lake Toba where Kartika made some lovely paintings at the lakeside in a pretty little village called Harangaol.

The Melbourne Cup and the Witch Doctor In November 1977, I decided to have a Melbourne Cup party. The first hurdle was to generate some interest in it among the expats, who had never heard of our most famous horse race. I managed to get a list of starters and riders from Radio Australia and made up a sweep with a total of R.25,000 ($A50). On the day we sat around the radio but no one except me understood the ritual description or the accent of the commentator. None of the sweep winners were present so I wrote their names on a piece of paper and put it together with the money in a small stainless-steel box on top of the bookcase. Three days later Ed asked, ‘By the way, did you pay out that sweep money?’ ‘Gosh, no. I forgot all about it.’ ‘Jimmy Pitts was one of the winners I remember. I’m going over there tonight to play poker so I’ll take it to him.’ I went to the bookcase but the box was not where I had left it. We searched everywhere but failed to find it. I was

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worried because no one ever stole anything at our house. It must have been mislaid. But it didn’t turn up anywhere. I decided to have a round-table conference with all the people in the house: Ed, Hereward, the five people working for us and four students. No one could throw any light on the disappearance. Everyone remembered the sweep and the box on the bookcase, but no one knew where it had gone. Karmila made a shy suggestion. ‘Maybe we could ask the Dukun Baik to help us?’ The Dukun was a wise old man, sometmes erroneously called a witch doctor by foreigners. He was highly respected by village people so I said, ‘That’s a great idea Karmila. When do you think he could come?’ ‘I will go and see him straight away. He will come immediately because we all want to find the money.’ We waited around the table and, about 20 minutes later, the Dukun arrived. He was very old and dressed in a faded sarong, patched shirt and a black peci songkok. He entered with great dignity and he took his place at the table. After the usual formal greetings, he inquired about our problem then sat back with clasped hands. He closed his eyes and after several minutes’ meditation said, ‘The money is still in the house. Yes, it has not left the house.’ After another silent interval he said, ‘A woman has the money. But it will come back. It will come back soon. Now I need some water please.’ Supartini brought in a bowl of water and placed it in front of him. From his pocket he took what looked like a cork, but which, he explained, was wax from a special tree. Striking a match, he held the flame under the wax and allowed drops of melted wax to fall on the surface of the water. As it coagulated and formed patterns he continued to study it intently. Finally, sitting upright, he announced simply and with authority, ‘The money is in a book. You will find it tonight.’ We were all relieved and sat back to take tea and bananas and chat about the coming wayang kulit (leather

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puppet) performance. No one mentioned the missing money and, after a respectable interval, the Dukun took his leave. The group dispersed but our Western impatience for a solution to the problem was too strong for us to wait until evening. We riffled through all the books on the shelves, row after row, but there was no money. We went through all the books in the office and in the bedrooms but the result was the same. We felt disappointed and began to doubt the mystic powers of the Dukun. Later that evening, after dinner, I suggested to Hereward that if he wanted something to do he could collect all the photos that were lying around the house and put them in one of the albums. ‘This one’s only half-full. You can put them in here,’ I said. As I opened the album to show him, the money fell out — 25,000 rupiahs, exactly.

Return to Pelantungan The next Christmas I was invited to go again to the Women’s Political Prison in Pelantungan. Unlike the earlier visit, we went in the early morning, meeting at the Roman Catholic Presbytery in Jalan Pandanaran. Truus Dicke, the nurse, was there with a young girl called Tuti, who worked for Pelkris, a protestant old people’s home. Her mother had been in Pelantungan since 1965. The rest of the people were from the Dutch Reformed Church and representatives from the Urban Mission. At the last moment Saleh arrived and asked if he could come along. I explained to the group leader that he worked for us and had friends in Pelantungan. His tapol status was not mentioned and it was agreed that he could accompany us provided he kept a low profile. In a caravan of three cars we set off about 7am. In Weleri we stopped for a warung breakfast and I bought some batteries for my camera on the off-chance that I would be able to take photos. We also bought soap, shampoo, toothpaste and

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handcream hoping there would be an opportunity to give it to the prisoners. My previous journey along this road had been in the dark and it took on quite a different aspect in the early-morning light. When we reached the village of Pelantungan on an improved road, I took a photo of the signpost showing the distances to Semarang and other towns. This time we didn’t have to walk to the prison but continued by car. When we arrived at the familiar meeting house, the pastors began unloading bamboo baskets and cartons. The smaller ones contained chocolate, dried pineapple and other sweetmeats. The two large cartons were full of Bibles in English and Indonesian. Sutrisno, the pastor from the Urban Mission, arranged all this in neat piles and then, without asking anyone’s permission, took photographs of us standing around the gifts. Some guards looked at us apprehensively but said nothing. When we got to the big meeting hall below, it was the same as the previous visit. The stage was decorated for Christmas and the rows of women prisoners were seated at the back, behind the guards’ wives. There seemed, however, to be considerably fewer prisoners than before. In the news recently there had been an announcement of the release of 10,000 prisoners from all parts of the country. Maybe this was the explanation. We took our places at the right-hand side of the stage facing a preacher’s podium. An army captain in green sat behind us as did the six student nurses. Tuti, who was hoping to see her mother, moved into the front beside Truus and me. She had spoken to the Pendeta (official in charge), who had agreed to bring her mother into the hall. It became obvious that not all the inmates were attending the performance. The ceremony began with a prayer followed by songs from the choir but this time it lacked the verve and brilliance of the previous year. As the performance proceeded, I searched the rows of prisoners’ faces, looking for my friend from my last visit, the

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nurse. There was no sign of her. Tuti saw her mother being led in to the back row and they exchanged smiles. Her mother’s face was joyous but Tuti was tight-lipped, holding back tears. I decided to ask the Pendeta where the nurse was. Maybe she had been released. The officer regarded me quizically and I had to repeat my question many times before he understood. ‘Oh yes,’ he said finally. ‘Zuster. I will bring her.’ Within about five minutes she appeared at the side door and I was distressed to see how she had changed. Her hair was now completely grey and she was thinner, looking tired and drawn. She gave me no welcoming smile — just a brief handshake with her head lowered — and I thought she didn’t remember who I was. I sensed she was anxious to get away. I murmured ‘Happy Christmas’ and she was gone. Truus noticed what had happened and we both felt very uneasy. The show continued with a play about the Good Samaritan. As is customary in Indonesia the men were separated from the women and Saleh and the pastors were seated on the far side of the stage. I caught Saleh’s eye and gave a little wave. I wondered how he was taking this new experience of being a free man in such a place. When it was time for the army chaplain to speak, he rose in his chair, dressed in army green with his rank insignia and gold cross on the lapels, and passed in front of Saleh to get to the stage. To my horror, Saleh sprang to attention with a blank look on his face. It was an instinctive reaction from the past. Fortunately, no one seemed to notice. He could have been moving politely to make more room. The green uniform was no doubt too close for comfort. The chaplain made a flamboyant speech with grand theatrical gestures and changes of tempo, Billy Graham-style. As it was heavily leavened with Javanese words, Truus and I understood little of what he said, but his audience appeared to hang on every syllable. After he had been speaking for about three quarters of an hour, there was a flurry of activity outside. A party of highranking army officers was coming down the slope with three tall Europeans carrying tripods and cameras.

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Pastor Sutrisno, who had already taken several flash photos in the hall without being cautioned, whispered as he walked by, ‘I think it’s Amnesty!’ But we knew this couldn’t be true as Amnesty International had been banned in Suharto’s Indonesia. The Europeans entered the hall and began setting up their tripods and shooting film. I left my seat and went over to them. ‘Where are you from?’ I asked. ‘Reuters and German Television. We’ve just come from the [prison] island of Buru. Spent the night there with 15 other correspondents. All sorts of highly educated people on that island — chemical engineers, doctors, lawyers. It all has something to do with throwing some generals down a well.’ It seemed surprising that a foreign correspondent knew no more than that about Indonesian history but he explained that he was only the photographer and introduced me to the journalist, Hertel. ‘We’ve been allowed to speak to anyone we like and take pictures,’ he said. ‘They tried to get us to set scenes but we split up and went in different directions. Confused them. After that they didn’t seem to worry.’ ‘Can you speak Indonesian?’ I asked. ‘Some of us can. But the main thing is we can photograph anything we like.’ ‘Can you take a photograph for me? I have a friend here who —’ ‘Sure. What uniform is he wearing?’ ‘It’s a woman. She’s a prisoner.’ He was startled as he had presumed we were something to do with the camp. I explained that she was the only nurse here and he went off to investigate. Five minutes later he signalled to me and there was my friend looking very frightened. ‘Let’s have both of you out there by the bougainvillea.’ I whispered to her not to worry and we stood arm in arm by the bright flowering shrub. In spite of my assurances, she was trembling.

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‘There are many spies here today,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t let them see you talking to me about anything serious.’ I smiled widely and laughed as though there was some joke and, continuing the charade, asked how she was and if there was any news of her family. She took my cue and, laughing, whispered, ‘I saw my two youngest children last month. They came here. They are so big I didn’t recognise them. We walked together with the guards standing by. Don’t say any more. They are watching me.’ The Reuters man took several pictures and then my friend broke away and rejoined the prisoners. Hertel asked me what her name was but I said it was not the right place to give such information. I’d tell him later. We went back inside and watched the program through to the end. It finished with several pious addresses on a Christian theme. Just before it finished I went outside looking for the lavatory. My friend appeared at my side and led me to it. Putting her head around the door she said bitterly, ‘Only 31 have gone from here. Only 31. Just the very old and the sick.’ I asked when she thought she might be freed and she said, ‘Maybe next year.’ Then urgently, ‘Don’t let the press know my name. Foreigners are not supposed to know my name. I didn’t attend the Christmas concert this year because I am tired of the game.’ Did she remember my name? ‘Of course!’ It was almost an accusation. ‘If I get out I will try to find you. Go back inside now. They are watching.’ I rejoined the Reuters man and asked if he had seen the prisoners’ living quarters. ‘Yes, follow me and I’ll show you. We can go anywhere we like.’ We went further down the path, over a bridge and were rounding a bend when we were met by more photographers and army officers coming towards us. We could go no further. I lost my chance to see the dormitories as the press party was in a hurry to return to Semarang and interview some recently released tapols.

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Back in the hall the long farewell was taking place. All the women, in a long line, were waiting to shake hands and wish us a Merry Christmas. Some murmured names and phrases as before, but I was too disturbed to understand their words. When we came to the end of the line a strange atmosphere began to develop. It was almost gay. The Pendeta gathered a group of prisoners, visitors and guards on to the steps of the stage and asked anyone who liked to take photos. Such a thing could never have happened the year before. It was the presence of the high-ranking army officers and the press. Even my friend, who had been so restrained before, came up and linked her hand in mine. We posed for group pictures and there was Saleh standing beside me, smiling broadly and with a twinkle in his eye. We were then invited to the Kommandant’s house for lunch. Our prisoner friends walked along the verandah of the block house with us. The young girls from the choir came bouncing up to shake hands a second time. Saleh told me later that there were 15 of them in Pelantungan who were high school students in 1965 and were members of the Young Communist League. The most famous of them was Lestari and Saleh introduced me to her. She was very attractive, lively and alert, unlike the older inmates. The young ones still had a chance for a new life but, for the old women, the only goal was to be released and be back with what family remained to them. Tuti hugged her mother, who walked with our group until the last possible moment when we had to leave them behind. After hugging everyone again, we broke away and climbed the steps. Every few paces we turned to wave again. It was a difficult leave-taking for us all. The view from the Kommandant’s house was beautiful. Before being used as a prison, the camp had been a leprosarium. The officer’s house was pleasant and unpretentious and had its own orchard and vegetable garden as well as many flowering trees and shrubs. Lunch was simple and, once again, I caught Saleh’s eye as he tucked into the green beans and rice. He winked. A former tapol dining with the Kommandant of a tapol prison!

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I said to the Kommandant, ‘What a beautiful location you have here. Perhaps one day it will be a holiday hotel, with swimming pool, tennis courts and a restaurant.’ ‘Yes,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I hope so. Yes, maybe it will.’

The Affandi family art show I heard there were three Australian exchange students living with Indonesian families in Semarang, so I contacted one of them and invited her up to Candi. Kerry was a bright girl on a Rotary exchange scholarship and was glad to find a mother figure. She came from Killara in Sydney and was in her final year of high school. So far she had lived with two very different Indonesian families. The first had been a disaster as she had to sleep in the same room as the grandmother, who left the light on all through the night and played Javanese music continuously. Poor Kerry had survived that with difficulty and was now with her second family, who were quite different. Unfortunately, the father was making passes at her and she didn’t know how to cope with it. It is quite a difficult experience for young girls to come to a country such as Indonesia, where the social rules and regulations are very different. To give Kerry a break I asked her to help me with an art exhibition I was hoping to put on. I had discovered that the Affandi family had never exhibited together and I thought it would be a great challenge to see if I could bring this off in Semarang. I put the proposition to the Affandi family and they agreed, but had serious doubts as to whether it was possible. As they rightly said, Semarang was a crass, commercial city, dominated by Chinese merchants and with no cultural climate whatsoever. People in Semarang were interested only in money. Culture belonged to Yogyakarta. ‘Go ahead and try,’ they said. ‘We will cooperate. It’s a wonderful idea, but we doubt you will ever get it off the ground.’ It was a challenge so I decided to try. First, I had to find a suitable location for the exhibition. It would have to be accessible, have plenty of big white walls, good lighting and, above all, be very cheap or, preferably, free.

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I had a friend called Mr Benny who worked as protocol advisor to the walikota or mayor of Semarang, Pak Hadiyono. Hadiyono had eight children and was recently widowed. He had taken a new wife directly out of high school, a young girl of 18. He wanted her groomed in Western manners, language and customs and Mr Benny came to me for help. I agreed to try and had morning tea with the young wife a few times but the poor girl was so shy and timid I was never able to get through to her on a personal level. Taken out of school into this marriage, she was the same age as some of her step-children. The mayor joined us on one occasion and seemed very pleased with himself. As Mr Benny was so close to the halls of power in the city, I felt he was the one to help me now. There was a strict protocol which had to be observed when dealing with Javanese officials. Mr Benny was my tutor. After inspecting several school halls and deserted warehouses with him and finding them all unsuitable, I said the only location worthy of such a unique exhibition was the new Wisma Pancasila in the centre of town at Simpang Lima (Five Ways). Simpang Lima was the junction of five roads which joined a roundabout encircling a sports area, used also for ceremonial and army displays. Wisma Pancasila had a large auditorium but, what interested me most, was the wide enclosed colonnade of foyers which surrounded the central theatre. The walls were pure white, well lit and bare. It was the perfect place. I would be able to hang at least 70 paintings there. Mr Benny arranged an appointment for me with the walikota and in the meantime gave me lessons in formal speech and manners so that I could make a good impression. First I was to say what a great honour it was to meet the walikota. Then I was to congratulate him on the birth of his new son, then how great Semarang was and so on and so on — as many compliments as possible. After that I was more or less on my own and planned to talk about my interest in Indonesian art and eventually lead on to the proposed Affandi exhibition. The

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mayoral office controlled the Wisma Pancasila so the only way to use it was through their good offices. On the day of my appointment, dressed as formally as I could, I arrived at the walikota’s office and was asked to wait in the ante-room. I was the only female there, the other supplicants being neatly dressed males, all wearing sarongs, white shirts and black peci songkoks. I presumed they were petty officials with requests for funds as they were all shuffling papers and looking serious and worried. When my turn came I was led into the mayoral chamber and introduced. Walikota Hadiyono was a small man and smiled at me as he motioned me to a chair. There was a twitch about his mouth as he had probably been well briefed about me and my request. My best Indonesian came forth. ‘Selamat pagi, bapak. It’s a great honour to meet you.’ ‘Ja.’ A polite nod. ‘May I congratulate you on the birth of your new son.’ I went through the whole thing according to Mr Benny’s drill. The Mayor was all smiles and said, ‘May I congratulate you on the use of our language.’ ‘Thank you, bapak.’ I had made it to first base apparently and thought how lucky I was to be a foreigner. If I was Indonesian I would have had to have used high Javanese to him and he would have answered me in low — two very different languages. Bahasa Indonesia was at least a leveller. I presented my plan, explaining the prestige that Semarang would win from such an exhibition and then asked demurely if the walikota would allow the foyers of the Wisma Pancasila to be used to stage it. He looked at me keenly and said, ‘How much would you be willing to pay, nyonya?’ ‘Bapak, I would not be able to pay anything. The exhibition would be free for the citizens of your city.’ ‘Would the paintings be for sale?’ ‘Yes, some of them.’ We now spoke English. My gesture of politeness had been accepted.

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‘Then surely, if the paintings were sold, there would be money to pay for the Wisma.’ ‘Semarang’s gain would be the honour only, Sir.’ I took the ball and ran with it. ‘This will be the first time in the history of Indonesia that its greatest living artist will exhibit together with his wife and daughter. It is a most prestigious event for your city. It has never been done before in either Jakarta or Yogyakarta. It will make headlines in all the newspapers. ‘Your office and city will rise in the estimation of the nation. It will be seen to be more than a place where cloves, sugar and cigarettes are sold. To promote an event of such cultural significance will elevate your city to the ideals most dearly treasured by Javanese society.’ He was wavering and said, ‘Present me with your plan in writing and I will consider it.’ With Mr Benny’s help I did this and a week later was given the go-ahead. There would be 78 paintings: 10 of Maryati’s naive embroidery pictures, depicting the life of the people in bright colours; 24 from Kartika, including her black-and-white series of life in a Dyak village in Borneo, her Batak series in black and white and in colour of the people in villages surrounding Lake Toba, Barus Jahe, Harangaol and Lingga. The remainder would be from Affandi himself and would include his earliest works, which were part of the family archives and were rarely displayed. To hang the paintings I had the support of a group of young painters known as the Raden Saleh Group. Raden Saleh was a 19th-century son of Semarang, much admired by the Dutch, whose paintings hung mostly in Europe. Nyonya Meneer, the herbal drug company which was a large investor in Affandi paintings, agreed to supply the advertising and street banners or spanduk. The newest hotel in Semarang, the Metro, offered to supply cocktails, cheese and biscuits for the opening ceremony. The welcome drink was to be a surprising blue colour, but delicious. There would also be Teh-Botol, a sweet tea-based drink for the teetotallers. The local newspapers offered free

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space for advertising and also printed 10,000 dodgers, inviting everyone to visit the exhibition. These were scattered all over the city by Ed in his helicopter. Marganne Box, an American expat friend, who lectured at Undip on public speaking, agreed to be master of ceremonies and her husband’s company offered to supply microphones and to organise the lighting. Catalogues and invitations had to be printed and this cost was covered by donations from all the foreign companies working in the area. My mainstays through all this were the Priowijoyos, Mas and Yu Prio, who were friends of the Affandis and who had backed my idea from the beginning. Mas Prio was a printer and his wife, Yu Prio, coming from one of Java’s oldest families, was even more adept at protocol than Mr Benny. The stage was set. Everything was running smoothly and cooperation from everyone was 100 per cent. Then the axe fell. Mr Benny arrived at my house with a long face. ‘The walikota says you must pay for the space. He cannot provide it free.’ ‘But he’s already agreed! Everything is ready! How can he say that?’ ‘He says you must pay R.250,000 [$A500] a day. Otherwise he cannot give the permission.’ Mr Benny appeared to be upset, but I could see that he could do nothing. I would have to take desperate measures. Affandi’s paintings were due to arrive from Yogya the next day and Kartika’s were coming from an exhibition at the Goethe Institute in Surabaya. The Raden Saleh Group was already on hand to do the hanging. There was only one hope. I would have to go over the head of the mayor and speak to the Governor of Central Java, Pak Suparjo, one of the most senior officials in Indonesia, reponsible only to President Suharto himself. For the previous year I had belonged to the WIK (Women’s International Club) in Semarang, which was a group of middle-class local and foreign women. Its aims were to promote friendship and understanding between different cultures. It enjoyed limited success in raising money for

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charities, with an over-emphasis on tea parties and food, but it enabled me to meet Indonesian women. I had been elected vice-president on the foreign side and now I intended to put my position to good use. The patron of WIK was the wife of Governor Suparjo. I rang the Puri Gde, governor’s mansion, and was given an appointment to meet Ibu Suparjo at 4.30pm. Luck ran for me that day as, when I was shown into the drawing room, the Governor was also there, talking to some friends. I explained my desperate situation and the Governor showed immediate interest. He was a very sophisticated man and had a great interest in Australia. While serving as ambassador to Malaysia, he had become very chummy with the Australian High Commissioner and had also been impressed by the now famous writer Blanche d’Alpuget. ‘This is certainly serious,’ he said in his excellent English. ‘I’ll see what can be done with the walikota. Of course, you should not have to pay for the use of the Wisma for such a purpose. Just a moment.’ He went to a phone in the ante-room and I heard him ask for the mayor. An angry-sounding conversation in Javanese followed — very clipped, very short and very authoritative. Someone was being put in their place. The Governor returned and said, ‘The Wisma Pancasila is open to you for the Affandi exhibition. Without cost. Neither will there be charges for electricity or cleaning. My wife, Ibu Suparjo, will be pleased to open the exhibition and will be attended by Mrs Hadiyono, the walikota’s wife. I will also provide the Puri Gde gamelan orchestra to play in the forecourt. If there is anything else, please let me know.’ The exhibition was a resounding success. More than 4,000 people came over a period of five days. Parties of school children from the city and outlying districts came in great bus loads and, at times, it was impossible to move for the crush. The airborne leaflet drop, inviting everyone to attend, brought many visitors who might otherwise have felt excluded. Neatly dressed burghers and students stood side by side with beggars and becak drivers — all drawn together by the great man of the people, Affandi, and his art.

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After the closing night, Kartika invited all the helpers to supper at a nearby restaurant — the student group, the cleaners, the expats who had helped, Mansur and Intan from my house and Saleh and his wife. The whole thing put Saleh in a great dilemma: Affandi was a hero to him but the Governor was his enemy. The system the Governor represented — and the man himself — had sent him to jail for seven years. He overcame the problem in his Javanese way and was one of the mainstays of the whole enterprise, running everywhere, untangling problems, executing difficult assignments. He was indispensable. If any one person represented Java to me it was Saleh. He was the modern-day Java Man — natural courtesy overcoming all adversity.

Kartika’s portrait Kartika painted Ed’s portrait as part of a series of nude men. It was part of her new awareness of herself as a person and a woman. Portraits of nude women were common but she wanted to paint nude men. The one of Ed was in black and white and showed him seated in a chair in a relaxed position. As the painting progressed, Kartika kept standing back from it and making the comment that there was something missing. She painted in the edge of a mat under his right foot but that didn’t solve the problem. She added a Dutch lamp hanging high behind his head, but still she felt it was incomplete. Was it the colour? She added coloured flowers and a cloth, but that was wrong. We had lunch and then she went back to the painting. Ed was very patient and seemed to be enjoying the experience. He was lounging back in the chair, looking relaxed, but Kartika insisted there was something missing. I was standing in the background and suddenly she announced what it was that was missing. ‘It’s you,’ she said, looking at me directly. ‘Yes, it’s you.’ Cautioning me not to move, she began to paint my head peering forward from behind Ed’s left shoulder. As the form of

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the face began to take shape an extraordinary change took place in the portrait. Although she did not in any way touch the already completed part of the painting, Ed’s body now appeared to be coming forward instead of relaxing backwards. It was coming forward as though it wanted to come right out of the painting. Did it want to escape? That was certainly the impression it was creating. Later that afternoon Kartika pronounced the portrait finished and took it back to Yogya. Some months later it was exhibited in the Male Nude Show with the other portraits at Taman Ismail Marzuki, a prestigious gallery in Jakarta. Newspaper critics and reporters were intrigued by this one particular portrait and asked Kartika’s father, Affandi, if he could explain his daughter’s extraordinary painting. ‘You must ask the artist herself,’ was his reply. But she could not explain it either. The painting is now lost. It was not sold and Kartika thinks she gave it to me, but I did not ever have it. It is not in her old house in Karangwuni and it is not in the Affandi Museum in Yogya. We have searched and inquired everywhere, but it has vanished. A Javanese mystery. The portrait that ran away.

Farewell to Semarang In February 1978 news came from head office in Singapore that the training program in Semarang would be phased out in the next month. Ed would be posted to Irian Jaya and the students would be sent into the field as co-pilots. I was sorry to be leaving Semarang as I had made some good friends. But that’s expat life — it’s never permanent. It was harder for the children than for us, but I hoped what they were gaining in learning about other countries, customs and languages would in some way make up for the loss and prove useful to them in later life. As Ed would again be a roving pilot, I had to decide where I would live. I could have stayed in Semarang, but I didn’t

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think I would like it on my own. I would have been an odd woman out. Jakarta was central but awful, so I decided on Bali. I had taken several holidays there and it had a pleasant climate, lovely beaches and friendly people. The little thatched-roof holiday house I had started to build there needed only a bit more work to make it habitable. At Ed’s suggestion, I decided to take Saleh to Bali with me. With the pilot school closed, he would have been without a job. My plan was to open a little bar/restaurant in Bali with Saleh as my partner. He knew all about Western drinks and was a good bookkeeper. Saleh jumped at the idea and said he would be happy enough to return to Semarang every three months to visit his wife. If all went well, his whole family would eventually move to Bali. It was a great opportunity for him. Mansur and Intan and their two children returned to Ujung Pandang, in Sulawesi. They had been with us for five years and were keen to try to make it on their own. Mansur could now read and write and drive a car and was in excellent health. Intan could cook Western food and was an accomplished dressmaker. I would miss them very much but I agreed they should have a go at independence. They had enough capital to buy a house and start a small business and now had the great advantage of being able to speak English. If I had decided to take Mansur and his family with me, instead of Mohammed Saleh, my next few years might have been very different indeed. As it was, the events of the next three years would shatter many of my naive illusions about that extraordinary country — Suharto’s Indonesia.

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Bad omens in paradise The omens were bad from the beginning. In quick succession I lost my money, my suitcase and my jewellery. Making the bus journey from Semarang to Yogyakarta to connect with the Garuda flight to Bali, my wallet was stolen from my handbag while I slept. The thief performed the familiar trick of throwing a coat over the armrest we shared, a ploy which hides the thieving fingers exploring beneath. The Artful Dodger Indonesian-style got off the bus before we arrived at the Yogyakarta terminus which was where I discovered my loss. Nevermind, I was going to the magical island of Bali. How could the loss of some money be in any way depressing? On arrival at Ngurah Rai Airport in Bali, passengers stood in line waiting for their luggage to trundle along the rollers but, after 20 minutes, mine had not appeared. After waiting for nearly an hour at the airport manager’s office I was told my baggage had inadvertently been sent back to Singapore. (Several days later I got the bags back but by that time they had been rifled through and a small jewellery box was missing.) By the time I left the airport the terminal was deserted. With no further flights due that evening, there was no more public transport available. With my overnight bag, I walked the kilometre or so to the Nusa Dua turn-off and was lucky to stop an empty bemo, an Indonesian utility-cum-mini-bus for hire. In spite of these initial problems, I refused to be downhearted. After all, I was going to live in paradise. It was all just a bit of bad luck. We drove through dark and deserted Kuta to Losmen Artika in Legian Kelod. The word losmen derives from the

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European ‘lodgement’. Legian was the next beach along the coast from Kuta and kelod means south. I had stayed in this losmen before when I visited Bali from Java and it was clean, cheap and pleasant enough. With soft beds, showers, electric light and charging R.300 or about 60 cents Australian a night, it was a snip. Tousle-headed Made, the owner, welcomed me by name. Balinese always remember your name so it is no wonder we are so beguiled by them. I bunked down in a front room, simply furnished with two beds, a small table and a wardrobe. Made brought a Thermos of weak tea and left me to settle in. I gave a deep sigh and lay down. I had made it to paradise at last. Losmen Artika was built in the traditional style, with a row of six bedrooms opening on to a long tiled verandah. Each room had identical furniture, with floral curtains and a floral bedspread. Floral bedspreads were de rigeur in Bali. Outside each room was what was known as a stel; two rotan chairs, a small table and a metal clothes-horse for drying clothes. Each morning a Thermos of weak tea and two bananas were served. On good days there were also two sweet rolls. Made, who came from Singaraja on the northern coast of the island, lived in a bamboo shed behind the losmen and was assisted in running the place by his two orphaned nephews, Nyoman and K’tut, aged nine and 11. Made bought the boys’ school uniforms and paid for their schooling. He was an orphan himself and had been cared for by his cousin Killer in the same way. Killer lived in the losmen next door with his wife Kathy. They were both university-educated and owned their losmen as well as the one Made managed. Killer worked for the Government and Kathy was a receptionist at the nearby Legian Beach Hotel, a superior establishment on the beachfront owned by Jakarta Chinese. Losmen Artika looked on to a pleasant garden of hibiscus, flowering shrubs and the ubiquitous dracaena with its brightly coloured red and yellow leaves. The place had a very rural feeling, with chickens scuttling about, doves cooing on the roof and the occasional squeal of a runaway piglet.

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At the southern end of the verandah, high under the eaves, was a small temple altar. Every evening a young girl, her hair and body freshly bathed, wearing clean clothes with the traditional brightly coloured sash, came to the altar carrying a round bamboo tray of segehan (offerings). These were little squares of banana leaf with a few grains of rice on them, flowers, incense and holy water. Lifting some of them to the altar and placing a lighted incense taper with them, she took a frangipani flower between her first and second fingers, dipped it in the holy water and flicked it over the offerings. After making a silent prayer, she moved on with her tray held high to another altar in the centre of the garden, where she gave more offerings and said more prayers. Sometimes the little leaf plates were laid along the pathways and dogs and chickens stood waiting as this ritual took place. As soon as the novitiate moved on, the offerings were devoured. I asked about this apparent desecration of the offerings by animals but Made said it didn’t matter. The important thing was that the offerings were made. He said such offerings were the tangible way of giving thanks to God. In the Bhagavadgita, Krishna tells Arjuna of God’s wishes. ‘Whosoever offers to Me with devotion a leaf, a flower, a fruit or water, that offering of love, of the pure heart I accept.’ (Ch IX:26) God takes the sari (essence) immediately, so what happens afterwards is of no importance. The losmen had two bathrooms at the end of a short passageway between the bedrooms but the showers worked only if Made remembered to top up the tank with a hand pump. Each bathroom, however, had its own big, square concrete tub or tempat mandi, which was kept filled with water and always had a plastic dipper floating on top. The plastic dippers had replaced the traditional dippers made of coconut shell. The system of bathing was to ladle a few dippers-full of water over your body, lather-up with soap and then sluice the soap off with more water. It was a very refreshing method of bathing and far preferable to the weak spray of water from the shower. The ‘schwoosh’ of several ladles of cold water was invig-

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orating but it was an unpardonable sin to allow soap to get into the water tub. It was for ladling-out only. On my second night in paradise I was reading Time magazine before sleeping. As the light source was a naked bulb hanging from the centre of the ceiling, I moved the pillow to the bottom of the bed to get better light. Reading finished, I switched off the light and went to sleep with my head still at the bottom of the bed. This was the first of my many mistakes in Bali. In the middle of the night I awoke in a cold fearful sweat that was not caused by a nightmare. I was just suddenly wide awake and stark, staring terrified. I lay still for a few minutes, afraid to move or look around. Eventually I became more afraid of doing nothing than of doing something, so I carefully eased myself out of bed. As quietly as I could I opened the door and peered out. At the southern end of the verandah I saw a figure in a long gown, moving away rapidly, elevated several feet above the floor. Mouth open in disbelief and awe, I watched it disappear into the brick wall. Then I noticed that everyone’s doors were open. We had all awakened in the same way. The other guests, who were from many different parts of the world, made muffled exclamations in their own languages, which broke into high-pitched whispers, all very agitated. ‘Nothing. Nothing. It’s nothing at all. Go back to bed. It’s nothing at all.’ But it was something. The next morning Made came round for his daily chat with the guests. I said, ‘Something happened here last night. We all woke up at the same time. We were all frightened.’ Made looked vaguely troubled and, glancing into my room, noticed my pillow at the bottom of the bed. ‘Did you sleep at the wrong end of the bed? You must never do that nyonya. Never. It brings negative influences. The beds are positioned so that your head always points towards Agung, the sacred mountain. If you sleep with your feet pointing that way, then bad things will happen. Please don’t do it again.’

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He went off to amend my misdemeanor and I was left feeling severely chastened. This was my first lesson in the importance of orientation to the Balinese. Balinese have an inbuilt feeling for direction, no matter where they happen to be. If they should lose this feeling, through drinking alcohol or eating magic mushrooms, they become uncomfortable and extremely worried. It is important at all times to know where they are in relation to the sacred mountain, Agung. I asked a little girl on the beach one day if she’d like to come to Australia with me. ‘No thank you nyonya,’ she said. ‘Even though I know it must be a beautiful place, if I went there I wouldn’t know where Agung was.’ Agung is the dwelling place of Idi Sanghyang Widhi Wasa, Balinese Hinduism’s single god. Towards the mountain is kaja or north and away from it or seawards is kelod or south. Although we use the words north and south for these directions, it is not necessarily the same for the Balinese. A compass may tell us we are looking south but for the Balinese, if Agung is straight ahead of us, then we are looking north. When we look at a map, north is always at the top, but if a Balinese is looking at it he will probably turn it round so that the north is kaja in the direction of Agung. The directional points represent the sacred and the profane, high and low, up and down, and safe and dangerous concepts. Balance and harmony are all important when one lives in Bali. The evening after the visitation, when the girl came to make the offerings, I noticed they were twice the normal size and that she laid additional ones at the edges of the verandah and along the pathway. It was my first contact with Sekala and Niskala — what you can see and what you can’t see, the opposite forces and energies that are inseparable and always exist according to Balinese beliefs. It is the goal of prayer and ceremony in Balinese Hinduism to keep balance in the world, to keep either of the two opposites from getting the upper hand and to maintain equilibrium.

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Made to measure Nyoman Rentha was the gardener at Losmen Artika and one day he said to me, ‘I’m moving house tomorrow. Do you want to come along and watch?’ What a funny suggestion, I thought, to watch someone pack up their things and move them to another house! It didn’t sound very entertaining, but I failed to take the invitation literally; he really meant it when he said he was moving house. I went along and saw 25 or 30 men gathered around the house, the poles of which had been loosened from the ground. With one mighty heave the men hoisted it into the air and stood inside and below it. They then ran in unison down the road to the new location. Their bodies could be seen only from the waist down and the house, with its swaying thatched-grass roof, took on the appearance of an angular centipede, sashaying along like some mythical beast. During my previous visits, I had mentioned to Nyoman how much I would have liked that area for my own house — it was green and leafy and some distance from the main road. ‘No worries, nyonya,’ he had said. ‘This is all my land here. I am the eldest son and my father is dead so you can build anywhere you like.’ The land fronted the main road to Kuta but ran back down a side road towards the Pura Dalem or Sacred Temple of the Dead, near the cremation gound. The neighbouring fields were green lawns planted with coconut palms. I couldn’t imagine any better place to make a home. Nyoman and I walked around together selecting the best aspect and then, to my surprise, Nyoman handed me a stick and said, ‘Just draw the house with a stick.’ I was incredulous. Surely we should go about this more carefully? Talk to architects, surveyors, builders, not just draw lines on the earth like it was a children’s game. ‘Yes, just draw the lines,’ he said. ‘If you want to make a house it must be the house that suits you. That fits you. And is exactly where you want it.’

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It was like cutting material for a dress without a pattern but, as with all my actions in Bali, I followed instructions and started scratching the ground with the stick. ‘We’ll have a sitting room and dining room here. And a kitchen here. And a bathroom here …’ ‘And where will your sleeping place be?’ ‘Oh, yes. That will be upstairs. We’ll sleep upstairs with a wooden staircase leading up and a balcony in the middle so you can look down below.’ ‘It’s a good plan,’ said Nyoman. ‘I’ve never seen a house like that in Bali before. I will get the builders and we can start whenever you are ready.’ I could not buy the land from Nyoman, I could only borrow it. This arrangement would be drawn up officially by a lawyer with the length of time clearly stated. There was no charge for the land but at the expiry of the loan period anything built on it would become Nyoman’s. I wasn’t going to stay in Bali for ever so borrowing the land seemed like a good idea. When I told my American friends in Semarang of my plans, they were horrified, but they had different ideas about ownership and I knew that what I was doing was the best solution for me. I borrowed the land for five years. For the Balinese, a house is like a human being and has a head (the family shrine), arms (sleeping quarters and social parlour), a navel (courtyard), sexual organs (gate), legs and feet (kitchen and granary) and anus (garbage pit). My house would not conform strictly to these rules, but it would be, as they said, how I wanted it to feel. Feeling was the most important part of the plan. It was several weeks before construction began and the concrete slab was laid, the well dug and the septic tank put in place. Then we had to wait for the coconut-palm poles to be found. The house would need nine of them, and they had to be old and mature and extra long to accommodate the second storey. When the nine poles finally arrived they were carefully set in place with the root-ends in the ground. It would be inviting trouble to put poles in the ground upside-down.

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The walls of the house were made of coral and panels of gedek, woven strips of bamboo skin. Windows, with shutters made of the same material, were set on all sides. Everything about the house construction was based on my own stature. The builder asked me to sit in a chair so he could judge the correct elevation for the window openings. When it came to the width of the doorways, he asked me to stand with my hands clasped across my chest with my elbows sticking out sideways. For the height of the doors, he asked me to hold my arms upright and curl my fingers over slightly. ‘But what if really tall people come?’ I asked. ‘Then, nyonya, they must bend down. This is your house and made to your size.’ It was a perfectly sound explanation. The windows were placed to suit my line of vision and the stone steps at the entrance were designed to suit my tread. The stairs leading up to the sleeping area posed a few problems, as such construction was not common in Balinese architecture. But, after several days’ consultation and what looked like a great deal of praying, the stairs went in — measured to my tread, of course. The construction of the skeleton ceiling was a miracle of harmony and adaptability as the beams were ingeniously fitted together without nails — held in place only by pegs bound with bamboo fibre. I almost regretted the imminent overlay of the roofing material, as the skeleton itself looked so beautiful. The thatching took a few weeks to arrive as the special grass had to be a certain length before it could be gathered and prepared. The lalang grass was sewn on to the ribs of stripped coconut palm fronds. Starting at the top of the roof, the ribs were laid one on top of the other in slowly descending order and lashed to the skeleton with indestructible strips of sugar-palm fibre until the whole building was covered with this blanket of very thick grass. The lower thatches of grass drooped over the windows and, when finished, the whole thing was ‘combed’ with a long rake. The head builder then went around the house with a very sharp knife and evened it all up, like a hairdresser cutting a fringe. The thatching was almost 30cm thick in places and they assured me it would last about 40 years.

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My house was finished and ready for occupancy but, before I could move in, there were certain ceremonies to be performed. As the house was built on his land, Nyoman organised the melaspasin, a purification ceremony in which the house was brought to life by a priest. The materials used in the construction — wood, grass and bamboo — had been ‘killed’ to make the building and now they had to be brought back to life. When the date was propitious, a priest arrived and set up his altar on the front porch. Dressed in white with a flower behind his ear, he rang bells, burned incense, made passes with frangipani flowers over holy water and buried mysterious little parcels in various parts of the garden. Hereward was home from the International School in Jakarta and we stood respectfully at a distance, wishing we understood more of what he was doing. I was perfectly happy about it all as I knew that everything was being done with my safety in mind. It was in Nyoman’s interests too, of course, as he was only lending me the land and the house would eventually belong to him and his family. Offerings of rice cakes and fruit were made by Nyoman and his family and they retired to their own kuren, satisfied that my house was safe from evil influences. The whole experience gave me a really good feeling and that, the Balinese believe, is the most important thing of all.

My brother’s blessing My brother John came to visit soon after the purification ceremony and decided he should do something of his own to protect me. With my son Hereward as his assistant, he performed his own ceremony, which would protect me in times of trouble. John’s partner Bev and my daughter Gina disapproved and would not participate, saying we were making fun of Balinese beliefs. But it was not so. John believed in what he was doing and, in my opinion, that was what really mattered. Before beginning, John and Hereward turned their pockets inside-out so no impish spirits could get inside their

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clothes and cause trouble. They walked through the house, asking for peace and happiness to descend on all who came to live there, while beating the support poles with my pair of Aboriginal clap sticks. The Balinese sat politely off at a distance, watching the whole performance and treating it with the same dignified respect we had accorded their earlier ceremony. John’s ceremony ended when he hurled a live chicken from an upstairs window. Squawking wildly, it fluttered down to the ground, landing near the seated Balinese. They quickly scooped it up and carried it home in triumph; a welcome addition to the communal pot. They quite understood the proceedings as they also offered chickens or ducks as part of their own rites. Retrieval of the animal was a bonus. John had acted on instinct with his chicken, but it fitted perfectly with Balinese sensibilities. So now I was safe in both cosmologies and could confidently live happily in my new house.

The Legian Pub When Mohammed Saleh joined me from Semarang I decided to open a little bar/restaurant in Legian. I was glad to have his help as Ed had told me before I left for Bali, ‘If you take Saleh with you, I won’t worry about you being there on your own. I know he will defend you with his life.’ Saleh and I found an empty shop, which had been used by a dressmaker, and set about turning it into a restaurant. With help from my friend Hans Mochtar, a Bugis magic man I had met on previous visits to Bali, we went into the mountains and had tables and chairs specially made. We bought plants in Bedugul for the garden and invested capital in necessities such as cookers and refrigerators. In Kuta there was a very successful restaurant called The Pub, so we decided to call our place the Legian Pub. The name pub would ring a bell with all Australian tourists. It went well from the very beginning. Catering mainly to tourists, who thronged to the area, we were able to provide

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two things that most homesick travellers longed for: icy-cold beer and boiling-hot tea. Most places served warm beer and tea made with warm water — both intolerable to Australians and New Zealanders. We were busy from opening time in the morning until late at night and the little place developed a real atmosphere of its own. We always wondered what it was that attracted people so much. My artist friend Kartika’s large and marvellous painting of a Karo Batak house in Sumatra hung on one wall and my wooden portrait-statue of King Bolongongo of the Lower Congo sat on the bar counter. The King had a drum between his knees and people would place offerings on it. Sometimes they gave him flowers, while others would get into the swing of things and buy him fancy liqueurs and cocktails. He had a right old time. We were probably the only bar/restaurant in town to have a full set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica for our customers to use, as well as all sorts of table games, such as the Thai game Kun Pan and the more traditional chess. What really brought the Legian Pub to life, however, was the arrival of the Batak singers. Arsito and his group were paid big dollars by the prestigious Bali Beach Hotel, but they delighted in coming into the Legian Pub when their show was over and playing for us, unpaid, just for the sheer joy of it. Our customers learned to welcome them with the Batak word of welcome, ‘Horas!’. Bataks, from the Lake Toba area of Sumatra, are natural musicians and can play and sing any sort of music superbly. They have a marvellous sense of rhythm and, once they got going at the pub, there was no stopping them. I think they also loved the appreciative audience. As well as Arsito and the Batak Singers, another group who played for us were the Legian Rockers. They were a very young group from Muntilan in Central Java and their leader was a handsome young man called Sutrisno. Not as professional as the Bataks, they were nevertheless a very endearing group and became part of our life. Tris had a beautiful personality and an extraordinary ability to play classical guitar even though he had never had a

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guitar lesson. Unable to read music, he taught himself from tape recordings and played the music by ear. One evening there was a great storm with continuous rain and heavy thunder and lightning. I stayed at home like most people but, about 11 o’clock, we were startled by the most dreadful screaming. Wrapped in sarongs and carrying umbrellas, people ran out of their houses and made their way to the rear of the restaurant Kayu Api, where the dreadful screams had come from. There we found poor Tris, dead of electrocution, burned out from within. The whites of his eyes were dark brown. Foolishly, he had been trying to change a fuse in the pouring rain. We found out it would cost R.350,000 to ship the body back home to Muntilan, so we took him to the morgue and asked if he could be kept there until his parents in Java were informed. As he was a Muslim, his parents were supposed to see his body before burial. But the morgue had no facilities for keeping corpses, so we had to pack ice around his poor little body to keep it in some sort of reasonable condition until his parents arrived, five days and many ice blocks later. We set up a little memorial for Sutrisno in the pub with masses of flowers. I thought of him every time I heard Recuerdos del Alhambra, the music he played so beautifully.

An honorary consul During my time there, Bali had no Australian Consul and, as a responsible person living on the island, I was often called upon to act in an honorary consul-like fashion for tourists who had problems. People who had lost their passports or had visa problems were referred to me. But most commonly I was called upon to visit Australians in the Denpasar hospital who had fallen ill or had motorbike accidents. The sick ones were always glad to have an English-speaking person visit them, particularly if the local medico had prescribed drugs for them. In the Balinese hospital system there was no provision for procuring prescribed medicines so patients had to wait until a friend or relative could get their script filled at the nearest chemist.

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One sad case was a girl who had been travelling in a bemo when it was struck by a bus. She was knocked unconscious and, when she came-to in the hospital, she had lost her memory and didn’t know what her name was or what she was doing in Bali. Her carry-bag contained only some money and a swimming costume so there was no way of knowing even where she was staying. I sat with her for many hours hoping to get some clue as to her identity. She eventually flew back to Sydney without the mystery being solved.

Queen of the Water Palace The dynastic town of Amlapura (Karangasem) is at the eastern end of Bali and at nearby Ujung there was once a water palace. A fantastic creation of moats, bridges and statuary in the middle of a lake, the palace was built by the ruling family of Karangasem, the Djelantiks, in 1927, not in the traditional Balinese manner, but in an eclectic mix of European styles, with Italianate casements and causeways, Greek columns and Moorish doorways. During my time in Bali it was inhabited by a Dutch Australian, Anton de Neve, and his amazing wife, June Klughorn, who I often visited. June was an Australian country girl, who had married a senior American war correspondent while still in her teens. When the Japanese surrender was taken in Tokyo Bay in 1945, she was smuggled aboard the USS Missouri dressed in American fatigues and was a silent witness to this momentous occasion. Her husband was a foreign correspondent based in Washington and, for 10 years, they lived a glamorous life in Argentina and Brazil, before moving back to Washington where they had two children and lived in the fast lane of the political and diplomatic world. June was blonde and beautiful but no match for the smart cats of America’s most sophisticated city. They tore her to pieces. Her husband was appointed personal press secretary to Richard Nixon but, when his actions in blocking the lobbying activities of the Mafia became too annoying for the crime

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syndicate, he was quietly eliminated. Driving home from work in his Ferrari one night, he was followed by a cement truck which forced him off the road on a bend where the drop-off was several hundred feet. The hospital staff behaved badly towards June, refusing to let her see the body and she was devastated. It was the end of life in the diplomatic fast lane for the unsophisticated Australian girl. She returned to Sydney but could not find a niche for herself there as a widow, after the heady days in Washington. She returned to West Virginia and found her house had been broken into and ransacked by Black Power groups. With her insurance money, she bought a 70-foot yacht, Finistera, covered the cabin floors with thick wool pile carpet, hired a captain and crew and set off to explore the world. After several years exploring the South Pacific, the yacht landed in Bali and June decided to go ashore for a while and explore the magical paradise. The yacht captain was given free rein to take off for a few months and before long June had a delightful new companion who took her all over the island on the back of his motorbike, the most exciting way of discovering Bali’s charms. They stayed in remote villages, witnessed rarely seen dances and festivals, ate local Balinese food and were entertained by Balinese princes and princesses. After six months or so of this idyllic life, June came back to the yacht basin to find that her ship had been impounded by the authorities on charges of drug running and the captain had escaped custody and disappeared. A young New Zealander agreed to take the ship off her hands and pay the charges and, in return for her too-generous offer, introduced her to his recently widowed friend, Anton de Neve. It was love at first sight and, as they made plans to wed, Anton showed June the Water Palace at Ujung, which he was restoring. They would live there together in splendour, for the princely Djelantik family of nearby Karangasem had given him permission to undertake restoration work in return for an indeterminate lease of the castle. The dilapidated state of the property was the result of an earthquake some years earlier.

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The lake had been cleared of weeds, the causeway to the mainland rebuilt and the castle itself completely remodelled inside, keeping all the time to the original conception and decoration. There was no electricity and, as Anton and June were avid readers, the kerosene lamps and hundreds of candles did not provide sufficient light. Accordingly, they sat on the terrace in the evenings, each wearing a miner’s safety lamp, all the better to see the printed word. June’s car was a chauffeur-driven, navy-blue Cadillac, complete with mini-bar and fridge, and she often used it when making her early-morning calls to my house. She seemed able to get by on very little sleep and occasionally, after being up all night dancing in the discos, would call on me about eight in the morning with the cheery greeting, ‘Good morning! Good morning! Hurry along now! You’re very slow with the drinks around here.’ Nothing could persuade her to drink tea or coffee at this time of day. The ‘hair of the dog’ was always required. Her extravagant and self-indulgent lifestyle had not yet begun to take its toll on her and she was a most attractive creature, dressed always in the latest Parisian fashions and looking as though she was on her way to a garden party at Buckingham Palace. Floral, loose-fitting silk gowns were her style, highlighted with ropes of pearls and always a large floppy hat decorated with flowers, and occasionally a parasol, to protect her from the sun. She was a pale English rose in a tropical garden. When an earthquake hit the Water Palace for the second time, her way of life was changed for ever. ‘Anton was shaving and I was in the kitchen teaching Nyoman how to make a souffle,’ she said. ‘Suddenly the stone floor under my feet turned to water. It was a horrible sensation, just rolling like a wave. Not a solid floor any more. Then the roof came down all over us. ‘The fridge door was open so I dived in head first and managed to save my head and shoulders from the falling tiles. My behind and the back of my legs caught it though. You can

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still see the scars all over them. Anton and Nyoman jumped into the lake and only got cut a little by flying glass and wood.’ The greatest tragedy was that Anton’s collection of Venetian glass, which lined the walls of the sitting room, was lost. It was shaken to pieces and lay all over the floor in a shimmering mass of pink and green. Every single piece was smashed to smithereens. The de Neves took up temporary accommodation in the Bali Beach Hotel in order to try to regain their equilibrium. ‘Will you go back and fix it up?’ I asked. ‘Not possible,’ said Anton. ‘It would cost as much money again as I’ve spent already.’ But they did go back and lived in the watchhouse on the mainland from where the once-colonnaded causeway had reached out to the castle in the middle of the lake. Their stay there was short-lived, however, as the gempa bumi struck again, this time obliterating what little was left of the castle and severing the causeway. The watchhouse cracked and split down the middle and June and Anton were thrown from their beds in the middle of the night. Anton had had enough. He packed his bags and flew home to Melbourne leaving June to arrange everything from the safety of the Bali Beach Hotel. Safe it was from the depredations of natural disasters but for June, whose dependence on alcohol in order to face problems had doubled, it was a disaster. Her public behaviour went from bad to worse, to appalling. One evening she joined a group of us for a drink barefoot, wearing a black nightie with a black handbag upsidedown on her head, the two handles looped over her eyes like giant sunglasses. I gently led her away to the ladies room to try to make repairs and when I mentioned that her hair needed fixing she spun back with, ‘I’ll fix my hair!’ With that she dunked her head in the toilet bowl and flushed it. June played the piano well and would sit for hours in the piano bar playing entertaining music to a gathering of entranced listeners. But, in spite of all this, and in spite of the fact Anton had a good rapport with the management, the hotel eventually asked her to leave.

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With her car and driver, she moved to a little beachside hotel not far from my house. I was very fond of her but I could see that she could not continue in this way for much longer. The souvenir sellers on the beach pestered her day and night and she bought everything they pressed on her until her room was overflowing with sarongs and hats, carvings and paintings. She also took to wandering around the street wrapped only in a towel. She gave her driver full control of her money and he could not really be blamed for appropriating some of it for his own use. He told me he hadn’t been paid for months. June’s situation was serious. I was unable to get in touch with her husband, Anton, so I rang the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, but they could do nothing unless she committed an offence or was arrested by Indonesian authorities. This was the problem: June was doing no harm to anyone but herself. I rang her brother, who was an MP in the Queensland Parliament, but he would have nothing to do with his sister. A friend, Val Ireland, suggested I talk to a psychiatrist she knew, Dr Dani, in Denpasar. I discussed June’s case with him and he came up with a plan. ‘There is no way Qantas will take her on board as she is at the moment,’ he said. ‘She will have to dry out first. Get her into the car and suggest going for a drive to the Water Palace, just for a look. On the way there you will pass the turn-off to the Rumah Sakit Jiwa, the Hospital for Nervous Diseases. Make some excuse that you have friends to visit there. I will alert the Australian doctor that you are coming. Once there the staff may be able to put her up for a few days so that she will be fit to fly back to Sydney. Unfortunately, I have to go to Jakarta, otherwise I would do it myself.’ June jumped at the chance to visit the ruined Water Palace, so Hereward and I made up a picnic basket and collected her from her hotel. We waited in the shade of a big waringin tree while she got herself together. Ants love the roots of these trees and I noticed that some of them were busily working away there. We set off along the east-coast road with the driver and Hereward up front and June and myself in the commodious back

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compartment with its jump seats, electric windows, air-conditioning and bar. We sang all the way with June in her full entertaining mode. As instructed, the driver turned off at the Rumah Sakit sign and, as we drove through the gates, June, who was no fool, asked, ‘Why are we going here? I know that sign says hospital.’ ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ I said apologetically. ‘A doctor friend of mine from Sydney has just been transferred here and I thought it was a good opportunity to say hello to him. Is it all right?’ ‘Why not?’ she said with a smile, adding archly, ‘I do hope he can sing.’ We pulled into the main entrance and were ushered into a small sitting room by the Australian doctor and some Indonesian staff. ‘Hello Peter,’ I said in bright, gushing tones. ‘What a long time it is since we last met in Sydney.’ ‘Have we met before?’ He wasn’t playing the game. ‘In Sydney. You must remember. When I had the art gallery in the Rocks. You used to catch the Kirribilli ferry to the city. I heard you were here so I had to drop in and see you,’ I lied as convincingly as I could and winked. He looked at me strangely but fortunately the blunder went unnoticed by June. Barefoot as usual, she was charming them all with her bright conversation. She was in the middle of showing pictures of the Water Palace in its heyday before the earthquake when I felt a severe sting on my right thigh. I slapped at it several times and then at my other leg, which was also being attacked. With my arms and legs flailing, I jumped up and down in a frantic attempt to locate the beastie that was biting me so viciously. ‘What is the matter, Madam?’ the doctor asked in measured tones. ‘Ants!’ I said desperately, slapping again at my left thigh. ‘I see,’ he continued calmly. ‘And do you often get this sensation of ants crawling underneath your skin?’ ‘It is not a sensation. They are ants. I stood under a tree in Legian.’

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The doctor fixed me with an even more professional gaze and I realised he thought I was the problem person, not June. How could she be? She was holding the company spellbound with her stories of the palace and the earthquake and her marvellous lifestyle on the lake. Shaking my head and cupping my right hand in front of my face I made little stabbing movements with my left index finger, indicating that it was not me but June towards whom the doctor should be directing his attention. Totally unconvinced by my pantomime, which obviously only confirmed his suspicions, he took out a small pad and began making notes. I had just finished reading One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest and, realising the mistake was now beginning to take on sinister overtones, I jumped up and said, ‘The toilet. I must go please,’ and headed for the door. Before I reached it, my arm was pinioned and held in a vice-like grip by one of the attendants. ‘Just quietly now. We will take you to the toilet.’ Once outside my composure returned and, speaking as calmly and as normally as I could, I tried to explain everything. I even found the nasty black ant and showed the red weals it had inflicted on my poor leg. The nurse called the doctor outside and to my great relief he accepted the explanation. Dr Dani had told him only that a woman with a problem would be arriving and had forgotten to mention the deception we had planned — pretending the doctor was an old friend. Back inside the doctor turned his attention to June and invited us all to lunch. ‘Lunch in a hospital for lunatics!’ June was being funny but wary. ‘Well, what are you going to offer us for lunch? Champagne and caviar I hope.’ ‘Not quite that,’ said the doctor. He was stony-faced. ‘Just our normal hospital fare. Perhaps after lunch you might like to take a rest. You can even stay the night.’ ‘Stay the night! With the loonies!’ June was suspicious and on her guard. ‘But aren’t we going to see the Water Palace?’ ‘I have heard that the road to Ujung is impassable after Selat,’ said the doctor. ‘There have been further landslides and the bridges are down.’

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‘Oh well. I guess that’s it. We’ll just have to make the best of the hospital, won’t we?’ In a tight corner June was always a fatalist. We ate our adequate lunch and I took June for a walk to see the accommodation. As she knew something was up, I explained the problem about travelling back to Sydney. She would have to sober up and it would be best if she stayed for a week. ‘Three days,’ she said. ‘That’s the limit. And don’t leave me here any longer.’ Her easy acceptance pleased me but, of course, there was a catch. Before checking in she asked to be taken to the nearest village to buy a toothbrush, some soap and a towel. We waited in the car while she went inside and were surprised when she staggered out with a huge paper sack crammed with purchases. She had bought the toiletries all right but added to them a goodly supply of Anchor and Bintang beer, the only alcohol available in the village. We said nothing about it to the staff. Beer seemed harmless enough considering her addiction to the harder stuff. Three days later she passed the test and returned to Legian sober enough for the journey home. In preparation for the flight to Sydney, she went shopping and bought a completely new outfit of white cotton, threaded with gold, and a toque hat to match. In the evening she presented herself and her baggage at the airport check-in counter. Just as her bags were about to be lifted on to the scales, she raised an imperious hand and made a dramatic announcement. ‘No luggage, thank you. I don’t need it. Only poor people carry luggage. Give it all away please. Give it away to someone in need.’ So saying she swept off singing her latest hit song, Let’s Have Another Little Kiss, which startled the security officers and suitably distracted the passengers from seeing a corpse being loaded on to the aircraft.

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Hans Mochtar One of my good friends in Bali was an unusual man whose full name was Andi Hans Mochtar. Andi was a princely title in the former Bugis kingdom in South Sulawesi. Darker skinned than the Balinese, Hans was in fact the son of a Bugis father and a Batak mother. He had a great shock of frizzy black hair and was of indeterminate age and sex. My guess was that he was about 40 years old and probably bisexual. Tony, a mutual Chinese friend from Lombok, told me Hans was the son of a high-ranking army officer and prince and as a young man he had joined the army himself. He married a very beautiful girl from Menado and had two children. One day he found out his wife was having an affair with his superior officer, so he took a gun and killed him. He spent a long time in prison and had a stamp on his papers saying he was never to be given a passport. Tony’s story may or may not have been true, but what was certain was that Hans Mochtar had a very mysterious past and many powerful connections. During the day he would dress in tank tops, flared jeans and a baseball cap, but in the evenings the frog turned into a prince and he was a glamorous star in high-heeled, gilded cowboy boots, tight, white designer jeans and a Gucci shirt open at the neck. On his fingers he wore huge gold rings, studded with diamonds and other precious stones; thick, gold chain bracelets hung from his wrists and round his neck was a necklace of precious stones. He really was a knockout and always dressed in this flamboyant manner for his regular visits to the Matahari nightclub in Sanur. He was a fabulous dancer and never short of partners. As well as taking on all the smart young chicks, one of the nice things about Hans was that he also sought out as dancing partners the wives of elderly men who were probably on their last trip around the world. The husband was no doubt past dancing and Hans would lead the wife on to the floor and dance gently with her as the husband looked on admiringly, possibly

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remembering the past and their young life together. How many women travellers, I wondered, returned to America to tell the tale of this marvellous creature in Bali who asked them to dance? In all the years I knew him, I never found out what Hans did for a living. It must have been a respectable living as he had a smart house opposite the Do Drop Inn in Legian Kelod, with coloured lights in the garden, two sitting rooms, many bedrooms and several bathrooms and a pendopo at the back, surrounded by a moat and planted with ferns and flowers. A pendopo is a raised platform with a tiled roof and carved pillars, which is used to entertain guests and for dance performances. The real mystery about Hans, however, was his association with the ‘44 Giants’. He explained them to me in detail. ‘The 44 Giants are not of this world. They are like my family who died many years ago. My grandfathers and people like that. They are white magic. They come from outside the world and are more than six metres tall. Every morning they come to my house and I give them coffee and bananas. ‘If you doubt this then please check the amount of coffee on my shelves. Every week it goes down, down, down. They drink coffee with me and tell me about my life. Several years ago when they first came to me, they said I must stop trying to make money but just sit down and be good and honest and the money would come to me. And it has. I must be good to people and look after them. ‘I ask them for advice when I have problems. It is always good advice and my problems are always solved. Americans gave me $150,000. They were Las Vegas people and fighting. In the Hyatt. With fists. Boss to boss. Very rich people. I say to them, no fighting. You are my brothers. They stopped fighting and said it is good that I say no fighting. In three months we will give you money. First they gave me a Commodore car. Then they gave me the money. Very rich people. My very good friends until now.’ I asked him more about the intriguing giants and he continued, ‘Just now they gave me a new power. I can see through walls. It is a worry for me sometimes. When I walk along the street I can see through the walls and into people’s

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houses. I don’t know why they make this for me. They do not tell me yet.’ Hans could also tell people about their past by asking only one question — what number child they were in the family. From this information he drew a detailed character study, which was, in all the times I listened, remarkably accurate. He also made predictions about the future and held people enthralled; everyone wanted to know what was round the corner. I asked him how old he was when he first saw the 44 Giants and he told me this story. ‘When I was very young my parents put me in a little bed but in the morning when they came to look for me I would be gone. Every night I crept out of the house and went to sleep on the grave of my grandfather. Do you know the little yellow bird that flies in my garden sometimes? That is my grandfather. He tells me that if I do not drink alcohol, do not gamble and no narcotica, he will look after me. If I drink, I am sometimes headache. I like coffee only. And water.’ Hans was the Disco King of Kuta and was seen everywhere on his motorbike during the day and dancing into the early hours at night. He also appeared to be on very good terms with the army so it is possible he was some sort of agent. Every six months or so he would disappear inside his house and stay incommunicado for several weeks and the mysterious Chris would arrive. I caught only glimpses of Chris in the garden. He was a thin, stringy young man with a hang-dog expression and no sign of animation. Hans said very little about Chris, except to say he was ‘of the Onassis family’ and was afraid of being kidnapped but wanted a holiday in Bali. Hans was employed as his bodyguard. It was unlikely this story was true as Chris never left the house to enjoy the delights of Bali, but he added to Hans’ mysterious character. When Chris was not in residence, Hans came to my house every morning to drink coffee and talk and it was over these early-morning chats that our friendship developed. When I eventually left Bali he took over the care of my dog Rusty and fed him saté sticks every day until the poor creature was like an

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over-stuffed sofa. Being Muslim, Hans always saw to it that Rusty never ate pork saté; only lamb, goat or chicken.

The naturalist’s wife One day I came face-to-face with what could have been my future self. Someone came into the Legian Pub and said there was an old lady in one of the losmen who was very sick and they asked if I would go to see her. She was in a place called Lima Saudara (the Five Brothers), so I put together a Thermos of weak tea and sugar to take to her. It was a typical Balinese house turned into lodgings for tourists, with a long covered verandah built of coral and cement. This one was very much at the low end of the accommodation scale and had only the most primitive facilities for bathing. If someone was sick here I didn’t think much of their chances of survival. I asked the owner, a man named Made, for the orang sakit (sick person), and he took me to the back of the losmen where there were some very crude huts made from bamboo, banana trash and palm fronds. Surely she wasn’t lying in one of these? But she was. In the gloom of one of these huts, barely lit by a flickering lamp, was a figure lying on a tikar mat on the dirt floor. She was loosely covered by a sarong and had her head resting on a cloth bag. ‘Sakit keras. Lama sekali [She has been very sick for a long time],’ murmured Made. Leaving the lamp with me, he withdrew without another word. As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I knelt beside the prone figure and touched her gently. She gave a slight moan as a sign of recognition so I said quietly, ‘I hope you speak English. My name is Suli and I have come to see if I can help you.’ ‘Yes. Yes. I speak English. I am English. I come from Tunbridge Wells.’ Her voice was distinctly cultured but very faint and I had to lean forward to hear her clearly. She was a tiny woman, very

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thin and frail, with wispy hair and a gaunt face. She was wearing a T-shirt and a floral batik sarong. There was a strong musky odour of stale sweat, which I remembered from my own days of sickness. I offered her some tea, which she drank eagerly, moving into a sitting position and leaning against the bamboo support. ‘I don’t know what is the matter with me,’ she said. ‘It’s nice of you to come. The tea is good. I get so thirsty.’ She coughed for a little while. Her sentences were short and punctuated with long pauses, so I stayed quiet, waiting for her to speak. I had never seen anyone like her before. She was dressed like a hippy and had the hippy bag and the same apparent indifference to her appearance and living quarters that the young tourists usually adopted, but she was the wrong age. Observing her in the lamplight, I guessed her to be in her seventies if not older. She handed me back the empty glass and, sensing she was now better able to communicate with me, I asked, ‘What are you doing in Bali on your own? It’s an awfully long way from Tunbridge Wells.’ ‘I’m not really on my own. I’m here with my husband. He’s a naturalist and has gone off looking for specimens so I’m waiting for him to come back. He’s been away such a long time.’ She said her name was Anna Hastings. I think she had been suffering from delirium because her speech was very halting and she had a strange look in her eyes as though she was seeing things I could not see. After a second glass of tea I asked if she would like me to take her to see a doctor but she declined. She would wait for her husband to return and he would give her the medicine she needed. She said she had not eaten for some days so I said I would come back later with some rice and soup. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said. ‘But I’m sure my husband will be back soon and he will bring me things to eat. I’m quite all right. I’m used to this way of living, you see. I’ve done it all my life.’ I could see she didn’t want me to help her any more, so I left. I went looking for Made to see if he could give me any information about the poor woman.

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‘She has no husband, nyonya,’ he said. ‘She came here about 10 days ago on her own and just sat in the hut reading books and writing in a little book. She asked me to get rice for her a couple of times but then it stopped and I noticed she was looking very sick and lying down all the time. I asked some people staying here to go to your place and see if you could do something to help.’ I guessed she had been suffering from either a severe bout of malaria or typhus fever, which was endemic in that area, mostly a consequence of toilets being placed too close to drinking wells. Unless one was scrupulous about boiling water for 10 minutes before drinking, there was no way of avoiding recurrence of the disease. I was very careful about boiling my water and supervised it myself as the kitchen help were a bit vague about the difference between very hot and boiling. I went back to see Anna later and gave her some food and some of my own medicine, which she accepted politely but grudgingly. She did seem glad to have a visitor, however, and, as I gained her confidence, she told me about herself. As she talked I saw my own existence shadowing her story of a life wandering the world as companion to a man of adventure. Like me, she had always been fascinated by the exotic and was swept off her feet by a man who offered her not only love, but the chance to travel to remote parts of the world in pursuit of his calling. And this is how she had ended up. Was I seeing my own future here in this little grass hut? Was this the future I had to look forward to? I shuddered at the idea and quickly put it behind me. When everything is going well and life is a bowl of cherries, it’s difficult to imagine that eventually it may all turn sour and the joys will vanish. She told me her husband John was a distinguished naturalist who worked for the British Museum. ‘We have already spent 18 months travelling about the islands of eastern Indonesia from Sulawesi in the north, though the Moluccas to Banda and finally to the Portuguese end of the island called East Timor. We began our work from the town of Dili.’

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‘I was in Dili myself not long ago,’ I said. ‘It’s a very pretty little town, isn’t it? Lovely wide streets lined with shady red flamboyant trees and beautiful white churches. I stayed at The Tropical. Do you remember it?’ ‘No, I don’t,’ she said. ‘We stayed with friends in The Palazzio. They were all very sick with malaria. Did you know it’s the unhealthiest place in all the eastern islands? Our friends there have a big family, but there were always absences from the dinner table due to bouts of fever and dizziness. Such a lifeless town and such dilapidated buildings.’ It wasn’t the Dili I remembered, but travellers often see places from a different perspective and take away different observations. I knew that one’s state of health and happiness could have a powerful effect on impressions left in the mind. Anna told me they had lived in Timor for six months, making their base not far from Lahany. They built a small hut, a half-day’s difficult journey through an area called Tiring Rocks. Her descriptions of her life were so detailed and precise I could not help comparing them with my own, when we lived in remote parts of South America and Kalimantan. Much of the time, she said, she was left alone with only a Timorese woman for company, while her husband rode off on his Timorese pony to collect insects and rare plants. Even though the hills were less malarial than in the lowland areas around Dili, she spent a large part of her life with fever, nausea and vomiting. It sounded awfully similar to parts of my own life but I didn’t need her assurance that she could easily put the suffering aside and enjoy every moment of her life in that strange land. I believed what she said, because we also were sick a lot of the time when living in remote areas but it didn’t seem to matter much. We knew we would recover and the fascination of coming so closely in contact with someone else’s culture, as well as living in an exotic wilderness, easily overrode the temporary feelings of distress or discomfort. Just as our family had done, she and her husband often built their own accommodation while living on remote islands. On Ritabel they were given a site just above high-tide mark.

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During the 10 days of the house’s construction, John and Anna caught butterflies, which abounded on the hillsides. The height of the building in no way deterred the prying eyes of curious children and villagers. Once the lamps were lit, hundreds of pairs of eyes could be seen at every nook and cranny, every crack and crevice. The Hastings had become the evening’s entertainment for the village. This had been our experience, too, on many occasions. In Waikabubak on the island of Sumba we spent most evenings with the doors and windows filled with eyes watching our every move as though we were a play or drama. At times we had to ask people to move away from the windows in order to allow cooling breezes to enter the room, so closely were their bodies packed. As the days passed, Anna and I became friends and her health improved visibly. She told me she was 72 years old and knew she could never live back in Tunbridge Wells. She had passed the point of no return and would wander with her husband for ever. About 10 days after our first meeting, I went to her hut as usual, taking bananas and some chicken soup, but she wasn’t there. Maybe she had gone for a walk. I looked for Made but he knew nothing. She had paid her rent but he hadn’t seen her since the day before. I went back into the hut, but could find none of her possessions. Her sarongs were gone as well as her bag and notebooks. She had vanished. No word left for me. Nothing. I was slightly put out when she failed to appear in the next few days. I thought we had become friends and that if her husband had arrived to take her off to some new remote island, she would have introduced him to me and said goodbye at least. But Anna was gone. Did she ever exist? Was she a real person or a pleat in the fabric of time, sent to show me the prognosis for my own future should I continue to live my vagabond existence, moving from place to place and building temporary dwellings that were really only play houses? I loved her descriptions of the way she had lived, just as I loved the way I lived, but was that how it would end? In a smelly little bamboo hut, racked with fever and pain, waiting for a long-dead husband to return and make it all right?

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Anna has always been a mystery to me, because no one except Made and I ever saw her. Apparition or reality, she hung like a warning light over my expectations for the future.

Saleh and the pub problems Hereward had been at the International School in Jakarta for a year, but, acting on the urging of friends in the Australian Embassy, we felt he should do his final two years of senior school in Australia. Leaving the pub in Saleh’s hands, I travelled to Sydney to arrange things. It was almost three months before I was able to get things properly organised and return to Bali. While I was in Sydney I received some very puzzling telegrams from Saleh. Telegram of business concern. Excuse me me money is spent please quickly money send and I have met Mrs Jackie Huie [my sister-in-law] in Denapsar. Then came a letter. Dear Mrs Suli Fenton. Our problem. 1st about the house. Material checking was wrong because all material was less and then I must buy material more. And that for working salaries is me money. It’s for repair the wall second floor only. 2nd about bar. We must buy more electric stream. Then we must new more for bar. Also me money for work salaries and building worked and paid material. To buy chair. And also for drunk already. [Then the even more mysterious] Yes! It’s No. 196 as right. I hope else Mrs Suli come back in Bali and I have expectuate. Such is me letter to Mrs Suli Fenton. Thank you. Moch Saleh. It was very puzzling but there was nothing I could do until my business in Sydney was finished. When I returned, Saleh had only bad news for me. The pub had gone downhill. Not only was he making no profit, he was in debt. This was a blow because although I had never looked at the pub as a money-maker, I didn’t want it to cost me

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money. I was teaching English every day to the Customs and Excise Department and this gave me pocket money, but the pub was supposed to support itself. The arrangement had always been that as well as earning a good salary, Saleh would take over the pub for himself and his family when the time came for me to leave Bali. With the instability of the helicopter business, I knew this could come at any time. On top of this apparent financial disaster, Saleh had fallen violently in love with Gusti, the beautiful little Balinese girl who worked in our restaurant. She was 14 years old and came to me in tears to tell me that Saleh would not leave her alone and asked if she could live in my house. She moved in with me, but Saleh’s madness persisted. One day he appeared at my front door, his eyes staring wildly past me towards poor Gusti, who was cowering behind the table. ‘Gusti! I must have Gusti! She is my wife!’ I tried to remonstrate with him but he would have none of it and kept on repeating, ‘She is my wife!’ ‘Stop being so silly,’ I said. ‘She is 14 and you are 50. You have a perfectly good wife back in Semarang. Gusti is not your wife.’ He gave me a murderous look and swung out the door. I could see that I was in for some sort of trouble, but little did I suspect the enormity of it. Samuel was one of the helpers around the pub and I had asked him to keep a day book while I was in Sydney. He presented me with a dreadful tale of Saleh’s persecution of Gusti. Wanting to make his point clear, he had written it all down. Note for Mama. 1. What happened with Saleh. At 25-1-79 a little Gusti report to me that Saleh to discharge a little Gusti but not success. At that day a little Gusti was planning to report to Balian Bandjar [village council] but she regret the plan because she must be present at family cremation in Tampak Siring for 2 days. Saleh do a violent murder to a little Gusti.

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At 27–1–79 she ask permit to go to Tampak Siring for 2 days but because she was late half a day that is why Saleh discharge her. After she come to my house to report to Banjar. But I know this problem very danger. That is why I tell her don’t tell to Banjar. This problem belong to Legian Pub and Mama Suli. I say, beside Mama Suli, no body has right to scarge a little Gusti from Legian Pub. Three weeks interval. A little Gusti tell me again she is scarge from Pub. Because decrease staff. This not right. I have to talk to Hans Mochtar. A little Gusti say when Mama Suli come back I won ask for job back. Note for Mama. The Day Book I was make it. Saleh was making something very stirring in my head. This is why I have torn. Because at the time I am very angry. Saleh was furnish to me some people from Java. I talk to them on beach. They do not know my name and say Saleh tell them Samuel is korupsi. He is much korupsi in Legian Pub. But when Saleh went to Semarang much money in the Pub was lost in the Pub by Samuel in korupsi. When I tell them I am Samuel they are much afraid but I say don’t be afraid. Saleh is korupsi and stupid and arrogant and egoist. I am true angry but I remember Mama Suli is good. Samuel. At place. The story, as I eventually sorted it out, was that while I was away, there was a lot of fiddling with the money. The pub had been full as usual but all the returns were down. Saleh had gone off to Semarang leaving Samuel in charge and when he returned he decided to explain the shortfall in returns by putting all the blame on Samuel. He tried to sack Gusti because she wouldn’t give him her favours. In spite of the continuing popularity of the pub, the returns were down by about half, so there was obviously something going on that I didn’t know about. Saleh brought the receipts over each morning and the totals at the end of the week for me to check but, according to his bookkeeping, the business was certainly going down the drain.

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When my friend Yu Prio came by, we discussed the matter and she said the only way to find the leak was to set a trap. We numbered all the pages in the customer receipt books with a secret symbol and also checked the wholesale prices of the goods bought in Denpasar. Checking the secret symbols we found that only half the customer receipts were shown in the totals and that the wholesale prices for beer, wine and spirits shown as weekly expenditure were grossly exaggerated. So now we had to decide how to plug the leak. It would be difficult, as Saleh, like Yu Prio, was Javanese, and for Javanese saving face was very important.

Black magic In the meantime, some very strange things began to happen. One evening when I left the house to walk to the pub, I left some candles burning in little pewter candle holders. It was almost dark and as I walked along the road I heard someone calling me, ‘Suli! Suli!’ in a low, falling inflection. Just ahead of me I could see a shadowy figure and, although I didn’t recognise the person, I knew a lot of people and presumed it was someone who knew me. ‘Just a minute,’ I called back. ‘Don’t walk so fast so I can catch up with you.’ But the faster I walked the further off the figure moved, still calling my name softly. By the time I reached the street light it had disappeared. When I returned home that night, the candles I had left burning had died, of course, but the little pewter holders had melted and lay like soft butter on the counter. What strange sort of heat could have caused that, I wondered? As the days went by, more and more strange things began to happen. Several times, when walking out the gate on to the road, I tripped and fell heavily as though my foot had been caught by a rope. But when I picked myself up there was no rope or other obstruction there. Then I fell down the stairs and took all the skin off my shin.

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Lying on the beach one day I was looking up at the clouds and there, just below them, appeared the faces of strange, grisly looking men with beards. Not in the clouds, but below them. My nights, too, were disturbed by strange voices and faces appearing at the windows, high on the second floor. The most disturbing thing was the dead dog, which appeared on my front door step, and which took several days of burning to dispose of. It was about this time that I had my proof that Saleh was fiddling the books, including the day’s takings, by 50 per cent, so I confronted him with the evidence. It was a painful thing for me to do, as I had liked the man and felt his actions were a very great betrayal. Through our efforts in Semarang, he had been returned to normal life and had rid himself of the hated prison number on his identity papers. He had a great opportunity in Bali to have his own business, but was apparently too greedy to wait until I left, and wanted to take it now. He wanted the business and he wanted Gusti and every other consideration was forgotten. I put it down to a mid-life crisis and gave him notice immediately, before things could get worse. After Saleh had cleared all his things out of his room, which was also the store room, I went in to check the stock and found on the back of a shelf a curious little box of chased silver. Inside was a white powdery substance that I didn’t recognise. I showed it to Hans when we were out driving with some visitors, and he nearly hit the roof. ‘Throw that away!’ he said angrily. ‘Throw it away now, or I will no longer be your friend.’ ‘But what is it?’ I wanted to know. I suspected it was a drug such as heroin or cocaine but, having never seen either, I wasn’t sure. But Hans refused to speak further about the matter and hurled the silver box out of the car window as we crossed a bridge. Suddenly a lot of things began to fit into place. In the pub in the evenings, where I always enjoyed talking to the customers, I drank coffee, as drinking alcohol in such a situation could be a hazard. Saleh always brought me the coffee and now I guessed that whatever the substance was, he had probably been

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adding it to my drink, causing all those strange things to happen. I will never know what it was because from that day on, Hans refused to speak of it.

The trial By the second day of the trial, I was sure they were going to send me to jail. The panggilan or summons was delivered to me on a Sunday night by a man on a bicycle. It said only that I was to report to the Kejaksaan (Court of the Public Prosecutor) the next morning at eight. There was no time to seek advice, so I turned up on time and, after a wait of two hours, was shown into the office of a man in uniform. The name on the desk was Arif Channy. He did not look up as I entered, but I recognised him as the man I had met some time before in the house of an antique dealer in Kuta and who I had assumed was merely an antique collector. He looked up. ‘So. We meet again. Silahkan duduk. Please sit down.’ His attention returned to his sheaf of papers and nothing was said for about five minutes. I glanced around the room, which was barely furnished with his desk and chair, my chair and another smaller desk with a typewriter. The wooden floor was bare and there were no curtains. The modern Indonesian Public Service had none of the romantic flair of the ancient Javanese kingdoms which were extravaganzas of elaborate ceremonial dress, ornate carvings, scrollwork and pomp. This was the cold, hard, military approach of President Suharto’s New Order. A long interrogation followed. Channy wanted to know my husband’s name, his company, all the places in Indonesia where he had worked; my children’s names and their involvement in the country, their schools and friends; my involvement in the country and my reason for living in Bali, why I had gone into partnership with the Javanese, Saleh, and, above all, why I was working in the Legian Pub.

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‘I am not working,’ I said. ‘I am teaching. Just as I am teaching English language to your Customs and Excise Department. I am teaching Western cooking to the people in the restaurant. I am teaching Saleh how to cook food for the European visitors. I am teaching the people who work there how to serve them. I am only in this country temporarily. When I leave Indonesia, the restaurant will belong to Saleh and his family. I am acting only in a teaching capacity.’ Channy just sat there without speaking, then suddenly the interview was terminated. ‘That is all,’ he said. ‘Be here tomorrow morning at eight.’ Puzzled, but not yet especially worried, I took a bemo into Denpasar and made a few phone calls from the post office. Ed was out of touch in Irian Jaya, my friend Tari was away in Jakarta, Dr Dani didn’t answer and Hans was on the neighbouring island of Lombok. I went home and decided it wasn’t all that serious. Not serious enough to contact the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, a decision I would later regret. It must be some attempt at shady dealing by the officials, possibly instigated by Saleh. I remembered hearing that Channy was involved in some undercover affairs and guessed he thought I was a rich orang asing (foreigner) who was ripe for a bit of milking. Surely I was capable of dealing with problems like this. As a precaution I sought the advice of a local lawyer recommended by a friend. He suggested Channy was simply looking for money and the quickest way to settle the matter would be to give him some. Recourse to such actions had no appeal for me whatsoever, but I remembered what the lawyer said. ‘He will give you the opportunity. Just watch out for it.’ The next day I attended at 8am and waited the obligatory two hours before being shown into Channy’s office. Channy’s demeanour was more oily and creepy than ever. During the first few hours of the trial the previous day, when I wasn’t worried and was not taking things too seriously, I had asked exactly who he was. ‘I am your prosecutor,’ he had said. ‘And I am here to help you.’

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‘But if this is a court, where is the judge? And where is the jury?’ It was, perhaps, a naive inquiry. ‘I have already told you, I am your prosecutor. We are all prosecutors here. We are the judge, the jury and the prosecutors.’ He had twitched his shoulders so that the pips on them glinted, reinforcing his importance. ‘Would you like a cigarette?’ He had leaned forward and pushed an ashtray towards me. ‘Thank you.’ I had fallen for the trap. Flicking open his lighter, he appeared to be offering a light. I had leaned forward expectantly, but, just as I was within range, he slammed it shut, making me feel most uncomfortable. Fixing me a steely gaze, he had then flipped open a book and said, ‘Working without a permit. Maximum penalty: one year in jail.’ It was then I knew it wasn’t a game. It was deadly serious. By the second morning, I realised a series of charges had been laid against me. Deciding to take the initiative, I said, ‘Selamat pagi, Mr Channy. Good morning. Could you please tell me what exactly are the charges against me? May I see the list you are reading from?’ ‘Certainly not. All these papers are the private property of the court.’ ‘But Mr Channy, if I don’t know what I am charged with, how can I possibly defend myself?’ ‘The charges, as well as the evidence, all belong to the court. What do you offer in your defence?’ This was lunacy! How could I possibly defend myself against charges I was ignorant of? I looked for an opening, remembering the lawyer’s advice. Was this it? Was this when the bribe should be applied? But before I could think further Channy launched into the repetitive questioning of all my activities in Indonesia — and my husband’s and my children’s. It went on and on until I became quite dizzy, wondering if I was giving the same answers I had given the day before and not compromising myself. I explained how I had taught English in Kalimantan and Java and was now teaching a government

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department in Bali. I told him about my involvement with Indonesian art and how I had put on the Affandi family exhibition in Semarang. ‘I really enjoy living here, Mr Channy,’ I said. ‘I love the people and their way of life. Every penny of my husband’s salary has been spent in this country. Maybe this has been foolish, but it is because we have such friendly and warm feelings for Indonesia and its people. A few months ago I put in a well for drinking water in a retarded children’s home out near Sanur. Most of the money was raised by taking up collections from tourists. I have never taken from Indonesia, only given to it.’ Gazing at the ceiling, Channy said, ‘Our life here is very different from yours in Australia. For example, I have two very old people to look after — my parents. They are poor and I have to pay for their food, electricity and rent. On my salary this is very difficult.’ ‘Oh,’ I said carefully. Was this the opening? What did I say now? How did I actually offer the bribe? Taking a wild stab, I said, ‘What a burden that must be for you, Mr Channy. Is there something I can do to help you with your parents?’ During this second interrogation, a typist sat at the small desk in the corner and when I made my tentative suggestion Channy’s eyes flicked like a snake towards her. Some instinct told me this was another trap. He wanted whatever I said to be carefully recorded. I gasped inwardly, realising I was now in real danger — danger of being further charged with offering a bribe. My offer of help for his aged parents trailed away into silence as I wished I could erase it. ‘Are you offering me a bribe?’ His eyes narrowed to slits as he leaned forward, elbow on the table, the palm of his hand cupped around his mouth. This picture of him with his hand on the lever of the trapdoor was burned into my mind for ever. Some flash of intuition beyond my control took over my voice and I spoke coolly, in shocked tones, ‘Of course not, Mr Channy! I like talking to old people and I thought maybe I could visit them some time and learn something about their life.’

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Obviously disappointed by the failure of his ploy, Channy motioned the girl on the typewriter to bring him some papers. Two pages were stapled together and he handed them to me saying, ‘Please sign your name at the bottom.’ I could scarcely believe what he was asking me to do. The papers were all in Indonesian closely typed, and all in what appeared to be legal jargon. I understood very little of what was written but realised it was some sort of confession. ‘I cannot sign this,’ I said. ‘Why not? It is merely a record of what we have been discussing for the past two days.’ ‘In the first place it is in a language foreign to me and in the second place I never sign anything without legal advice. That is the custom in my country.’ ‘So! You refuse. In that case the whole matter will be sent immediately to the Immigration Department and you will probably have to leave the country in 24 hours. Is that what you want? Your husband will also probably have his work permit cancelled.’ Now I was really afraid. Could he really initiate such drastic action? I would have to think of something quickly. Once again, acting purely on instinct, I said, ‘I would like to request a cooling-off period.’ Channy was startled for a moment and then said, ‘Wait here.’ He left the room and I sat there on the stiff-backed chair, wondering how long I could hold on without breaking. I wasn’t very far off that point and I suddenly felt very small and alone. What was I doing in that crummy country anyway? I should have gone home to Australia when we left Semarang. I had smoked several cigarettes by the time Channy returned. He was accompanied by another uniformed man with the pips of a higher rank on his shoulders. They escorted me out of the room and along the passageway to another room, which was larger than Channy’s and had padded chairs, a small carpet and a low table, in the centre of which there was a bowl of fruit. The two men spoke to one another rapidly in Indonesian then the second man said to me, ‘Well now, nyonya. What is your request?’ His English was perfect, with a slight American drawl.

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‘A cooling-off period. A breathing space. I just need to think things over.’ ‘And how much cooling-off time do you require?’ ‘I would like at least 48 hours,’ I said, hoping it would give me time to find someone to help me. I had been very foolish not to take the matter seriously in the beginning. The two men spoke to each other again and then the man said, with a narrow smile, ‘We will accede to your request — partly. You have 24 hours. Report back here on Thursday morning at 8am.’ The interview was over and I was dismissed. I almost ran out of the building. It was already past midday and too late for further action that day, as in Bali all offices closed at 1pm. I took a bemo back to Legian and went to sleep. I would have the whole of Wednesday to get things organised. Fortunately for me, Hans came back from Lombok the next day. He listened to my story and said not to worry about the Immigration Department as it was extremely unlikely that Channy would want to share any money he was hoping to make with another department. At this moment a letter arrived from Ed in Irian Jaya. Sept. 24, 1979. Sorong. West Irian. Shirl. I just discovered that Peter, bearer of this letter who works here as a mechanic, is going to Jakarta and will be in Bali this morning. I got your letter about all the problems you are having with Saleh. I will ask the Bank of Indonesia to transfer R.100,000 [$A200] to your account ASAP and another R.500,000 [$A1,000] first week in October. Maybe we can all go to Australia to celebrate Gina’s birthday. Tell Saleh I’m going to turn him into a frog turd if he doesn’t stop harassing you. OK? Love, Ed. Reassured by these words of comfort, I felt nothing could touch me. I turned up at the court again at 8am on Thursday and, after waiting the usual hour or so on the hard bench, I was motioned into another office by a woman in uniform. ‘You don’t have to go to the prosecutor any more. You can go now,’ she said.

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‘Is the case dismissed?’ She didn’t answer, just shrugged her shoulders and walked off. It was all very difficult to understand but at least I was free, so I went home and decided a good swim was the only way to rid myself of the whole nasty business. There was a lively surf and I felt refreshed, but at the back of my mind there was a worrisome little niggle. Was it really over? About 9pm my doubts were realised when another summons was served on me — and not just on me, but on the whole establishment: Made, Gusti and K’tut, who worked in the restaurant, Saleh, his new girlfriend Wayan and Pak Latag, the landlord. We were all required to attend the court at 8am the next day. I rushed to Hans’ place to tell him of the latest development. His face took on a grim expression and he said, ‘Now, you must do exactly as I say.’ He fixed me with his witchdoctor’s stare. ‘Put on your very best clothes and get a proper handbag, not that one you use every day to go shopping. And wear your best shoes. I will collect you and Made and Gusti and K’tut in my car at 7.30am, so make sure you are ready. And look smart!’ A friend lent me a good handbag and I wore a silk suit and matching high-heeled shoes. Hans picked us up and delivered us to the court well before the appointed time, saying he would return later. We had just seated ourselves on the bench in the entrance hall when Saleh, Pak Latag and Wayan arrived and sat on the bench opposite, facing us. It was as though we were the Goodies and they were the Baddies. We avoided each other’s eyes and sat there, like sparrows on a telephone wire, waiting for something to happen. A few prosecutors came and went and orderlies ambled about, but no one took any notice of us. Almost two hours later, when I was thinking I would have to go out to stretch my legs, there was a sudden flurry of activity and who should stride in but Hans himself. And what a different man to the one in the tank top and jeans who had

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dropped us off that morning. Now he was resplendent in his high-heeled cowboy boots, pastel-pink Yankee shirt, gold rings, chains and necklace, with his hair fluffed up in high bouffant style. I was so pleased to see him I jumped up saying, ‘I’m so glad you’ve come. Let’s go over the road and get a coffee.’ He gave me a withering glance and, before sweeping off in the direction of the prosecutors’ offices, said, ‘If you don’t want to go to jail, sit on that bench until you are told to do otherwise.’ Channy appeared on the scene at this moment, greeting Hans warmly, like an old chum. They disappeared together down the long corridor. So we sat there, the Goodies and the Baddies, until well after lunch-time with no one taking the slightest notice of us. Gusti and K’tut were terrified and spoke only to each other in whispers, never to me or Made. They had never been in a court before and it was a devastating experience. It was almost one o’clock when an orderly appeared and asked Gusti and K’tut to follow her. Looking as though they were marching off to their execution, in spite of my warm assurances that everything would be all right, they went down the corridor without a backward glance. Five minutes later they were back, smiling and very relieved. Then it was Made’s turn and after that Wayan, Pak Latag and Saleh, until I was the only one left. I sat alone for more than half an hour until Hans appeared and said, ‘It’s all over. You can leave now. Lucky you have me for a friend, otherwise you would be on your way to jail now.’ I walked outside with him, quite dazed from thirst and hunger, as well as from nervous exhaustion, and suddenly my sang-froid collapsed. I leaned on the bonnet of the car and burst into a great flood of tears. Hans was horrified. ‘What do you think you are doing?’ He was very angry. ‘Do you want to go to jail? If they see you like this — you are acting as though guilty. Stop! Stop at once!’ Hans refused to tell me how he got the case thrown out or what the charges were against me, except to say there were

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nine of them and they were all of a most serious nature. It would certainly have included such nasty things as prostitution, procuring, drug dealing and embezzlement. To this day I have never found out what it was all about. Hans refused adamantly to discuss the matter further and said it was better for me to know nothing about the charges and just be thankful I was not in jail. I soon managed to avoid thinking about it, as what happened in the next few weeks wiped it all from my mind.

The exorcism A telex came from Ed, who had moved back to Kalimantan. October 8, 1979. Balikpapan. Received your letter — and later your telex — I’m sorry Saleh is such a monster — I will come to Bali October 15–16 if necessary — send me telex before that date if you still need me in Bali — love Ed. A week or so later, when the horrors of Channy and the Kejaksaan were beginning to fade, I had a surprise visit from my artist friend Kartika. Also with her were Yu Prio and Maria Tjui, mutual friends from Java. They were my special friends and it was good to see them in Bali. We shared Indonesian tea and caught up with local gossip. Then Kartika said, very seriously, ‘We are pleased to see you but we have come here for another reason. Because of things we know and things we have heard, we feel you are in danger and we want to help you.’ I was quite surprised at the serious tone in her voice. With the court case over I had been feeling that all danger had passed. ‘What danger do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Do you mean in danger of my life?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We do mean that. Now don’t get upset. We have thought a great deal about this and we will look after you.’ She explained that I was surrounded by very strong negative influences and that in Bali this was dangerous and difficult to combat. She had already heard about my falls down the stairs and about the dead dog on the front verandah.

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‘We thought about taking you to the Dukun so that the black magic could be turned around, back on to the person who is directing all these negative forces towards you,’ she said. ‘Reversing the power. But that will cause you too much pain and it will not be good for you in the long run to cause pain to other people. ‘Maria Tjui is a Christian and we went to her church in Denpasar to see if praying there would help. But we decided against it as you are not a church-goer yourself. So then we thought of another way, a way we have in Java when we have to deal with problems like this. It is called Senin-Kamis — Monday– Thursday. We are not sure if you can do it but we will explain everything about it. We will just try.’ Having broached this apparently difficult subject and accepted my agreement, they said we would all go on a picnic. Curious as the suggestion was, I placed myself completely in their hands, trusting them implicitly. ‘We are taking you to Ulu Watu,’ Kartika said. ‘It is a very sacred Balinese temple and, although we don’t share their religion, we think the protective spirits of the sea will be helpful to us and to you.’ The picnic was already prepared and packed in their car, so we drove south to Nusa Dua and across the isthmus that separates it from the main island of Bali. Nusa Dua, or Second Island, is arid, in sharp contrast to the lush green fields and forests of the main island. We ate our picnic of fruits, perkedel (corn fritters), cold rice, hot chilli and the ubiquitous Teh-botol, on the grass near the steps leading up to the temple. When all was done we wrapped selendangs (long scarves) around our waists — the strictly enforced requirement before entering any temple in Bali — and climbed the steps to Pura Luhur Ulu Watu. There were no tourists and we had the place to ourselves. There was a priest in attendance, his head swathed in a white cloth, and Kartika asked if we might enter the centre of the temple. She explained that we had a problem to resolve, so he smiled politely and indicated the way with a sweep of his hand.

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We settled down in a corner and the monkeys, who lived in the unique temple, perched precariously on the railings fringing the edge of the cliff, which dropped 200m to the sea below. They gathered around us to see if we had peanuts and, finding none, soon moved off. Then my friends started talking. Each one in turn talked of her most pressing problems. Maria Tjui spoke of her sister’s critical illness and how difficult it was with the children to be cared for and the anxiety attached to such a serious disease. Yu Prio spoke of her home problems and her daughter’s recent marriage and her fears for its success. Kartika told of her difficulties in managing all her eight children with no money and her plans for further study in the field of art. No one spoke of the dangers they felt were surrounding me. Then we all held hands and Kartika explained the meaning of Senin-Kamis. ‘It is something we do in Java. It helps solve problems. We are not sure you can do it but we will stay with you and help you. The reason we think you will not be able to do it, is that we know all foreigners are empty.’ This is what Saleh had said, back in Java, when I questioned the validity of the Sultan of Yogyakarta’s carriage going under the sea. ‘You are empty.’ ‘We don’t mean that unkindly,’ said Tika, anxiously. ‘We love you. It’s just that this is very much part of our culture from when we are very little children and you have come here only recently. But we love you and we know you love us, so we think you can try to do it. I will explain.’ She settled herself down, cross-legged on the floor, and continued. ‘After sunset tonight you must not eat or drink anything until after sunset tomorrow night. Senin is Monday. You must not eat, drink or smoke or even clean your teeth. And you must not go swimming in case some water accidently gets in your mouth. Once it is dark on Monday night you may eat and drink what you like. But you must not go to sleep. You must stay awake until midnight and then go outside the house and stand in the open, so that not even a leaf stands between you and the heavens. At this time you must think good things as hard as you

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can, even about people you know who are working negative influences on you. No bad thoughts. Only good ones. Then on Tuesday and Wednesday you just live normally until Wednesday night at sunset, when you do the same thing until sunset on Thursday. That is Kamis. ‘You must follow this pattern seven times, never forgetting to stand outside at midnight at the end of each fasting day. At the end of it you will be free and safe. This is what we believe. We know it will be hard for you and maybe you will not be able to do it, but we will stay with you and help you. We think this is the best way.’ It didn’t sound like it would be too difficult so I agreed immediately. How could I say no to such a gesture of love and friendship? With my friends’ help I got through the first week quite well, but it was more difficult than I had expected. Living in the tropics, I usually needed to drink a lot of water, and the restriction on drinking was difficult for me, especially in the middle of the day. The midnight experience was quite strange. Standing outside my house in the garden and keeping well clear of the coconut palms, I followed the instructions to think only good and kind thoughts. After five minutes or so, I had to admit that I felt a sort of warm glow descend on me. It may have been exhaustion or light-headedness — we empty Westerners always seek a logical explanation for extra-sensory experiences such as this — but it was an unusual, warm feeling which encouraged me and made me feel I was doing the right thing in persevering with the fast. On the fourth day of my Senin-Kamis, I began to experience real difficulty about lunch-time. Kartika, Yu Prio and I were on the beach and I told them I didn’t feel well so we agreed to walk up to Legian Kelod and sit in the cool of Hans Mochtar’s house. It was about 2pm and the others drank tea and chatted, but I began to have great difficulty talking. My tongue had gone thick in my mouth and my words seemed to be jumbled. I felt very faint. Tika noticed my distress and said, ‘Suli! You aren’t well. I think you must drink some tea.’

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I protested, saying I wanted to continue and not spoil the effort I had already put into the Senin-Kamis. Tika soothed me, ‘It doesn’t matter if you break once in a while. That you are trying is the main thing. You can continue once you feel better.’ They ordered me tea in a long glass from the Do Drop Inn across the road and I swallowed it in one gulp and followed it with another. It disappeared as though into sand. After this apparently excusable aberration, I was able to continue as before, and my friends assured me that no harm had been done.

Outrageous fortune Unfortunately, due to a family crisis, my friends had to return to Java and I was on my own again. Having managed four out of seven Senin-Kamis, I felt I could cope. As we made our farewells, they told me they were proud of me and that maybe I wasn’t so empty after all. The next day, Friday morning, I was walking along the road towards the restaurant when an Indonesian woman stopped me. ‘Excuse me, can you tell me where I can find a woman called Suli Fenton?’ ‘Why, of course. That’s me. I’m Suli Fenton.’ ‘Oh,’ she seemed startled. ‘But I thought you would be Balinese.’ Why did she say that and why was she looking for me? She looked uncomfortable and explained that she was from the helicopter company Ed was working for. ‘Can we go to your house please?’ she asked. I led the way back down the road and, as we entered the house, I said, ‘What is it you want with me?’ ‘Please sit down.’ She was very solemn. I did as she said, my heart beating in a sudden surge of panic. ‘Yesterday at two o’clock in the afternoon, your husband was killed in Kalimantan.’ The words, even though half-expected, hung in the air like black smoke.

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She was a kind woman, a secretary from the office and told me as much as she knew. The helicopter had taken off from a jungle pad near the ITCI camp, turned upside-down and crashed. Ed was killed instantly. She said I had to return to Jakarta with her as there was much paper work to be completed regarding insurance, work permits and, curiously, my status as Ed’s wife. Ed had only recently joined this company and I was puzzled as to what the complications could be. We flew to Jakarta the next day and the company put me up in a very smart hotel, the Sahid Jaya. I was told to rest on Sunday and come to the office in the nearby Arthaloka Building on Monday morning. It gave me time to put my mind in order and to make the sad phone calls to Ed’s family in America and our children in Australia. On the Monday morning I was introduced to the jointventure partner of the helicopter company, a retired Indonesian general whose name I have forgotten. He asked me how long I had been married and if I had any children. ‘It is all very strange,’ he said. ‘I have had many talks with Captain Fenton and have enjoyed his company very much, but he has never mentioned that he had a wife and children. Do you have proof that you are actually his wife?’ It was a shocking question and quite devastated me. Did I have proof of my marriage? Of course not. After 23 years I didn’t carry a marriage certificate with me in case identification might be called for. My passport had my mother’s name as next-of-kin and her address in Australia. ‘I’m sure I can find the marriage certificate in Australia, but it may take some time as I will have to ask my mother to look for it,’ I said. ‘Would you please do so then. Under local regulations the name of the chief beneficiary under the life-insurance policy must be identified within eight days. There is an added complication that another woman is also claiming to be the wife of Captain Fenton.’ His words struck me like a sudden blow across the face. Another wife? Could I be so stupid to not know or even suspect

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such an eventuality? Ed and I had been living apart for some time, but he wrote letters, sent money and came to visit in Bali when he could. The not-so-smooth parts of our marriage I had put down to our unstable living conditions, and the possibility of his going through a mid-life crisis. Another wife was something I had never considered. ‘Who is the woman?’ I asked. The general gave me a file containing a number of brief letters in Bahasa Indonesia and a larger number of telegrams, all directed to the company and all making requests for money, noting its failure to arrive. All were signed ‘Lia Vonta Fenton, your wife’. I suppose I blanched and I know I shook a little. The general, noticing, leaned forward and said, ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ ‘No thank you.’ ‘Would you prefer tea or some juice?’ ‘No. Nothing thank you.’ He looked puzzled, questioning my negative responses. ‘I’m sorry … I am … I’m doing … er, Senin-Kamis’, I didn’t know how to express it properly. The general looked startled. ‘Senin-Kamis! Do you know what that means? Can you do it? I didn’t think foreigners could do it.’ ‘Because we are empty?’ I couldn’t resist the comment in spite of my shocked state. ‘Well, yes. Yes.’ He smiled kindly and said in what sounded like a tone of admiration, ‘It’s very hard on the body, isn’t it? But very good for the mind.’ We spoke briefly of the Javanese fast and I said I hoped it would stand me in good stead during the difficult period I knew was ahead of me. He then paid me some compliments about my interest in the culture of Indonesia, which were very soothing to my bruised spirit. ‘Could you please get me the marriage certificate then,’ he said. ‘We need it urgently to process the insurance claim. If it is not received and witnessed here by Thursday the proceeds will probably be divided between you both. I should inform you

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that the amount is not large as Captain Fenton was employed by us at Indonesian rates, which are considerably lower than those applying to foreigners.’ In a state of shock, I excused myself and returned to the hotel. Back in my room, I opened the door of the mini-fridge and looked at the array of little bottles: gin, whisky, rum, brandy and their accompanying mixers — soda, coke and ginger ale. For a moment, I was tempted to chuck the Senin-Kamis and all its Indonesian works to the winds. Why should I dabble in a culture that was giving me so much pain and anguish? But then the strength I was getting from the ritual came to my aid and I told myself the best thing I could do was stay strong and in control and trust in those who had given me the hand of friendship — Kartika, Yu Prio and Maria Tjui. I shut the fridge door, went to the phone and put in a call to my remarkable mother in Sydney to ask her to find my marriage certificate. I had no idea where it might be, but all our left-over belongings were at her place. She said to me, with a strength and certainty that warmed my heart, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll find it for you. And I’ll get it to you by Thursday.’ Trusting her completely, I put the problem out of my mind and set about writing letters to Ed’s brother and sister in America. When darkness came, I opened the fridge and was pleased to find that the strong liquor wasn’t all that great a comfort anyway. My problems came later that evening when, at midnight, I had to find a venue for my open-air meditation. The street outside the hotel was full of becaks, noise, people and bright lights and was not suitable for my purposes. I investigated the swimming pool area on the fourth floor but found the door locked, with a sign, ‘Pool open 8.00am–6.00pm only’. It looked ideal for my tryst with the spirits, however, so I took the lift to the ground floor and sought out the Bell Captain. ‘Would it be possible to unlock the pool door? For a special reason?’ I asked.

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‘I am sorry Madam. The pool opens at 8am tomorrow.’ He moved back beside his lectern, so I made a further desperate plea. ‘I am Senin-Kamis! I must be outside at midnight.’ ‘Senin-Kamis!’ He gave me that ‘all foreigners are empty’ look and checked. ‘Senin-Kamis? You know what it means?’ ‘Yes,’ I said with a patient sigh. ‘You know that I must be outside at midnight?’ ‘Of course, Madam. Come with me.’ He led me up to the fourth floor, unlocked the pool-side door and courteously requested that I push the door shut on leaving. He saw beyond my ‘emptiness’ and bowed politely. I performed the meditation with only the smog-filtered stars of Jakarta’s night above me.

The suitcase Tuesday brought a new train of painful events. The helicopter office called me to say that although Ed’s body had been held up in Kalimantan, his personal effects had arrived and I should collect them. His effects were in a single suitcase, which I lugged back to the hotel by hand. When I opened it, I was relieved to find that the clothes were clean. Someone had taken the trouble to wash them, so I wasn’t faced with blood-stained shirts and shorts. The suitcase was packed with shirts, socks and underwear, some books and papers and other miscellaneous items. I thought to myself, is this all that remains at the end of a life? The life of a man who grew up in Canton, Ohio, a steelmill town in which his father had worked his whole life. Whose brother Jack fought in World War II as a foot soldier, was wounded in Guadalcanal and invalided to New Zealand. He later went to university and held the Chair of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts. Ed was a man who so desperately wanted to ‘get into the war’, in spite of his flat feet, he spent a whole year picking pencils off the floor with his toes so he would be able to control

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his instep muscle sufficiently to raise it during the medical test. His efforts paid off and he joined the United States Marine Corps (Navy) to become a Hellcat Dive Bomber pilot, serving in the Pacific. Following in his big brother’s footsteps, when the war ended, Ed returned to the United States and studied law for three years until he was recalled to his Marine Wing in his final year to fly for his country in the Korean War. He was transferred to the newly formed Helicopter Squadron, whose duty was not to kill, but to evacuate the wounded. It was not until Vietnam that helicopters were used in combat. His USMC number was 402 and he was one of the original M.A.S.H. pilots. Was this all that remained? A suitcase of laundered clothes? My sad reverie was interrupted by a call from reception to let me know I had some visitors — Jeni Irawan and her husband Bambang, who were good friends from our Kalimantan days. Bambang was the first Indonesian pilot to fly for our former company, NUH. Being Javanese, he had a great respect for the spirits. He had told us how, during the Indonesian struggle for independence from the Dutch, his father had used the spirits to put the Dutch guards to sleep so he could smuggle out cattle that had been corralled by the Dutch, and which were sorely needed to feed the Indonesian freedom fighters. Jeni and Bambang were true Javanese, well aware of the power of magic and how it could be wielded for good and for evil. Jeni came up to my room to offer sympathy and help me with the suitcase. It was a great relief to have a sympathetic friend. We removed all the clothes from the case and found letters and papers relating to the helicopter operation. Lots of my letters were there as well as one from the husband of my best friend Gloria Ross, who had recently died from cancer. He had written to me about her and his love for her and it was such a beautiful letter I had sent it to Ed to read. He must have been carrying it in the breast pocket of his shirt when he was killed as it had little holes driven through it and was spattered with blood.

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There were letters from Lia Vonta, too, but there was no sign of love in them. They were all demands for money. There were many packets of strong pain-killing tablets and I wondered what had been causing Ed so much pain and why he hadn’t spoken of it to me. Then we found the jar. It was an ordinary jam jar with a screw top. I opened it and saw inside a dark, blackish substance, the consistency of chutney. As I started to sniff it, I saw a look of horror come over Jeni’s face. ‘Put that down! Put it down quickly! Cepat! Cepat! Put the lid back on!’ She wrested it from my hands and sealed it firmly, holding her breath all the time. ‘There! Get rid of it immediately. Out of this room. Out the window.’ But the hotel was fully air-conditioned and the windows were sealed shut. ‘Outside then. Out in the corridor as far as you can from this room.’ ‘Jeni, what is it? What do you mean? What’s in the jar? Tell me please.’ ‘It is from Java,’ she said in a very low voice. She meant Central Java, the home of Javanese culture and magic. ‘It is very, very bad black magic. Very, very bad. It will kill you. Take it now quickly as far away as you can.’ I went into the corridor holding this terrifying object and carried it as far away as I could and stood it in a corner. Jeni then told me about Lia Vonta. Ed had taken her to the Irawan’s on one occasion when he was alone in Jakarta. Jeni told him then that he was always welcome but he was never to bring that girl to her house again. ‘She is very bad,’ Jeni said to me. ‘She is dangerous. She has killed Ed Fenton. She is a morphinist. She is a prostitute. She has killed a man with a knife. If I had not come here today and told you about that jar, maybe she would have killed you, too. She is from Central Java, Jawa Tengah, and they have very dangerous magic.’ I told Jeni about the letters and telegrams in the general’s office and she said, ‘Of course. She was not getting enough

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money. She was afraid Ed Fenton was going to leave her so she killed him, hoping to get his insurance money. What about his money? Have you checked his bank account?’ Jeni was very practical and now took things out of my hands. She said there was no time to lose so we dashed over to Bankamerica and asked for a balance of his account. Sure enough, a large sum of money had been transferred the previous week to an account in Semarang, where Lia Vonta lived. ‘You must go there as soon as things here are finished,’ Jeni said. ‘Otherwise you will lose that money. The girl is a morphinist and will stop at nothing.’ I guessed that she was right and assured her that I would go as soon as the funeral was over. About 10pm on Wednesday, I received a message to go immediately to Halim Airport and contact the captain of the Qantas flight from Sydney which had just landed. The message must have been sent while the plane was still in the air because, when I arrived at the airport, it was just coming in to land. I dashed across the tarmac and met the captain, who was coming down the steps with a large manila envelope in his hands. I knew it contained the precious document required by the insurance company — my marriage certificate. I kissed the startled captain and blessed my wonderful mother, who had not only found the certificate but had seen to it that it was safely handcarried by the most responsible authority possible and delivered personally into my eager hands. Dear Mum, truly your finest hour. The next day was spent between the helicopter company office and the American Embassy as, even though the certificate was forthcoming, it had to be verified by the Americans, who declared it to be valid and the only one in existence. The day after that was Friday. The Day of the Dead.

The Day of the Dead Now I knew what was going on, what it was all about. My husband didn’t die in Indonesia, he was killed. And he wasn’t just my husband. He was my lover and my friend.

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That is what can happen when you get too invloved, when you get too close to things that don’t belong in your world, and start lifting up the rocks and seeing all the things moving about underneath. Sekala and Niskala. They sent Ed’s body back from Kalimantan to Jakarta after keeping it in Balikpapan for a week. There were quarrels over who was going to pay for this, and who was going to pay for that: the Customs Department versus the police; Kotamadya Local Government versus the army. It went on and on. Every last bureaucrat was trying to wring as many rupiahs as they could out of it. Eventually the well ran dry and the coffin was put on a Bouraq flight from Balik to Jakarta. I waited for two hours in the sun on the hot concrete at Kebayoran for the plane to arrive, with the hearse attendants in their black pyjamas and black skull caps. The plane touched down and, as the passengers alighted, they gave startled and apprehensive glances at the hearse and then back at the luggage which was being unloaded on to a trolley. Horror of horrors! They had been flying with a corpse! When all the baggage was out, the groundsmen started to unload the coffin. But it was too long for the cargo door. Heaven only knows how they got it in there in the first place. They pushed it and shoved it, banged it and kicked it, until finally it lurched forward and hit the concrete at an oblique angle. The lid came off and the sickly sweet, pungent odour of decayed human flesh assailed my nostrils. I fainted.

Black Cross Funerals The Black Cross people were in charge of the cremation, but my memories of those events contain a lot of black holes. The funeral parlour was in down town Jakarta, somewhere near the canals, in a very run-down area. The other people there were from the helicopter company and no one spoke English except me. Haltingly, someone explained that the only minister they could find at short notice did not speak English, so the service would be conducted in Indonesian. They were suitably

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apologetic. The others were all Muslims and did not believe in cremation. The walls were unpainted, yellow with age and the benches along the walls had torn cushions on them. The coffin lay on a concrete slab in the middle of the room and had been repaired after its fall at the airport — there was no smell. I wondered if the box really contained the body or if it had already been disposed of, being in too great a state of putrefaction to be placed before the public. Prayers were intoned which had the same rhythm as those said in English. A large cockroach scuttled under my feet and tried to mount the plinth but gave up in disgust as the peeling paint broke away. More black holes. Next I remember travelling out of town to Jelambar, the place of cremation. I had expressed my dismay at having to endure such a long journey in the ricketty old hearse, but the looks of disapproval convinced me that it would not have been right for me to let the coffin go unaccompanied to the place of cremation. Was the landscape really so bleak and desolate as it seems in my memory? Or did my state of mind give everything a grey and formless appearance? We swung in through the gates and, stretching to the horizon, were grey tombstones, set every which way, leaning left and right, some toppled over on their faces. The ground was stony and lifeless, a grey wasteland with no sign of green, on which nothing could grow. A scene of desolation and despair. Wraith-like trails of mist curled around the stones and out of the gloom the cremation house loomed up, a construction of corrugated iron, leaning on thin posts. The officials had already arrived and were standing together in a group. The hearse pulled up alongside a trolley standing on railway lines and silently the black-clad phantoms manoeuvred the box out of the hearse. No one spoke. There were no flowers. No music. It seemed something was expected of me, so I put the frangipani flowers I was wearing on top of the coffin and also a photo of the house in Bali with Gina and Hereward standing at the door. A symbol. A token. An oblation perhaps. I was running out of reasons and explanations for anything.

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At the end of the short railway track was a huge oven. Its doors swung open and the trolley rolled in, screeching loudly on its unoiled bearings. The attendants moved the coffin to a plinth in the centre of the oven, rolled the trolley back, then with a great clang that reverberated around the corrugated walls of the shed like peals of thunder, the doors slammed closed and were locked with a great iron chain. I stood in stunned horror until one of the men whispered that I should return to the city in his car. As the oven was powered by kerosene it sometimes took six to eight hours to reduce its contents to ash. Black holes. Black night. Blessed oblivion.

Accident report Accident — Incident — Discrepancy Report: Pilot: Fenton. Location: ITCI (logging company) Helipad. Experience — total: 10,945 hours. Helicopter PK-TPZ with E. Fenton as captain had just released a sling load on this helipad. When load was clear he told his passenger to stay behind and wait for him to return with another load from base camp. Passenger said he saw TPZ lift off ground approx. one metre instead of four metres as he usually does and turn the aircraft into the wind. Investigation shows that aircraft hit a tree stump with skid and mainframe. Pilot tried to correct situation without success. Main rotor hit the tail and long drive shaft. Aircraft dived nose-down along hill 50 metres. Pilot killed and aircraft totally destroyed. Chief Engineer’s Report: Note: It must be understood that the landing spot and platform were below minimum standard. According to eyewitness, who made an attached report, everything sounded normal until bottom of helicopter struck tree stump. Handwritten report from Max Bukunusa, witness: ‘… Pilot call to me, I come forward. At the same time that I will fast my seat belt pilot knock on my shoulder and say in

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English, “Boy, you stay here, one trip again.” I step down and close heli door. Heli take off but not as before with three to five metres lift. This time only one metre, turn and has not normal position strikes trees and crashed down valley 50 metres deep. I wait five minutes for explosion but nothing heard. I come down. Heli destroyed and pilot dead.’ Several days later a small wooden box, firmly wired up and sealed with red wax, was delivered to me with its own Surat Keterangan (identification papers): Name: E. J. Fenton. Age: 55 years. Nation: America. Date of death: 11 October, 1979, Balikpapan. ‘Herein as requested by the family are the remains of E. J. Fenton cremated at Jelambar 19 October, 1979. The ashes have been placed in a small wooden box lined with lead in order to be transported to Bali and the said box has received the official Government seal.’

Return to Bali I flew to Semarang clutching the box of ashes, sealed with red sealing wax, which frightened away two people who had taken the seat beside me. One glance at the box and they were off like rockets. Ashen remains generate great fear, apparently. At the bank in Semarang, the transferred money had already been withdrawn so there was no point pursuing it any further. I stayed the night with some friends and flew to Bali the next day. I was met at the airport by my dear friends hidden behind the most enormous armfuls of freshly cut flowers I had ever seen. They swept me off to my house, which had been draped with more flowers. I laughed and wept at the enormity of it all. Something was over and maybe something new would begin. The main thing was to remain positive. Although I said this to myself over and over again, it was seven years before the new did begin. Grief is a grey, mysterious veil that webs about mind and body in such a sly and insidious fashion you scarcely know it is there until you are free of it. It isn’t just weeping or lamenting or

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regretting. Grief is an inexplicable state of being. Joan Mas, my dear poet friend, who wrote so tenderly of women’s sensibility, spoke of it this way, in her poem Loss. The same grass is, The same birds fly, The same trees are, As when he spoke about them to me. This ash, that was his whole entity, Scattered … We, the bewildered, see how He keeps delicate company now, With flower and tree. Nothing to be done. With appetite for all under the sun The fellow eats us slowly One by one.

Restless spirit Ed’s spirit was not at rest. He was wandering around, not knowing where to go. We had to try to help him find peace. At Bambang and Jeni Irawan’s house in Jakarta, a visiting friend was given the spare room, which Ed had always slept in whenever he visited. The next morning they found their guest sleeping outside in the corridor. He said he couldn’t sleep in the room because there was a white man with a beard in there, who didn’t want anyone else to be in the room. This guest did not know the white man and had never heard of Ed Fenton. Bambang’s two children, aged three and five, also refused to sleep in the room. Kartika saw Ed sitting in a chair outside her house and I thought I saw him in a crowd in Denpasar. In Amlapura, at the eastern end of Bali, there was a mystic who could speak with the dead. I went to see her with

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Gina and Hereward to see if we could find out where Ed was, what was making him so restless, and why he was inhabiting rooms in the houses of his friends. We were all getting this strong sense of agony from him and we thought we might be able to help him. The mystic was a 17-year-old Chinese girl who worked from the back of her family’s grocery store in a room with a religious altar with candles, pictures of ancestors draped in black crepe paper and one ricketty chair. We sat on a mat and, after an interval, the girl came in and sat on the chair. As instructed, we gave her a packet of clove cigarettes and she smoked two in quick succession. Puffing furiously, she drew the pungent smoke in and out of her lungs, the red glow from the burning tobacco glinting like an evil eye in the gloomy room. Then she began to talk. Her voice sounded old and cracked and quavering — she was taking on the persona of a very old man. It was in this trance state that she was able to speak to the dead. She used the Indonesian language, not Chinese. ‘What is your problem?’ she croaked. ‘My husband,’ I said. ‘He died but he is not at peace. Can you find out what he wants us to do?’ The girl, who now even looked like an old man, took another cigarette and lit it. Her movements were not those of a young person; she moved slowly and deliberately as though unsure, just as very old people do when performing an action which involves both hands. She moved about on the chair, rolling her head from side to side, her eyes closed all the time. Finally she spoke. ‘This man has died salah pati. Before his time. At the wrong time. Not the time determined for him. That is why he is restless. He should not be dead.’ There was nothing she could do about it. No way she could help. Because he died in Kalimantan and his spirit was over the water, she had no way of crossing the watery gap. We left uncomforted. We got through Christmas but, as the months went by, it became more and more difficult to stay in Bali because of problems with visas. Each time I went to immigration for a renewal they asked for more certificates and more money. The

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last occasion was quite shocking. I was taken in to see a senior official and, after looking at my passport, he said, ‘I am leaving this room for a few minutes. When I come back there will be R.50,000 [$A100] inside your passport. It will be placed, closed, on my desk.’ The crudity of the demand was beyond belief. I did not comply and left the office without waiting for his return. I decided it was time to go home to Australia. At the end of April 1980, I was at the airport with all my baggage. The flight was half-empty so I knew there would be no excess-baggage problems. I was taken aback when the sharp young customs official in charge of the scales took my luggage through and announced, ‘Excess baggage charge is R.73,000.’ This was the equivalent of $A150 and was the exact amount of money I had changed into Australian dollars only minutes before. The customs man and the money-changer obviously worked hand in hand. I paid it, of course, and arrived back in Sydney with just enough money for a taxi fare. ——————— Suharto’s Indonesia: land of dreams, land of illusions, friendships, trust and fidelity. Land of political prisons and man’s inhumanity. Land of misunderstandings, joy and sadness, true and loyal friends and the occasional, forgettable, crooked official. Some years after my return to Australia, when my time of grieving had almost passed, I went back to Bali for a visit. I asked Hans Mochtar about the little silver box I had found in Saleh’s room and about the court proceedings. ‘That was Saleh,’ Hans told me. ‘He wanted to keep you in jail. But I must look after Suli. Suli doesn’t know about anything. I tell my government at the court, “Suli only help Indonesia people. She is very polite. How can she make business like this? I am very angry with Channy and Saleh. This good lady. I know her long time.”

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‘I say, “They rubbish people. Suli know about Saleh and tapol before, but she take him to Bali to help him. How can you find people like that? Like Suli? It’s right! I say, you should say thank you to Suli. Why you want to keep Suli in jail? If Suli not out then I make big trouble with government. Something wrong. Suli good lady. How can she business narcotica? She doesn’t know narcotica”.’ I asked Hans what else they had said about me, what other crimes I had been accused of. ‘I say to them, “Not Suli, but Saleh”. He also have trouble with his wife Wayan. His second wife. She look at him and say, you old man, you have no money, you must out. Goodbye! Saleh very silly man. Very busy man, but silly man.’ He refused to be drawn any further about the court case and instead explained why we were brother and sister, born out of these terrible experiences. ‘Now I really know Suli is my sister,’ Hans said. ‘I am her small brother. She really look like it in my heart. Not just look like it, but she is my sister.’ It is so long since I left Bali, but my little brother Hans is still there. Maybe I am his sister, from some other time, some other place, some other world. Only time and providence will tell. He is often in my mind.

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A short biography

Shirley Fenton Huie has lived in many parts of the world including the United Kingdom, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, the United States, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Vanuatu and New Zealand. She was born in western New South Wales, Australia, to a country doctor who always wanted to be a sailor, so from childhood she was surrounded by books of adventure and derring-do. She was lucky to live the life that her father would have loved. Her four children are all grown up and she now lives in Canberra, the most beautiful city in the world.