The Balinese are aware that their deities are only symbols for forces, and not the real forces themselves. They pick and choose the best of the West and incorporate it into their living mysticism. The carved demons on temple walls have begun to acquire helmets and machine guns. During the special day of Saraswati – goddess of wisdom and the arts – offerings are now made to her not only on our neighbour’s canvases and paint brushes, but also on our typewriters, cameras, and tape-recorders. In the rice paddy opposite our house is a temple shrine whose highest points sport electric lightbulbs. They are not wired, but they serve as symbols for the Light of the Upper World.
Of all the islanders, the Balinese have traditionally had the most uneasy relationship with the sea. Indeed, the waters there seethe with rip currents and are turbid with virulently healthy micro-organisms. It is the only seawater I have ever swum in which can infect rather than heal an open wound. We used to treat our coral cuts with iodine, unaware that the coral polyps which had entered the wounds normally thrived on iodine which they extracted from seawater – and were now extracting from our blood. Treatment with pure iodine promoted, in effect, the burgeoning growth of a coral reef in the festering wounds, and its crackling could be clearly heard if they were pressed. For the Balinese the ocean has always been the underworld, and source of their demons; except for a few intrepid fishermen, they used to approach it only to scatter the cremated ashes of their dead. But recent years have witnessed a remarkable example of their ability to adapt to change. With the arrival of Australian surfers in the late 1960s, the Balinese took to the water like the true temple dancers they are.
Disciplined in ritual dance from an early age, there are now several young Balinese who rank amongst the world’s top competitive surfers. Our close friend Bobby Radiasa, whom we trained as a soundman and took around the islands on our last expedition, was amongst the first intrepid handful of Bali’s surfers. ‘It’s just a matter of remaining possessed by Arjuna, who belongs to the Upper World,’ he told us. ‘That gets me past the fear of what lies beneath.’ Arjuna is the noble shadow-puppet hero who appears to walk on air. Another young champion, Ketut Widjaya, who had been famous as a child dancer, remarked that he applies what his instructor had taught him. A Balinese, like a tree, he told us, must remember that he is strung between two worlds, balanced between the pull of gravity and the pull of heaven.
Both the very young and the very old are seen as being particularly close to the Upper World. A Balinese child does not touch the ground for the first three months of life. He is cradled and cosseted above the earth and introduced to gravity very gently. When he is 105 days old a ‘foot-touching-the-ground’ ceremony is held, when the child is ritually ‘planted’ in matter, and first sets foot on the earth. Until then he has merely been an angel, hovering at the frontiers of the heavenly world. He is even weighed down with bracelets and anklets, to discourage him from floating up again too soon.
Everywhere in Bali the atmosphere is leavened by the experience of being only half of this world. It is expressed in their myth of the first human child or ‘adam’. They say that before the first human was born, the seven celestial sisters – the Nymphs of the Pleiades – using their sarongs as wings, used to descend to a sacred pool in Bali to bathe naked in the waters of the world. The prince, Raja Pala, lost on a hunting expedition, came across the pool and spied on the star nymphs. Obsessed with Siti, the youngest, he stole her sarong from the bank so that she couldn’t fly back to the stars with her startled sisters. Despite her pleas Raja Pala insisted he would only return her wings if she first bore him a child, whose eyes might always remind him of the world she came from. This child was the first human, strung between two worlds, born of a prince and a sky goddess. But before Siti returned to the stars she told Raja Pala. ‘You may have this child for his brief life on earth, but after that, remember, he returns to me.’ Even today, when a child cries at night, he is taken outside and shown the stars. ‘There is your mother,’ they say, ‘the place we all come from and where we all return, and there is no need to weep.’
But to start our adventure story at the beginning… long before we visited Bali, we escaped the ashram walls of Subud in Java, raised some money to make our first film, and found ourselves amongst a tribe who literally believe their ancestors descended from the stars in skyships.
3. Tom Simpkin and Richard Fiske, Krakatau, 1883: The Volcanic Eruption and Its Effects (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983).
4. Three books on the Wallace-Darwin relationship, as fascinating as they are undeservedly obscure, are: Wilma George, Biologist Philosopher (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1964); H. Lewis McKinney, Wallace and Natural Selection (New Haven, Conn./London: Yale University Press, 1972); and the trenchant Arnold C. Brackman, A Delicate Arrangement: The Strange Case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (New York: Times Books, 1980).
5. Alfred Russel Wallace, The Wonderful Century (London: Macmillan, 1898).
6. Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (New York: Random House, 1977).
7. An authoritative source on this theory is Austin Coates, Islands of the South (London: Heinemann, 1974).
8. Rosemary Grimble, Migrations, Myth and Magic from the Gilbert Islands: Early Writings of Sir Arthur Grimble, Arranged and Illustrated (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 37.
The Last of the Star Children
Midway between Borneo and New Guinea sprawls the great four-limbed landmass of Celebes, which has variously been compared to an orchid, or a spider, depending on your perspective. Her long shorelines are lapped by the Java, the Flores, the Banda, the Moluccas and the Celebes seas.
The island presented such a complex profile to the early European navigators that they assumed her to be separate islands – and her pluralized name remained all the way up to Indonesia’s independence when an orgy of name-changing occurred and Celebes was renamed Sulawesi, and her capital, Makassar, became Ujung Pandang.
The sapphire waters of the coast have long been the domain of fierce sea-going tribes who were such a formidable barrier to the early European spice traders that the mountainous backbone of the island remained unexplored until the turn of the 20th century. It wasn’t until then that the Toraja tribe – meaning ‘the people from above’ – revealed themselves. Being ethnically dissimilar to any of their neighbours, their origin gives rise to conflicting anthropological theories, but when the Toraja themselves are asked where they came from they reply: ‘Before the dawn of human memory our ancestors descended from the Pleiades in skyships.’
They still build their houses in the arc-like forms, they say, of the ships which once brought them, and their funeral rites, which for their nobility are unequalled for extravagance, are intended to launch the souls of the dead back to the stars of their origins.
When Lorne and our mother, Lydia, visited the Toraja in 1971 they found that the last great king, lasso Rinding Puang Sangalla, had been dead for three years, and was still lying in state awaiting his final star-launch. Although this event would signify the end not merely of another king in the nation, but of a dynasty which had so far extended unbroken into prehistory, no one had any idea just when it would take place. A year later, when Lorne and I reached Celebes to make our first film, the stargazing Toraja priests were no more certain as to when, or even if, this climactic coup-de-grâce to their culture would occur.
We had arrived in Indonesia speaking very little of the language, with 20,000 feet of film stock and what was left of Ringo’s £2,000, intending to film our search for the Bird of Paradise with the Bugis pirates aboard the schooners which Alfred Wallace himself had sailed in 125 years before us. We had talked our way past the immigration officials in Jakarta, flown to Makassar, and checked into the rotting, former colonial splendour of the only hotel on the waterfront. We were not much concerned at discovering that we shared our beds with lice, or that the hotel also doubled as a brothel for the town’s leadin
g gentry, because for us it had the finest view in the world. From our balcony we could see the great Bugis sailing prahu scything past us into the harbour. To watch them, the largest working sailing ships left in the world, shaped like the galleons of dreams, straining softly into port under thousands of feet of black canvas, made us long to put to sea in them.
At night we were visited by entrepreneurs in sarongs and Muslim black felt peci hats, who knocked so quietly that for a long time we thought they were merely underpowered geckos. When we opened the door, they looked furtively around them and hurried inside with grimy bundles of sacking and newspaper from which they proceeded to unpack superb Chinese porcelain. These fellows fenced, it turned out, for a small syndicate of grave-robbers. We later managed to track down their elusive boss, Halim, a fragile, sharp-eyed father of 12, in the back of his porcelain shop on the waterfront. It took weeks of winning his trust before he finally let us film his operation. We took a rickety public bus with him 20 miles out of town and then struck out on foot for several hours into the wilderness. We saw not another soul, not even when we finally reached the clearing where a number of circular dustbin-sized holes had been neatly excavated in the red mud. Only when Halim whistled astonishingly loudly through his blackened front teeth did a small platoon of grubby, half-naked men sheepishly emerge from their hiding places in the bush and recommence excavating the holes with trowels made from flattened tin cans, and thin probes of concrete-reinforcement steel.
‘This my army,’ Halim announced proudly and, with a sweeping gesture, ‘this our private Ming mine! We have many more, further off, but this is a new one.’
We were keenly aware that the local and national authorities, to say nothing of the international archaeological community, would have been horrified by such a spectacle. And this was just one of a number of sites, known only to Halim and his team, where the early Chinese mariners had buried their dead together, as was their custom, with porcelain some of which had been fired in the imperial kilns of the Sung and Ming dynasties and dated back as far as the 11th century. We watched one fellow as he probed the soft mud with a steel rod and then shouted excitedly. He pulled out a blue Ming vase which, after a preliminary dousing with water, appeared as good as new after its four centuries of burial.
‘Fine! Fine!’ Halim encouraged them. ‘Many more must be here; that common bowl always means more.’ He turned to us. ‘See!’ he said proudly. ‘Why government try to stop us? This bowl mean these men and me already make more money today than three months of growing rice. My children eat that very quickly.’ He grinned.
As the money man of the team, Lorne is also strongly drawn to both bargaining and gambling. I was appalled to find him investing a portion of our diminutive budget in some 60 bowls. Less than 20 of them finally made it back to England, alas – but their sale at Sotheby’s made this one of the most profitable ventures we’ve ever engaged in, and did much to offset our subsequent post-production costs!
Makassar, still barely visited at that time by foreigners, was an eye opener. Her chief contribution to the English language appeared to be in the areas of poison and grease. Makassar Poison, which was smeared on dagger blades to make them instantly fatal, exerted a certain fascination over Europeans. The 17th-century diarist Samuel Pepys, in one of his less endearing passages, describes witnessing the chilling effects of this toxin being given experimentally to a hapless dog in a London gentleman’s club. Makassar Oil (a particularly noxious distillation from coconuts) was a popular hair cosmetic for Victorian men, and perhaps the greasiest of ‘greasy kids’ stuff’ ever to have caught on. It gave rise to its defence, the ‘Anti-Makassar’ – the strip of linen still occasionally found protecting the headrests of seats in the older first-class carriages of British Rail. Our only other cultural memories of Makassar came from Wallace and the tales of Joseph Conrad, his contemporary, who had written:
At that time Makassar was teeming with life and commerce. It was the point in the island where tended all those bold spirits who, fitting out schooners on the Australian coast, invaded the Malay Archipelago in search of money and adventure. Bold, reckless, keen in business, not disinclined for a brush with the pirates that were to be found on many a coast as yet, making money fast, they used to have a general ‘rendezvous’ in the bay for the purposes of trade and dissipation.9
We found the Makassarese remembered us, the Europeans, mainly as pillagers and colonial invaders. As recently as 1949 a Dutch officer had committed some appalling massacres here in a misguided attempt to regain control of the colonies for Holland. ‘Belanda’, the derisory equivalent of ‘gringo’, was screamed at us wherever we went. Hordes of hostile bicycle-rickshaw drivers would jeer at us – and it became quite hard just to walk through the streets.
The town appeared very much as Wallace himself must have witnessed it. The markets were humming with things we had never seen and would require considerable practice to begin eating. There were two types of cicada: one of them fried, for consumption; and the other alive, for fighting. For this was the season when at every doorway and table the locals were noisily betting on the lilliputian battles of fighting cicadas. They were sold in tiny cages by little boys who poked them so that they chirruped for potential customers, for the feistiness of a cicada is judged by the pitch and quality of its song.
The harbour was crammed with the great prahu which we had come so far for, but our attempts to communicate with the captains and crewmen were discouraging. Their initial abuse would give way to laughter when they understood we were looking for a prahu which would carry us eastwards. More distressingly, we discovered that the Aru Islands and the Greater Bird of Paradise were no longer on their trading routes and that for the last 20 years they had been pursuing the shorter and more profitable triangular passage between Celebes, Java and Borneo. We might well have to wait for six months before we found a prahu which was heading in the right direction.
We anxiously resigned ourselves to a long wait, and as the weeks passed we gradually got to know the handful of long-term foreign residents in the town, all of them eccentric survivors from days of former glory. Hans Weber, a frail, piercingly blue-eyed Swiss, had been a sea-captain here in the early 1900s specializing in smuggling Bird of Paradise feathers back to Europe when they were all the rage for ladies’ hats. There was the redoubtable Mary O’Keefe – daughter of the famous sea-captain who became known as King O’Keefe of the South Seas. We also found Karl Bundt, born of an incestuous union of titled aristocrats who had fled the opprobrium of European society for the Moluccas before the First World War. This bespectacled bear of a man was born here and had lived here all his life, and was now Makassar’s sole expert and international exporter of the rare shells and orchids for which the archipelago had once been so famous. We were to spend many long hours exploring his meticulously catalogued treasury, practising the identification of species from our slim reference books on flora and malacology.
But it was the German Dr Werner Meyer who was to become our closest confidant and endlessly generous source of both nonsense and invaluable information. We first found him sitting bolt upright, dressed immaculately in a white safari-suit, eating gado-gado – a delicious local vegetable dish with a spicy peanut sauce – at one of the tiny mobile eateries near the market. He had a flowing white mane, and an expression of vaguely inscrutable self-possession, giving him somewhat the air of a Nordic Chinese Mandarin.
‘Is this the place to eat, then?’ I asked.
‘Where I eat,’ he replied. ‘Good. But, for me, also free.’ He nodded towards the couple who were solicitously cooking his food for him, mouthful by mouthful. ‘Five years ago now, Hasim here came sick to my hospital, with no money. I make him better. Still he want to feed me forever. So I come here sometimes,’ he chuckled, ‘so he stay healthy.’
When Werner heard of our filming plans he took us back to his bungalow, where he proved to have a superb cook of his own, a staggering collection of ethnographic art, and an intimate kn
owledge of the islands. He seldom spoke above a whisper, as if to disguise his theatrically thick German accent, and punctuated his sometimes outrageous stories with deep gurgling chuckles.
It transpired that during the war he had been a medical officer in the German Wehrmacht fighting on the Eastern Front. He was captured by the Russians, and spent two years doing hard labour in a Siberian coal mine. After his release and recovery he joined a United Nations medical programme for Third World nations, and reached Celebes in the early 1950s as part of a team of 16 other doctors and nurses. This was shortly after Indonesia’s independence, when chaos racked the nation and Celebes was terrorized by the ‘Darul Islam’ rebels, an Islamic fundamentalist group who succeeded in capturing the entire medical team and holding them hostage for 18 months. Conditions were so harrowing that only two of them survived. One of them immediately returned home, never to set foot in the tropics again while the other, Werner Meyer, the only white doctor left on the island, stayed on to become the director of Makassar’s hospital. It was a position which helped him survive many subsequent close calls, particularly during the wave of anti-foreign sentiment engendered under the later years of President Sukarno’s regime.
‘The Bugis you cannot trust a lot,’ he whispered to us. ‘They like easy trading routes now and they have forgotten old navigation ways. Often they do not go where they’re saying. And many sink now every year. The government is very angry with them.’
He told us unsettling stories of Chinese merchants who had insisted on travelling aboard the prahu to keep an eye on their cargo, and had somehow been lost overboard while their merchandise appeared for sale in harbours far from their intended destination. There had also been recent newspaper reports of Bugis prahu putting into the atolls east of Celebes, burning the villages to the ground, and making off with the whole year’s harvest of copra – the oil-bearing coconut husks which was the inhabitants’ sole source of income.
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