Ring of Fire: An Indonesia Odyssey

by Lawrence Blair

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 much better you try film funeral of Puang Sangalla of Toraja people. I just hear it begins, maybe one month now.’ If anyone knew when this unique event might actually happen, it was Werner, for it was he who had dramatically cured the late king of tuberculosis in the 1950s, thereby becoming a much-loved honorary member of the tribe,

They made no effort to withdraw, or temper their gaze or remarks, and I struggled to maintain the sort of meditational dispassion which I’d observed in my cat on its box.

distances which separated the stellar bodies. ‘So men go to the moon in rockets the way you two came from England in rocket planes?’ someone asked. ‘Why go to the moon?’ Tasman enquired. ‘Did the Queen go to the moon?’ asked Amir. ‘What’s on the moon to go there for?’ continued Tasman. Some of them turned to regard the sickle moon which was rising over the Banda Sea. ‘Are there still people living there?’ ‘Well, if no one lives there and there’s only stones to bring back, why go there?’ Tasman persisted. Answering these questions taxed our ideologies as much as our grasp of Indonesian,

‘April 1958. A government patrol, investigating headhunting reports on the Cassuarina coast, killed four warleaders in Otjanep. This may have led to the death of Michael Rockefeller three years later.’ Searching further I discovered that just a few months before Gaisseau’s arrival the Dutch colonial government was attempting to eradicate a headhunting war between Otjanep and the neighbouring village of Omanasep. In Omanasep the Dutch patrol burnt down all the longhouses, destroyed all the canoes, confiscated the weapons and arrested 11 men. When the patrol reached Otjanep, where news of the sacking had preceded them, they met with fierce resistance. The nervous Dutch officers opened fire on the Otjaneps with pistols and submachine-guns. The full body-count was not recorded, but amongst the dead were four important war-leaders. This suppressed skeleton in the Dutch cupboard, which provided an excellent motive for including the ‘white tribe’ in the Otjanep revenge cycle, was a disquieting discovery to make so shortly before setting out with the intention of living in the village.

‘Don’t you know?’ he said. ‘It’s a good system. We send the native evangelical scouts in to reach the remote pagans on foot, like you foolish characters. They pray with them, tell ’em what they’re missing in life, and leave them exact instructions on how to flatten an airstrip. Length, flat as the river, and all that. I check them every few months to see if they’re safe enough to land on with preachers.’

The terrain was far more treacherous and the pace faster than anything we had yet experienced, and as the days progressed we discovered how varied were the ecological islands hidden beneath the forest, and how different from the monotonous ‘green hell’ so often used by foreign travellers to describe the jungle.

‘I used to kill him with a spear, in eye or ear or mouth. But Bereyo is a “modern man” now,’ he said, thumping his chest. ‘I take a gun.’ Closer questioning revealed this to be a sawn-off double-barrelled shotgun, which he had left hidden in his longhouse at Belinau. ‘He’s talking about Rhinocerus sumatrensis,’ I remarked to Lorne, of which the World Wildlife Fund says there are only about 170 left anywhere, and only 25 of those in Borneo!’ ‘How many have you killed, Bereyo?’ Lorne asked him. ‘Last year, one!’

As I hungrily picked the slivers of flesh from between the charred fingers of these primates, Lorne took some relish in pointing out that they were listed as an ‘endangered species’, and that the gibbons we now ate fetched a good 5,000 dollars a mating pair on the black market. At this, our hungriest hour, we were eating by far the most expensive dinners of our lives.

The second surprise was the news that Suleh had been reached several times the previous year by a team of zealous young Indonesian missionary scouts, led by ‘treacherous Punan guides from the north’. Suleh, with no help from any of the other three villages, had obeyed precise instructions and built a landing surface just atop the hillock on the other side of the river. It was an astonishing coincidence. The old chief spoke little Indonesian, but his son was an enthusiastic interpreter.

‘We’re very modern,’ he explained. ‘We finished it just two moons ago. Got our first plane just before last big rain, maybe 10 days ago. We all rushed over the river and climbed up the hill. It never landed, just fly around and went away again. Didn’t even drop a banana!’

people were making the superb shoulder-baskets and sleeping-mats which, for all the Punans’ obscurity, has won them recognition as amongst the finest weavers of rattan in the world. Intricately patterned, and extremely practical, their mats and baskets gradually acquire a lustrous chestnut-like patina from human skin oils, making them resistant to weather, wear and rot. The Punans also appear to have been amongst the first people prepared to harvest rattan

Rattan, for wickerwork, for furniture, hampers, and even headmasters’ canes, became fashionable in Victorian Europe as a symbol of Imperial reach, and is still much prized. But the Punans use only the surgically shaved skin of the rattan vine, with which, in effect, they spin complex three-dimensional fabrics, rather than basketry.

It was at Long Huruk that we encountered the vortex of the dream time of which we had so far only touched the periphery, for this was the semi-nomadic community of mystics and dream wanderers. As we tottered up the bank towards the crumbling longhouse, Nanyet came purposefully down and embraced us both – an unheard-of greeting between Indonesian strangers. He

On the day we returned to Bali from Borneo, Gusti Nyoman Lempad, the great Balinese artist, died a conscious death aged 116 in the nearby village of Peliatan. John Darling, our Australian anthropologist friend and an immediate neighbour of Lempad’s, brought the news. I was shocked at first, but the Balinese attitude was that it was high time he moved on, and that after 116 years of conscious living a man ought to know how to die.