Under the Volcano: The Story of Bali

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MAP OF BALI

VIII

MAP OF INDONESIA AND REGION

IX

PROLOGUE

Blood and beauty

This is the morning of the world.

—PANDIT NEHRU

The steady hum of political violence … plagued the Balinese state … probably through the whole course of its history.

—CLIFFORD GEERTZ

Mangku Meme, old, old woman with nut-brown face and ground-down teeth stained betel crimson, lives under the volcano on the shore of Lake Batur in the village of Kedisan. The lake was born after an eruption of Gunung Batur thirty thousand years ago left a deep depression, a caldera. Lake Batur is sacred to Dewi Danu, Hindu goddess of rivers and lakes, provider of irrigation water for the rice which has sustained Balinese people for centuries. It is a place for the sacrifice of animals — goats and even great water buffalo — drowned in rituals to placate the spirit guardians. It is a source of the holy water essential for ceremonies which thread through the lives of Balinese, binding them together.

A boat-ride across the lake from Kedisan is Trunyan, isolated under the caldera wall, where Wayan Ardana lives. He is twenty-eight years old, a fisherman and a virgin. Trunyan is one of the 1 last refuges of the Bali Aga, the ‘original Balinese’, descendants of the animists who pre-dated the coming of Javanese Hindus of the Majapahit kingdom in the fourteenth century. For Wayan Ardana, Lake Batur is a source of sustenance and the centre of the world. Hidden in the village temple is an ancient statue, almost four metres high, the tallest traditional statue in Bali. This is the old Balinese god Ratu Gede Pancering Jagat, possessor of magic powers and defender of Trunyan, who has a powerful consort. Each year young men like Wayan, and adolescent boys who have passed a test for holiness, undergo a purification process — in isolation — for a month and seven days. They then perform the Barong Brutuk dance to celebrate the legendary wedding of Ratu Jagat to the goddess of the lake, Dewi Danu.

In Kedisan, old woman Mangku has her own gods: the Hindu trinity — Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer — and Bung Karno, Brother Karno, Sukarno, the flawed, charismatic first president of the Republic of Indonesia. The shrines of the trinity are in the small courtyard outside her home. Each day she prepares offerings for them, sitting cross-legged, quid of tobacco in cheek. In her nineties now, she has been doing this since she was a small girl, slicing and splicing coconut leaves to form a small basket, adding flowers, incense and betel and intricate decorations to make three canang sari, offerings fit for gods. Inside the house, there is a small room, smoke-stained, full of mysterious smells and watched over by the official photograph of Sukarno, taken at the height of his power. At times Mangku talks to his spirit. These are easy conversations: Sukarno was of the people — importantly, he was half- Balinese — and as in life he consulted mystics, it is fitting that in death he talks with Mangku, for she too is a mystic.

Gunung Batur, the volcano, often reminds Mangku and Wayan of the need for protection by gods and spirits. It grumbles 2 and spits steam. But the black scars down its flanks to the caldera floor and the lake shore remind them also that prayers and offerings aren’t always enough. The volcano has erupted more than twenty times since 1800, most recently in 1994. In 1917, it roared out rocks, ash and lava. Down at the base of the volcano in Batur village, home of Ulan Danu Batur temple, which is dedicated to Dewi Danu, fearful people sent their prayers up to the gods and goddesses, but more than a thousand people died and more than sixty thousand homes and two thousand temples were destroyed. Then a lava flow stopped at the gates of the temple, so the Batur survivors put their lives together again. But in 1926 Gunung Batur erupted once more and the river of lava swallowed the village and all the temple but the highest shrine. This time the rebuilding of Batur and Ulun Danu Batur temple was done on the crater rim.

Mangku is known far beyond the shadow of the volcano. For decades she has taken part in festivals, a dancer, as most Balinese are, but an innovator too. One year she made a fan part of her costume and as quick as word of mouth, fans appeared in hands across the island. She has taken a role in distant ceremonies, for she is a priestess. She is shaman and maker of rain, healer of body and mind. Such a woman for all seasons is needed in Bali.

*

Bali of contradictions. Bali, beautiful by nature, but riding a geological fault line full of fury and primordial fire. Bali, dancing to the gamelan, going about its traditional business gorgeously dressed in gorgeously decked temples. Bali with long avenues of urban concrete ugliness, strung with powerlines and scented with pollution, where drug addiction grows and courier mules fl irt with the death penalty. Bali, sculpted by rice farmers, with its emerald-green fields turning to gold, water temples 3 and ancient, intricate irrigation systems, now thirsty because of the demands of tourists. Bali, where terrible, evil Rangda the witch and the barong, the strange animal which represents goodness and which protects mankind, are more than masks and actors; where dancers fall into trance; where people can change themselves into leak, practitioners of black magic which can take the form of a monkey, a human, wind or light. Bali, where, as Alfred Russel Wallace — a naturalist who developed the theory of evolution and natural selection coincidentally with Charles Darwin — proclaimed, the Asian sphere ends and the Australian sphere begins (for, as a modern biologist put it, ‘one is a world of tigers, the other a world of kangaroos’). Besieged Bali, a Hindu island in an Islamic sea, desperate to maintain its culture against the waves which wash in from the rest of Indonesia and from the West. The Bali which happily believes marvellous myths about itself and which refuses to face a terrible reality. Bali, paradise? Bali, paradise lost?

*

The search for a paradise has been a preoccupation of romantics, adventurers and the alienated since explorers proved the world wasn’t flat and Rousseau invented the noble savage: Bali — like the islands of Greece and the South Pacific — has long been the focus of voyages, both real and imagined.

In 1971, I made my first overseas trip, a circling of the South Pacific, calling in on dots of land in the endless blue, ready to find the paradises Europeans had claimed to discover over two centuries. A long procession had left passing furrows across the Pacific: poets, painters and writers; searchers for skin-deep beauty, for love, for escape, for life and health: Paul Gauguin, Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rupert Brooke, Jack London, Henri Matisse, Somerset Maugham, Margaret Mead … It was 4 reading Mead’s seminal anthropological work, Coming of Age in Samoa, in a university library, that fi lled my head with idyllic images.

When Margaret Mead arrived on the South Pacific island of Samoa, in 1925, it was her first overseas trip, too. Indeed, she confessed to never having spoken a foreign language (nor had I), stayed in a hotel room by herself, or spent a day alone. She described herself as twenty years old, 5 feet 2 1/2 inches tall, weighing 98 pounds and determined to be ‘the student of man in all of his most diverse social settings’.

Mead had set out to investigate ‘the storm and stress of adolescence’, to assess how far the experience of American adolescents was biologically determined, how far modified by their culture. Samoa, she wrote, in her Letters from the Field, proved to be a most felicitous choice: ‘From no other Polynesian culture would I have returned with results that challenged so completely the prevailing belief that adolescent turmoil is wholly biologically determined and therefore inevitable’. Coming of Age in Samoa was a spectacular success when it was published in 1928, perhaps because it provided some solace, some hope for American parents waiting for the storm of adolescence to break over their household: that wonderful claim, that it is not inevitable; that what was possible in a Pacific island village was possible too in American suburbia.

The Samoa I arrived in was physically beautiful. I had flown from a Melbourne winter to an endless summer, driven along a verge of shining white beach and palm trees and sea a rainbow of blues, through small villages with thatched-roofed, open-sided houses which seemed both brave declarations of nothing-to-hide and dauntingly vulnerable to judging eyes. I watched a fa’afafini (transvestite — ‘in the way of a woman’) dance among beautiful young women and later, and very briefly, held her/his hand at the 5 Mt Veea club, under Stevenson’s grave. I sat in the ceremonial fale at Taga, on the lava cliffs of Savai’i Island, hearing the beat of the Pacific and the high-language cadences of the talking chief welcoming Tupuloa Efi , a member of the four aristocratic families which provide Samoa’s four high chiefs, sipping kava for the first time.

When the doomed poet Rupert Brooke visited Samoa in 1913, he wrote, ‘(they) are the loveliest people in the world, moving and dancing like gods and goddesses, very quietly and mysteriously and utterly content. It is sheer beauty, so pure it’s difficult to breathe in.’ I could understand Brooke’s infatuation, yet Samoa was stressed. It was on its way to joining the United Nations’ list of Least Developed Countries, depending on the remittance of the many Samoans who lived and worked elsewhere, with a culture, fa’a Samoa, struggling to survive. Many of its youth were lost. Too many were killing themselves. Both Mead and Brooke had ignored dimensions of Samoan life and the sometimes devastating impact of the coming of the Europeans. I left Samoa feeling that paradises existed only in the eyes of hopeful foreign observers.

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In 1974, I made my first trip to Bali. Pandit Nehru, India’s great Prime Minister, was only one of a multitude of visitors in the twentieth century queuing up to coin epithets for Bali. Nehru’s was the poetic ‘morning of the world’; ‘paradise’ was the favoured cliché. Western musicians, painters, surfers, hippies, ordinary tourists fell under the island’s spell; as did Margaret Mead, as she had once fallen under Samoa’s. Mead wrote of Balinese beauty, music and an incredible busyness: ‘And the tourist wondered. For wasn’t his own life full, crowded with striving and effort? — yet he was not content. What difference was it between the 6 Balinese way of packing the hours and our way that brought them contentment and relaxation to which music and dancing and gay laughter are the natural accompaniment, while we had so much strain and fatigue, grumbling and discontent, and weariness of living?’

As she had in Samoa, Mead sought in Bali answers to America’s insecurities and frustrations, ‘a formula by which we could build our society into a form which would make possible, on a fi rm economic basis, both simple happiness and complexity of spiritual expression’. Of such a dream, she proclaimed, Bali was a fitting symbol.

Mead was a keen observer of the physical Bali, of the ritual Bali, of Balinese child-rearing and of Balinese arts (she describes music and dancing, properly, as symbolic activities). Where Mead’s Samoan child lived in a simple society, safe, mainly, from confl ict, Mead’s Balinese child ‘may be taught to know terror and frustration, bitterness of rejection and cruel loneliness of spirit very young, and yet grow up to be a gay and light-footed adult because, for every tension of the threats which have been twisted or double-woven in the delicate mesh of the child’s spirit, the culture has a symbolic relaxation ready’.

Mead said that average tourists would find the very opposite of ‘the pleasant, sensuous idling away of life which the romancers had imputed to the South Sea islands’; they would find lives ‘packed with intricate and formal delights’.

In the 1920s, she said, people wanted to go to the South Sea islands to escape a postwar world, a dull and empty routine, denial of spontaneity and the trammelling of individual passions. They wanted to escape to a kind of divine nothingness in which life would be reduced to the simplest physical terms, to sunshine and the moving shadows of palm trees, to bronzebodied girls and bronze-bodied boys, food for the asking, no 7 work to do and no obligations to meet. They wanted to go and never come back. The average tourist came away from Bali talking not of undressed maidens but of happiness and art.

Mead was, in part, anthropologist as image-maker, continuing the work the Dutch colonists had earlier begun. In 1914, the Dutch steamship company KPM, which had previously carried as its main cargo prized Balinese pigs, had set its sights on tourists. This is what appeared on their brochures:

BALI

You leave this island with a sigh of regret and as long as you live you can never forget this Garden of Eden.

Garden of Eden. Place of carnage. In 1974 I was prepared for a Bali with a rich ceremonial life, but it seemed to me there was an inordinate number of funeral processions. I asked a Balinese. He told me, with a sigh, that some people were being moved by conscience. They were telling relatives of the massacred where to find their dead. The history of the Balinese has been marked by violence; in 1965 and 1966 they had conducted their own holocaust.

*

In the last third of the twentieth century, millions of Europeans came to Bali, some searching for paradise, others for cheap, exotic holiday packages, oblivious, most of them, to the blood that soaked the island. In the twenty-first century, terrorists came to spill more blood, driven by visions of martyrdom and heavenly virgins in an Islamic paradise.

I visited Bali in November 2005, not long after the second bombings, in the middle of the trials of Australian drug mules fighting for the lives. Over the decades, since my first visit in 8 1974, I had travelled to many countries as a foreign correspondent. None, of course, was a paradise, and in several I found resonances of, or links to, Bali. In Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle there was the beginning of the trail of misery and death along which heroin flows; in Afghanistan there was al Qaeda gaining strength and converts to spawn the new Islamic terrorism; in Rwanda neighbours slaughtered neighbours and a nation devoured itself; in South Africa there was a grappling with how, after one part of a population has done terrible things to another, there might be a balance between justice and reconciliation.

I made another visit to Bali in 2006. I wanted to examine the uniqueness of beautiful Bali, but I wanted to do this in the context of world-shaping and world-shaking events and forces: the greed, arrogance and brutality of colonisation; the quixotic searches for paradise; the march of ideas; the jihadist phenomenon; the recurring acts of inhumanity while much of the world watches, helpless, heedless.

Bali is in so many ways a microcosm of the human condition.

9

Part 1

CHAPTER 1

Crossing the line

Our ancestors may have crossed from apehood to humanity as they crossed Wallace’s Line.

—JARED DIAMOND

The weaver bird (ploccus hypoxantha) has a fine yellow head. It builds its bottle-shaped nest near the beaches in Bali. During his visit there in 1856, Alfred Russel Wallace looked at a weaver bird with admiration; he would look back on it with regret. Damn! As he put it in his monumental work The Malay Archipelago, ‘my ignorance of how important a locality this was for the elucidation of the geographical distribution of animals caused me to neglect obtaining some specimens which I would never meet again’. The weaver bird, a native of Java, was at the extreme limits of its eastern range. Wallace would have raised his trusty gun and shot it for skinning and preserving, as he had a wagtail thrush, an oriole and some starlings. If nature is red in tooth and claw, so are naturalists.

They were giants, Charles Darwin and Wallace, their intellectual footsteps shaking the scientific and religious worlds. Wallace dedicated The Malay Archipelago to Darwin, ‘not only as a token of personal esteem and friendship but also to express my deep admiration for his genius and his works’. The two marched independently to reach a momentous conclusion, challenging 13 dogma, faith and the doctrine of creation in putting forward the scientific theory of organic evolution by means of natural selection. After that, however, their paths diverged dramatically.

They came from different backgrounds: Darwin was born into a wealthy family, receiving a comfortable inheritance which was bolstered by the income of his wife, Emma, a member of the china and pottery Wedgwood dynasty; Wallace (described by one observer, with good reason, as ‘always unlucky’) descended into poverty with his family after his father had frittered away part of an inheritance and been swindled out of the rest. But both became fascinated by the natural world, Darwin having a life-long love affair with beetles, as Wallace had with butterflies. Darwin had sailed towards the Galapagos Islands and scientific immortality on the Beagle in 1831; Wallace had sailed for the Amazon (and a reputation which would be eclipsed by Darwin’s), in 1848.

The Amazon region was an El Dorado for a naturalist. Wallace travelled deep into its heart and then up the Rio Negro system, further than any other European. He studied not just the monkeys, fish, insects, birds and plants but the ways of the native peoples. In 1852, however, sapped by illness, he retreated down river and found that his younger brother Herbert had died of yellow fever. There was another loss to come. In his two years in the Amazon, Wallace had built a huge collection of specimens, including live animals, which he had loaded on a brig bound for England. He lost it, and almost lost his life, when the ship caught fire, three weeks after sailing for Brazil, and sank. For ten days Wallace and his shipmates survived in leaky lifeboats, until they were picked up by a cargo ship.

A few years later, Wallace decided to go collecting again, and this time he sailed to what was known as the Malay Archipelago. He roamed there for eight years, and during that time his 14 thoughts on the lives and deaths of animals took firm shape: it was a matter of the survival of the fittest. In 1858, he wrote in a landmark essay, ‘On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type’:

The numbers that die annually must be immense, and as the individual existence of each animal depends upon itself, those that die must be the weakest — the very young, the aged, and the diseased — while those that prolong their existence can only be the most perfect in health and vigour, those who are best able to obtain food regularly and avoid their numerous enemies. It is a ‘struggle for existence’ in which the weakest and least perfectly organised must always succumb …

An antelope with shorter or weaker legs must necessarily suffer more from the attacks of the feline carnivore; the passenger pigeon with less powerful wings would sooner or later be affected in its powers of procuring a regular supply of food; and in both cases the result must necessarily be a diminution of the population of the modified species. If, on the other hand, any species should produce a variety having slightly increased powers of preserving existence, that variety must inevitably in time acquire a superiority in numbers.

As it happened, more powerful wings could not help the passenger pigeon, once perhaps the most populous bird on the planet. They were to become victims of forest clearing and mass slaughter by commercial hunters, and the last, lone survivor died in captivity in 1914. Even the fittest don’t survive the works of humans.

Wallace sent his essay to Darwin. It rocked the great man, 15 who had slowly been preparing his own theory for publication, worried, undoubtedly, by the probability that a storm would break. Within eighteen months Darwin had published On the Origin of Species. In July 1858 — while Wallace, unaware, was in his Asian archipelago — his paper and Darwin’s writings were presented at a meeting in London of the Linnean Society, England’s pre-eminent scientific organisation.

At his life’s end, Darwin’s reputation was set in stone: he was the father of evolution. Wallace’s had dimmed: he was the godfather of creationism, having become a convert to spiritualism and a participant in séances, and argued that the human species is unique, separated from the biological world. Anthropologist H James Birx compared and contrasted Wallace and Darwin in a seminar in 1997 fittingly titled ‘Religion and Science: the Best of Enemies — the Worst of Friends’. Birx said Wallace fi rmly maintained there had to be a spiritual explanation for the fact that man’s mental abilities were superior to his needs for survival. Further, man’s artistic, musical, mathematical and metaphysical faculties could not be attributed to natural selection or the ability of the fittest to survive. In particular Wallace insisted that human wit, speech, humour, morality, naked and sensitive skin, and specialized and perfected brain, hands and feet could not have been the product of natural selection alone. ‘Obviously, Darwin did not agree,’ Birx observed.

Indeed, when Darwin heard that Wallace was arguing ‘evidence of a power’ which had guided the laws of natural selection in definite directions for specific ends, he wrote saying: ‘I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.’

Birx sees the difference between the men as the conflict between emotion and reason. Straying into psychological analysis, he suggests that the schism grew out of their contrasting reactions to the death of a loved one: Wallace to that of his 16 brother Herbert; Darwin to the loss of his ten-year-old daughter, Annie Elizabeth. Whereas Darwin ‘rejected outright his faith in the teachings of Christianity as a divine revelation and, instead, favoured a metaphysical stance grounded in science and reason’, Wallace needed more than the theory of natural selection to explain the position of man on earth, man the unique. Birx is saddened that Wallace ‘allowed himself to be subsumed by simplistic spiritualism’ but remarks that Wallace at least committed himself to the fact of animal evolution. It could be argued, however, that Wallace was simply grappling with the complexity of human existence. Wallace had his glory days in the 1850s. Wallace, the unlucky, luckily visited Bali.

*

Jared Diamond, 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner and populariser of biogeography, flies across the narrow strait separating Bali from its eastern neighbour, Lombok. He is thrilled. He has read and dreamed of this strait for decades because ‘it constitutes part of Wallace’s Line, which for a biologist is the sharpest and most famous boundary in the world, and the line whose crossing may have transformed our ancestors from glorified apes into real humans’. The strait, halfway along the archipelago, is eighteen kilometres wide at the southern end and forty kilometres wide at the northern end. Though riven by fierce currents, it seems an unexceptional, if pretty, stretch of water.

Wallace arrived in Bali on June 13, 1856 after a twenty-day passage from Singapore on the Kembang Djepoon (Rose of Japan), a schooner belonging to a Chinese merchant, manned by a Javanese crew, and commanded by an English captain. He had not intended to go there, having tried to book a direct passage from Singapore to Makassar, the great port city on Sulawesi, to the north. The Rose of Japan carried him to his destiny.

17

‘It is well known,’ he wrote in The Malay Archipelago:

that the natural