2022
Day 2, The Festival hurtles on
29 October 2022
Only in Bali do you get a passing parade at breakfast. They are heading for Pura Saraswati, the temple by the Lotus Pond, one so sacred that tourists are unable to visit it without full Balinese dress and being invited to a ceremony there. I have seen inside through a side gate from the hotel and it is sumptuous - gold leaf everywhere. There is a special Hindu festival on right now at Campuan Temple, bringing the devout masses on to streets (adding to traffic chaos) but so far, I have avoided the traffic jams. Coming home at night on Thursday gave us a spectacular view of this very sacred temple below the bridge, all lit up. There were thousands of people down there, their motorbikes and cars parked densely up and down the road. I heard that half an hour later when the ceremony was over, the road up into Ubud was impassable for a long time. The deeply religious life of the Balinese exists parallel to the rampant commercialism of tourism - the former always takes precedence to the Balinese. Much of what they earn from looking after us visitors goes into religious devotions.
So back to our secular festival. Great session on climate change in this part of the world - a bleak message which the panel members tried, but failed, to give some hope to. An amazing story from an academic - (he specialises in the negative impact roads have on the environment) about taking a student group into the jungles of Sabah in Malaysian Borneo, on a remote dirt track and seeing a rare clouded (?) leopard crossing the track just as he was telling them it was so rare that they would have little chance of seeing one. He took another group to the same area the following year and found that the dirt track was now a four-lane paved logging road. That leopard will never be seen again. A fact for you - roads are the single biggest man-made impact on the environment! And from another speaker about his book on the massive fire in the vast open-cut coal mine in Morwell, Victoria in 2014 that burnt for 45 days - an advance view of the climate Armageddon that awaits the world. Due to neglect on the part of the company to properly manage the mine after it was no longer in use. What was I doing that year that I missed this disaster?
Alternative histories. Australia’s tireless academic, left-wing activist Max Lane on the Soeharto era, especially those that resisted. During those terrible long years my own awareness and involvement was largely down to Max and the fabulous magazine Inside Indonesia. The other speaker, a former Oxford academic, has written on the early 19th C. Prince Diponegoro, whom Raffles had earmarked as the successor to the Yogyakarta sultanate for his extraordinary abilities, but who ended up the last 30 years of his life imprisoned by the Dutch on their return to running the colony after the British Interregnum (1811-1816) during the Napoleonic wars. (There’s your Indonesian history lesson for today, folks! I bet most of you did not know that Britain ruled Java for a few years back then.)
Max has dealt with major cancer surgery to his face in recent years, but doing well. A new book out on Pramoedya, but I will have to miss his session on that due to a clash.
So back to our secular festival. Great session on climate change in this part of the world - a bleak message which the panel members tried, but failed, to give some hope to. An amazing story from an academic - (he specialises in the negative impact roads have on the environment) about taking a student group into the jungles of Sabah in Malaysian Borneo, on a remote dirt track and seeing a rare clouded (?) leopard crossing the track just as he was telling them it was so rare that they would have little chance of seeing one. He took another group to the same area the following year and found that the dirt track was now a four-lane paved logging road. That leopard will never be seen again. A fact for you - roads are the single biggest man-made impact on the environment! And from another speaker about his book on the massive fire in the vast open-cut coal mine in Morwell, Victoria in 2014 that burnt for 45 days - an advance view of the climate Armageddon that awaits the world. Due to neglect on the part of the company to properly manage the mine after it was no longer in use. What was I doing that year that I missed this disaster?
Alternative histories. Australia’s tireless academic, left-wing activist Max Lane on the Soeharto era, especially those that resisted. During those terrible long years my own awareness and involvement was largely down to Max and the fabulous magazine Inside Indonesia. The other speaker, a former Oxford academic, has written on the early 19th C. Prince Diponegoro, whom Raffles had earmarked as the successor to the Yogyakarta sultanate for his extraordinary abilities, but who ended up the last 30 years of his life imprisoned by the Dutch on their return to running the colony after the British Interregnum (1811-1816) during the Napoleonic wars. (There’s your Indonesian history lesson for today, folks! I bet most of you did not know that Britain ruled Java for a few years back then.)
Max has dealt with major cancer surgery to his face in recent years, but doing well. A new book out on Pramoedya, but I will have to miss his session on that due to a clash.
Another session was on prize-winning translators and writers from an Australian Award (none of them Indonesia-related.) Always interesting to hear the challenges that translators face. In this case, Spanish and Portuguese. One woman, who lived much of her life in Brazil, and became a translator, took on the challenge of translating a 600-page novel in a made-up rural dialect - she described it like Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake - an impossible task. Took her forever. Sounds like my idea of a nightmare job. But she won an award!
The last session was with three older guys who are travel writers - but by that stage of the day I was nodding off in the heat, so did not follow the thread.
So, I headed home for a short nap and even a short swim before heading off to party! John McGlynn invited a few Lontar-connected guests to a posh dinner to celebrate the founding of Lontar 35 years ago on 28 October, the day that the Indonesian language officially came into being in 1928. Held at Janet de Neefe’s grand hotel “Honeymoon Cottages”, the place has outgrown its name - huge stone and marble structures having been added long since her honeymoon days. Our upstairs verandah room resembled a glorious Mughal palace. Beautifully laid tables. The fifteen or so guests included a few of us Indolitclub folk and Michael Vatikiotis plus the Oxford historian. We had a chance to talk and mingle before being seated at two separate long tables, after which no more chance to talk to the others. Nice Balinese food, but after the first course, a hearty soup, I had little room for more. And there was a Lontar birthday cake from Janet’s Honeymoon Bakery. And wine that John treated us to. Isla had come from Jakarta just for a couple of days of the festival and it was a good chance to enjoy her company, even though we’d seen each other in Sydney very recently. A most pleasant evening but it meant missing a unique innovative Javanese wayang puppet performance that the others said was superb. But one can’t be everywhere. We are often torn by the choice of simultaneous programs at this festival.
Ready for dinner. Janet’s brilliant sense of decoration is a key to the success of all her restaurants. This was a private dinner at her hotel.
The last session was with three older guys who are travel writers - but by that stage of the day I was nodding off in the heat, so did not follow the thread.
So, I headed home for a short nap and even a short swim before heading off to party! John McGlynn invited a few Lontar-connected guests to a posh dinner to celebrate the founding of Lontar 35 years ago on 28 October, the day that the Indonesian language officially came into being in 1928. Held at Janet de Neefe’s grand hotel “Honeymoon Cottages”, the place has outgrown its name - huge stone and marble structures having been added long since her honeymoon days. Our upstairs verandah room resembled a glorious Mughal palace. Beautifully laid tables. The fifteen or so guests included a few of us Indolitclub folk and Michael Vatikiotis plus the Oxford historian. We had a chance to talk and mingle before being seated at two separate long tables, after which no more chance to talk to the others. Nice Balinese food, but after the first course, a hearty soup, I had little room for more. And there was a Lontar birthday cake from Janet’s Honeymoon Bakery. And wine that John treated us to. Isla had come from Jakarta just for a couple of days of the festival and it was a good chance to enjoy her company, even though we’d seen each other in Sydney very recently. A most pleasant evening but it meant missing a unique innovative Javanese wayang puppet performance that the others said was superb. But one can’t be everywhere. We are often torn by the choice of simultaneous programs at this festival.
Ready for dinner. Janet’s brilliant sense of decoration is a key to the success of all her restaurants. This was a private dinner at her hotel.
Weather report: no rain for two days! Those offerings to appease the rain gods must have worked!
Started writing this very early this morning, but could not get it sent off before the 8.30 start to get to a 9 am session. It’s now late afternoon and I’m back at the hotel, totally worn out, and trying to reboost my energy levels to go back up for a Threads of Life film and see my dear friends Jean and William.
Started writing this very early this morning, but could not get it sent off before the 8.30 start to get to a 9 am session. It’s now late afternoon and I’m back at the hotel, totally worn out, and trying to reboost my energy levels to go back up for a Threads of Life film and see my dear friends Jean and William.