KUNTORO MANGKUSUBROTO

Kuntoro Mangkusubroto
Working as the hands of God Duncan Graham

At the time it was the toughest job in Indonesia.

Repair a landscape ripped raw by the world’s most extreme natural disaster; house the grief-torn survivors who’d lost more than 170,000 relatives, friends and neighbors; rebuild roads, bridges, ports, power stations, hospitals – all the infrastructure that makes cities function.

Manage a huge budget and be accountable to governments and NGOs in Indonesia and around the world.

Cope with the hostility, the prejudice, the deep-seated suspicions still virulent after 30 years of civil war, the jealousy, the angry confrontationists and the back-stabbers. Aceh was a tortured land drained of trust, particularly hostile towards Javanese from the central government.

That Kuntoro Mangkusubroto stayed the distance, achieved the goals and at 61 looks fresh enough to tackle another epic catastrophe indicates that the director of the Bureau of Rehabilitation and Reconstruction in Aceh and Nias (BRR) is a distinctly gifted human being – though he rejects this appraisal: “I’m just myself.”

Four years ago this Boxing Day a massive undersea earthquake off Aceh triggered a tsunami. Waves to 12 meters swept across 800 kilometers of coast and up to 1.6 kilometers inland.

It was a scene from Armageddon.

The world pledged US $7.2 billion and paid $6.7 billion. Thousands of aid workers flooded in with a multiplicity of agendas. Also lured were those who saw the chance to exploit the situation and milk the largesse.

Indonesia ranks 143 on the world’s corruption index and the cynics predicted much of the aid would never reach those hurting most, and that petty bureaucracy would destroy even the best intentioned and most resilient.

There has been some minor project-level corruption that’s being pursued, according to Kuntoro, but the BRR has not been infected. The agency’s accounts have been checked by international auditors and given an unqualified pass.

“We set up an internal anti-corruption unit, the first for any Indonesian government agency,” he said in Wellington, New Zealand. He was in the country to address a conference on disaster risk management and thank Kiwis for their aid. Like Australia, NZ was among the first countries to offer help.

“We developed new standards of accountability for Indonesia and in advance of many other countries.

“We encouraged everyone to blow the whistle if they saw anything amiss. They just had to send me an SMS. I asked my staff to pledge their honesty and promise never to take one penny they were not entitled to have.”

When President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono hand picked the former Minister for Mines, business rescuer, company director, academic and civil engineer to take on the new BRR job in April 2005 Kuntoro dictated his terms.

They included ministerial ranking, direct access to the President (a privilege used only three times) and a salary three times larger than other ministers, an issue that drew much criticism.

“They were able to moonlight to supplement their salaries. I have no other income,” he said. “I do not take speaking fees or envelopes for anything I do.

“I fly economy class and not just to save money. At the back of the plane people talk to me and tell me what’s really happening. I thought this job was the chance given by God to touch the hands of the needy people, to go and do something good.

“Not many have that opportunity. Our success can be measured.”

Kuntoro said he draws his moral values and anti-corruption stand from his parents: “My father was a straight lawyer and my mother a professor of English.

“They brought me up to do good for other people, to be a good person, to be happy. We led a simple life. Although I started as a civil engineer (he was educated at Bandung Institute of Technology and Stanford University in the US), I fell in love with decision analysis.

“This discipline covers so many issues, but above all moral values are the most important. There are consequences to every action and the last defence is your conscience. You can compromise your strategy but never compromise your values.

“Have I been tempted? Many times, but it’s always like that. Life isn’t all about money. How does money relate to family, values and God?

“There were no how-to textbooks available for this job, no models of what to do. The task was so huge. I’ve had to face demonstrations and brutal words.

“Management was a nightmare. People blamed me for being too slow or not sensitive enough, but I had to remember they were the victims and had the right to blame.

“Twice I felt like giving up. I’m not too religious, but I believe. Yes. I trusted that we were sent by God to do this job. We are the extension of the hands of God and it is our duty.”

The first bureaucratic challenge came within hours of Kuntoro being sworn into office at the Presidential Palace. No one in the government would give him the money for airfares to Aceh because there was no system in place and it was a weekend.

The Australian aid agency AusAID stepped in with US $100,000 cash and Kuntoro and his team were able to get to ground zero. But there was no office or housing. Then the United Nations High Commission for Refugees gave the BRR space.

“I thought these things were God’s doing,” he said. “I was just the man in the middle.”

“When I chose staff I sought people of the highest integrity. I didn’t know them before. I asked if they were willing. If they said ‘yes’ they were employed. If they asked ‘how much?’ or ‘I’ll have to ask my boss’ then they were out.

“I have self confidence – some think I have too much. A good manager must have guts and be self reliant, have a nothing-to-lose attitude. You will make mistakes. The art is in solving problems at the lowest cost, to create harmony and make unbiased judgements, to get results.”

In April the BRR vanishes from everything except the history books. One of these will be written by Kuntoro unless he’s headhunted to fix another crisis.

In material terms the BRR has changed Aceh for the better. Much good has come from much horror.

More than 93 per cent of the job has been done. People are back farming and fishing. Traffic chaos has returned. The roads are bituminised, the bridges sturdy, the 125,000 new houses hygienic, the public buildings of a standard better then other provinces. Visa, work permit and import clearance procedures have been streamlined and accelerated, delivered through a one-stop shop.

Land titles now include the wife’s name ensuring her security should her husband die – a reform yet to spread to other provinces. National whistle-blower laws are being considered.

The templates for business and departmental propriety are there for other agencies and managers to pick up – if they so desire. Could corruption be eliminated and Indonesia rank high among the world’s clean countries?

Kuntoro, normally master of the snappy response, paused: “Yes. But only if there’s the political will.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post on Boxing Day 2008)
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Romo (Father) Benny in Wellington, NZ

BENNY SUSETYO - TURBULENT PRIEST

Bashed, bloodied but unbeaten © Duncan Graham 2008

Preaching the universal religious virtues of peace, love, understanding and forgiveness is easy enough before backslapping thinkalikes in a safe house.

In the warmth of the applause the speaker can bask in the sunshine of self-righteousness. The challenge comes when the audience is hostile, even brutal and the environment is the street.

Catholic priest Benny Susetyo has been confronted by the ugly side of Indonesian life and passed the test splendidly. Though not without considerable pain.

In August he was bashed senseless by three thugs and spent five days recuperating and undergoing tests in a Singapore hospital. So far no-one had been arrested for the crime.

His assault came a few months after hoons from the Islamic Defenders’ Front (FPI) thumped peace marchers in central Jakarta, wounding 70. This encouraged the Christian press to claim Father Benny was the victim of a planned assault by fundamentalists aiming to fracture Indonesian pluralism. However the victim doesn’t go so far, saying he doesn’t know why he was bashed.

He said he is no longer in pain and had forgiven his assailants – “of course.” Maybe they were just after his handphone.

If the criminals were religious loonies or hired hitmen who thought their violence might bludgeon the secretary of the Inter-Religious Commission of the Indonesian Bishops’ Conference into silence they selected the wrong man.

For the human rights activist is still hammering his message of reform in the way Indonesians use and misuse religion and he’s taking his mission far afield.

His latest stop was New Zealand where he was invited during Human Rights Week by the Indonesian Embassy to promote the Republic as a multi-faith tolerant society. His visit was also used to celebrate the Christmas season.

NZ is a nation that still holds to a Judaeo-Christian heritage and values, but where organised religion is in decline. There are about 40,000 Muslims in the South Pacific country and only a tiny fraction from Indonesia.

“There are so many things that New Zealanders can do to help democracy and promote public civilization in Indonesia,” he told anyone who would listen during a tour in early December.

“I don’t just mean in terms of trade. Visit Indonesia and do whatever you can to explain what’s happening in the world. Spread the message that religion must be on the side of the poor and disadvantaged.

“Religion is being used as an instrument of power in Indonesia, manipulated by the State and big business.

“Religion has been trapped by rituals, people chasing after symbols and failing to find the balance between the state and the market. Religion must be a source of morality.”

Father Benny sees parallels in Indonesia with the Soviet Union after Mikhail Gorbachev, the last head of the USSR who presided over the disintegration of the union and the arrival of democracy.

Father Benny claimed that the Russian people eventually grew tired of the way democracy was being mishandled and corrupted, and are now drifting back to totalitarianism. He fears the same disillusionment may infect Indonesians.

He said this is because politicians are continuing to use religion for their own ends and consequently risking harmony in Indonesia.

Benny Susetyo, 40, is normally based in Malang in East Java where he studied for a masters’ degree in philosophy. He is a member of the Alliance for National and Religious Freedom and has written several books on pluralism and religion.

In the mass media he has used Indonesia’s press (“the most free and democratic in Asia”) to savage the government’s response to the Lapindo mud volcano disaster in East Java, demanding that businessman Aburizal Bakrie (who is also the Coordinating Minister for the People’s Welfare) be held accountable.

The meddlesome priest has even dared to demand the government seize the Bakrie Group’s assets to compensate the thousands who have lost homes, land and jobs to the unstoppable eruption of gas and slime. (A Bakrie company was associated with the gas drilling that allegedly caused the eruption.)

Father Benny has also been a critic of the banning of the Islamic Ahmadiyah sect under pressure from hardline Muslims who believe that only their interpretation of the faith is correct.

His other targets have been poorly educated religious leaders who have used the hate passages in the ancient books to provoke violence. So it’s easy to assume the man has garnered many enemies who might want to give him a hard time – literally and metaphorically.

“We need a new paradigm for religious teaching that will interpret the texts in accordance with modern usage,” he said.

“Take off your exclusive glasses and start looking at the world in an inclusive way. The dialogue must be about life. The challenge for religion is to take sides with the downtrodden, the poor, migrant workers – and advocate on their behalf.

“In many cases religion has lost its true essence in bringing peace and justice to the world – advocating solidarity, forgiveness and being good friends with all. Plurality should be the main issue in the development of our national character.”

In an earlier age Father Benny would have been pilloried as a Communist and publicly harassed by the military and police if not jailed. For he is not afraid of putting the boot into politicians and the corporate world, both untouchables during Soeharto’s authoritarian era.

He has focussed on the power of cashed-up business-backed politicians to buy media time and who use religion to clothe themselves with piety in the search for votes.

At the same time he has trust in the common sense of the ordinary people. He said they had not been fooled by the large number of celebrities and clerics who have put their names forward for public office; these candidates have been dumped at the ballot box.

He unsuccessfully supported the removal of religious affiliation from identity cards and thinks it will be some time before Indonesians can accept the idea that the state and religion should be divorced, as it is in NZ and many other Western countries.

“The issue is not to have a religion, but to be a religion,” he said. “Religion has become a plaything of the state.

“The important things are not the number of places of worship, but the creation of a life of togetherness. We have to become better educated and intellectually more mature.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post 13 December 2008)

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JACK BODY: Kiwi master of Indonesian music

Jack Body
Interpreting Indonesia’s sensuality through the Bard © Duncan Graham 2008

Living in one of the most isolated Western countries in the world requires adjustments and rituals. For Pakeha (white Kiwis) one essential has long been the big trip abroad known colloquially as OE, or overseas experience.

This journey, mainly to explore the northern hemisphere and seek the family’s roots, is an important part of the culture of New Zealand, a country still searching for its identity.

Young musicologist Jack Body was no exception. He’d already graduated with a masters degree from Auckland University and won a prestigious arts fellowship. In the late 1960s he headed for Europe where he studied in Cologne and at the Institute of Sonology at Utrecht.

Then he took the long way home wandering through Europe and South-East Asia with his mind and microphone open. The last stop was Indonesia.

“I was an innocent abroad and I knew next to nothing about the country,” he said. “I’d already been to India and was intrigued by the music I’d heard in the streets and villages.

“But Indonesia was quite different. By comparison I found India to be harsh. In Indonesia I started recording the sounds I heard, like other people take photographs of their travels.

“I followed my ears. I recorded birds, animals, street sounds, music. I was fascinated by the fantastic richness of the culture. I liked the way that people took things easily. They couldn’t be bothered to get hot and bothered.

“What attracted me most? The sensuality.”

Back in NZ Body transcribed some of the music he’d collected, a laborious task but one he thought necessary to understand what he’d heard. He also knew he needed more of the seductive archipelago.

In 1976 he scored a guest lectureship at the Akademi Musik Indonesia in Yogyakarta where he stayed for two years. On his return home he joined the academic staff of the School of Music at Wellington’s Victoria University where he’s now an associate professor.

He’s been a featured composer in the US and Holland, a widely exhibited photographer and he also runs a music publisher called Waiteata Music Press. His speciality has been cross-cultural compositions and experimental electro-acoustics.

In these jobs he’s set out to bring the music of Asia, and Indonesia in particular, to the attention of Kiwis and he’s done this with such success that he’s won a swag of awards, including a NZ Order of Merit in the 2001 Honors List. The following year his recordings titled Pulse won the NZ Music Award for the Best New Classical CD.

And all the time he’s been promoting Indonesian culture, along the way collecting a set of Javanese gamelan instruments for his university donated by Ibu Tien Soeharto, the wife of the late Indonesian president.

This year he’s been back to Indonesia twice, recording music played by the soldiers of the kraton (palace) in Yogyakarta. He said the music was an intriguing and ancient European-derived mix of fifes, drums and other instruments performed by men in quaint uniforms whose origins could well be the topic of a PhD.

Body’s work isn’t the only way Kiwis are learning more about Indonesia. He’s organized numerous residencies in Wellington for Indonesian artists and praised the Indonesian government for offering a range of cultural scholarships for structured three-month arts programs. These are expected to be enhanced later this year when an agreement between Indonesia and NZ is signed allowing young people from both countries to get work visas.

Now 64 Body shows no sign of going stale, repetitive or monotone. If he followed the Shakespeare formula he’d be ‘the lean and slippered pantaloon’ but he moves, physically and intellectually, as nimbly as his students.

He has the quirky mannerisms of a long-time creative artist living in a parallel universe where music rules. While he has to be involved in teaching and university administration his mind seems to be somewhere else, pulling sounds and ideas together for some future fusion.

His latest production (“exhilarating, the most ambitious I’ve ever done”), staged with help from the Indonesian Embassy in NZ and the Asia-NZ Foundation, was the Seven Ages of Man, a ‘cross-cultural, multi-media music theater’ piece based on Shakespeare’s famous lines in All’s Well That Ends Well:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

Body’s idea was to mix bits of the Bard in English with music from the Javanese gamelan and a Balinese gamelan, plus an electric violin, four vocalists singing in Javanese and Balinese, and have the lot interpreted in dance and puppetry.

Translation of the Shakespeare was not without difficulties. The verse about the soldier ‘full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,’ caused problems.

“In Shakespeare’s time most of the military were mercenaries, but in Indonesia being a soldier is an elitist occupation,” said Body. “We had to make some adjustments in the language.

”Many people in the English-speaking world have been taught the Seven Ages of Man and I found Indonesians related well to the sentiments.”

The composers included the Javanese gamelan director Budi Putra (originally from Solo but now a NZ resident) and the Balinese gamelan director I Wayan Gde Yudane. Most of the gamelan players were university students and staff, including Jack Body.

In the wrong hands this could have become a real dog’s breakfast, but in fact it worked brilliantly on every level – emotional, imaginative and creative.

There were several reasons; the inclusion of the masked multi-talented Balinese dalang (puppet master) I Nyoman Sukerta as a musician, singer, dancer and actor, was a masterstroke.

So was a lighting system that included a haze machine, recreating in the Wellington timber studio the misty, musty, dusty, mysterious, spooky, smoky and almost tangible atmosphere found in villages and kampongs of Indonesia come nightfall. The only thing absent was the scent of clove cigarettes, for NZ takes its anti-smoking laws seriously.

“The reception has been great,” said the exuberant ethnomusicologist. “I love this synthesis – I’ve long wanted to use dance and now I’ve got the theater bug. We’re hoping to take the production on tour around NZ, maybe even to Indonesia. That would be terrific.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post 11 November 2008)

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KALIANDRA TREKKING

The march of the eco-tourists draws closer © Duncan Graham 2008

Are they flashpackers or backpackers plus? They’re the same creature, but the second term is the polite one you use when you meet these knowledge-hungry 60 somethings out to exercise their minds and bodies around the world.

Having done the Australasian wilderness they’ll soon be heading for the mountains of East Java if Janet Cochrane and her Indonesian colleagues have their way.

British academic Dr Cochrane has done the hard yards in the tourism industry. Before teaching at Leeds University she used to lead and organize tours, including outbound events.

She’s also been a frequent visitor to Indonesia, so her surprise at the lack of development in hiking, eco-tourism and cultural tourism carries some clout.

“Trekking tours are extremely popular in other parts of the world,” she said. “It’s amazing that nothing has yet been successfully developed in Indonesia, other than hikes of a day or more up and down mountains which can be extremely challenging.” (See sidebar)

This dearth is now being tackled in central East Java where a group of young Indonesians backed by a conservation center and some of Dr Cochrane’s students, are developing a one-week trekking tour with the pedestrian title ‘A Walk Around Arjuna’.

Arjuna, 3,339 meters, squats between Surabaya and Malang. It last erupted in 1952. Its neighbor is Mount Welirang, just 183 meters lower and a well-known sulfur mine for those brave or driven enough to enter the smoking crater. There’s a 1,000-meter deep valley between the two peaks.

“We want to create an experience where visitors can get involved in local culture and traditional arts,” said Agus Wiyono, executive director of the Kaliandra Sejati Foundation that runs an education and training center. “We’d like them to understand and maybe experience the cycles of rural life, including the harvesting of rice.

“To do this successfully we need to be supported by the local communities, so we are taking things slowly and smoothly. We are calling this our pride campaign and want it to encourage conservation of the environment. We don’t want them to feel threatened.”

Or exploited. The days when tourism was considered benign and a plus for the locals have long gone. The Bali experience, where farmers’ land has been lost to hotels and the post-construction jobs they anticipated have been given to outsiders, is a classic example of the downside of tourism.

Dr Cochrane said the negative impacts include arousing the desire for material goods, particularly the shiny buzzy things that tourists carry. However mobile phone coverage in the Arjuna area is like the landscape - full of holes. So the pleasure of arousing envy by browsing e-mails from Exeter while standing on the crumbling cusp of a smoking caldera will be limited.

Then there’s the danger of infection by the glazed-eye monotone ‘have a good day’ virus that infects city supermarket checkout chicks. If this sickness gets into the Arjuna villagers it would be a tragedy because the locals are genuinely friendly, even though their interrogation of visitors’ age, faith and fertility can get a bit wearing.

Agus and his Kaliandra colleagues, Sapto Siswoyo and Agus Sugianto have been organizing village meetings to help people understand what might happen when the trekking program gets underway in a big way. So far there have been nine sessions involving farmers and householders.

Agus Wiyono said the locals are enthusiastic because they have the chance of adding to the income they currently raise from farming and forestry. They’ll get the opportunity to build and maintain tracks, erect signs, act as tour guides and provide handicrafts, food and accommodation.

The other issue concerning the organizers is whether they should try to limit visitors. If the trekking tours get too popular cashed-up developers from outside might muscle in to build flash resorts and destroy the things that attract genuine eco-tourists.

Although the trekkers are likely to be hardy Europeans and Australians enjoying an active retirement on handsome pensions, they’ll still want their little comforts. They may be prepared to forgo hot showers and sit-down toilets, but they will insist on cleanliness, and their desire for contact with nature will vanish if the little black things on the bedroom floor turn out to be rat droppings.

So the Kaliandra crew are busy explaining about foreigners’ needs and funny customs, like wanting to take part in some of the most boringly repetitious jobs in agriculture – threshing rice by hand and pushing buffaloes to plough paddy.

As a tourist lure Arjuna and its neighboring mountains have so many add-on attractions that even the most wilderness-worn will find something new. It’s not just the views that make high-definition TV look like black-and-white transmissions. The area is rich in culture and history, mystery and magic. For in these lush and fecund mountains the major religions haven’t had the missionising successes they’ve enjoyed in the coastal cities.

Many ancient traditions and ceremonies have survived, particularly those involving planting and harvesting of crops. The locals will share these with outsiders provided they’re not trying to shut down these practices.

Then there’s the chance to spot a rare Javan hawk-eagle, or the grizzled langur. Both are heading down the one-way track made by hundreds of other Indonesian birds and beasts as forests are felled.

“There’s a huge variety of things to see, from ancient temples and pristine montane forests to nightclubs, from hot-springs and waterfalls, to tea plantations and rice fields,” said Dr Cochrane. The area is also cool – Kaliandra is 850 meters up Arjuna. It’s not quite outside mosquito range but they’re not the saber-toothed brutes found on the steaming floodplains far below.

Although it will be another year before the long tour is ready for its first corrugated-sole footfall, shorter one-day tramps around Kaliandra are almost open for business. Check www.kaliandrasejati.org for details and prices.


Kicking-off the trekking trend

Kaliandra isn’t the first to highlight nature tourism based on tramping. In West Java an NGO called the Forum for Information on Nature Tourism has published detailed maps and high-quality booklets promoting trekking around Mount Gede and Mount Pangrango.

This is a big project covering 140 kilometers of walks that takes up to two weeks to complete, though it can be handled piecemeal.

The mountains lie inside a block marked at its corners by Bogor, Cianjur and Sukabumi. UNESCO calls this the Cibodas Biosphere Reserve, ‘an example of an ecosystem in the humid tropics undergoing strong human pressure.’

City-based Indonesians and expats fed up with negotiating Jakarta’s concrete canyons started circumambulating the mountains late last century. They formed a walking club loosely based around the University of Indonesia’s Geography Department and eventually found the time and funds to publish.

Bogor-based Alex Korns, who led the project, has pointed out that unlike the US and many European countries, hikers are ‘free to walk almost anywhere he or she fancies, along paths that wind between farmers’ tiny garden plots.’

It’s the same situation in East Java where the folk who live in the hills seem unworried about pink-skinned men and women in khaki shorts wandering past their smallholdings. The TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED signs that disfigure much of outback Australia are largely absent in Indonesia where ironically it’s the entrances to the national parks that are policed.

Check www.puncaktrek.com for more information.

(First published in The Jakarta Post 17 )ctober 08)

CHARLES PILLIET

The curious yarn of a Kiwi in Java © Duncan Graham 2008

Hanging on the wall of a cramped kampong house in Singosari, East Java is a set of grainy soft-focus photos of the family’s ancestors. Sunshine, termites, damp and age haven’t treated them well, and the pictures started with a disadvantage.

In the early days of photography the rules were rigid; you had to dress formal and look severe. Today it’s difficult to sense the soul behind the monochrome stare, humanity in the flat featureless features.

And so it is here with the portraits of a gaunt, long faced foreigner in a bow tie flanked by Javanese teenagers, or with his housekeeper, equally stern. They seem to say; ‘We don’t trust this newfangled technology’.

The man wearing the ‘butterfly’, as they say in Singosari, was Charles Mainwaring Pilliet, a New Zealander who fled a disciplinarian father in his homeland to become an adventurer in South East Asia. He eventually died in 1959 in East Java aged 90, nursed by Mutmainah one of his adopted nieces.

Now 68 she recalled the day of his passing vividly: “As we took the body out of the house a powerful wind sprang up,” she said. “Windows banged open or slammed shut. The trees shook and bent their branches. We knew he was a paranormal.

“He was fanatical about the number seven. We had seven windows in the house and seven trees in the garden. He gave me seven bracelets.”

Who was this strange septenary Kiwi who apparently supported the Indonesian revolution and loathed the Dutch? What was he doing squatting in an Indonesian village and dying poor after being cheated of his wealth by the Madurese wife of a Scottish banker who got Pilliet to sign over his estate to her husband?

At the end of his life the old Kiwi was reduced to boiling buffalo bones to extract fat for sale as a rheumatism cure and getting the kids to hawk this door-to-door.

Now his great, great nephew Michael Pringle is trying to put together the missing threads in the tapestry of his colourful relative’s life. Pringle came to Indonesia 11 years ago to research the story and will return in January to see if he can sew a more complete narrative.

Unfortunately the old man’s books seem to have vanished. Mutmainah said he kept thousands in cupboards and wardrobes, but only the furniture remains.

Pilliet was born in 1869 in NZ’s South Island into a family with legal, journalistic and political connections, and ancestors from France. His mother died when he was three. It seems he didn’t get on with his stepmother and was raised by his grandfather.

Pilliet worked as a merchant seaman, then a miner before leaving for what was then the Dutch East Indies.

“His experiences on the west coast of Sumatra were extraordinary,” said Michael Pringle who is writing a biography of Charles’ father Walter. “Charles hunted tigers and elephants up remote rivers and undertook extremely dangerous exploratory forays into regions which had never previously seen a white man.

“ He suffered numerous bouts of malarial sickness and was probably lucky to have survived. In 1899 he was exploring the northern coast of the Celebes (now Sulawesi) sleeping in the open to avoid leprosy and other diseases that were rife in the villages.”

In Sulawesi Pilliet apparently fathered a daughter with a local woman, though the child later died. He set up house in Kupang, owned a lugger and traded in pearls in Western Australia and Singapore, amassing considerable wealth. He became the British consul in Dili where he worked as a spy monitoring German activities in the area.

He seems to have been fascinated by Eastern religions and philosophies. He read widely and in 1923 moved to Lawang, about 15 kilometers north of Malang where he built a house and had coffee plantations.

“He had a Javanese housekeeper who moved her two young nieces in with her for company,” said Pringle. “Charles became very fond of these children and almost adopted them as his own, picking them up from school and treating them with great affection. He was well regarded by the people of Lawang and taught the local children English in his house.”

Stories vary about his time during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia. One version has him being transported to the Changi prisoner-of-war camp in Singapore, though Mutmainah is adamant that didn’t happen.

She said he was arrested by the Japanese and released later when they discovered he wasn’t Dutch. This seems unlikely because New Zealand, along with Australia, was fighting with the Allies and Pilliet would have been considered an enemy alien.

However Mutmainah said that after the war he did stay for a year or more in Singapore where he had a Jewish friend. This may have been during the four-year war for Indonesian independence.

When Pilliet returned to Java he was a poor man though he got some support from his family in NZ.

Why didn’t he go back to his homeland? Mutmainah said this was because of his antagonism towards his father, but Walter had died in 1885 aged 45 from typhoid when young Charles was still a teenager. If this was the reason the hostility must have run deep.

What attracted Pilliet to East Java? Mutmainah said he spoke Indonesian, but not Javanese. He doesn’t seem to have gone native and continued to read newspapers from Singapore, drink whisky, make his own wine and dress as a European.

Pringle is particularly keen to trace his great, great uncle’s books. These were probably in English because the old man refused to use the Dutch language. They may well have been sold to libraries and were probably about philosophy.

If you have any clues or anecdotes, please contact Michael Pringle at tixall@xtra.co.nz
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(First published in The Jakarta Post Saturday 11 October)
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SINETRON AND SHAKESPEARE

Where there’s a Will, there’s a sinetron Duncan Graham

If you consider sinetrons (soap operas) much ado about nothing, the most base Indonesian art form loitering at the depths where tectonic plates jostle for space, then this BTW is about to change your mind.

Lend me your tears, for I come not to bury sinetrons, but to praise them.

My extensive research shows that sinetrons have style and substance. They embrace the wit and wisdom of our times, expose emotions, drive visions, reveal truths. Watch closely and you’ll notice they’re really high culture, up there with Shakespeare.

The prolific penman from Stratford-on-Avon had a way (or as he was wont to say at home, Hathaway) with plots. And so does Raam Punjabi, the producer from Jakarta-on-Ciliwung and boss of PT Multivision Plus, custodian of this republic’s rich tele-literature and clearly a Shakespearean scholar of note. Mainly large currencies,

Take the use of soliloquies. The Bard employed this technique to avoid scene building and shifting and it’s an equally handy cost saver for a budget shoot. The tousle-haired lad who ponders on the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as the Prince of Demak, astonished at the arrival of Islam in his hometown, has other things on his mind. He’s just learned that his family is more dysfunctional than the House of Windsor. Better to muse aloud than employ set designers.

Black magic practitioners are the unstable staple of a good sinetron. On the small screen they’re usually men with bad teeth and rank hair and a fondness for goat-skull arrangements. But just like the three hags from the highlands they make vile brews, rabbit on over their steaming road-kill menu and unleash fearsome threats we know will come to pass, like night the day.

Scenes in cemeteries are a dead giveaway of the plagiarism, with a grove of frangipani sheltering the mist-shrouded tombstones the tropic equivalent of a blasted heath. Bringing on the banshees is a masterful piece of theater equally effective on SCTV as it was in the Globe where the God-fearing Elizabethans were as partial to a haunting as any modern Javanese.

Treason, treachery and trauma – but what about love? Muhammad Montague and Sri Capulet are faithful remakes of the timeless theme. In Indonesia these involve teenage trysts set in the local high school, a furnace of raw emotions where trigonometry means plotting a three-way affair.

Mr Punjabi knows well that though the path of true love never did run smooth it does lead to his bank.

Who hasn’t thrilled at the sequence where the red-lipped, rouge-cheeked nymph in her seam-straining white shirt and black skirtlet flits and flirts from class to class on level two?

Missed it? No worries, you can catch it tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

Meanwhile her beau with a showroom-fresh Mercedes CLK 350 coupe parked among the clapped-out Yamahas gets a glimpse of her long black locks as she steals a glance over the wall of cancerous concrete.

Don’t tell me this clip doesn’t have a direct lineage to Mr WS’s static balcony scene.

The world’s finest wordsmith was flexible enough to add bawdiness to his plots, a bit of light relief for the folk in the pits. Sinetrons follow suit with comedies of errors, using dishevelled security guards as the knockabout buffoons, indifferent to the needs of the anti-hero desperately seeking to break into his mother-in-law’s house and drip caustic soda into her happy soda.

Not that she doesn’t deserve the crimson phial treatment. These brutal, scheming maid-monstering matrons are determined to thwart young love. They make the mad Scotswoman’s ambitions for her weak-kneed soldier hubby a toddler’s bedtime story.

But all’s well that ends well. The villains in the best sinetrons realise that using shabu-shabu as an elixir isn’t so smart (a message that’s lost on some actors if the gossip tabloids are right). Overnight their tattoos vanish and they awake from their midsummer night’s dream with neat haircuts and no interest in a cold Bintang or a winning hand at cards. So they return to mum, the mosque and the patient virgin in the headscarf.

So don’t knock Indonesia’s sinetrons. There’s method in their madness. Remember – the play’s the thing.

(First published in the Sunday Post 7 september 08)

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