Bali Is Known As A Magical Place
Java Is Just As Enchanting
Article and Photography by Peter Wallack
If
there were anywhere I would choose to live for a time besides
these United States, France or Italy, it would have to be in Indonesia.
Yes. Indonesia is a third world country but there is an incredible
charm, grace, aesthetic order to humble material achievement;
warmth, welcome, and cooperation are the way people act towards
one another and towards me; every job that is done, from the weeding
of rice fields to the fine artistic dancing of the Bali Royal
Ballet Ramayana Dance is measured slow and eye riveting graceful
movements.
Indonesia is where the heat humidity index goes off the chart,
but I loved every moment I spent in Bali and Java. Sulawesi with
its very different culture and lavish long houses built to look
like boats, is an island I have yet to see. Kalimantan, the Indonesia
section ofBorneo, with its Organatangs is also on my short list
of places to see. I just hope the new democratic government of
Indonesia is not selling all of its timber from Kalimantan to
Japan to increase their own personal wealth as the old government
did. For seeing the death of cultures like the Dayak would be
too painful to witness.
Indonesia is like a world within a world; there are hundreds
of different cultures and languages through the 3600 miles expanse
of these archipelagos but the island of Java, the size of California,
having half the people, 100 million people, and with three related
languages, may help glue Indonesia together for surely there will
be much bloodshed if places seek to secede from their union. It
is only fair that I mention the horror of East Timor in 2000 along
with the beauty I saw elsewhere.
Everyone
I met in Bali was involved in the Arts in one way or another even
if most were humble farmers who worked terraced rice fields on
the mountainous terrain that dominates the places of good soil
both in Bali and Java. Farmers would make wooden carvings and
oil paintings, among many arts and crafts, and as I trekked 12
miles away from any town, but near villages with extended family
compounds, people would come out to sell me jewelry boxes with
fine carvings and paintings of their wonderfully lush world. I
bought and I bought since you cannot resist the art and the memories
of the wonderful moments all day long there which these objects
still hold for me a decade after my visit.
The Sobuk is the organization of families that share one side
of a 
mountain
in their cooperative terrace farming. If the walls are not constantly
firmed up and the water flow ways for the daily rains of this
rain forest are not what they should be, many will suffer. The
top terraces could get too much water and drown or too little
waterand not grow, but generally gravity keeps the upper terraces
healthy even if the walls and water flows are off. It is the lower
terraces that are more prown to drown or whither, and it is for
this reason that the President of the Sobuk always is the holder
of the lower terrace shares while he holds his tenure in office.
The powerful are the most vulnerable if they do not complete their
charge; I wish I could figure out how our system could have such
poetic justice built into its design.
Enough said of what an academic learned. Let us turn to what
I saw and photographed.
The women washing clothes in the stream is using a little cement
pool the stream feeds but which is kept in that pool. Yes, that
allows
the very nicely dressed lady in the lovely washing garden stream
to use Wisk of Cheer. I saw no one in Bali or Java who looked
very dirty even when working in the fields. They seem to control
slow movements in this environment almost too hot for work and
in doing that their coordination keeps them clean. In any case,
some of these people must have gotten dirty when I was not looking,
or at least a little sweaty or why the washing out of doors. Clothes
are washed early in the day and dry out in the midday sun before
the late afternoon showers come. The site of vegetable dyed clothes
and batik skirts on lines reminded me of how the Buddhist Tibetans
place their holy flags up in the Himalayans.
Sometimes it rains just at the rise of the sun and there are
dark shadows and cloud reflections in the rice paddies where the
sun is breaking through.
An hour later, still early morning, the sky is mostly sun with
nice white puffy clouds and farmers are out in the rice paddies.
Away from the little villages, which have their own governance,
including several Sobuks, we find school children in uniforms
on
their way to and from schools with their ever-present umbrellas.
The children of the most humble families all had manufactured
clothes in good shape; lovely book bags made of material, and
manufactured footwear.
Women go to town once or twice a week to sell garden vegetable
goods to towns' people. With this money they buy the few manufactured
goods that are absolutely essential like school clothes, medicines,
flashlights, umbrellas, and hand farm tools. You can see their
comings and goings with batik skirts, batik blouses or solids,
sandals, and, of course, their baskets of produce balanced on
their heads.
In
Java sits one of the wonders of the modern world, Borobudur. It
is the highest Buddhist monument in the world even out competing
350 foot Buddhas carved into the sides of mountains in China and
Southeast Asia. Borobudur is 5 stories of succeeding smaller square
floor plans terraced back; it includes statues, universal symbol
shapes, and over one hundred 14 foot wide by 5 feet high relief
depictions of the life of Buddha.
My other images here include a Javanese farmer dredging out the
soft bottom of a rice paddy to create walls to hold in the correct
height of water for his strain of rice. By the way, there are
over 600 rice plants in the world each with their own soil and
water height requirements. The tool he is
using was forged of steel in one of many small factories that
make hand tools in Indonesia. With Japan investing in Indonesia
because the people are literate, healthy and diligent workers,
Indonesia is now producing many more technological products.
Javanese farming women sell their vegetables in nearby Yogyakarta,
which is just one hour from Borobudur. Their grace, strong but
thin stature, and lovely smiles made me realize what we in the
United States have given up all too often as we need do very little
physical work while we eat the best foods from our own country
and all over the world.
Gamelan Music is used to accompany dance and puppet shows. The
dances have either a traditional, royal, or religious significance.
The wooden puppet shows, Wayang Gullet, and the leather shadow
puppet shows, Wayang Kullet, tell the stories from the Ramayana
and
Mahabrata, which are Hindu moral bible-type stories to teach good
and evil. However, the only Hindus in Indonesia are the Balinese
but the majority which is Islamic in name seems to have influences
of Buddhism from the Chinese Colonial period and Hinduism from
the Indian Colonial period as well as their Islamic traditions
from their continuing Islamic Colonial period
Gamelan Music uses brass and wooden percussion instruments like
a xylophone and the sounds they make sound like waterfalls. Perhaps
this is the result of combining several cultural musical backgrounds.
The Hindus of Bali have outdoor Temple compounds made up of many
small and medium sized temples, which are, really alters to their
Gods.
One of my all time favorite images is of a mother, in a small
village near one of Java's Volcanoes, whose flow is controlled
by cement flow dams made with hand tools and a cement mixer, feeding
a baby using a palm leaf as a plate and a part of that leaf as
a spoon.
The smiles on their faces and their lovely peacefulness seem to
best represent the aspect of my experience there. The old women
with enough poise and presence to look at me right through the
camera also showed me a strength of personality which only comes
to those who have worked hard and long at a simple but labor intensive
live.
I was very lucky to actually show up at the village of Sabatu
in Bali where the old man praying in the Hindu temple, already
mentioned was taken, and where at the end of the day adult young
men on a sand square performed a very wonderful dance; the sand
on which the dance was performed was as clean as an oriental carpet.
If
all this has made a less advanced people on the technical scale
seem to have some attributes more advanced than ours than I have
completed my mission. Look and study other cultures for there
are ideas of the good life, not our own, that are there as well
as here.
About the Author: Peter
started taking photographs for academic slide shows in the early
70s and ended up in Soho Photo Gallery by the late 70s. Cooperative
Galleries and Art Shows were his forums for landscapes with man,
landscapes, and world cultures images. By the 90s so much of his
work was world cultures in developing lands that he called his
business "Ends of The Earth Photography". In 1999, after
contracting to buy his retirement house in Sanibel Island, Florida,
a paradise for bird photographers, he transformed himself into
a bird photography with a little help from other professional
bird photographers.
Peter will have his writings and images in
Nature Photographer, Winter 2002, and regularly in Sanibel's Nature
Guide.
You can see more of Peter's work in his Profotos Portfolio:
Click
to see Peter's Profotos Portfolio
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