2016
Books in Bali - Survival Course Day 1
27 October 2016
The thing about a survival course I guess, is that, despite the exhausting pace, one ultimately does survive! Hours on the go, as much talking in the 15-minute intervals between sessions with old friends and new, as there is in concentrating on the talking of others in the sessions themselves.
Cathy is now here and delighting in the festival pace! Last time for her was 2011, the year she had her bike accident. And for Amanda it is her second festival. She has the makings of a true UWRF junkie. And for a new friend Janet Dawson, introduced by my sister in law, it is her first festival. The four of us have teamed up to share the fun.
The festival has got off to a fabulous start with a day of heightened excitement and large crowds. Amazing how it can all be brought to a culmination of organisation, with masses of people involved all being in the right place at the right time - and the mikes working too! Lots of amazing volunteers, young Indonesians and old expats. No rain today either! And most of the day the heat was bearable - even a breeze if one sat at the back at the big open Neka Museum pavilion, (but the resident flock of geese – or were they peacocks?- in the garden below were not to be silenced!)
Highlights? Lots! But one was the keynote address by Chinese Canadian Anastasia Lin, actress and beauty queen who uses her platform on pageants to fight for human rights in China. Feisty and articulate. I think every man in the audience fell in love with her.
Cathy is now here and delighting in the festival pace! Last time for her was 2011, the year she had her bike accident. And for Amanda it is her second festival. She has the makings of a true UWRF junkie. And for a new friend Janet Dawson, introduced by my sister in law, it is her first festival. The four of us have teamed up to share the fun.
The festival has got off to a fabulous start with a day of heightened excitement and large crowds. Amazing how it can all be brought to a culmination of organisation, with masses of people involved all being in the right place at the right time - and the mikes working too! Lots of amazing volunteers, young Indonesians and old expats. No rain today either! And most of the day the heat was bearable - even a breeze if one sat at the back at the big open Neka Museum pavilion, (but the resident flock of geese – or were they peacocks?- in the garden below were not to be silenced!)
Highlights? Lots! But one was the keynote address by Chinese Canadian Anastasia Lin, actress and beauty queen who uses her platform on pageants to fight for human rights in China. Feisty and articulate. I think every man in the audience fell in love with her.
Another was a panel of three Asian writers who have lived most of their formative years outside their home countries of Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand. Questions of identity for each of them, but more interesting was their political insights into their own countries, coming from the perspective of a different set of values instilled by their upbringing elsewhere, yet still writing of their own birth countries. Despite huge misgivings about the way their countries have been ruled, the Singaporean and Thai admitted to being very moved when they heard of the deaths of Lee Kwan Yu and the Thai king. Not so the Indonesian on the death of Suharto!! (I positively cheered at the time!)
I heard Eka Kurniawan interviewed by the same Indonesian woman as in the above panel, Desi Anwar, a famous TV presenter here. Eka has reached sudden worldwide fame, having been shortlisted for the Man Booker with his book Man Tiger. His two major works have been translated in America and he has been acclaimed as the greatest Indonesian writer of today - and some see him as the only Indonesian writer of note, but this is not necessarily the opinion of my friends in the field of Indonesian Literature who are bemused by the hype surrounding him. I have his earlier book Beauty is a Wound in the pile by my bed and wanted convincing today that I should read it. But it is full of violent sex, ghosts and fables - supposedly an allegory of the rape and violence perpetrated on Indonesia under colonialism (though apparently the reader needs to know this background to pick up the allegory, yet very few American readers would.) Eka is not a great speaker in English, though Desi was a brilliant interviewer. Came away unconvinced! That enormous tome just might stay at the bottom of the bedside pile.
Interestingly, in a panel on fact and fiction, Louise Doughty got away with discussing her novel which is set in 1965 about the mass slaughter of communists that followed the attempted coup here in Indonesia. This topic was banned by police at the festival last year, remember, but this year no mention was made in the blurb on Doughty’s book of that trigger date.
My panel session "Reading the Archipelago" in the early afternoon went very well. Good crowd too in a pleasant smaller venue, the open joglo - a high-roofed Javanese pavilion. Pam Allen had planned it brilliantly, getting each speaker to provide a part of the story of how the publication of a bilingual anthology of the works of 16 emerging writers invited to the festival each year has contributed to Indonesia's body of literature and the exposure of these authors to a wider readership. My role was to talk about some of the treasures I have come across over the years and give the audience an idea of what these stories touch on and how they manage to cross the boundaries between languages and cultures. The young author from Madura, Royyan Julian, whose long dramatic story "The Dancer" was the gem of those I did for this year's anthology, was on the panel too. I met Michael Cathcart from ABC radio also on the panel - he explained why the ABC has chosen to feature these writers on his Books and Arts program.
I heard Eka Kurniawan interviewed by the same Indonesian woman as in the above panel, Desi Anwar, a famous TV presenter here. Eka has reached sudden worldwide fame, having been shortlisted for the Man Booker with his book Man Tiger. His two major works have been translated in America and he has been acclaimed as the greatest Indonesian writer of today - and some see him as the only Indonesian writer of note, but this is not necessarily the opinion of my friends in the field of Indonesian Literature who are bemused by the hype surrounding him. I have his earlier book Beauty is a Wound in the pile by my bed and wanted convincing today that I should read it. But it is full of violent sex, ghosts and fables - supposedly an allegory of the rape and violence perpetrated on Indonesia under colonialism (though apparently the reader needs to know this background to pick up the allegory, yet very few American readers would.) Eka is not a great speaker in English, though Desi was a brilliant interviewer. Came away unconvinced! That enormous tome just might stay at the bottom of the bedside pile.
Interestingly, in a panel on fact and fiction, Louise Doughty got away with discussing her novel which is set in 1965 about the mass slaughter of communists that followed the attempted coup here in Indonesia. This topic was banned by police at the festival last year, remember, but this year no mention was made in the blurb on Doughty’s book of that trigger date.
My panel session "Reading the Archipelago" in the early afternoon went very well. Good crowd too in a pleasant smaller venue, the open joglo - a high-roofed Javanese pavilion. Pam Allen had planned it brilliantly, getting each speaker to provide a part of the story of how the publication of a bilingual anthology of the works of 16 emerging writers invited to the festival each year has contributed to Indonesia's body of literature and the exposure of these authors to a wider readership. My role was to talk about some of the treasures I have come across over the years and give the audience an idea of what these stories touch on and how they manage to cross the boundaries between languages and cultures. The young author from Madura, Royyan Julian, whose long dramatic story "The Dancer" was the gem of those I did for this year's anthology, was on the panel too. I met Michael Cathcart from ABC radio also on the panel - he explained why the ABC has chosen to feature these writers on his Books and Arts program.
Josh came to hear me and claimed to be impressed by his old mum's gift of the gab! He came to the interview with Ian too, at the intimate Bar Luna venue. Big crowd there as well, to hear Ian and I discuss his three beautifully produced books on Indonesian history. Normally he talks to his slides, but while he had a few as background, this time he was being interviewed. Did my best to create questions which gave him scope to reveal a bit about himself and how he metamorphosed from a career oil geologist into a historian and adventurer on the high seas of the Indonesian archipelago.
Mad dash the minute I put the mike down to get to the venue for the opening of the Black Armada exhibition with the Australian Consul. They decided to hold the reception outside in the splendid gardens of the vast ARMA museum. Cathy and the others were mightily impressed with the grandeur of the place. A reasonable crowd of Balinese dignitaries and Australian plebs like us, sipping on chilled Oz whites and nibbling on Balinese banana leaf-wrapped nibbles (impossible to unwrap while holding a glass.) A good background speech by Anthony Liem on the history of the Black Armada and Australia's role in supporting Indonesia's independence struggle in the 1940s. And a truly execrable speech by the Governor's rep, delivered in Indonesian and translated by two young bulé museum interns. Full of platitudes and saying nothing. The Consul spoke too, but despite taking Indonesian lessons, she mispronounced every Indonesian word and name. I had a chat with her later - has been here less than a year and was given no language training before she left Australia. She spoke of her own ignorance of this remarkable historical connection between Australian and Indonesia. The speeches were followed by a viewing of the 1946 film Indonesia Calling about these events - stirring propaganda piece in old newsreel style. None of us had much energy left to give the panels more than a cursory glance, though I have seen the exhibition before in Sydney.
By this stage of the evening we were all seriously exhausted so the museum arranged a vehicle to take us back to town. While waiting for it we posed for a few more photos, joined by the very police security guards recruited by my permit application!!