A LECTURE tour brought me to Australia in March. I arrived in Perth, and moved on to Brisbane, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Adelaide. It seemed as if I talked non-stop for more than three weeks. On March 28th, I left Australia, via Jakarta and Surabaya (Surabaya actually exists!), for Ambon, a tiny island in the Moluccas archipelago in the south eastern part of Indonesia, and for the next six days, I barely talked at all.
I visited this island because of an extraordinary novel which is set there. The book, The Ten Thousand Things, was written in the 1950s by a Dutch woman, Maria Dermout, who had lived on Ambon at the beginning of the century when the area was still under Dutch rule. She wrote the book in Holland at the end of her life, having spent more than 20 years away from the Moluccas. The story is disarmingly simple; when Felicia's good-for-nothing husband deserts her, she returns with her son, Himpies, to her grandmother's spice garden, in which she had spent part of her early childhood. Time passes, the grandmother dies, the son is killed, and as Felicia grows old she becomes obsessed with all incidences of murder which have taken place on the island. Once a year, on the anniversary of her son's murder, she banishes everybody so that she can entertain the ghosts of those who have been killed. The idea of one person wilfully making the life of another fills her with sadness. Her annual conversations with those who have been killed help her to "try again to go on living".
At one time the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, were the only source of clove mace and nutmeg. Prior to refrigeration, such spices were highly prized because they were the only means of making decaying or rancid meat palatable. Because of this monopoly, the Moluccas have a tradition of trading which goes back to the first century AD, and a colonial history which goes back to the 14th century.
The first colonisers, the sultanate of Ternate, brought Islam. They were displaced by the Portuguese who brought Christianity (St Francis Xavier worked there as a missionary) and, today, Christianity and Islam co-exist quite happily. The Dutch, with the help of the Ambonese ousted the Portuguese in the early 17th century. Between 1796 and 1802 the British took over the Dutch holdings, returning them after the Treaty of Amiens. In 1942, Japanese soldiers swept through the entire archipelago, and after their defeat in 1945 an independent Republic of Indonesia was declared. Under pressure from the United States, the Dutch finally relinquished the colony, transferring it to a Federated States of Indonesia which included a semi-independent Timor. In 1960, President Sukarno abolished the elected parliament and claimed the entire archipelago for a new Republic. Sulawesi and the Moluccas resisted. The ensuing war resulted in 35,000 pro-independence Moluccans being relocated in Holland on the implicit understanding that they would return within six months to establish independence, with Dutch support. This never took place, and the Moluccans still live in Holland. During the 1970s, their plight gained an international notoriety when some of the younger, more radical expatriate Moluccans hi-jacked a train resulting in the deaths of several Moluccans and one hostage. In response to this, the Dutch government did implement a series of measures designed to reacquaint Moluccans with their own culture, and to give them a sense of identity within Holland.
So what remains of Dermout's Ambon? Certainly, it is hard to discern the quiet and sparseness of her book in the bustling city of Ambon with its large port, its markets, its endless cars and mini-buses, and its industrious population. Once outside the city, however, one encounters a different world. The landscape is dramatic and mountainous and covered with lush vegetation, much of which appears impenetrable. The majority of the population lives in villages strung along the coastline. People are incredibly friendly, and are genuinely interested in foreigners; I saw only three other foreigners while I was there.
Because of the island's modest size (48km x 22km), it is easiest to use the city as a base, and a good range of hotel accommodation is available there. The Hotel Hero, where I stayed, offered four different room rates ranging from about £10 to £20 per night, and this included a rudimentary breakfast.
Travel around the island is cheap and dependable. Taxis cost approximately £3 per hour. It is much cheaper again to travel by Bemo (small mini-buses which travel, continuously, around the island and pick passengers up at any point on the road).
Despite its small scale, Ambon is the administrative centre of the thousand-odd islands which make up the Moluccas. It is certainly not a tourist resort in the traditional sense, and the "peak" season is from November to February. When I visited, the annual monsoon was about to start, and the weather was hot and humid.
However, the local administration is obviously wakening up to the island's tourist potential. Several well-serviced beaches have been established around the island. The Banda Sea is warm, clean, and very, very blue green. The once abundant coral beds have been devastated by the practice of using dynamite to catch fish, although at Manuala beach on the north of the island, a little coral survives.
Dermout never names Ambon in the book although the book is filled with a wealth of detailed descriptions of the island. The firs? chapter ends with the characteristically poetic sentence: "All these things, and still others, and with the sky added, were the island."
Dermout identified with and was much influenced by Rumphius, a 17th-century naturalist who spent nearly two-thirds of his life in the Indies. Because modern scientific terminology did not exist in Rumphius's time he adopted an almost poetic language to describe the strange and exotic flora and fauna which he encountered. His florid descriptions, particularly of, shells, are woven into Derinout's text and provide the inspiration for the grandmother's curiosities cabinet, complete with its various shells, jewellery, a real poison plate from Ceram, and the snake-stone. He also provides the inspiration for "the Scottish Professor", another of Felicia's murdered `guests'. Both Dermout and Rumphitis were deeply influenced by traditional Indonesian beliefs, and in particular animism.
Apart from an extraordinary range of the most wonderful fruit, food in the Moluccas is among the most basic in all of Indonesia.
Fruit drinks, which are served in even the most spartan establishment, are truly memorable. The best "meal" I had while there was at Natsepa beach on the east coast of the island, about 14km from the city. During the day, older women with baskets of exotic fruits prepare a dish called rujak. This consist5 of a paste made from fresh chili, dark cane sugar, and half a starfruit pounded in a rudimentary pestle. A selection of various chopped fruits is tossed in the paste, and this is eaten with a pointed stick. When I indicated that I would like something to drink, a younger woman was dispatched into the forest. She reappeared moments later with a coconut which she deftly hacked open using a machete. The milk was transferred to a plastic bowl, tasted by the older woman, and handed to me.
Maybe it was foolish (arrogant even) to think that the place described by Dermout would still exist. Is this because the island has changed so much, or just the nature of travel? After all, she had spend a significant part of her life there. The experience of a wonderful book and a wonderful place are two entirely different things, even if one is about the other.
DERMOUT'S book, as with all great books, is more about a quality of the language than about anything in particular. Her rich, resonant prose is the result of great wisdom forged by age, memory, and absence. Still, I will always remember the sacred eels at Waai which disappear on the eve of a disaster, the ceremonial conchs at the Siwalima Museum, the towering sago palms, the dramatic clouds, and the clear, blue-green sea.
Maria Dermout should have the last word about this place which meant so much to her: "The remembrance of a human being of something that happened, can remain in a place, tangible almost - perhaps there is someone left who knows of it and thinks about it sometimes. Here it was different again with no foothold anywhere, no certainty - nothing more than a question? perhaps?"