THE BALI TIMES DIARY September 17, 2010

Don’t Run
Amok: That’s
Reserved for
the Locals

On our neighbouring island, Lombok, two silly expatriates have wound up in jail over foolish and quite unnecessarily out-of-control arguments with the locals. There is a warning in their fate for every foreigner in Indonesia who forgets – even for one heated moment – that their real legal status is best defined as merely “tolerated,” that their actual rights are notional, and that they live here on sufferance.

    That doesn’t mean it is foolish to live here (quite the reverse: especially in Bali where the people have a far finer grasp of the mutuality of neighbourliness). But it does mean you can’t blow your top, even under extreme provocation.

    We might all agree that it’s unlikely anyone’s god, or their ancient prophets, had raucously loud sound systems in mind when they defined the rites in regard to when and where to make obeisance. And Indonesia is the world capital of cacophony, now we are plagued by wonky wiring, bootleg loudspeakers and pirated (and nearly dead) CDs and tapes.

    Many years ago, living in the Middle East, The Diary looked forward to the regular calls of the muezzin, mellifluously sung from atop the neighbouring mosque. These were beautiful; they both defined the hour and encouraged reflection. They were also rendered in manageable decibels and heard above background level only by those nearby whose mosque it was, and any infidels among them.

    It is therefore possible to feel a measure of sympathy for the silly American gentleman living (apparently without benefit of visa, also daft) at Kuta on Lombok’s south coast. It is perhaps understandable that he should have finally cracked, under the strain of untrained voices and execrable Arabic, over continual nocturnal blasts of unnecessarily amplified supplication from the neighbouring Islamic house of prayer. But clearly he should not have been living where he was. There is no excuse for breaking the rules of others’ religions (such as bursting into a mosque wearing shoes where all are meant to go barefoot in the sight of God) or plain bad manners, such as unplugging a devotional moment, however discordant it may have been. A good rule of life is that two wrongs do not make a right.

    The other instance of foolishness across the Wallace Line was that of a German gentleman in Senggigi, reported in last week’s paper, who, enraged that someone had vandalised the statuary at his villa and apparently in a state of spontaneous combustion, swept into his neighbouring village just as Ramadhan prayers were ending and asked – as one does, if thick-headed or incautious – a rhetorical question of those present. Common sense, as well as good manners, should have told him not to ask: “What sort of Muslims are you?”

    The archipelago is the place that brought the word amok into the English language. This was not by chance. It came from observation of the quick temper and propensity to – well, run amok – of the inhabitants of these islands.

    In both recent Lombok instances, unsurprisingly, they did. The villas of the stupid American and the foolish German were vandalised. But it is no surprise, given that both the people and the law effectively regard foreigners merely as necessary excrescences, of utility chiefly as mobile ATMs, that none among the ransacking mobs is apparently in jail for criminal damage.          

Poor Marx

While talking about what was in last week’s paper – a lot of good reading for a start, and some real reportage such as can be found nowhere else in Bali’s English-language media – the risible Kevin Carson rates a mention. He popped up in the Opinion page asserting, from the strange perspective he places on life and the human condition, that competition is theft.

    Authors are allowed to put forward questionable propositions; even ones that are so far away in fairyland that all they really rate is a hollow laugh. There are many who – surprisingly, given the abject failure of his political creed and the uneconomic outcomes at his door – would like to reinterpret Marx in an anarchist bent and invent a moneyless society. In one sense that’s fair enough: Marx was writing from a mid-19th century German standpoint, just as laissez-faire liberals and gross capitalists did from theirs, long ago. Their separate outcomes have proved equally ineffective: the experiment goes on.

    This is not the place for a lecture on politics or economics, far less for a dissertation on the human capacity for inventive and irrational argument. The settler collectives of Ubud and Seminyak have already cornered those markets. But we can say with certainty that, unless our name is Kevin Carson or another among the legions of creative New Age tome-writers who nowadays litter the landscape with batty ideas and are rewarded for their scholarship with undergraduate acclaim, abolishing money and wealth acquisition won’t work.

    Individual monetary reward has proved the most potent energiser yet. Serfs, whatever the genesis or hare-brained justification of their enforced status, and whatever the variety of this condition, are not happy people.

Road Overload

Anyone who wants an introduction to the arcane art of not organising an infrastructure project could usefully examine the Dewa Ruci theory, lately invented by a collective of politicians, local administrators and exclusive bureaucracies. Applying this theory to practice shows that whatever is proposed as a solution to an unmanageable traffic snarl - in this case the developing blot on the landscape known as South Bali - will immediately attract rival proposals and lead nowhere except to endless delay and ever more inventive suggestions about where that slide rule should properly be put.

    The provincial government wants to apply some elements of free-flow to the traffic before the ASEAN summiteers turn up in 2013 and discover that the only things that get anywhere in Bali are pipedreams. Its solution, on which everyone signed off after great exertions by Governor Pastika, is an overpass at Simpang Siur and associated road works at the airport turnoff three kilometres (or one hour at jalan macet time) to the south.

    This will involve shifting the statue of Dewa Ruci – a character from the Mahabharata, not a sacred figure – to new digs nearby, unless the overpass is to be vastly more expensive by virtue of the need to buy back commercial property and dangerous because kinking the overpass around the statue would break every rule of trafficable road construction.

    Now Badung regency which, under Indonesia’s existing policy of devolution and because no one rating more on the political Richter scale wants to publicly cavil at the asinine idiocy exhibited lower down, believes (like every other local administrative entity) that it is empowered to do whatever it wants, wants to re-plan the whole thing. It wants an underpass in a place where the water table is 1.5 metres below ground level. And this is in a country where every tap leaks because no one bothers to install them properly.

Stay Away

The idea of banning enormous charabancs from the middle of Ubud, where the town can’t properly handle either the vehicles or the travel-weary contents they drop off for a wander round the sights, has definite appeal. That’s why, at the behest of the super Sophie Digby (whose latest Yak is just out) your diarist has just joined the cause. It’s one of those Facebook things; harmless fun and, who knows, it might make someone think.

    There was one moment of mild alarm before clicking “join,” however. Whoever it was set up this civic-minded group is inviting people to ban the busses. That’s not a good idea. Many a good cause has been sealed with a kiss. And in the right company (or even the wrong company) they can be fun, too.

Rok On

Regular readers will know that The Diary feels a measure of ambivalence towards that Victorian reinvention, the kilt, in former times a garment worn by Scotsmen who couldn’t afford trousers. This is a view held by surprisingly large numbers of people of Scottish provenance, as well as many (in Scotland and elsewhere) who do not fully subscribe to the view that the late Victorian era was the summit either of British achievement or inspired interpretation of Highland clobber. One alternative view is that it was merely the ascendancy of the Widow Queen’s favourite ghillie as fireside companion.

    Apropos of this, a delve into a Bahasa Indonesia dictionary the other day, in pursuit of a manageable translation of a quite separate English language idiocy, revealed a wonderful “explanatory noun” about the plaid rok (rok is skirt in Bahasa) that Mad Prince Charles, other unemployable British royals and ersatz Scotsmen from everywhere like to affect.

    Here it is: Pakaian nasional berupa rok pendek yang dipakai laki-laki Scotlandia. Should you have a tartan in mind, you’ll have to say: Pola belah ketupat. We are fortunate indeed that there are no kilt shops in Sulawesi Street.

    But the madness is spreading with the renaissance (though that should really read “invention”) of the Celtic world. The islanders of Ushant, the most westerly bit of France and, like the neighbouring mainland, part of Bretagne (Brittany), have just invented their own plaid. Don’t know how you say that in Breton, sorry. In their daytime language, French, it might best be summarised thus: “Un peu de folie, peut-être?”

diary@thebalitimes.com

Hector's Blog appears as The Diary in the weekly print edition of The Bali Times www.thebalitimes.com, out Fridays. The Bali Times is available as a print product worldwide through NewspaperDirect.

THE BALI TIMES DIARY September 10, 2010

Will Their

Easy Money

Now be Just

A Distant

Dream?

It’s good to see that new Bali police chief Hadiatmoko has given orders that, if followed, which would itself be a novelty, will foreclose on at least one informal police revenue collecting point, the Dreamland turnoff on the Bukit. He has ordered a report on the practice and has promised to make this public. It could make interesting reading, since – even though informal – unofficial revenue collecting is a widespread hobby among what would be the constabulary if Indonesian police were peace officers rather than enforcers and can never have been unnoticed by those higher up the food chain.

    It used to be a firm rule of bureaucracy, as well as politics, that you never start an inquiry whose outcome cannot be known. In recent times, happily for diarists in search of snippets that will cause them and their readers to fall about the floor laughing, this sensible caution has gone out of the window in pursuit of something erroneously called “openness.”  

    But what did surprise The Diary was the insubstantial nature of the levies apparently required of passing surfer-foreigners on motorbikes who, when flagged down by the plods, found their perfectly valid licences to be invalid and their wallets invited to make a donation to ensure their problem went away. On the few occasions when The Diary has fallen into the hands of unofficial police revenue collectors (it’s a lottery: you don’t have to have done anything wrong) the sum required to make the problem go away has been substantially in excess of a mere Rp25-50K.

    Perhaps, on the unofficial donation tariff which the feisty Hadiatmoko is apparently about to outlaw, older Bules who look as if they might bite are charged a special premium.

Boys from Brazil

Some tourists deserve to be targeted. The ones who drive like madmen either because they actually are gila or because, from the examples they see around them, they think that’s how you should drive here.

    The police could do more about regulating local driving and motorbike-riding practices (a good starting point would be “something”) but at least local people – and long-term foreign residents – know roughly what to expect.

    Most short-termers don’t, naturally enough. The sensible ones know this and react and behave accordingly. With excess caution is a good rule. But when you’re a testosterone-charged bullyboy, you are by definition not sensible. You are an idiot.

    There was a tragic accident the weekend before last near Uluwatu. Such things are a commonplace of course, so much so that it didn’t make the local Bahasa media. The Diary heard about it much later from some Australian surfer friends of the victims.

    They were a young woman named Made – she was not yet 30, The Diary is told – and her daughter, known as Cindy, 11. Made was killed instantly; Cindy is in intensive care.

    Their nemesis was a carful of Brazilian boyos flying home, heedless of caution, insensitive to the sanctity of the lives of others, oblivious to the bends in the road, from Kuta after an all-night session in party town. It was around 7am and Made, by repute a very careful and cautious motorbike rider, and Cindy were on their way somewhere or other, a little mum-and-daughter duo inoffensively going about their business.

    The word from the tragic and unnecessary wreckage was that the boyos were uncooperative with the police. They’d apparently come here to party, bitch about the high price of warung food, and ignore surf etiquette by stealing other people’s waves around the breaks at Uluwatu. It was not part of their programme to waste time talking to inconvenient police who back home their rich daddies would just pay off.

    One of them finally had the guts to own up to being the driver.

    Here’s a photograph of Made as her many friends will remember her. It’s from a friend’s Facebook:

 Hector did not know Made; and sheds a tear because now he never will.

Mind the Dogs

They say that organising festivals is like a walk in the park. That's if you don't mind the resulting disorganisation and can accept it as all part of the local colour; the ambience of the event. And it is this factor - the delicious alchemy produced by the confluence of Murphy's Law, Sod's, and those of Unintended Consequences and sundry others - that came to The Diary's mind when in an idle moment last weekend the foraging cursor lit upon the Schedule of Special Events posted on their website by the good folk at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, whose 2010 short working week in the global spotlight is October 6-10.

    For Rp250K, also delineated on the website as A$32 and being roughly approximate (in the currency against which the rupiah is generally quoted) to US$27, you can Jalan Jalan With the Poets on Friday, October 8, on a tiny trek through Janet de Neefe's local Garden of Eden from her Casa Luna restaurant (that’s not the other, unconnected and apparently frowned upon, one in Sanur) to Sari Organik.

    We're sure it will be fun, particularly since the little ramble is being led by local Irish expatriate John O'Sullivan, who when he's not being a perambulatory poet is in charge of the Four Seasons hotels at Jimbaran and Ubud. Lionel Fogarty, a robust Australian, and other gabblers are on the manifest.

    They say wear walking shoes and a hat and carry water. We'd suggest carrying a stout stick too, since Ubud's dogs, rabid or otherwise, also like to make a breakfast of everything.

    The special events schedule is devoid of any mention of Israeli writer Etgar Keret, by the way, which is a shame since he's said to be coming such a long way under difficult circumstances.

Saying Hi

An old mate – he really is: he’s five days older than your Diarist – plans to drop by on Sunday for a late brunch at The Cage. He’s staying in Ubud for a break and, traffic and driver willing, will find us with the kettle on in the wilds of Ungasan. It could be a long brunch. We have more than five years of gossip and scandal and reminiscence to catch up on.

    Ross Fitzgerald, Australian historian, author and commentator and long-standing chum (we share a deep affection for coffee and Australian Rules football; customarily we order the same brew but barrack for different teams) is a lively companion, an assiduous scholar, a keen observer of the peripherals of life as well as the things that matter, and a first-class bloke.

    He’s also an alcoholic. Last Christmas Day, when he turned 65, it was 40 years since he touched a drink. He’s written a book about it, called My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey (published by New South in Australia). It is a tour de force in every sense.

No Reading

Make a note in your diary: No reading (or writing) on September 25. That’s because it will be Saraswati Day. The name comes from saras – meaning flow – and wati, which means a woman. The goddess Saraswati is the symbol of knowledge, which flows like a river and is alluring, like a beautiful woman. (The Diary goes for a sense of humour in a wati above all else, incidentally. Physical beauty is but a visual stimulus.)

    There are many mysteries in the Hindu religion and its rites, whether here in Bali or in India, where the forms, substance and a number of the rites themselves are differently expressed. Elizabeth Gilbert is an expert on neither, by the way. A wandering wati of a certain age and distressed status in search of a way to justify a substantial publisher’s advance rarely has answers to anything. So give that movie a miss.

    Anyway, back to mysteries: quite why one should celebrate knowledge by not reading or writing is a puzzle, at least to the Western mind. It does give the kids a day off school, though. The Diary was a youngster once and can see the allure of that.

    But seriously, Saraswati Day is among the most colourful of Bali’s panoply of ceremonial events. On the day, offerings are made to the lontar (palm-leaf scripts), books and shrines. Schools and other educational establishments hold ceremonies to worship and thank Saraswati for her blessing; they offer a prayer that knowledge and the arts will continue to develop and grow.

    Teachers and students forgo their uniforms and wear bright and colourful ceremonial clothes. Children bring fruit and traditional cakes to school for offerings at the temple. Ceremonies and prayers are also held at the temples in family compounds, villages and businesses from morning to noon.

    Worth seeing; just don’t write about it (on the day).

diary@thebalitimes.com

Hector's Blog appears as The Diary in The Bali Times, out Fridays, and on the newspaper's website at www.thebalitimes.com. The Bali Times is Bali's only English-language newspaper. The print edition is available worldwide via NewspaperDirect.

THE BALI TIMES DIARY September 3, 2010

The Neighbours

Are Doing

Quite Nicely,

Thanks

Very Much

Some parts of this week’s diary were penned (though perhaps these days it should be “cursored”) at De Quake, one of the fine waterside eating places in Senggigi in Lombok. They do a nice lunch and they have wifi. It couldn’t be better, really. There’s a roof, so the fact that it rained on Sunday afternoon was not a problem. And The Diary sat upstairs to avoid the field of view becoming crowded with insistent little fellows anxious to sell you bootleg DVDs and all sort of other impedimenta. It became temporarily overcrowded with tourists of French provenance. They always assume that any neighbouring Anglo is incapable of understanding their lingo and Sunday’s multiplicity of heureux fêtards was, as is the nature of the French, noisily indiscreet. But The Diary, itself the soul of discretion, silently outlasted the lot of them.

    Our neighbouring island is an interesting place. It’s even interesting that the local government – of West Nusa Tenggara, of which Lombok is a part and Mataram the capital – seemingly takes the view that it can entice large numbers of recreational revellers from the Arab lands away from the fleshpots of Europe to enjoy themselves on holidays that will further the cause of Islamicising Lombok and beyond. That’s if the Wahhabi money from Saudi Arabia keeps coming in and the authorities can stop people stealing the runway lights at the new airport for long enough to land a plane. And if they can manage not to crack the runway on landing, they might even get to take off again.

    On Lombok’s west coast – where it really is one of the best places to see Bali (it’s just across the Strait) – things are marginally different. That’s where the island’s substantial Hindu community is concentrated. It’s where the bulk of the tourists go – pre-eminently to the Gilis, of which more in a moment – and it’s where party-time is available on call.

    Senggigi was not exactly buzzing, but there were enough tourists around to pique the interest of the street sellers. The Diary bought some lovely ikat while dining street-side one night; or rather the Distaff did – The Diary kept munching on the sensibly small smoked marlin plate that had been ordered as a main course.

    The beach resorts in and out of town seem to be doing well. There are some new players around, apparently financed by Singaporean money (Silk Air flies the city-state’s flag to Lombok, a long-standing commitment that delivers welcome dollars to Lombok’s embryonic economy), and established resorts also seem to be having a high old season.

    The Diary chose to stay at Puri Bunga, which is operated by Lombok Hotels Association chairman Marcel Navest. The tariff there is on the reasonable side of good. And waitress Novi, who despite her Ramadhan fasting always managed to serve infidels breakfast with a smile, would be our pick for employee of the month.

‘High’ Seas

There are some mutterings on the mainland of Lombok about the focus international visitors put on the Gilis, the three islands off the north-west coast that offer a different experience. One might wonder at the vacuity of visitors who travel from Bali to the Gilis, spend whatever time they have there within cooee of Lombok itself, and never set foot on the island proper.

    The fast boats are the attraction, apparently. The ones that don’t deposit you unexpectedly on some bleak East Bali beach when the waves get a little nasty and they start taking on water, that is. The dark theory among some of the Lombok crowd is that these are particularly popular because luggage isn’t scanned and all sorts of goodies that would otherwise be dangerously detectable travel free from interference.

    Needless to say, the Gilis are at high-season overflow level at the moment.

On a Winner

Garuda seems to have picked its moment – and its scheduling spot – in Lombok. It flies Denpasar-Mataram-Denpasar once daily, at the locally unfriendly times of 7.15pm out of Ngurah Rai and 8.15pm out of Selaparang.

    Its flights are full, because they are neatly timed to take international arrivals to Lombok the same day and extract returning holidaymakers from there in time to connect with mainly night-time flights out of Bali.

    The “full service” is a bit of a joke. The cabin crew have time to hand out a fruit tea (in economy) and to momentarily flick shut the “them-and-us curtain” between cattle class to the rear and executive splendour forward.

    It’s a pity though that they don’t seem to have time to clean the cabin between trips. The Diary and party, travelling in the same seats both ways, three days apart, found a plastic wrapper in the seat pocket on the return trip that the party had left there on the outward journey. And by the time we got back on board to return to Bali the bulkhead video screens – on which one is enjoined to closely attend to the safety demonstration – had given up the ghost too.

    Another problem – it’s a perennial one – is tour parties. Our flight back had what seemed like at least a thousand Chinese, none of whom apparently could manage to sit in the right seat, or indeed, sit down.    

  

She Loves Us

While in Lombok, The Diary received a cheery email from a happy reader named Heidi who lives on that side of the Wallace Line. It’s always nice to get a compliment, though (see below) it doesn’t do to let them go to your head.

    Here’s her little billet-doux:

    “Hi Hector. I was just in Starbucks at the airport in Bali on my way back home to Lombok. I had the great fortune to find a copy of The Bali Times in their reading bin.
    “Let me say I am an Aussie girl living in Lombok and one of my greatest joys when in Bali is to get a copy. The very best of compliments to you for a most professional newspaper; it is a rare find indeed.
    “Long live The Bali Times ... it is truly a shining beacon to us, possibly gila, expats who have chosen to take a path less travelled.”

    Thank you, Heidi. Keep up the good reading.

Here Jack, Catch!

The Jakarta Globe had an article recently in which the newspaper discovered that there are a few things wrong with Bali. They’re not wrong, of course, in making that assessment or in publishing their recent illumination on such matters. And it is only right that a national reading audience should get the real picture.

    What was rather more surprising was the fact that Jack Daniels of Bali Discovery Tours – a travel agent, one of the endemic oversupply of same on this island – chose to cut-and-paste the piece, co-opting it as a promotion for his weekly email update. From this we learned that Daniels had single-handedly already revealed the dark side of Bali. The Globe was just playing catch-up.

    Good promotion, Jack; it’s just not exactly accurate. But it’s great to see you’re catching up too. Just ease up a little on the blow-hard bit, there’s a good chap.

Right Priorities

The most telling comment to come from news that Governor I Made Mangku Pastika and his deputy A.A. Ngurah Puspayoga have refused to accept the new cars set to be provided for them in the current provincial budget – on the sensible argument that there are better things on which to spend scarce money – was made by the vice chairman of the special legislative committee for the budget, Ketut Adnyana. We report the story in the news pages in this edition.

    Apparently, Adnyana was astounded by the novelty of such a gubernatorial caveat. He said in response that the Governor’s and vice-governor’s vehicles often have trouble keeping up with the motorcades of the political glitterati when they come to town for high-speed car chases escorted by phalanxes of police armed with offensively loud whoopee sirens and very bad manners. Well, if that’s the case, perhaps in the cause of political harmony they could just try going a little more slowly; or even stay within the speed limits. Further, said Adnyana, the Governor’s modest official limousine was often outranked by the plush carriages preferred by district heads.

    There’s a grand old Australian slang term, now quite properly in use throughout the English-speaking world, which amply covers this pathetic excuse for a policy position. It is “bullshit.” The Governor and his deputy have done all Balinese a favour – especially the poorer, pedestrian, ones most at risk of being run over by politicians, plutocrats and lawyers in their disgustingly expensive motor vehicles – as well as everyone who pays tax on the island, and the budget, by foreclosing on such nonsense. There are indeed worthier things on which to spend money.

    And as for the regents with their ramshackle budgets and shambolic administrations, any testicular-vehicular boy-toys in their possession are an unconscionable disgrace.

diary@thebalitimes.com

Hector's Blog is published as The Bali Times Diary in the print edition of the newspaper, out Fridays. The Bali Times, Bali's only English language newspaper, is at www.thebalitimes.com. Print editions are available worldwide through NewspaperDirect.  

THE BALI TIMES DIARY August 27, 2010

Shooting Them

Is Not a Good

Idea, if

the Aim is

Humanity

We hold no brief for drug runners or the low-life scum who organise them; or for terrorists who avoid being blown away and are thus forced into a system of jurisprudence that really should have nothing to do with them. And we concede that the death penalty argument is a particularly fractious one in a society such as Indonesia’s, where religious figures apparently find it perfectly acceptable to assert that some classes of God’s human creation should be denied prayers for their souls after they die.

    But Indonesia is a signatory to a United Nations treaty that specifically outlaws judicial murder. National policy is thus at variance with the nation’s international undertaking. This does not make Indonesia unique. It simply makes it as impervious to obligation as many other states. The government may be happy with this position; but that doesn’t make it right.

    The issue is pertinent because three of the so-called Bali Nine drug criminals are appealing their death sentences in hearings now before the courts in Denpasar. Andrew Chan, Myuran Sukumaran and – separately, since he was but a stupid dupe of a mule and not a ringleader – Scott Rush, have future but as yet undetermined dates with Indonesian firing squads. They wish to avoid this (and quite reasonably) for their own purposes. But the argument goes beyond that. It goes to the crucial question of whether – having accepted international law as the benchmark via accession to the UN treaty – it is lawful for Indonesia to execute people.

    The rejoinder (which we may expect) that it is in fact lawful, because death is prescribed in national law for criminals who commit specified offences, begs the question. There is – morally, legally, ethically – an unfathomable gulf between taking life in a military or police operation, or in self-defence, and cold-bloodedly ordering the extinction of it by judicial fiat months or even years later.

Lombok Beckons

This weekend The Diary is in Lombok. A trip eastwards across the Wallace Line has been long delayed – by all sort of things, including the fact that if you’re in Bali, you’ve already arrived at the best possible destination – but was made necessary by business, as well as a touch of nostalgia. It is a beautiful island and – on the west coast – one of the best places from which to see Bali. Gunung Agung, 70 kilometres away across the Lombok Strait, is a constant presence.

    It is an opportunity too to see old friends, though not all of them. One set has decamped for Ramadhan on a circular tour to the Philippines, Singapore-Malaysia and then Western Australia that will bring them back to Lombok long after the fast is finally over for another year.

    And it will be nice to say hello to the eucalypts that are a natural part of the ecology on our neighbouring island, though The Diary will while doing so also be missing the chirpy little squirrels that daily put on a floor show and trapeze act in the teak trees across the road from The Cage. We left them a note saying we’d be back soon.

    The Diary and Distaff chose to fly Garuda. We had to keep our infrequent flyer points alive. And anyway, it’s a much quicker flight. Garuda flies Boeing 737s on the route. They make the crossing in 15 minutes. The turboprops used by other airlines take 17.    

Nice Train Wreck

It’s not very often Australian politics gets interesting; even to Australians, far less to the rest of the world. But the election outcome (what outcome?) in Australia last weekend delivered drama by the spade-full.

    It produced the first “hung parliament” (where no single party has enough seats to guarantee a majority vote) since 1940. It proved that the Labor Party – now in power nationally only in caretaker mode pending negotiations between all parties on who can actually form a government – cannot take the electors for granted. It brought forth a surge in support for the Greens. This must surely silence the Greens’ continual bleating that the electoral system denies them lower house seats (they won the seat of Melbourne: all they have to do now is what the other parties do - persuade more voters, in other seats, to vote for them).

    Saturday’s election may have forever altered the face of Australian politics. It definitely produced a spectacular train wreck.

Harry’s a Crock

Well so much for saurian prescience. Harry the Croc, resident of a Darwin attraction that seeks to capitalise on the fascinated horror with which both Australians and international tourists view the salt-water crocodiles native to the country’s tropical north, picked Julia Gillard to win last Saturday’s national elections.

    She didn’t. The result (see above) was exactly what most observers who are not hungry crocodiles had been predicting for weeks. Gillard’s Liberal opponent Tony Abbott can take some comfort in the fact that his own chicken-on-a-string was passed over by Harry on Thursday last week in favour of the feast attached to a photo of Gillard.

    It was certainly made clear last Saturday that Australians do not like the concept of the midnight knock on the door, such as that in late June when Gillard deposed Prime Minister Kevin Rudd at the behest of faceless Labor Party factional leaders who thought Rudd was going to cost them unfettered access to the gravy train.

    But we have a theory. It is that, being an adventurous type of a certain age (he’s an Over-40) Harry simply prefers redheads. Did anyone actually ask him why he picked the Ranga (Aussie slang for redhead) in his snap poll?

Go Away World

A curious little advisory note is nowadays popping up on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s website, for people outside Australia who might want to watch one of its programmes on line. Say something like The 7.30 Report, hosted by Kerry O’Brien, which is essential material for anyone interested in keeping fully abreast of Australian affairs, especially at times of high political drama.

    The note reads: “Due to copyright reasons this video programme is available for download by people located in Australia only. If you are not located in Australia, you are not authorised to view this video.”

    Ah well, Aunty (like other once genuinely, now notionally, public broadcasters around the world) is a very commercial old girl these days.

    But perhaps in the interests of the accuracy and objectivity it asserts is its constant aim, it should cease promoting itself quite so assiduously as a vehicle for carrying the voice of Australia around the globe; at least for the rapidly increasing audience out here beyond the migration exclusion zone who want – or need – their viewing on demand rather than on the not necessarily convenient schedule offered by Australia Network, Aunty’s cash-strapped overseas arm.

Write On

The Ubud Writers and Readers Festival – from October 6-10 this year – has a great deal for aspiring writers. The Kilat! Flash Fiction Challenge offers such scribblers an opportunity to post stories. People vote for them. It’s an engaging idea and thoroughly commendable. A delve into the site this week showed that entries thus far are eclectic – as they should be – and coming in a fast trot. That’s also good news. Visit http://flashfiction.ubudwritersfestival.com/ if you’d like to read them, vote for them, or try your hand at writing one.

    Most of the material is in Indonesian. The festival has added Google Translate to the site so that “everyone can enjoy entries in English or Bahasa.” Good luck with that. Google Translate produces something called Googlish. Or Bahasa Buruk.      

Flying High

The Merah Putih has just returned to storage at The Cage, after its annual weeklong-plus flutter in honour of Independence Day. This year it remained aloft for the full period without the need for adjustment because the bamboo pole to which it is affixed as required is now housed in a length of PVC piping attached to the outside wall of the Bale by the handyman who looks after the pool and other things.

    It nearly didn’t. The gent, who has a day job elsewhere and is a very cheery and helpful fellow, was asked last year, straight after Independence Day, to add this essential piece of infrastructure to the domestic inventory, and hadn’t done so for 12 months. A gentle reminder three days before flag-raising – the last in a lengthy and regular series of such prompts – got the pole-holder in place in the nick of time.

    The Cage is also celebrating because this year its flag went up first in the neighbourhood, beating the patriotic local family compound across the gully by a clear two days and everyone else in the area by a country mile.

diary@thebalitimes.com

Hector's Blog is published as The Bali Times Diary in the print edition of The Bali Times, out Fridays. www.thebalitimes.com. The newspaper is available worldwide via NewspaperDirect.

THE BALI TIMES DIARY August 20, 2010

Pitiful
Tifatul
Unplugs
Us All
Again

The Diary spent last Friday night and much of last Saturday unplugged. The internet was inaccessible, as well as inexplicable when your high-priced provider only provides online support in business hours. It was all eventually sorted out – or it sorted itself out – but this process took place without benefit of explanation.
    But we blame Tifatul Sembiring, the minister for miscommunications and leading member of a political party that wants to jilbab the lot of us, whether we like it or not. The minister has been fulminating about the un-Islamic nature of porn on the web – and we agree that it is morally unsound and all sorts of things; plus it gums up Indonesia’s woefully undersized web for the rest of us, given the wall-to-wall virtual titillation that we are warned is going on – and has vowed to pull the plug on it.
    Unfortunately, as columnist Vyt Karazija points out on the Perspective page today, if you want to target specific websites to unplug you have to know what you’re doing. Tifatul clearly doesn’t, though this is not a surprise. However, the skill of being a minister and of implementing policy (even policy made on the run, which is the general way of affairs here) lies in finding the means to achieve the objective.
    Sending out a lot of dunderheads to unplug everything, willy-nilly, lest somewhere out there someone may be obtaining an un-Islamic jolly on the web, is not the way to do it.
    Web-based pornography may be distasteful and offensive to many people. It is not the sort of thing with which those among us who are religiously inclined should even contemplate dallying; or anyone with a mind, for that matter. But these are personal choices; and that goes to the very heart of a free and democratic society. The government of which Tifatul Sembiring is a part is committed – it says – to advancing freedom and democracy.
    Cutting off a lot of crass whackos from their fun time should not be done at the expense of internet access for people who have other reasons for being on line, or for trying to be.

So Excited

The funsters at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival keep giving us all a laugh. Last Friday they posted on their Facebook this engaging little come-on: “We have an excited announcement coming up very soon! Stay tuned!!”
    It must have been the three-year Citibank naming rights sponsor agreement that was announced shortly thereafter. There’s a report on it in this edition of The Bali Times. It was certainly good news for the festival, which has been trying to find a major commercial (as in, lotsa dosh) sponsor for a while.
    Perhaps the announcement was excited. But it’s more likely the post was worded as it was as the result of illiteracy on Wudbee Hill. The multiple exclamation marks were a dead giveaway.

Get Along

Australia votes this Saturday (August 21) and all good Aussies, everywhere, are waking from their customary slumber to trot along their local voting place to do the right thing: That’s as in vote, or be fined for not doing so.
    The Diary, having been one of the flock since 1972 (when separate citizenship of the Great South Land was acquired) and still registered to vote, has already done its duty. But lest there are any Australians about, resident here, who are eligible to tick the boxes but have not yet done so, we remind readers that the Australian Consulate General is a postal voting place. They’ll even be open on Saturday to permit this exercise in democracy to have its fullest expression.
    The election is about all sorts of serious things but, for those who might have difficulty choosing between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, some useful guidance emerged in the final stages of campaigning. A Sydney radio station quizzed both Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott on their musical tastes.
    Gillard opted for Bruce Springsteen and Cold Chisel. Abbott, plainly an old-style conservative to his bootstraps (or possibly his Speedos) said he was a man of his generation and liked The Beach Boys, The Big O, Elvis and The Beatles. Gosh, he’s older than his years (he’ll be 53 in November). But he’d love Bali’s wandering minstrels.
    The radio station told him: “Even Obama is listening to Jay-Z.” Abbott replied: “Yeah, well, I probably wouldn't even know who that guy is.” We hope he meant Jay-Z.
    Disclosure: The Diary would vote for Bruce Springsteen and Cold Chisel if they were on the ballot paper.

Bon Chance

It’s not every day you run into a Canadian consul in these parts, since a treaty exists under which the Australians look after straying lumberjacks in this neck of the woods while the Canadians, ever the drawers of the short straw, get to pick up the debris of the Bintang singlet brigade in other remote parts of the globe. 
    So it was nice to meet Dana Lajoie, second secretary and vice consul at Canada’s Jakarta legation, who was in town on the sort of business visiting consuls do from time to time and popped up at the little soiree Australia’s departing consul-general, Lex Bartlem, put on last Tuesday week.
    She was able to give The Diary cheery news about the Canadian woman badly injured here in a motorbike accident a little while ago, an event that among other things brought The Bali Times Virtual Blood Bank into play. She’s back home and on the mend, we’re told.
    The Bali Times Virtual Blood Bank is a register of members’ blood types for matching with emergency requirements. It coordinates with the Red Cross Blood Bank at Sanglah Hospital in Denpasar. If you’d like to sign up, there’s a form on Pg 4.

Faux Pas

Lajoie was here with her husband Gilles. The Diary, being an inattentive oaf, immediately thought: Ah, Quebecois. Alas, the ultimate Canadian joke had been self-played. Gilles is from New Brunswick. It is Canada’s only officially bilingual province and it’s where they actually do speak French.
    Dana is from Saskatchewan, a different place altogether, famous in The Diary’s mind for two things: First, for being the destination of choice of Sitting Bull who, having assisted in the most significant US Army snafu of the Indian wars (the annihilation of the terminally incautious George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Little Big Horn in 1876) crossed the border and told the Mounties that since his Latoka Sioux cousins at Woods Mountain were subjects of HM Queen Victoria, he was too. And second, for being right next to Alberta, home of the world’s best fiddle music and the fabulous singer kd lang.
    In Quebec they still speak the sort of colonial pidgin thrown by the citoyens at poor General Wolfe who, being a bewigged and powdered English gentleman, was mortally offended by them on the Heights of Abraham outside Quebec City in 1759 as he wrested – posthumously as it turned out - what would become the Dominion of Canada from the failing grip of the Versailles mob to add to King George II’s imperial domains.

Hype Alert

It was nice the other day to pick up Sophie Digby’s fun little August-datelined MinYak – that’s the Yak magazine’s monthly get-it-on they pop into people’s inboxes to keep readers’ interest up between quarterly editions of the actual mag – and see Craig Seaward, boss of the oh-so-W property said to be soon coming your way if you’re at Seminyak and Susi Johnston hasn’t yet had cause to complain about another out-of-season biblical flood.
   The little Yak had a Q&A with him: the usual fluffy stuff you see in the glitter-box media these days. Goodness, the guy’s so hip he must be prosthetic. Still, it’s great that the Zip Generation, who can only manage 20 words at a pop, including adjectival overload, can get a brief on the real meaning of life, even if they’re really only channelling Julia Roberts.
   Those interested in reading longer sentences, written with some objective purpose, would have got a fuller (and much earlier) picture of the big W from reading our LIFE section feature on July 21. It was written by our Seminyak correspondent, Novar Caine, and included this memorable bit of what’s-that-you-say from Seaward:    
   “We flirt with guests’ senses – sexy with a touch of whimsy, seduce through individual attention through emotional connection in unleashing the spirit of fun. We welcome all that is ‘now’ by bringing guests behind invisible velvet ropes into the world of W, from discovery of Balinese customary ceremonies to VIP access to celebrated fashion showcases and music happenings.” Thanks, we’re quite clear now.
   No, seriously, we like the thought of outré hotels; and the Yak and its little offspring. And Sophie, as we have noted before, is a dear. Oh dear, it sounds as if we’re starting a zoo.

So There

In the letters page last week, feedback contributor S. McLean wrote that she or he – we’re guessing she: we did ask at the strange Yahoo email address from which the missive had issued, but we heard nothing, as you do – was upset that The Diary had seemingly (and apparently unbelievably) set out to discomfit some poor souls hereabouts who were only trying to keep their names in lights.
    Stripped of its hyperbole, it asked if we enjoy writing this sort of stuff. Well yes. That’s what diarists do.

diary@thebalitimes.com

Hector's Blog is published as The Bali Times Diary in the print edition of the newspaper, out Fridays. The Bali Times, Bali's only English language newspaper, is at www.thebalitimes.com. Print editions are available worldwide through NewspaperDirect.