Bengawan Solo

My father’s parents’ marriage certificate has them married in “Madioen” (Madiun) East Java in 1918. There is a black and white photo of my twenty-one year old grandmother, in a long, black skirt, standing by a steam train in the American West, travelling to join her intended husband in the Dutch East Indies.

Grandmother Mieke was from the family Ankersmit, who owned the Deventer (Netherlands) cotton factory, and the estate that went with it. Grandfather “Freik” was the son of Abraham Frederikse, an Amsterdam doctor. Freik was not an academic and, being handy with his hands, was sent to the Deventer School for Tropical Agriculture.

A decade ago my travel companion and I passed through Madiun on a train. The Dutch-built railway followed the flats between the volcanoes. Closely spaced villages (kampongs) with orange tile roofs were ringed by fertile rice paddies following what contours there were. Here and there stood tobacco barns and brickworks making roof tiles. Coconut palms and tropical spices, fruits and vegetables filled the spaces between. By all accounts it was paradise in 1920 when Java had a population around 30 million and there were still wild tigers, elephants and rhinos in the teak-forested hills – now the population of Java is approaching 150 million.

The millisphere of Bengawan Solo (2014 population seven million) includes the Madiun River catchment which joins the Bengawan Solo at Ngawi before flowing through Bojonegoro and discharging into the Java Sea just north of Surabaya. The headwaters of the Bengawan Solo itself drains the neighbouring millisphere of Surakarta (Solo), to the west.

The Bengawan Solo is an important site for hominid remains and Ngawi is where Dutch archeologist Eugene Dubois, in 1896, found fossil remains of Pithecanthropus erectus (Java Man). Dated at one million years ago, Java Man is the first evidence of hominids outside Africa or Europe. Zig zag marks on a freshwater clam shell, found nearby, is thought to be the oldest man-made marks in the world.

In 1940, Surakarta musician, Gesang Martohartono composed the song “Bengawan Solo,” which was popular with the Japanese soldiers occupying Indonesia during World War II. The soldiers brought “Bengawan Solo” home to Japan after the war, where it became famous and a hit throughout Asia, then worldwide.

When the Japanese forces arrived in 1942, first Freik was taken away to the men’s camp in Bandung, then Mieke to the women’s camp in Semurang. Their  two sons had already gone to the Netherlands for their education and their daughter managed to catch one of the last passenger ships leaving for the United States, where she met her future husband.  It was not until after the end of the war that they heard from each other again. By then it was apparent that it was all over for the Dutch in Indonesia and the family dispersed to Holland, Switzerland, California and New Zealand.

In 1948, in the lead up to independence, when Dutch forces still held the major cities, Indonesian factions, positioning themselves to become the new government, clashed in the “Madiun affair”. Sukarno’s republican forces put down an Indonesian Communist Party municipal uprising in Madiun, imprisoning 36,000 and executing 1000 communists. This skirmish finally played itself out in 1965, in “the year of living dangerously”, when Suharto and the army finished off another million “communists”. American agents were involved in both affairs.

Indonesia’s development model under Suharto was one of corruption and joint ventures with foreign companies. Japanese plywood factories and the like went into business with various members of the Suharto oligarchy, who became fabulously wealthy. Tommy Suharto bought a sheep station in the South Island of New Zealand.

The Bengawan Solo, Java’s longest river, was once much longer, extending into Sumatra and Borneo during the last ice age, when sea levels were lower, and, in fact, it once flowed in the opposite direction, before the line of volcanoes coming out of the Java Trench tilted it the other way.

Today the Bengawan Solo Water Resource Management Authority has to cope with annual cycles of flood and drought in an environment subject to intense industrialisation, agricultural development, and population growth. Wet season flooding is compounded by the river’s sediment load from volcanic debris and erosion, including from illegal logging. Industrial pollution and untreated effluent from urban areas means the water is not drinkable like it was only a century ago. Potable water is in critically short supply in the dry season.

A joint venture between ExxonMobil and Indonesia’s Pertamina recently announced significant finds of oil and gas around Bojonegoro. This will enrich a few and further degrade the Bengawan Solo for the millions living along it.

Malang

I call this millisphere Malang after the largest city in the southern East Java. The millisphere of Malang (nearing ten million, mostly Javanese) includes Malang City (0.8 million) and Batu, Bitar, Kediri, Pacitan, Ponorogo, Trenggalek and Tulungagung cities and regencies.

About ten years ago I went there for no other reason than Malang was where, during World War II, the Japanese occupying forces had captured my grandparents and sent the women and children to a camp in Semarang and my grandfather to Bandung, where he nearly died.

Wanting to follow the route my ancestors took, by the Java Sea, we had crossed from Singapore to the Riau Islands in Indonesia and into another world. At Tanjung Pinang we bought tickets and at Kijang we caught a Pelni government ferry to Surabaya, via Jakarta. Over the next two days and one night we learned that most of the other passengers were Indonesian immigrants, who had been arrested in Malaysia and who were being sent home to Java.

In the Midday heat, at Surabaya wharf, we were drafted off from our fellow travellers, who were loaded onto army trucks, and we set off by taxi to the bus station with a new friend from the ferry. Jacob gave us our first lesson about catching buses in Indonesia; just get on and as soon as the bus is full it leaves; there will be a conductor and you pay, in cash, on the road; watch out for the buskers on the buses, they are crooks, but always pay them, but only a little amount, we were informed.

Soon the full bus to Malang was barrelling down the Surabaya southern motorway, for about an hour, before the highway disappeared into a sea of mud at Porong, where, a year earlier, a mud volcano, had started erupting. An Indonesian oil and gas drilling company, PT Lapindo Brantas, had been drilling nearby and, many believe, caused the break-out of pressurised mud. PT Lapindo is owned by Golkar Party chairman and Indonesian rich lister, Aburizal Bakrie, who still denies responsibility. 30,000 people were displaced by the mud. Some locals are cashing in on “mud tourism” as Indonesians come to see the world’s largest mud volcano and still no one has been compensated.

Our detoured bus wound through the congested main streets of little towns before Jacob told the driver to drop us at a crossroads. Dusk was falling rapidly, but, don’t worry, motorbike taxis would turn up and take us to Trawas, Jacob assued. He was right. Soon we were weaving down the centre line, with no crash helmets, passing trucks and vans. The air was warm and you could smell the tropics.

The people at the PPLH Seloliman environment centre/backpackers were astonished that we made it so fast from the midday ferry.The next day was Indonesian independence day and we were dressed as Indonesians and we shouted Merdeka (freedom) along with Indonesian Greenies from Surabaya.

Further up the volcano were, spring fed, ancient Hindu, stone bathing pools, divided between men. The pools contained a gaggle of Javanese transvestites, who made much ado about my white shin, but fortunately they were just leaving. Javanese volcanic soil and tropical climate produces spectacular growth and I observed that the local farmers were even better gardeners than the Greenies at the eco-centre.

The taxi to Malang, slowly passed marching lines of brightly uniformed school girls and we arrived in the centre of town as the parade reached the town hall. There were lots speeches and tan police uniforms and military marching bands and red and white flags flew everywhere.

The latest news from Malang is that 41 of the 45 members of the Malang City Council had been suspended by the government anti-corruption commission for taking bribes paid out by the former Malang mayor.

After a day of self-touring we lucked into Mollys, the Malang community art worker. We witnessed a live broadcast of Malang buskers at a radio station and a rock band at a trade show where we had to shake hands with smiling people in tan uniforms and it was Mollys who guided me to the stream under the main road where children swam, just like in my father’s youth. I paused to sketch the scene before being asked to leave – the women wanted to bath.

Under the bridge in Malang