HECTOR’S DIARY Bali Advertiser, May 16, 2012

His fortnightly diet of worms and other non-religious experiences

What Rubbish!

When we heard that “the authorities” – the quotation marks are possibly essential – had suddenly demolished a number of rather well known and heavily patronised watering holes favoured by the Bling-and-Bolly and Boys-and-Girls-Behaving-Badly sets on the beach at Batu Belig, a wreck and rampage event held on May 7, an unkind thought crossed our mind. It was that “They” (the quote marks and capital T are definitely essential) had mistaken the real task upon which a modicum of concentration is required.

It occurred to us that a far-sighted official – Find that man! Give him a medal! – must somehow have become aware of the real problem on Bali’s beaches and directed the troops to clean up the rubbish, but that a critical wire or two had got crossed while the order was being passed down the line. There is a precedent for this, though sadly it too is a joke. An order “Pass the word forward, we’re going to advance,” given to British infantry on the Western Front in World War I was duly passed forward but got lost on the way. It became “Pass three-and-four-pence, we’re going to a dance.”

It is asserted that Karma Kandara, La Barca and other outré establishments were operating without the necessary permissions and permits. They may have been.  We don’t know. But that’s not unusual hereabouts, particularly when if you do pay up you’ve often no idea who is actually going to pocket the dosh.

Oh, THAT Target

Meanwhile – surely to no one’s surprise – environmental specialists are at loggerheads over how the Bali government’s commitment to a plastic free Bali in 2013 can be achieved. The short answer is it can’t be. The real political game is finding some smoke and mirrors with which to claim it has been, or very nearly so.  This little shadow play has now produced a statement – from provincial environment agency chief AA Gede Alit – to the effect that 2013 is just the target for the initial commitment.

Dr Wayan Arthana – of the Centre for Environmental Research (PPLH), which is hardly an impartial player but never mind in this instance – says there is no clear plan to achieve this. He is apparently shocked to learn this, which in turn is shocking. We’re on Planet Bali, where clear plans are never part of the picture. It’s true that Bali has a big waste problem. But even 10,000 cubic metres of waste a day is not insuperable. At the moment more than half is left untreated and scattered around the island. The 10 to 12 percent of it that is plastic could certainly be managed under the right programmes.

Arthana is pessimistic about the target date. “I think it will not be achieved,” he says. Gosh, if betting were legal here he’d make a brilliantly successful bookie.  It’s hard not to be pessimistic about the entire project, frankly. A study by graduates from Reading University in Britain found various impediments in the way, including the behaviour of people who it seems – in the comfortable do-nothing fictions that govern life here – “do not realise” that plastic is harmful to the environment.

Ooh, Yummy

Alila Villas Soori, on the Tabanan coast and somewhere we really must get one day, has a culinary treat in store for guests in June. Michelin chef Tom Kerridge, whose Hand and Flower public house, at Marlow on a picturesque Wind in the Willows-style stretch of the River Thames in England is Britain’s only two-star Michelin-rated pub, will be creating haute cuisine – some of it hot too, no doubt – in-house on his first ever Asian tour.

He is said by some to be the finest chef in Britain today. As far as we know, he’s not one of the rude ones, which is truly a blessing. Kerridge had a hard childhood, a time upon which he reminisced in February in the London Daily Telegraph newspaper. He recalled they were so poor – his divorced mum worked nine to five and then after hours on the till in a pub to make ends meet – that their usual Sunday Roast (a British tradition) was cheap sausage meat from a supermarket rather than prime beef or chicken from the butcher.

He said: “I look back on that meal with really fond memories because it shows my mum didn’t give up. She worked hard to help me get where I am. Now she comes to visit me at the pub, where we’ve just won our second Michelin star, and I get to treat her instead.”

What a lovely fellow.

And that’s not all that Alila Villas Soori has on its schedule next month. Its latest Artist in Residence is Raymond Wiger, a master sculptor in the art of wire mesh, who will show a collection there in June including some pieces inspired by and resulting from his residence at the resort.

Scat, Cat

We heard this story from Villa Kitty, the rapidly overcrowding refuge for deprived felines in Ubud. Apparently at Champlung Sari, a resort property in Monkey Forest Road, unwanted or nuisance kittens – the product of breeding age cats left unsterilized by unthinking owners or the ubiquitous stray animals – are cleared from the property by the cheapest method possible. Someone tosses them over the wall into a dirty little watercourse that fights its way through the garbage to get where gravity would otherwise like it to go.

Villa Kitty tells us a couple staying at the resort recently were upset at seeing a kitten thrown over the wall in this manner and one phoned them up in high distress. Further inquiry elicited the information from the management that the guests had evidently failed to see the kitten then climb back over the wall.

Is this a joke? Sadly it is not. But animal lovers and anyone with an elementary sense of decency might like to get their essential Ubud experience at some other accommodation.

A Ra’re Treat

Hector’s ghost-writer was browsing through his LinkedIn site recently when the ever-helpful People You Might Know feature popped out the name of Angus McCaskill. Well, we don’t know Angus and neither did we know his alter ego, the faux-Maori Willie Ra’re, when he was hanging around the party scene snorting cocaine. That is, we didn’t know him except vicariously as a result of the public notoriety he acquired on being arrested, charged, tried and sentenced to jail on a drug charge. We shared this condition – though ours was legitimate lack of knowledge – with a great many people who, after his sad denouement in a supermarket, suddenly seemed not to know him either.

McCaskill went home to Australia last August after serving a year in Kerobokan jail. He had originally been sentenced to seven years in one of those over-reactive challenges to common sense that the courts here seem to like so much.

He said at the time he was a changed man and that he had used his year in the slammer to reconnect with the non-narcotics-enhanced side of life. We wish him well.

LinkedIn tells us he is now business development manager at a Melbourne-based leisure, travel and tourism outfit called DealsOnDeals and also lists him as owner at the Wall Street Group of Companies. Now that might give us the Willies; not to mention the Gekkos.

Eat Up

Ubud, as befits its status as the centre of myriad universes, many of them very strange places indeed, has plenty of spots where, your head filled with pipedreams, you can also stuff your face. That’s as it should be, even if it’s only a mungbean you’re after. So one more won’t matter and it’s no surprise that Kuta fixture Dijon has wandered up the road to open a café. It’s in tastefully eclectic Jalan Raya Sanggingan, just across the road from a favourite Diary spot, the Beji resort.

Dijon Café officially commenced business on April 29, with all the pomp and circumstance people seem to view as de rigueur when opening a new emporium (of whatever variety) here. It was open – perhaps this was unofficially, or maybe it was just softly – when we were staying in the area last December.

It’s not very far from Mozaic, which keeps getting noticed – the Diary chiefly notices it for its prices – and Naughty Nuri’s, which being extremely tiny is always overflowing with the I-Must-Be-Seen crowd. So it will be good if Dijon cuts the mustard.

Vacant Lot

The April issue of the Bali Peace Park Association’s e-newsletter popped into our in-box right on deadline – ours, not theirs, it now being May – with some fascinating thoughts on fundraising, land acquisition, and building completion. It records that Man-With-the-Udeng Made Wijaya, whose landscaping firm did the drawings for the Sari site development, told them building the park facilities would take six months. Then it says they’re on schedule for October, the tenth anniversary of the first bombings. It’s May, so they now have five months. But they haven’t acquired the site – and there’s not a brick in sight.

We’ll read more. Watch this vacant space.

Hector’s Diary appears in the print edition of the Bali Advertiser, published every second Wednesday, and on his Blog at http://wotthehec.blogspot.com. Hector is on Twitter (@scratchings) and Facebook (Hector McSquawky).

By Jingo, It’s Time for Common Sense

BOAT PEOPLE

There’s a streak of jingoism in Australia that irritates many people, including, let it be said, large numbers of Australians. It gets in the way of common sense and stymies the requirement to deal with reality. It’s a political and social phenomenon born of residual colonial cringe, earlier isolation and boastful over-pride, all now overlaid with nationalist perceptions that the world’s largest inhabited island (or smallest continent: take your pick) is some sort of very special biosphere.

It is found broadly, in various forms, across the social and political spectrum. A constant refrain at all levels is that Australia is the best country in the world, but when this claim is tested – on the norms – it is at least arguable. This is reflected in schoolyard-style national pride that defines sporting teams and lots of other people who are just doing their jobs as heroes, another disastrously devalued term.  At that level, national life is frankly infantile.

In politics jingoism is a distressing commonplace. For all its proclamations that it is now a modern social-democratic outfit (excepting a few recent distractions that the Prime Minister would really prefer we didn’t talk about) the Australian Labor Party persists in worshipping totemic symbols whose utility is lost forever in a distant past. The Liberal Party often seems very far from liberal, as in sentient and open; though less so about economic issues, on which it is rational, than on social policy where sections of the party seem intent on reinventing the past. The Nationals remain a proto-rural rump, still looking for uneconomic handouts. The Australian Greens are condemned to the sidelines of politics unless they can cobble together an economic policy that wouldn’t simply ruin the country (perhaps senator-elect Peter Whish-Wilson, Tasmanian replacement for Bob Brown who will shortly be just an ordinary Earthian, can help lead them out of that thicket). None of the other minor parties effectively matter; not even the Cool Katters, who are anything but.

And it is in this context that Tony Abbott’s speech to the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne on April 27 needs to be viewed. John Howard was incontrovertibly correct when he stated in 2001 that Australians “will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.” Clearly any national state has that right. But Howard was wrong – morally, ethically and in the end politically – in what he intended that decision and those circumstances would be.

Boat people – it’s such a pejorative term, a weasel-word propaganda tool – are not criminals; they are protected under international agreements to which Australia is properly a signatory. They are entitled to lawful processing and treatment if they arrive (and that doesn’t mean being locked away in remote detention centres or being shipped to Nauru or Malaysia). And despite the “300 boats since Labor came to office” – five years ago: 60 boats a year, five boats a month, statistically one a week – that the opposition leader shouts about, they are very far from being a flood.

Many more people apparently intent on evading Australian migration law arrive by air, on scheduled airline flights.

Figures for 2010 indicate there are around 13 times more illegal immigrants than there are asylum seekers in detention who have arrived by boat.

The data, obtained by an Australian newspaper from the Immigration Department under the Freedom of Information Act, showed arrivals in 2010 by air from the United States (5,080) and Britain (3,610) were near the top of the list of those in the country without a valid visa. China (8,070) topped the list and Malaysia (4,200) came in third.

In 2010, on the official figures reluctantly released by the government, there were 4,446 detained boat people. The largest national grouping was people from Afghanistan (1,422).  Given that Afghanistan’s ethnic rivalries won’t cease any time soon (Who’d be a Hazara? Does Abbott even understand The Kite Runner?) and the country’s threatened non-political elites will continue to view migration as their best option, that figure is likely to increase.

In 2010, a total of 58,400 foreigners overstayed their Australian visas; they were people who had entered Australia on tourist or holiday-working visas. One in seven arrived as students and one in 15 was not heard from again after being granted temporary residency. But in 2010 only 6,720 people who overstayed their visas were sent home, most of them voluntarily, after applications to stay longer were rejected.

Abbott’s flood is in fact a trickle. The 4,446 detainees in the 2010 data are a minuscule 0.02 percent of the lawfully resident Australian population. The 58,400 people who overstayed their visas, about whom Australian political leaders are apparently not in any flux of distress, aren’t a flood either – they represent only 0.26 percent of the resident population – but they’re 10 times the problem “boat people” are.

We could presume on that basis that Abbott didn’t know what he was talking about in his IPA speech. It certainly sounded as if he had mistaken the Arafura and Timor seas for the Rio Grande and northern Australia for Texas. But that would be unfair. He’s a bright chap. So we must assume that when he promised prime ministerial fleet-footedness in defence of national interests under critical threat he actually knew what he was saying.

Did he know what he was doing, however? There, the answer is more elusive. On one hand, you’d hope that he did, since he’s running for prime minister. On the other, given what he’d said, you’d hope that he didn’t, because it was vote-seeking, jingoistic rubbish.

He was banging a political, if not a populist, drum; he was not enunciating sensible policy. Abbott said (among other things on his list of unlikely first-foot-under-the-desk achievements) that he would order the navy to turn boats around. (He had several caveats on that putative order, which at least indicates he may know he’d be grasping a very painful nettle.) He would visit Indonesia to make it plain that Australians viewed boat people whose port of embarkation was in Indonesia with as much distaste as Indonesians viewed Australians who peddled drugs in Bali. Peddling drugs is a crime, as is boarding an unauthorised boat in Indonesia. But trying to reach Australia in a leaky, unsafe boat is not a crime. It is too often – sickeningly often – a fatal misadventure.

In any case, Abbott would get at best a polite hearing on the issue in Jakarta where the political realities are somewhat different.  Indonesia’s interest lies in getting unauthorised arrivals to move on. So-called boat people matter very little to the government in Jakarta, since they have arrived in Indonesia planning to do so and to become Australia’s problem instead.

And at the administrative level, removing the impact of Indonesia’s money buys anything bribe culture, so far as it relates to facilitating the onward passage of unauthorised arrivals Indonesia doesn’t want and cannot accommodate, requires a rather longer term view than apparently suits Abbott.  Further, the Indonesians have already made clear their distinct ambivalence towards Abbott’s excursion into Flashman territory on the boat people.

It might be true – though the point is arguable and substantially untested beyond anecdotal evidence – that most Australians regard so-called queue-jumpers, “illegal” arrivals, and specifically “boat people” with unequivocal distaste. The cost of processing and supporting refugees who arrive outside the parameters of Australia’s formal immigration programme is substantial, particularly at a time when even the most inattentive Australian has worked out that money is after all a finite resource.  But it would probably cost substantially less if processing were done in Australia under rules that ensured people did not spend months locked up in quasi-prisons, rather than overseas, the preferred out-of-sight, out-of-mind option of both sides of politics.

The revived Nauru option, flagged by Abbott in his IPA speech as a live proposal if he were to become prime minister, effectively would bribe a foreign country (albeit a tiny Pacific Ocean outcrop with no economic future) to become a prison island. This is a sorry excuse for policy and immoral to boot, at a distressingly fundamental level. (The same can be said about Labor’s so-called Malaysia Solution.)

Australians need to take a reality check. Politicians beat up the issue of unauthorised arrivals in ways that encourage the quite erroneous view that the country is being swamped by illegal and politically suspect people. They are playing to the gallery. The overwhelming majority of Australians are not racist in the formal sense of the term. But many Australians take national pride to jingoistic levels encouraged by politicians in office and politicians seeking office – though this may not be their intent – and by discordant national cheerleaders who declare that the country is open only to the Chosen.

HECTOR’S DIARY Bali Advertiser, May 2, 2012

His fortnightly diet of worms and other non-theological experiences

Building for No Future

Among the many wondrous things that fix one’s attention in Bali is the question of building permits. It has been raised – again – as a matter of public interest by people who are objecting to the construction of yet another lodging place, allegedly without benefit of permit, in Jl Drupadi at Seminyak, which not many years ago was a quietly meandering little street where residents had rice fields to gaze upon. It is still a meandering little street, but concrete view-blockers have replaced the rice fields and silence is a notional, relative thing. This, of course, is progress.

It is not necessary to completely oppose development to be outraged by the cavalier attitude of many developers to dangerous impediments to their own wealth-garnering, such as building regulations. “I should get a permit? Well, I asked for one and you said no, so I’m building my nightmare project anyway. I’ve called it Excrescence, by the way; somehow it seemed apt.”  This statement is of course fictional. The actual statement, were one ever to be made, would probably be unprintable.

We have hotel developers – and other entrepreneurial types – who build what they like, where they like and how they like without bothering with building standards, licences, permits, or even drainage plans. (We know too that getting building permits is often a process fraught with costly problems but that’s not the point.) Few are effectively countered. It’s not just in Bali, of course. Indonesian law insists (well, suggests is more accurate in actuality) that you consult your neighbours before building, but hardly anyone ever bothers with that nonsense either.

If Bali is to escape eventual tourism ruin and have any chance of protecting its heritage, architectural and other, something needs to be done urgently. Reform could start with amendments to the devolution law so there is no longer room for argument over whether the provincial or district administrations have legislative power over building regulations. It could usefully then continue with cast-iron rules enforcing those regulations.

Bali has benefited hugely from tourism and related developments since the mid-1980s. Thousands of people have jobs they once could only dream about. Money has flowed – and is flowing – to local people like never before. All that is good, yet we face a dreadful problem, one that relates to virtually unfettered development and to the Balinese (and national) habit of ignoring both regulations and common sense.

And a Further Thought

Here in Bali we have by-passes that aren’t anything of the sort – because the instant someone builds a traffic thoroughfare it is built out and traffic-jammed by an epidemic of retail and other premises. We have intersections choked by vehicles and motorbikes whose drivers and riders simply ignore the rules.

We have traffic police who sit – for example in the little sponsored box at the McDonald’s lights at Jimbaran – sipping their coffees and Cokes and ignoring the tailbacks caused by people intending to turn right but sitting in the left-hand (through) lane because they’re so selfish or ignorant that they’re not prepared to queue.

There’s little money in it for the cops, of course. No “tourists” (even those who’ve lived here for years) do that. It’s home-grown idiocy and if it were penalised at all it would only be at concessional local rates.

In the Pink

Last October your Diarist – along with a chum who was visiting from Queensland, Australia – donned pretty pink to take part in the annual Bali Pink Ribbon Walk. It was a fun show, once the masculine genes had got over being paired with pink, and in a very good cause. We even did the full five kilometres, something that was apparently beyond many of the other walkers who, without benefit of marshals, cut a few corners.

The 2012 event is on May 26, retimed to take advantage of the less humid conditions and slightly lower temperatures of the season. Sadly, we can’t make it; we’ll be flying back from an overseas trip on the day and won’t be back on Bali soil until after walk time. But everyone else should, so put it in your diaries.

Gaye Warren, who initiated the Walk in 2009 and who as a breast cancer survivor is a leading light in the UK events, tells us that this year they’re providing optional design pink tees for chaps, with a black collar and the chest-legend “Real Men Wear Pink.” Nice try girls; only on special occasions, we fancy.

The Walk starts at 4.30pm on May 26, from the grounds of the BTDC headquarters at Nusa Dua with registration from 3pm. There will be the usual tasty morsels available from international food stalls and this year’s entertainment programme is being provided by a wedding planner. That’ll go without a hitch, surely?

Funds raised this year are going towards the building of Bali’s first Breast Cancer Support Centre in Denpasar. Bali Pink Ribbon works with leading hospital Prima Medika in a joint endeavour to identify breast cancer in Balinese women who otherwise might not notice the symptoms until the disease is far advanced. Around 200 women a year are diagnosed with breast cancer in Bali.

Details are at www.balipinkribbon.com.

Conrad Calling

There was a lovely soiree at Tanjung Benoa on April 11 when the Conrad Bali turned eight, said cheerio to inaugural GM Michael Burchett and bonjour to new GM Jean-Sébastien Kling, a native of France who joins us here on our island from the Hilton Maldives Iru Fushi. Kling joined the Hilton group in 1996.

We’re not losing Burchett, though, which is good news because he’s a good bloke. He’s staying in Bali to run his own consultancy business.

Non! Cela ne peut pas être vrai!

No! That can’t be right! A poll conducted by international travel search site is said to have revealed the French as the rudest people on earth. Apparently they were thus rated by 19 percent of those polled. It’s true that the French are historically known by their European neighbours for an abrupt and curt nature, especially when dealing with foreign tourists – those who don’t speak classic French, for example, such as Quebecois from Canada, or (even worse) don’t speak French at all. It is further alleged that this is often taken by visitors as rudeness.

Paris is a difficult city. But the people there are nearly in Seine, so that’s no surprise. In other parts of France your diarist, among thousands or more likely millions of visitors, Francophone or otherwise, has experienced no trouble at all getting along with the locals.

Scratch Him

Here’s a thought for the graspers among us, courtesy of Villa Kitty Ubud founder Elizabeth Grant Suttie. She recently asked (on Facebook) this reasonable question:  “How can an expat living in Ubud in a comfortable home with his own graphics business think to bring in three tiny kittens and not offer a donation?”

We’d say the answer is obvious.

That’s the Spirit

It was Anzac Day on April 25 – the Australian and New Zealand day to honour all those who have served their countries in the armed forces – and as usual there was a traditional Dawn Service organised by the Australian Consulate-General.

The Diary was there (as always); and this year was wearing his Australian Army tie for the occasion. It rained, rather heavily. But as Consul-General Brett Farmer reminded the large crowd present, given the occasion marks the bloody Gallipoli landing in World War I, we could put up with a little inconvenience.

Smile, Genius

The Diary’s current MFA (Most Favoured Argentine) Leticia Balacek, architect and artist – she had a lovely ink-wash sketch called Yellow Dog in her exhibition at El Kabron at Bingin Beach late last year which the Diary would covet for a wall were space available – has been spreading her wings. She had an exhibition of 47 mix-media works, Crossing Borders, at the Cemara 6 gallery in Jakarta from March 28-April 12.

Now, five of her manual colour screen prints are to go on show at the Indonesian Contemporary Art and Design ICAD by Artura, also in Jakarta, from May 5-June 15. Balacek, who has the sort of effervescent personality that makes you want to hug her, will also present a short animation stop motion film.

This year’s Design ICAD theme is Genius. Buenos Aires native Balacek tells us it’s about the genius we all have inside. Well, some among us do.

Unrevealing

The Bali Times, which has been published weekly since 2005, failed to appear on Friday, April 20. There was no announcement that publication had been suspended, but you expect that here.  It is bad news – any descent into a catatonic state preceding death by any newspaper is – but is unsurprising given the difficulties the paper has had, particularly since November 2010 when the editor decamped to Ireland.

Revealing the real Bali – the paper’s masthead boast – was probably always going to be a little difficult from as far away as one of the Euro zone’s least effective economies.

Hector’s Diary is published in the Bali Advertiser, out every second Wednesday, and on his own Blog http://wotthehec.blogspot.com. Hector is on Twitter (@Scratchings) and Facebook (Hector McSquawky).

Save Us from Visiting Firepersons

Judith Sloan, contributing economics editor at The Australian, is someone who should be read regularly for her insights on matters within her portfolio. She generally makes very good sense. But in a piece in her newspaper on April 17, she breaks a fundamental rule of considered comment. On the basis of “travelling around Asia for the past three weeks,” she judges that the government should axe the ABC-run Australia Network and save taxpayers millions of dollars.

She’s making a political – or perhaps it’s a corporate – point. But it isn’t one that has any basis on a broader view. It panders to the assumption that Sky News, which had tendered to produce the service before Julia Gillard’s overly muddled government cancelled the process, would do a better job of presenting an Australian face to the region than the ABC. That’s a moot point. Sloan says Australia Network’s news coverage is below par. So it is – and ABC24, from which it draws some of its content, could certainly improve. But Sky News does not inspire one with confidence that what is being broadcast is necessarily the distilled essence of a better pile of dung.

Sloan bemoans being assailed (as an apparently infrequent viewer of Australia Network’s fare over three weeks – wow! – in the near abroad) by ancient programming drawn, as it must be on Australia Network’s deficient funding, from the bottom drawer. Watching four-year-old rebroadcasts of that advertising industry self- love-in The Gruen Transfer is neither edifying nor informative, agreed. Watching “reruns” of Sea Patrol isn’t either – except that for most of Australia Network’s audience they’re first-run shows. We’ve only just got to the series where the fine folk of HMAS Hammersley get to wear their “new” RAN-cam spotty uniforms. What’s old to Sloan, who presumably views television most of the time from safely within the  wall-to-wall reality show environment of the Special Biosphere, is not necessarily old to others.

In her gratuitous polemic promoting Sky News as a better alternative – it is part owned by the Murdoch empire which publishes the paper in which her words appear – she also says this:

“For anyone interested in Australian politics, the coverage is scant and unsatisfactory. It almost seems that the programmers regard it as unseemly to cover too much Australian politics. By contrast, the rescue of orang-utans in Kalimantan or melting ice sheets in the Antarctic – this opinion segment was carried in the news – are given lengthy coverage. I also stumbled on some sort of basic English-as-a-second-language teaching programme.”

In the utter vacuity of that comment, she exposes herself as a visiting fireman of the worst sort, the kind of blow-in to whom the lowest assessment is awarded: She doesn’t have a clue that she doesn’t have a clue.

Sloan might be good at economics (well, she is, and eminently readable about it too) but she’d be woeful as an editor or programmer, on her analysis of what might interest overseas neighbours. Australian politics are parochial, mundane and peripheral to the broadcast region, except in exceptional circumstances or when – as for example on the excellent news analysis shows broadcast by the network – some deeper coverage is warranted.

In her article in The Australian, Sloan also wrote this: “As far as the Australia Network is concerned, there is simply no case for its continued existence. The content of the network is second-rate and any notion that a contribution is being made to the soft diplomatic effort of Australia is simply laughable.

“It is very likely that Sky News would have produced a more interesting and vibrant range of programmes, which would have attracted a wider audience. But the bottom line is that we should be ditching this endeavour altogether and saving the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.”

There’s the rub.  Australia Network is not presented for an expatriate audience – though some of us watch it from time to time – or for wandering warblers, such as Sloan in this instance. And it’s very unlikely that news flashes about another traffic accident on the F3 (or whatever) would add anything to a foreign viewer’s perception of Australia.

Of course Australia Network could do a better job. Some lateral thinking is certainly required. An effective merging of the cerebral efforts of the ABC and SBS, for example, and creation of an international broadcasting division formally including both Radio Australia and Australia Network, could do the trick.

But that would need more funding, not less. It’s unlikely to get it while ever Australians – including, apparently, the otherwise cerebral Sloan herself – take the view that it’s not worth presenting a measured face to the world.

HECTOR’S DIARY Bali Advertiser, April 18, 2012

That’s the Spirit

Meghan Pappenheim, who will now be enjoying some well-earned downtime after the 2012 BaliSpirit Festival held at Ubud – where else? – from March 28 to April 1, tells us her moment of pure joy at this year’s event was taking part in Indra Widjanarko’s yoga class for kids. “Pure happiness for a split second,” she reports. There’s a photo on the festival site that might give a clue as to why the happiness was for a split second. Meghan’s a good sport. Oh, and a good sort.

She tells us too that the other amazing thing she took away from the festival was how international it was. She says that in the night concert area she found herself surrounded by full-pass holders who had flown to Bali for the event from 13 countries – one of them Germany, from where the man in question had visited Bali for every festival since its inception.

The global reach of BaliSpirit is certainly remarkable. One of Meghan’s night concert companions had come from Iran. The others were from India, Mexico, Slovakia, Brazil, Spain, the USA, Canada, Australia, China, the Philippines and France.

BaliSpirit is not just the five-day event itself. It has a strong outreach and community building aspect as well, which every year is augmented incrementally. Says Meghan: “Aside from the thousands we raised with our partners for local initiatives, I don’t believe we’ve ever had this kind of backing and programming input from local community organisations before.”

Way to go!

Get Real 1

If anyone wants a take on the unreality that drives Bali’s Wayan Mitty real estate sector, they need look no further than the chairman of the Real Estate Indonesia (REI) Bali branch, Dewa Putu Selawa, who said in late March that property prices had already increased by 15 percent since earlier in the month because of the government’s announcement of rising fuel prices.  He meant, of course, asking prices.

For good measure, he added that many property owners had withdrawn their properties from sale. Doubtless, as the unfortunate (and entirely blameless, naturally) victims of the twin epidemics of unreal expectation and rampant greed that afflict our island, they did so in pursuit of further excuse to ask for an astronomical price in the hope that some mug would pay it.

The fuel price rise did not eventuate, even though ending a US$14 billion a year subsidy on highly pollutant low-grade petrol is clearly a good idea on budgetary and environmental grounds. This was absolutely no surprise, given that the national government – unless energised by antediluvian misogynists into pursuing mini-skirted women in the astonishing belief that female knees are pornographic – has all the courage of a craven. And little grip on reality, except in relation to who might still be persuaded to vote for it in 2014.

A recent study by Knight Frank and Elite Havens showed that Bali has the highest rate of land price increases in Indonesia (up by an average 34 percent last year against 8-16 percent in other parts of Indonesia). Selawa explains it this way: “The property business is very sensitive to rumours and discourse. Many businessmen cancelled the sale of their properties because the prices would again increase when the fuel price is hiked. They were waiting to get the highest profit.”

A fuel price rise of 33 percent would increase costs, naturally, by some quantum. That would be after the price rise took effect and impacted on transportation costs, not before. We’re talking about profiteering here.

Get Real 2

It’s not only the big end of town that needs to take a reality check. We heard an amusing little tale the other day – well, it’s irritating really, but you’ve got to laugh – that hits one of the nails of Bali’s development dilemma squarely on the head. We won’t name names, because that would be invidious and in any case the problem is so widespread as to be unremarkable.

There’s a nice little restaurant we go to where the land upon which it stands has been leased for 20 years from the local – Balinese – owner. The land has been leased by an Indonesian, so the usual fleece-the-filthy-foreigner rule hardly applies. But in the nature of things here, and of course elsewhere in the country, such arrangements come along with unrelated, unscheduled and entirely promiscuous calls upon the pocket: the landowner needs money, for this, that, or some other purpose; the fridge is on the blink; the beer has run out; someone is ill perhaps; or maybe that remarkable aunt in Jauh Sekali (it is nearly always far enough away to discourage direct inquiry) has experienced a further bout of repeated death and there’s yet another funeral to be paid for. If you live here, you’ll know the score.

Anyway, on this occasion, we hear, the landowner was after some money (a not insubstantial sum apparently) and was culturally distressed when the readies were not ready to be handed over; that of course means the cash was not available immediately. He then visited the establishment and engaged in that other customary local practice – looking miffed, shouting loudly, and banging any available flat surface.

Apprised of the fact (again) that the casual, unbudgeted and off-contract sum he demanded was indeed not yet to hand, he said he would never lease his land again and would not be renewing the current 20-year lease (it has about 19 years to run). Fine, replied our restaurant proprietor, a lovely chap from Sumatra. That was his privilege. But in the meantime, for the rest of the lease period, he didn’t want to see the other fellow’s ugly mug anywhere near the place. Got that?

Here’s to Your Health

The new BIMC Hospital at Nusa Dua opens its doors on May 5, an event that will certainly please anyone on the Bukit who needs international-standard medical care and doesn’t want to risk a potential two-hour road trip to BIMC’s other facility at Simpang Siur. It will be especially useful for those whose blood pressure is apt to rise to crisis level if stuck in traffic on what would normally be a 25-minute, 12-kilometre trip if everyone stayed in lane and obeyed the other road rules, or gave a tinker’s cuss about anyone else on the road.

That’s far from the only benefit of the new hospital, of course. It includes a 24-hour accident and emergency centre, a 24-hour medical centre, cosmetic medicine and dental centres, and – good news indeed – a dialysis centre which should make it possible for tourists who require regular dialysis to consider holidaying at Nusa Dua or nearby.

BIMC Nusa Dua plans an open day on May 5 to introduce residents and visitors to the new facility, housed in purpose-built accommodation in the BTCD enclave just across the road from Bali Collection. The complex was built by a Perth-based Australian firm that specialises in hospital construction and fitted out with state of the art interiors and infrastructure by a South African company.

Best Endeavours

Applications have been invited for the Endeavour Awards for 2013. This Australian government scholarship programme provides opportunities for Indonesians to undertake study, research and professional development in Australia.

Announcing the awards on April 2, Australian ambassador Greg Moriarty said: “Twenty-six Indonesians were awarded Endeavour scholarships in 2011 and we look forward to receiving more Indonesian applications to participate in this internationally competitive, merit based scholarship programme.”

Applications close on June 30. Details are available at www.australiaawards.gov.au.

Why, Thank You

Diarists and other scribblers generally only hear from readers who have a gripe. This is not necessarily a problem. Often it gives you a good laugh, as for example not so long ago when a self-elected lunar luminary of long standing in these parts told Hector’s helper – it was in response to a polite inquiry – “Eat shit and die you twerp.”

How much more pleasant it was to receive feedback recently from reader Nurul J. Darmawan, who posted this note on Hector’s Facebook wall in response to the item in last edition’s Diary headed True to Herself:

“Hi Hector … reading your article really impressed me. What you said about Facebook is true in our lives. You’re right: we need late in life more real than virtual life. Facebook is where I find friends to add insight in my life. Your articles are very insightful and give an input to many people such as me. Bravo Hector’s Diary!”

And Again

Hector also tweets (some people say he twitters, but cockatoos don’t do that) and was recently followed – you do that on Twitter – by one Frank Seth, from Idaho, who advised: “I’m an undiscovered American watercolour artist. Have been painting over 53-plus years. Maybe this will be my year? I want to keep on painting as long as I can do it.”

Good on you, Frank.

Hector’s Diary appears in the fortnightly print edition of the Bali Advertiser, out every second Wednesday and on Hector’s Blog at http://wotthehec.blogspot.com. Hector is on Twitter (@scratchings) and Facebook (Hector McSquawky).

A Green Tinge is Common Sense

Bob Brown is the Australian Greens. Whether the present tense can convert smoothly to past, and the statement become “Bob Brown was the Australian Greens”, is a question Christine Milne and others will have to answer in due course.

More importantly for the moment, Brown is the most underrated politician in Australia. Others have noted that he fatally undermined Julia Gillard’s Labor government by suborning the Prime Minister into an alliance with the Greens she didn’t need after the August 2010 federal election. Labor and Gillard will pay a political price for that; its quantum is as yet unknown.

But the mainstream federal political parties cannot dismiss the impact of the Green vote. It is not just an environmental vote and far from being one simply for the tree huggers. The Australian Greens are just as dangerous for the Coalition as they are for Labor. This is not necessarily a bad thing: politics requires continuous renewal and Australia’s history is replete with examples of non-performing monopolies, duopolies, cosy little cartels, and idiotic, largely self-serving designs to take us back to the past.

It is far too early to say, and it is disingenuous to do so anyway, that the Green vote has peaked and that, with or without Brown, the party had already begun at least a cyclical decline. The Queensland and New South Wales state elections, which tossed out appallingly atrophied Labor governments, cannot safely be cited in support of that argument. Voters in both those states were on a mission to eliminate Labor as a state government party – these things are cyclical too and not confined to Labor – and not many of them wanted to bother stopping by the Greens on their way to punishing Labor.

At federal level, the parameters are different. Gillard and her government – in part quite unfairly – are the objects of opprobrium. Gillard’s broken carbon tax promise – Brown’s greatest poisoned chalice bequest – is fatal. The disgraceful refusal of the Prime Minister to deal as she should with NSW federal Labor MP Craig Thompson is yet another example of her fatal unwillingness to recognise unpalatable political fact.

But while Tony Abbott’s Coalition is riding high in the opinion polls, that doesn’t necessarily indicate they are a certain bet on Election Day, whenever that is.  It doesn’t matter of course that Labor characterises Abbott as “Mr No”. Public politics is all about scoring quick points – many of them vacuous – in pursuit of a catchy tabloid headline.  He does that well, chiefly, though he needs to keep himself in check.

Voters know that on the preponderance of legislation (which is after all the principal business of government – it’s not the morning news call) the government and the opposition are cooperative and mutually supportive. As Christopher Pyne said on Sunday (Insiders on ABC on April 15), the opposition has supported 87 percent of Labor’s legislation in the federal parliament.  The mortal combat is not on process and implementation; it is on winning the vote, on securing power.

Most people understand this. Many more Liberal-inclined voters than might be imagined do not in fact see the Greens as a fatal threat to themselves or to the nation. The same applies to many natural Labor voters. Mainstream politicians still cling to the theory that there’s a substantial rusted-on vote base. The clear signs of today’s politics indicate that this is not the case.

Under Bob Brown the Greens became a national force in Australian politics. It’s true they were assisted in this process by Cheryl Kernot’s treachery while leader of the other potential third force, the now defunct Australian Democrats. But it would wrong – and very foolish – to see the Greens as an aberration, an irritant that the combined electoral appeal of the major parties will eventually vitiate.

The argument over the carbon tax is an instance. It’s a foolish tax on many scores – not least in being just another tax imposed by government (any government, the point is not political) on its own fundamentally rapacious Peter and Paul programme that institutionalises a sleight of hand revenue versus spending regime.

Yet the related argument – that the world (which includes Australia, despite the efforts of some other fringe politicians to pretend otherwise) must move sensibly and as quickly as possible to fully renewable and non-polluting technologies – is one that resonates with almost everyone.

Brown’s political achievement swung off the back of this popular movement. He capitalised very skilfully on the innate common sense of the electorate. Voters don’t want a carbon tax (who would?) but they do want their government to move forward with emerging technologies.  Climate change cannot be denied (climate is a dynamic process that’s been with us ever since we cooled off a bit following the Big Bang) though you can argue over its direct cause and whether human activity has had any measurably deleterious effect. The policy imperative is clear, however: just as the climate changes, so must we adapt. Pollution is the greater threat, since it is immediate and – albeit on a relatively small scale in Australia itself – locally sited. Anything that reduces atmospheric emissions is to be welcomed, whether or not the underlying issue is seen by some as the threat of Armageddon-style climate change if nothing is done.

This is the genius of the political green movement, captured in spades by the former doctor from Tasmania who parlayed opposition to invidious development in his isolated island state into a national platform. His achievement deserves recognition, even if you do not think it deserves applause.

Bob Brown’s legacy, if new leader Christine Milne and deputy leader Adam Bandt prove to have the ticker to maintain it, is to have entrenched the Greens in Australia’s political landscape. For all sorts of reasons, however one chooses to vote, that is a good thing.

HECTOR’S DIARY Bali Advertiser, April 4, 2012

Off With the Pixels

Australia Network, the officially funded Asia-Pacific TV satellite channel run by the ABC, is always strapped for cash. It gets its money from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and is tasked with presenting an Australian image to the near abroad, so to speak.

It does a lot of good things with the modest stipend it gets from the government in Canberra (note to Bob Carr, new Foreign Minister: do something really useful and get it some more money so it doesn’t have to show us ancient examples of blinding self-abuse such as of The Gruen Transfer circa 2008) but its total annual budget would barely fund one of those awful reality TV shows everyone seems to like to watch nowadays.

(It is difficult to think why they do, except from madness or possibly ennui. Oscar Wilde once described foxhunting as the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable, and of course he was dead right, as he so often was.  A similarly fatal rapier thrust is urgently required to dismiss the relevance and taste of the disreputable modern sport of figjamming, especially as seen on reality shows.)

Australia Network is not targeted at Aussies who live beyond the boundaries of the Special Biosphere, even if they do tend to watch it for news from home and, occasionally, TV drama shows in a language they can understand (this rules out most Kiwi programmes).  We know this, having once asked that precise question. So given that the Diary is in that underclass – of Australia Network viewers about whom the operators affect a Rhett Butler air, frankly not giving a damn – the following complaint may well fall on deaf ears.

A new drama on air is Rake, starring the insouciant Richard Roxburgh playing yet another reprehensible but occasionally insightful roué, this time a barrister. It’s a good show, but it’s made for audiences accustomed to naked butts and bosoms on screen and these are pixellated out on Australia Network. Since the ubiquitous naughty words are bleeped out as well, watching the drama itself is difficult. You tend to watch for the pixels and listen for the bleeps and lose the plot completely, even in the brief interludes during which it is remotely visible.

The thought occurs that if nudity and foul language are judged unacceptable for Australia Network’s target audiences – and the censorious proclivities of their governments – the programming is wrong.

Of course, how you then effectively reflect popular Australian culture – given its preference for bad language, near-nakedness and self-centred disrespect for almost everything – is another matter.

Welcome to Purgatory

Legian resident Vyt Karazija – a good friend and eminently readable blogger – recently posted a cri de coeur that really should be read by anyone who still thinks Bali is a paradise populated exclusively by caring, sensitive, sentient souls in touch with their inner Muse. And then they should weep. It concerns a young Balinese woman whose life is being ruined by her grasping family, who wrench from her all the money she makes an enormous effort to earn.

It would not be an unusual story either; which makes it worse. You can – and you should – read it at www.borborigmus.wordpress.com. Look for the post headlined Suffering in Silence Behind the Smile.

Hello, Kitty

Villa Kitty, the cat refuge at Ubud that is celebrating its first birthday, had a fundraising night at Indus restaurant on March 27. We’re sure it all went well. Villa Kitty founder and Chief Meow, Elizabeth Grant Suttie, who in her other hat is personal assistant to Ubud identity Janet DeNeefe, is a fine organiser and a dedicated animal lover.

She tells us the fundraiser was brought forward from its original planning date due to the generosity of Edwina Blush, the sexy, sassy Australian jazz vocalist, songwriter, poet and (as Blush’s website self-describes) provocateuse. Someone once wrote of Blush that “she must have a tail under that gown”; and maybe that’s why she’s singing for the kitties, as it were. Or perhaps it is just that some people are cat people (the Diary is such) and it’s all in a good cause.

Villa Kitty needs to expand, we’re told, because it’s proving such a popular place with felines seeking accommodation.  We wish the establishment the very best of good fortune and we’ll keep up to date with its developing story.

Time Goes By

The delightful publicist Hellen Sjuhada, who among other things helps keep that haven of Catalan cuisine, El Kabron at Bingin Beach, in the public eye, tweeted the other day that she was old enough to remember when MTV played music videos. We sent a little tweet in response, noting that we were old enough to remember when there was no MTV. She replied in turn, saying she took her hat off to us. We said we were trying to age gracefully and that perhaps her hat might help.

But that’s the trick, when at the more mature end of whatever is one’s unknown allotment of Essential Vivacity: to age gracefully, which among other things surely means keeping abreast of technology. Well OK, disgracefully is all right too, and it’s a lot more fun.  But the real time-saver is to keep up with the pack. That’s why here at The Cage we’re right into gizmos. They cannot be allowed to bamboozle and must be conquered. We’re working on that.

It might be all downhill from here … but hey, as any former snow-skier can attest, it can all go so well until, finally, that unavoidable magnetic tree collects you.

Silly Clod

Why anyone would seek to break out of their villa at Nyepi defies belief. Why anyone would seek to do so merely to go in search of milk elevates the level of stupidity to stratospheric height. Yet this is apparently what an American villa owner in Seririt, Buleleng, chose to do on Friday, March 23, in an area where Nyepi rules are strictly enforced and where as a result his villa was blockaded by angry villagers.

His name, according to reports, is Claude. Perhaps he should be known as Clod. Nyepi might be an onerous imposition to people in Bali who are not Hindu, but there are ways round that. If it’s all too much, decamp to a designated tourism entity, where by convenient fiat some services continue and the lights remain more or less on. Or if you really want to make a noise, go to the Gilis off Lombok.

Or you could do what we did here at The Cage. We stayed home (having made sure we had sufficient milk for the duration) and stayed quiet. We didn’t observe the full requirements of Nyepi.  But we kept lighting to an absolute minimum and made sure none escaped our villa; that no noise got past the gate; and that the holy customs and practices of our Hindu neighbours were entirely undisturbed. That’s not only common sense; it’s also good manners.

Mea Culpa: In the Diary of March 21 we wrote that since Muslims would be allowed to go to mosque on Silent Day, it being a Friday, the authorities should provide the same privilege to Christians when Nyepi fell on a Sunday. An Indonesian friend who is a practising Christian tells us this is already the case.

True to Herself

Some of us live on Facebook – not literally you understand, it’s more of a virtual vitality – and some of us pay a price for this devotion. Some of us, for example, have Dear Spouses who wouldn’t touch Facebook with the grottier end of a used toe-rag, and say so quite often. But there you go.

Those among us who do use Facebook for rational reasons – those in other words who do not use it as their personal diary or for marginal notes on their day – generally get good results. Hector’s helper, for example, has many virtual friends, some of whom are actual people known to him. He says it’s great to be able to keep in contact in real time rather than waiting for the time-worn stuff that used to be stuffed into real mailboxes.

Then there are the others, collected as Friends rather in the manner that one might acquire buddies at a bar. These come and go. Hec’s helper recently lost a Dear Friend who rejoiced in the name of Ivana Logov.

Apparently, she finally worked out how to do that.

Bitter Glitter

We love a pun, as countless people have come to learn, some of them, poor things, believing this to be at their cost. And we’ve just been reminded of this little gem:

King Ozymandias of Assyria was running low on cash after years of war with the Hittites. His last great possession was the Star of the Euphrates, the most valuable diamond in the ancient world. So, desperate, he went to Croesus the pawnbroker to ask for a loan.

Croesus said: “I’ll give you 100,000 dinars for it.” The king protested: “But I paid a million dinars for it. Don’t you know who I am? I am the king!”

Said Croesus: “When you wish to pawn a star, it makes no difference who you are.”

Hector’s Diary appears in the fortnightly print edition of the Bali Advertiser, out every second Wednesday, and at www.baliadvertiser.biz. Hector is on Twitter (@scratchings) and Facebook (Hector McSquawky).

Bali’s Silent Day: A Time for Contemplating Navels – But Only Your Own

Friday this week (March 23) is Silent Day in Bali – Nyepi, the Balinese Hindu New Year. It is called Silent Day because for 24 hours, from 6am on the nominated day – the date varies, being on a lunar calendar – until 6am the next day, everything stops.

Well, not quite everything. Since Bali is part of today’s interconnected world the airport remains operationally open although no one can begin or end an air trip here over the silent 24 hours.  Transit flights continue and emergency landings are permitted, should that need arise. The seaports also close. All road traffic ceases, unless for emergency purposes.

This is the first Nyepi during our now lengthy residence in Bali that we’ve chosen to spend at home.  (We were living in Lombok in 2007, where Silent Day is silent for the local Hindus only in their own homes.) But the Silent Days of 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 were spent  at tourist accommodation exempted in part by the authorities – and presumably also by the bad spirits that in Hindu tradition are supposed to find Bali in darkness, conclude there is no one here, and move on to work their evil ways elsewhere – from the lights-out-no-noise rules.

These sojourns themselves have provided illuminating moments in our Bali experience, especially in 2010 when, at a small resort bungalow property at Candi Dasa in East Bali, dinner finished at 7pm and the staff chivvied us all back to our rooms (where we could have lights on if the windows were blacked out by curtains). Fine, we thought; these guys are really devout and we should naturally support their beliefs.

So it was something of a surprise when shortly afterwards the (no longer) on duty crew  arrived at the pool – just outside our little bungalow – with all sorts of pool toys and had a great party.

It reminded us of 2006, when our housekeeper firmly suggested we should disappear to a hotel for the duration and then let on that she and her friends would be having a “quiet party” at our place in our absence.

This year, our present housekeeper seems slightly discomfited by the fact that we’re staying home in the dark. She has several times mentioned that it would be much better for Mr and Mrs to go away. We’ll be having our quiet party, of course, with our headphones and our Kindles, our low-set lanterns and our blind-sided cooktop; we just shan’t be telling anyone that. (We’ll turn the pool filter system off for the day but the main pump’s staying on since it runs the water and the lavatories.)

Times and traditions change, of course. In our own western tradition, you’ve only got to look at Christmas and Easter with any sense of religious or social history to understand that point. And despite claims that Bali Hinduism is strictly keeping to its set-in-stone liturgy and traditions, it’s not.

This year, not for the first time, the local government and Hindu hierarchy have warned against turning the pre-Silent Day tradition of Ogoh-Ogoh – a religious celebration in which young people produce giant representations of demons and other entities which symbolically fight it out in the streets – into an occasion for secular point-scoring.

Ogoh-Ogoh requires that the “good spirits” always win. But “anti-korupsi”, a popular theme nationwide and also of this year’s Ogoh-Ogoh representations, is not a spiritual matter – neither, apparently, is corruption itself – and does not earn a mention in the sacred texts.

Two years’ running, the local government has monstered the radio and television companies into blacking out broadcasts on and to the island over Silent Day. Only people with parabola dishes (those not tied to a particular provider’s satellite service) win on this one. Hey, we’ve got a parabola.

The official island-wide rules for Nyepi are strict. Tourists for example are confined to their accommodation for the duration, and what level of service – and lighting – they get is largely up to the management of the establishment. Early dinners and minimal lighting are inevitably the result, even at plush five-star resorts.

Lack of lighting is not necessarily a problem for local expatriates. Those without generators have been well trained by the state power monopoly company in how to blunder around in the dark.

In recent years the effort to keep strictly to the ancient requirements of Silent Day have been given some prominence outside the Hindu community by global greenies who see it as an exemplar for the world – everyone should turn the lights out, it would be a jolly good thing – and the more lunar-connected among local expatriates.

And totem-fixated greenies and the lunar-connected aside, the push to revitalise Nyepi by returning to ancient precepts is fine, except that in a society as diverse as Bali’s – speaking of the Hindu population only: others, including other Indonesians who are not far short of making up half the island’s population nowadays, have a very limited role in discussing such matters – those ancient precepts are pretty diverse themselves. There are villages, for example, where the local tradition is that life continues as normal over Nyepi – including lighting and cooking and doing all sorts of other normal activities – except that on the day, you remain within the village boundaries.

There are “relaxed” Banjars (these are local community based traditional organisations) and more traditional ones. Ours, on the southern Bukit, is rather traditional. We never really hear from them unless they remember to come and collect the Rp25,000 a month (about $2.80 at the moment) we’re supposedly levied for the privilege of living among them. (It is a privilege and we’re glad we do and happily pay – apparently whenever the beer money runs out.)

We do hear from them at Nyepi, however. They send round a circular that sets out in fine detail what you can do (contemplate your navel is about the extent of it) and what you can’t. You cannot work; you may not use electricity or naked flame; or play games or entertain yourself. And if you do commit any of these offences the village security force (Pecalang) will find out; count on it.

Specifically, this year, when we troubled to read the document fully as we’re staying home for the non-festivities, we learned that while you are encouraged to contemplate your own navel you must on no account consider the merits of anyone else’s: Lust is also on the no-no list.

HECTOR’S DIARY Bali Advertiser March 21, 2012

Banking on it

Janet DeNeefe, doyenne of dinners and instigator of that annual Ubud fixture, the writers’ and readers’ festival, has been busy lately. That was in Melbourne, where she did a stint demonstrating the cuisine of Bali to residents of that alternatively cold, hot, wet, dry city at the southern extremity of continental Australia. (Only Tasmania, where the Southern Ocean winds truly find an edge and evoke the true ambiance of Europe, is closer to Antarctica. It’s a lovely island; really. The Diary spent two years there long ago.)

But we digress. DeNeefe’s culinary exemplars teased taste buds in suburban Hawthorn – not the Diary’s preferred footy suburb: we barrack for St Kilda – over a series of evenings this month, in aid of promoting Bali and DeNeefe’s latest cookbook.  That’s all to the good. It will have had its spinoff in favour of this year’s UWRF, the eighth, from October 3-7.

DeNeefe said of her Melbourne culinary enterprise: “I want to highlight the majesty of Indonesian food in all its glory. I will be featuring dishes from all over the archipelago, spotlighting elegant curries, golden seafood broths, wok-tossed greens, banana-leaf specials, sambals and an array of traditional and contemporary desserts.”

Her food nights were staged at Wantilan Balinese Restaurant. Hopefully DeNeefe found some elegant curry-eaters to sample her elegant curries.

This year’s festival theme, announced with a flourish this month, is This Earth of Mankind: Bumi Manusia, from the title of a work by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, regarded as one of Indonesia’s greatest contemporary writers. It was the first book in Pramoedya’s historical fiction trilogy, The Buru Quartet, first published in 1980. Pramoedya died in 2005.

The story is set at the end of the Dutch colonial rule and was written while Pramoedya was a political prisoner on the island prison of Buru in eastern Indonesia. His life there was one of deprivation, hard labour and physical cruelty. Denied even the most rudimentary writing implements, he got around this obstacle by narrating the work to his fellow prisoners, who shared it around the prison. The work was maintained and kept until eventually Pramoedya was allowed to write.

The narrator in the book, Minke, wishes to be a writer. He is told: “Write always about humanity, humanity’s life, not humanity’s death. Yes, whether it’s animals, ogres, gods, or ghosts that you present, there’s nothing more difficult to understand than humanity. That’s why there is no end to the telling of stories on this earth.”

That’s sound advice. Here’s some more, from another Pramoedya work:

“It is really surprising sometimes how a prohibition seems to exist solely in order to be violated. And when I disobeyed I felt that what I did was pleasurable. For children such as I at that time – oh, how many prohibitions and restrictions were heaped on our heads! Yes, it was as though the whole world was watching us, bent on forbidding whatever we did and whatever we wanted. Inevitably we children felt that this world was really intended only for adults.”

Pramoedya is referring to children. But the prohibition on prohibition that he implies should be mandatory is no less valid more widely, and should be insisted on for governments whose grasp of democracy extends only to acceptance of their own official truth.

Last year’s UWRF was sponsored by leading Australian bank ANZ, which owns Panin Bank locally.  Hopefully the 2012 festival will benefit from that sponsorship, renewed.

Nyepi Non-Silence

Silent Day, the annual 6am-6am Balinese Hindu seclusion that shuts the island down, falls on a Friday this year (it’s on March 23). Because Friday is the Muslim day of prayer, the authorities have agreed that Muslims may leave their houses to walk to prayers at the nearest mosque. This is a fair concession and should be applauded for several reasons.

The first and most important reason is that it recognises that Bali is not exclusively Hindu. It has never been so, of course, but in the distant past the numbers who followed other religions were tiny. Not so nowadays.

The importance of the day to practising Hindus (and to local communities who traditionally mark the day in significantly varied ways) cannot be gainsaid, should never be, and must be protected by law.  But it is time symbolic restrictions were confined to traditional practices: there is no reason to black-out broadcasting for example.

And there’s a further issue, given the precedent set for Friday prayers: If Nyepi falls on a Sunday, Christians should be granted the same concession.

Not so Mobil

Once, as they say, is a misfortune. Twice looks likely to set a trend. And thrice definitively establishes this. Diary and Distaff have now three times tried to buy a car – a mobil in these parts – from the Suzuki distributor here, PT Indo Bali. On each occasion, deal done except for the final signature, these fine sellers of motor vehicles have dealt themselves out of the game by failing to provide a test-drive vehicle, finding an eleventh-hour reason to demand more money, or refusing to hold the nominated vehicle pending final payment.

We had been unwilling this time to venture into the premises on Imam Bonjol in Denpasar where these reluctant salespeople are to be found. But our attempt to acquire our chosen vehicle from a new dealer on the by-pass at Jimbaran failed when that was too hard for them too and they flick-passed us onto PT Indo Bali.

It’s a shame, because Suzukis are fine vehicles. But we’ve had it. We’ll buy another make from some outfit that actually closes deals.

Open Arms

We hear that a new watering hole has opened in Banjar Anyar, on the northern extremity of the KLS traffic snarl. It’s the Plumbers Arms, which is trading without benefit of the singular or plural possessive in the ungrammatical way of the modern world. It is billed as an English pub and is the latest venture by that peripatetic Anglo-Australian couple, Nigel and Jacky Ames, who do all sorts of other things around Bali and in the Gilis off Lombok.

We wish them good fortune with the new enterprise. Presumably they’re chilling that awful English beer. We would have inquired about that, except we did ask about the opening and heard nothing back. Perhaps all that hot froth got in the way.

Mangoland Rules!

There’s an election in the Australian state of Queensland on Saturday (March 24). This is a matter of decidedly finite importance to anyone outside Queensland – the north-eastern third of the Australian continent – unless they are former residents; or perhaps for readers of lately published satirical novels.

Ross Fitzgerald, a professorial type well known to Hector – he’s also a frequent Bali sojourner and will be here again in June – has written a book, Fools’ Paradise: Life in an Altered State, which is about an election in the fictional state of Mangoland. For those who do not know, Queensland produces a lot of mangoes.

Fitzgerald, who wrote the book with Trevor Jordan, is a historian and Mangoland aka Queensland is a rich field for anyone interested in examining the venalities of politics. It’s a readable yarn, except that – irritatingly – it uses discrete (meaning severally) for discreet (which among other things means don’t get caught).  Never mind; this is after all the post-literate age.

The book – dedicated thus, “For all the fools we have known, including ourselves” – is published by Arcadia, an imprint of Melbourne publisher Australian Scholarly Books. Fitzgerald has written several books, including Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia.

Corked Out

A kind friend, possibly mindful of the conditions endured by drinkers of alcohol in these parts – it is Haram to the majority of Indonesians after all – sent Hector this little thought the other day: “Nobody has ever come up with a great idea after a second bottle of water.”

Quite so; it’s no wonder all those earnest seminars and conferences, locally and globally, seem to have difficulty fixing anything other than the date of their next gabfest.  But our problem in Bali is of a different kind. Given the price of the fermented product of the grape hereabouts, few people can come up with a second bottle of wine.

Hector’s Diary appears in the print edition of the fortnightly Bali Advertiser, out every second Wednesday, Hector tweets @scratchings and is on Facebook (Hector McSquawky).

HECTOR’S DIARY Bali Advertiser, March 7, 2012

Dolts Rule

It’s always fun visiting the Odd Zone; it’s the very best of your diarist’s former domiciles, for all sorts of reasons, most of them a cause for wry smiles or irritated grimaces. There’s the traffic, for one thing. It largely obeys the road rules and even stays in lane; what’s more, at traffic lights if there are, say, three lanes of traffic marked, none of the vehicles present attempts to create eight lanes. It’s very confusing for drivers accustomed to Bali’s road system (sic) and driver behaviour.

But the very worst of the Australian experience, for those citizens of the Odd Zone who have exchanged You’re Being Watched resident status for the significantly better benefits of Frequent Visitor, is the bureaucracy in general and the customs and quarantine and airport security you encounter in particular.

On our way back to Bali from Perth the weekend before last, for example, the Diary and Distaff lost some valuable soft cheeses – the finest products of Western Australia no less – on the risible grounds that they were “gels” and thus suspected of being potentially explosive.

We all value airport security and agree that mad shoe bombers and others of incomprehensibly suicidal intent should be detected and diverted from their proposed criminal acts. But a little common sense wouldn’t go astray among those whose daily duties arm them with bureaucratic instructions that an imbecile would instantly recognise as stupid.

If the two Aussie border control heroes who fished around in our cooler bag had exercised common sense when they detected brie and haloumi (we had to insist they dropped it down the disposal chute while we watched – we’re not in the business of providing free gourmet foods to anyone) they’d also have confiscated the prime soft Tasmanian blue with which we were also armed.

But they didn’t.  For that oversight they and their over-prescriptive masters should be shoe-ins for a Dumbo award.

There’s a serious side to this.  Frequent visitors have plenty of other places they can choose to go instead, where you’re much less likely to get cheesed off by doltish buffoons on food patrol.

Bit of a Stumble

It’s not always as much fun as it should be returning to Bali. This time The Diary stepped on a hidden road-level metal guardrail on alighting from the bus from the plane to the terminal and overstretched a hamstring.  Perhaps it is there to deter bus drivers from motoring up the terminal steps. But the embarrassing limp that resulted has not been a Favourite Moment.

In the terminal, we ran into some nattily dressed customs and excise officers who, while presumably present to clamp down on the informal system of paying under the counter for extra alcohol above the one-litre limit attempted to extort even more. Unfortunately for them they had to deal with the Distaff, who was not in the best of moods. We paid, but not on the basis of their aberrant and singularly profitable mathematical concept.

Flagging

By happenstance, the day after our return from the Odd Zone (Western Division) the Perth online newspaper WA Today ran an article headlined “Where the bloody hell are all the tourists?” Coarse language (along with bad grammar) is only one irritating element of life as it is lived in the continent of kangaroos.

We tweeted that, suggesting that perhaps all the tourists were in Bali. They’re not, of course – for some strange reason Aussies are also travelling elsewhere overseas on cheap holidays – but one of the reasons they’re not packing Western Australia’s many attractions is the cost of doing so. We sympathise with WA’s tourism marketers and agree there are a great many reasons to be a tourist on their patch, among them the beaches and the wineries. And beaches might be a mass market chance, except that most Australians already live within reach of perfectly adequate alternatives to flying 3000 kilometres to sit on one in WA.

Other tourism options are largely for niche markets. It’s a tough business, as Bali itself is finding out.  Pursuing quantum figures in tourism is fine if you’re only looking – in the Australian context and here – for the Yeh ‘n’ Neh crowd and big sales of “I Drink Beer and Have the Belly to Prove It” vests.

The Diary looks forward to regular trips to WA where, in the south-west particularly, there are many establishments offering prime potable products. On our recent visit to home territory we dined and drank at both Voyager (whose Girt by Sea pinot noir is fabulous and not only for its name, which comes from a memorably ridiculous line in the Australian national anthem) and Wise, a personal favourite because it looks over an expanse of generally calm north-facing ocean and has a Provencal air. Voyager affects a Cape Dutch architectural style (quite well) and has lovely roses – and perhaps the biggest flag in Australia apart from the double-decker bus-sized flutterer atop Parliament House in Canberra.

Quality Counts

On the question of looking for quality rather than quantity (and the higher per visitor spend that results) it’s cheering to hear that Bali proposes to shift its focus that way. We’re under siege here, after all, though not solely from foreign tourists: all those chaps who bring their cars with them on holiday from Jakarta and Bandung and Surabaya, and their road manners and driving skills too, are a nuisance.

It’s long overdue, even if we’re pitching for three million foreign tourists to write another record. Bali’s infrastructure – not just the roads and the pathetic power system – is literally cracking under the strain of the tourist load. Provincial second assistant secretary Ketut Wija recently pronounced upon this at a planning meeting on economic development held appropriately enough in Lombok (which should be taking a larger portion of the tourist load, except that Bali keeps putting rocks in the road of that endeavour) when he said: “We no longer will prioritise the quantity of tourist arrivals, but will now place the emphasis on quality of those visitors.”

Wija said Bali – an island of only 5632 square kilometres, 0.2 percent of Indonesian national territory – has between five and six million visitors annually. It is also a magnet for Indonesians from other islands seeking work, with about 400,000 arriving to settle each year.

Skippy’s a Winner

The Diary’s side trip on the Australian tour – mentioned in the Diary last issue – was by Qantas flying Perth-Canberra-Perth.  We’re now a mere bronze QFlyer (the halcyon days of pointy-end platinum status are long gone) but a happy confluence of an accommodating friend at head office and unoccupied seats in business class resulted in upgrades both ways. It was delightful to have space to stretch the legs, food to match the ambiance and actual metal cutlery to eat it with, and an unobstructed view out of the window.

Both flights were into the gloaming and then the night, affording the Diary an opportunity also long forgone to feast the eyes on the amazing light-hues off to the south in the stratospheric distance and to imagine all that ice-waste far away beyond the Southern Ocean. It stirs the Muse, that sort of thing.

Another stirring element of the flight was a dangerous confection, the work not of the Devil but of Maggie Beer, who may be one of his culinary agents but is certainly an Australian icon. Her burnt fig and honey ice cream is to die for, though one naturally hopes not immediately.

The Purser on the flight agreed, when we beckoned him over and said: “Maggie Beer is a bad, bad woman.” A big smile lit up his face and he replied: “Oh I know, I know. But I’m lucky. I live only 30 minutes up the road from her shop.”

It’s a Riot

It is the lot of the unlucky diarist to be elsewhere when something happens. We had to watch the unfolding drama of the Kerobokan prison riot through the imperfect prism of Australian television.  Matt Brown was measured – and by far the best – on ABC. The commercial stations were their usual breathlessly uniformed selves.  And that’s such a shame because most Australians get what passes for their news from tabloid TV.

The Kerobokan insurrection was hardly unexpected. It beggars belief that the custodial authorities are not provided with sufficient funds to properly house all those that their companions in crime, the police and the judicial system, insist on jailing.

A solution is more prison space so that at least the basics of human existence can be practised in clink. There are some useful human rights rules the government could read up on, in that regard, too.

Oh All Right Then

Last issue’s guarded reference to Titian and ladders – it was in the context of the Renaissance exhibition at the Australian National Gallery – brought a rash of requests to expand upon it. So OK, we were wrong to attempt to be decorous. Here’s the limerick in question:

While Titian was mixing Rose Madder

His model reclined on a ladder.

The position to Titian

Suggested coition,

So he ran up the ladder an’ ‘ad ‘er.

Hector’s Diary appears in the Bali Advertiser’s print edition, out every second Wednesday, and on the newspaper’s website www.baliadvertiser.biz. Hector is on Twitter (@scratchings) and on Facebook (Hector McSquawky).