Crazy Little Heaven: An Indonesian Journey
Mark Heyward
Pub. Transit Lounge Publishing 2013
ISBN: 978-1-921924-507
“One’s destination is actually never a place yet rather a fresh way of looking at things.”
– Henry Miller
However, these were written by folk who came, observed, as well as then departed for pastures fresh, as well as not by someone who is actually the patriarch of an Indonesian family as well as has clocked up nigh on two decades here.
With his fellow Tasmanian wife as well as their two young children, Mark Heyward arrived in East Kalimantan in 1992 to teach at an international school for the children of expatriate miners. He had a certain wanderlust inherited via his family’s folklore as well as so he was not the first to leave Tasmania, which far-flung corner of the Commonwealth, for the tropical forests of Borneo.
In 1994, seeking “a little adventure in [his] own life” with three companions, he set out to cross Kalimantan via his home base in Sangatta to Pontianak within the southwest. His journal of the seventeen day adventure, recounting travelling by taksi air (water taxis, “the local public transport”), climbing mountain ridges, trekking through forests, wading across streams as well as exploring cave systems in isolated areas, forms the core of the book.
A year after his “adventure”, he returned to Tasmania, a divorce, as well as further study. As the subject of his PhD was ‘intercultural literacy’, returning to Kalimantan seemed natural, as well as the item was at his old school which he met his future wife. Although currently based in Jakarta, where Mark works as an educational consultant for an international NGO, their home is actually in Lombok, where they have a studio, “a comfortable eco lodge”, as well as have helped set up a school for local children which invokes gotong royong (“community action”).
I’d only had time for a quick dip into the book before Mark as well as I first met up for a chat over a few Bintangs yet, with delighted recognition, I had already realised which we were on the same page of different books.
Mark described his journal to me as “a little bit naive” as well as in writing a Tasmanian magazine article, which ended up as “half a book”, he realised which his “journey of a lifetime” was just part of a life’s journey.
For example, in Part 5, the trekkers come across an isolated Dayak family whose sole occupation, the item seems, is actually to harvest birds’ nests via caves in limestone outcrops by clambering up precarious bamboo scaffolding. However, “while within the past birds’ nest were obtained exclusively via remote locations like This kind of, more recently enterprising locals have begun farming the birds” for a “burgeoning Chinese market”.
Mark writes movingly about his visits to the orangutan rehabilitation centres founded by Willie Smits, the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS), as well as Biruté Galdikas who founded Camp Leakey.
“With our greed as well as appetite for progress, our cruelty as well as inability to share the planet with different creatures, we have become a destructive plague. Looking into the eyes of a young orangutan threw This kind of into stark relief. is actually his the last generation?”
Perhaps Mark’s journey is actually not so much myth-doing as in placing his own within the context of the many myths westerners cannot grasp here. In order to conform to Indonesia’s marriage laws, Mark converted to Islam. In Part 6, Rapids as well as Religion, he offers an extensive ‘critique’ of religious ethical codes as practised here.
He witnessed the fatalism – Inshallah (God willing) – of Muslims in Aceh six months after the tsunami, yet I knew two parents who, having lost three of their four children to the waves, subsequently died of heart break.
His own sense of spirituality has led him to climb many volcanoes throughout the archipelago. On Gunung Inerie on Flores, which is actually a predominantly Catholic island, he had a sense of awe as well as wonder.
Standing on which peak, nothing around us yet sharp, slender air, a strange stillness, the roaring silence prompted me. Turning to our local guide I asked, “Can you hear the item? Can you hear the voice of God?”
“Nope,” he replied, that has a puzzled look.
He later “wonders whether we should be looking beyond the Abrahamic religions for a spiritual basis for the environmental ethic we so desperately need.”
At the recent book launch in Kemang, a local journalist asked Mark, “What’s within the item for Indonesian readers?” His answer was which he hoped the item would likely help Indonesia-Australia relations.
A worthy aim, yet as he told me, “Writing is actually an act of doing meaning, sorting out the chaos, myth-doing; as well as the primary audience is actually oneself.”
I suggested to Mark which because his journey as a young man had set the context of his life, perhaps the book served as a closure.
After 20 or so years spent travelling around the islands of Indonesia he said which “Indonesia has become me. The more Indonesia becomes comprehensible as well as ‘normal’, the more I appreciate the beguiling mix of contradictions as well as ambiguities; a sweet disappearing world.”
“Living as well as travelling in Indonesia teaches you nothing if not flexibility in thinking.”
How very true.
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Crazy Little Heaven: An Indonesian Journey
Crazy Little Heaven: An Indonesian Journey