HAPPY ISLE OF BALI

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 55, Issue 3938, 11 August 1937, Page 4

HAPPY ISLE OF BALI

SHOP WINDOWS OF THE INDIES. BEAUTY’S LURE. (By D. Batchelor, in Melbourne Age.) Bali is the shop window of the Dutch East Indies. There can be no more startlingly beautiful place in the world; no place more unspoilt, and no paradise inhabited by more genuinely happy people. The Dutch have really grasped the possibilities of this little island as the. most alluring haven for tourists nature has to offer. Bali does not have to trim and polish itself, to put lace curtains in its windows, to meet the inspection of the traveller; it simply has to go on being Bali, and its inhabitants simply have to go on being Balinese.

It has been laid down as an axiom that no writer who realises the limitations of language will attempt to describe a humming-bird or to write about Bali; the former because it can’t be done, and the latter because it has been. And yet, hackneyed as Bali is as a theme with travelogue poetasters, the man in the Australian street probably knows almost nothing about this next-door neighbour. All he vaguely knows about Bali is what the women wear or rather, what they dpn’t wear.

As a fact, the Balinese women, universally advertised" with an anatomy as carefully selected as Garbo’s face or Dietrich’s ankles, is the very least of the lures of Bali. As often as not she does not unveil her charms, ami when she does she generally should not have bothered to. MIRACLE OF BEAUTY. The country itself is the chief point about Bali; the real breath - taking miracle of beauty. With bewildering speed it changes from great terraces of luminous green rice fields wicn looming cloud-girded mountains beyond, to profuse jungle or infinite ravine with a soundless flow of silver water far below tangled canopies cf giant ferns. Perhaps the rice fields are the most dazzlingly beautiful and the commonest of all that kaleidoscopic Balinese landscape. The square fields with the crop standing in glittering water drop in curving terraces from mountain tops above or sheer away to horizons where forests of cocoanut palm stretch out in impenetrable jungle. The green of the rice field is not of this world. It is so blazingly brilliant that it almost blinds the eye tha': dares to stare into this green sun of light. It makes a shining emerald or an Irish meadow look as dingy "s an aspidistra. And then a sudden twist of a Balinese road can waft you like a magic carpet from such a gay scene into a landscape conjured cut of a nightmare of the mountains of the moon. The green fires of rice fields are behind you, with their wallowing pigpink water - buffalo and pyramidhatted bronze peasants, and suddenly below you glows Lake Kintamanu, as grey and still as a sick pearl, with Batoer towering up, vast wall on wall of dead mountain; a huge molten valley, foothills, and flank, and cloudcapped peak of lava. The brooding volcano has kept silence now for ten years. , Then that terrible mouth now lightly wreathed in smoke, poured forth a red torrent that utterly overwhelmed a large village, which only the strict insistence of the Dutch succeeded in getting evacuated in time. TOBACCO TOOTHPASTE. The country and the people make up the sum of the charm of Bali. It is the sort of paradise where you do no:, have to do, merely to be, to reap the full joy of life. You cannot help loving the friendly, light-hearted people of Bali. Witn their broad brows, rounded cheeks and pointed chins, the men at least are beautiful, while the poise of the women as they sway along, flexible yet firm, with great loads balanced their heads, does something to compensate for the religiously filed teeth and the mouth red and reeking with sirih (betel nut). As a fact, the Balinese grow tobacco for one sole pur-

pose; not to smoke it, still less tc sell it, but to rinse the sirih from their mouth with a chew of it. The Dutch should spare no effort to encourage the growing of this mordant toothpaste of a crop. It is hard to imagine that so peaceable and cheerful a race as the Balinese ever had to be conquered, but in fact the Dutch finally annexed the island by forceful methods as lately as 1908, and now it is not necessary for the handful of white men stationed there to have the smallest of military forces to control over 1,000,000 Balinese. A few police are all that is needed, and they, like the gilded army of Monte Carlo, have little to do but add to the picturesqueness of the scene, for serious crime does not exist on the island. Theft is almost unknown—the ancient Balinese penalty for it was the loss of the riglit hand at the wrist; and every Balinese needs his right hand to extend palm uppermost whenever he meets a tourist.

I inquired whether the island was governed solely by the Dutch, or whether the Balinese have a say in the disposal of their country. The Balinese help to govern Bali, I was assured. Over in Java there is a sort of Parliament of native races of the Dutch East Indies, The People’s Council, and out of the hundred or so delegates one represent the million inhabitants of Bali. But, however, inadequate this may appear, there can be no doubt that the people of Bali aie perfectly well satisfied with their lot. The poorest labourer in the rice fields may earn but a shilling a day, and ba taxed on that to make superb roads for the motor cars of tourists, but a shilling a day can be spread a long way in Bali. A family cf six who spend more than fivepence a day wouij be accused of vulgar ostentation in their mode of living by the standards of decent Balinese domesticity. IMPROVEMENT NOT NEEDED. The smallest coin in the currency of the Dutch East Indies is a cent, which is worth about a third of an Australian penny. Among the Ba.inese, however, such a sum is too vast to be squandered all in one piece. It is split up into seven Chinese kopens, coins too small to be recognised O.v the Dutch Government, though each is large enough to buy a cup of coffee and a meal of rice for any Not that there are any hungry Balinese, any more than there are any unemployed. It seems certain that an uneducated Balinese will be an anachronism in a few years’ time. The Dutch Government, which has not attempted to. convert the Balinese from his ancestral Hinduism, has created schools where every child from the lowest class and humblest family may learn to read and write his own language. If he shows exceptional ability a wider field offers. I met in Den Pasar a Balinese clerk who ha 1 been sent to Java as to a sort of finishing school, and had come back speaking French, English, Dutch and German.

But it is doubtful whether the Balinese can be improved by what would pass in, say, a Sydney suburb as education. Such learning would teach him to be a better Sydney suburbanite whereas what is wanted is for him to be a perfect Balinese. That end his own instincts, family and tradition will teach him to attain. I saw two small boys at work on a wooden screen which the best artistic brains of Europe could hardly have taught them" to create. I saw a humble village artisan producing a museum piece of a huge wooden horse, fit coffin for the cremation of a kinsman whose ashes were to be throw into the sea after a ceremony which Reinhardt could not have bettered from the point of view of production.

1 saw the gamelan and legong danced in ritual gold filigree sarong, by peasants from the rice fields and taxi drivers and labourers. Our education has nothing to offer to such people who desire to perfect themselves in the art of being Balinese. If we can only teach them not to 6e taught Bali will remain the island of a dream or vision for long years to come.