Scott
Merrillees, BATAVIA in Nineteenth Century Photographs (Archipelago
Press, 2000); 282 pp: A$ 85 plus postage from scott@bataviabook.net
Scott Merrillees, Greetings from JAKARTA: Postcards of a Capital 1900-1950 (Equinox Publishing, 2012); 248 pp; A$ 50 plus postage from scott@bataviabook.net; or Rp 495,000 plus postage from www.periplus.com
Scott Merrillees, JAKARTA: Portraits of a Capital 1950-1980 (Equinox Publishing, 2015); 159 pp; A$ 50 plus postage from scott@bataviabook.net; or Rp 495,000 plus postage from www.periplus.com
“I recently came across three books that
trace, pictorially, the history of the development of Jakarta, from the
earliest days of photography in the mid-nineteenth century through to 1980:
Browsing
through the books brought back a kaleidoscope of memories.
It all began in early
1962 when, as a newly arrived 18-year-old, first year student at Sydney
University, I sat down in Fisher Library next to an Asian student. We got
talking and about what we were studying and I told him I was studying French
and German. He told me his name was Albert Kwee and that he came from
Indonesia. He said that although he was of Chinese descent, he did not speak
Chinese as his family had lived in Indonesia for many generations and only
spoke Indonesian, the national language. Curious, I asked him about the
language. He wrote down a few sentences, showing me that it was written
perfectly phonetically in Latin script, had a very simple, straightforward
grammar in that its verbs did not conjugate and its nouns and adjectives did
not decline. For someone who had struggled through high school with the
grammatical idiosyncrasies of Latin, German and French, and the intimidating
nature of French pronunciation, Indonesian seemed like a breath of fresh air.
Soon after, I found that Sydney University had a Department of Indonesian and
Malayan Studies. I quickly enrolled, and in so doing determined the course of
the rest of my life. Albert became a life-long friend, both of us being best
men at our respective weddings. I ended up completing my bachelor, master and
doctoral degrees in Indonesian studies, have often lectured on Indonesia, and
still work as an Indonesian interpreter and translator.
Half way through my
first year studies, I was so taken by Indonesian studies that I decided to buy
a ticket on a Lloyd Triestino passenger liner to see the country for myself.
This is how, in December 1962, I caught my first glimpse of Indonesia from the
deck of a ship as it sailed into Tanjung Priok, Jakarta’s harbour. I still have
the letters I wrote home to my family and upon reading them now, I am
transported back. In the distance behind the city, there were mountains and on
the wharf below, I could see Albert’s family holding up a sign saying “Kwee” so
that I could recognise them. As they drove me to their home, I was overwhelmed
by the stifling heat and humidity, the kaleidoscopic impression of becaks
(trishaws), cars, army lorries, buses, street vendors, people, people and
people. They drove me to their suburban house on Jalan Mangga Besar Raya in Kota,
the north district of the city.
In 1962 in the front yard of the Kwee family
home on Jalan Mangga Besar Raya
Jalan Mangga Besar
Raya was a wonderful introduction to Indonesian urban life. There was the
constant “tok-tok” of bamboo sticks and “clang-clang” of metal bells coming
from the street as a steady stream of vendors walked, peddled and rode past the
front gate selling a multitude of products, ranging from every conceivable type
of food delicacy to every household good one might possibly want. Up the street
was Prinsen Park to which families thronged to enjoy the rides, performances
and recreational facilities that had existed since colonial times. At the other
end of the street were the major thoroughfares of Jalan Hayam Wuruk and Jalan
Gajah Mada, which were then still rather grand tree-lined boulevards.
I soon became immersed
in the Jakarta of the early sixties. The Kwee family drove me around the city
to see the newly built monuments to Sukarno’s vision of a modern Indonesia:
Sarinah, Jakarta’s first department store (still under construction), the new
Japanese-built Hotel Indonesia, and the new Russian-built Senayan sports
complex for the Asian Games with the Gelora Bung Karno stadium.
En route to the south
of the city to see the newly established satellite residential district of
Kebayoran Baru they drove me over the new Swedish-built Semanggi (meaning
“Cloverleaf”) Bridge:
As Scott Merrillees
comments: “In this post card we are looking across a recently completed and
still very dusty Semanggi with the new Senayan stadium in the distance.”
I recall that driving
south to Kebayoran Baru I could still see rice fields on either side of the
road south from the city.
It is only now that I
realise I had a very privileged experience of a world that was soon to change
for ever. The city has grown from around 3 million when I arrived in 1962 to
the current largely unmanageable population of over 10 million, and continues
to grow inexorably. The Kwee’s house on Jalan Mangga Besar Raya is now long
gone and the suburban atmosphere I experienced there has been replaced by
hotels, nightclubs, brothels and shopping malls. Becaks and many other aspects
of 1962 life have disappeared from Jakarta’s streets. I was still able to see many
beautiful buildings from the colonial era, such as the charming Hotel des Indes,
which had already been renamed Hotel Duta.
However, the hotel,
like many other such historic buildings, was soon to be demolished to make way
for a mall. There is much that has changed. One no longer sees mountains to the
south of Jakarta as the pollution has drastically restricted visibility. One
can no longer swim on the beach at Cilincing, near Tanjung Priok:
...and the rice fields
I saw en route to Kebayoran Baru are long gone.
I made two more visits
to Jakarta in the 1960s, the second in late 1964 when I landed at Kemayoran,
Jakarta’s former airport in the city’s east.
Over the decades since
then, I have made many more visits. Each time I have seen profound changes to
the city, though underneath it all there is the old Jakarta I first experienced
in 1962.
The three volumes by
Scott Merrillees document, with a multitude of striking photos and postcards, lucidly
discussed and contextualised, the way this city has changed from its earliest
days as Batavia, Holland’s grand colonial outpost, to Jakarta, the modern city
of today. The images accompanying this review are but a small taste of the
fascinating sights captured in his three volumes. His commentary on each of the
photos and postcards often draws one’s attention to details and features that
would otherwise remain unnoticed. He also often links the image to his maps and
to other images so that they become in effect a mosaic reflecting the city as a
whole.
I am sure that for
many who have ever lived in the city, one’s first inclination is to use the
excellent indexes and maps in each volume to locate familiar places, relive the
experience of having been there at a particular period, and to learn how they have
changed over time. For example, I quickly found images of Mangga Besar, in colonial
days named Prinsenlaan, and was amazed that the busy, crowded street of my
memories had in former times been a quiet, grand tree-lined road:
I could even find an
image of Prinsen Park, the amusement park down the road from the Kwee family
home, whose name of course commemorates Mangga Besar’s colonial name of
Prinsenlaan:
Prinsen Park was then re-named
to become “Lokasari” before finally succumbing to Mangga Besar’s less than
family-friendly atmosphere of today. As has been the fate of many a Jakarta
landmark, Lokasari was demolished to make way for yet another of Jakarta’s many malls.
The books have allowed
me, through its images and maps, to explore where I have lived in later years,
including Jalan Raya Radio Dalam in Kebayoran Baru and Jalan Yusuf Adiwinata in Menteng. There is also the enjoyment of
looking at the changes in the locations of familiar institutions, such as the
Australian Embassy’s former location on Jalan Thamrin before it was moved to
Kuningan. I still recall that the embassy, located on the west side of Jalan
Thamrin, also had offices on the east side. Due to the heavy, and for those on
foot, life-threatening traffic of Jalan Thamrin, embassy regulations required
diplomats and staff, if they wanted to go from the main building to the offices
across the road, to take an embassy car north on Jalan Thamrin to a roundabout
located some distance and then back south so as to enter the building on the
east side. To return to the embassy, required a lengthy and often
time-consuming trip south to the nearest roundabout. However, it became a badge
of courage for some (Australian males, of course) to defy regulations and to
cross Thamrin on foot and at speed. Particular honours were accorded those who
managed to do it without stopping en route.
I might mention that
on a recent visit to Cuba I met some Indonesians, now in their eighties, who
had been studying in communist countries in 1965 when Indonesia’s military took
over Indonesia. The Suharto government forthwith cancelled the citizenship of
such students abroad under the generally wrong assumption they were all
communist. Some of the students gravitated to Cuba where they began new lives.
One of them told me that in 2000 President Abdurrahman Wahid restored their
citizenship and apologised to them for their enforced exile. One of the exiled
students I met in Cuba said that in 2008 he returned to Jakarta for the first
time since 1964. He said the Jakarta he encountered was thoroughly bewildering
and he could not deal with the large, noisy and overwhelming metropolis he
encountered. He said he was happy to return to Havana with its old cars, its
quiet streets, its clean air and, in his words, its “liveability”. He said that
he believed that his life in Havana had allowed him to live in a kind of
Jakarta frozen in time.
I defy anyone who has
ever lived or even visited Jakarta not to lose themselves in memories as they
gaze at this treasure of post cards, photographs, maps and images. Indeed, it
is the sort of treatment many other major cities of the world deserve.
Ron Witton
