Under the Volcano: the story of Bali
By Cameron Forbes
Black Inc., 2007
286 pages, $32.90 (pb)
There are a plethora of books written about Bali ranging from works of fiction by Westerners to fully-fledged academic works about Bali's history and politics. In Under the Volcano: the Story of Bali, Cameron Forbes, formerly a foreign correspondent who is the father of Fairfax Newspapers' Indonesian-based correspondent, Mark Forbes, tries to present the many facets of Bali.
Bali is a place linked with Australia and Australians. Not only have Australians been visiting Bali for decades, they are now linked to the place through incidents of violence and suffering that have affected both Australian and Balinese communities.
Forbes tries to steer clear of the cliches and laments for "our Bali" or "our Schapelle (Corby)" that characterise some of the post-bombing representations of Bali. The West, after all has been exploiting Bali for decades, since its supposed discovery by anthropologists and artists in the 1920s and '30s. This relationship between Bali's people and those who consumed their culture — and sometimes also their bodies as part of the sexual exploitation of the Balinese — is also explored in this book.
Forbes provides a historical overview of Bali from the 19th century until the present, including the well-known mass suicides or puputan in 1907-08 of many of the Balinese royal families as a form of protest against Dutch colonialism. Forbes does well to create a sense of place by sketching out the diversity of the island and how people live and how society has evolved.
To demonstrate the violence that has characterised much of Bali's history, he discusses the waves of killings that took place in Bali in 1965-66, when members of the Indonesian Communist Party and their sympathisers were killed by the military and civilian militias. Between 80,000-100,000 people were estimated to have been killed in Bali during the mass killings, representing about one in 12 people. Conveniently however, the Suharto regime went on to exploit Bali as its tourism cash cow, with some luxury hotels built literally on top of the mass graves of leftists that are scattered throughout the island. Forbes should be commended for taking up this topic, which is often not canvassed in similar works.
Examining Forbes' treatment of these mass killings also demonstrates another of the book's strengths. Forbes recounts the experiences of people during that period, some of which he obtained by first-hand interviews, such as that of Ni Luh Suryani, who cycled past dead bodies left on the streets of Denpasar, Bali's capital city. His account of the 1965-66 killings and imprisonment lays the foundation for a compassionate look at how the Balinese have dealt with the aftermath of violence and trauma and adapted to the needs of a modern international tourist industry.
The second part of the book deals with the suicide bombings and the drug couriers in prison in Bali. This is a less successful part of the book. The section on the suicide bombers for example relies heavily on the information and analysis of the International Crisis Group and somewhat lacks the historical grounding of the earlier chapters of the book. In the first part of the book, Forbes is assisted by some sound scholarly works on Bali such as those written by Adrian Vickers and Geoffrey Robinson. Forbes' work is aimed at a broader audience, but readers interested in well-crafted histories of Bali should also look at the works of these scholars.