by Jeffrey Mellefont, Honorary Research Associate, Australian National Maritime Museum
The subject of my recent lecture to Oceanic Art Society (OAS) in March – the artistry that can be found on many of the timber sea craft of Indonesia both today and in the past – grew from a wider research interest that has drawn me to this equatorial archipelago since 1983.
In the last decades of the 20th century, Indonesia had the world’s largest and most diverse fleet of traditional sea craft still working under sail across its thousands of remote islands. As a sailor, maritime writer and later as a museum researcher, I wanted to go sailing on some of these unique and exotic types of sailing craft that could be found nowhere else on earth, and to help document them before they disappeared.
Their boat-building techniques threw light on the extraordinary human achievement of populating the oceanic world that the OAS focuses on, from the Pacific’s western margins almost to the Americas, by people we call Austronesians. Indonesia can be seen as a pivot point in this dispersal. It’s where the tide of Austronesian voyagers – expanding from central China through Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia, over four or five millennia – mingles with pre-existing Melanesian cultures and languages on its way into Micronesia and Polynesia.
Since the earliest kingdoms and states formed in Indonesia, boat building and seafaring have underpinned trade, politics and warfare, transport and communications, as well as livelihoods and subsistence. Indonesia was crossed by ancient sea routes that linked China with Indian and Arab ports and the Mediterranean, distributing valuable Indonesian spices and sandalwood. These sea roads were also conduits for new political, religious, cultural and artistic influences, including those of expanding, colonising Europe.
While I was fascinated to encounter the late-20th-century remnants of far older maritime technologies still sailing in developing, post-colonial Indonesia, I was also enjoying the lively exhibition of Indonesian decorative arts on these vessels. Here were rich and enduring traditions of painting, woodcarving and sculpture that were an expression of complex, ancient beliefs and rituals. Many of these decorations were powerful talismans intended to safeguard the fortunes of the vessel, its owner and crew.
I’ve continued to monitor these fleets as they became increasingly modernised and industrialised. In the places where these decorative arts were strongest, and where the motorised fishing fleets were still built by hand using traditional timber shipwrighting techniques, the decorations have flourished.
One such place is the devoutly Islamic island of Madura. Dryer and harsher than its neighbour Java, its fishermen and seaborne traders seek a living in working vessels covered with vibrant paintings, carvings and ornaments that combine prehistoric motifs, the courtly arts of vanished kingdoms and touches of modern whimsy. Exuberant flowers and foliage, sinuous shoots and spiralling stalks abound. Stem posts can be inlaid with mirrors or wrapped in embroideries. Masts are festooned with macraméed fishing line and beads, and topped by crowns. Crows nests are extravagantly constructed as regal thrones.
These floral forms are well-suited to Islamic ‘aniconism’, which prohibits images of living creatures since only Allah may create the divine spark of life. Despite this, animals real and mythological – serpents, dragons, mermaids, eagles, wild fowl or peacocks – are common on many Madurese boats so that they may share the creatures’ qualities of beauty, swiftness or strength. Although rarer, images of people sometimes appear: a folk hero, film star or tele-evangelist or, even rarer, a daring ‘pin-up’ girl in a universal ‘truckies’ art’ style.
In the poor villages of Madura, houses and furniture, mosques and graves are generally plain and austere. Artistry is reserved for special occasions, lavished on the regalia of weddings or a harvest festival cult of gladiatorial bull racing called kerapan sapi. Of all workaday items, only boats are decorated.
Islam took root in Madura in the 16th century. Its mariners will often say that their ancestors were taught to build and decorate boats by Nabi Nuh – the prophet Noah, that prototypic boat builder shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The forms and folk art of Madura’s boats are in fact the result of its key location, washed by currents of history bearing not just Islamic but prehistoric, shamanist, Hindu and Buddhist, Chinese and Dutch cultures. Every one of these influences can be observed in Madurese art, from the coasts to the courts.
Madura was an often-rebellious subject of the powerful kingdoms of nearby Java, such as its last great Hindu empire, Majapahit. It later came under the 17th-century Islamic state of Sultan Agung. In war or peace Madurese mariners were crucial, carrying ambassadors and armies, princes and brides given to strengthen alliances between the courts of Madura and Java. These heroic times live on in the folk stories – and arts – of the seamen.
One art shared by Madurese palaces and working boats is multi-coloured woodcarving, for which the island is noted. The colours have meanings. Black, like iron, strengthens the crew’s resolve while red is for bravery. Green represents God-given life, while white represents spiritual purity. Yellow or gold invokes wealth. The red, white and blue of the Dutch flag is a common motif. Not just a memory of a former imperial master, it magically summons some of that vanished power to serve the boat and crew.
The unique polychrome carvings of cargo boats called janggolan display virtually all the influences on Indonesian aesthetics. From the enigmatic bronze-age Dong Son culture we discern traces of the tree of life and a border of repeated triangles called cok repung (young bamboo shoots). A Chinese geometrical figure known locally as kihong always occurs. From China and India come dragons, demons and the Garuda or eagle… but on janggolan these creatures are completely disguised by floral and plant designs including sea hibiscus.
Janggolan are built in a remote, very devout region of Madura where ‘aniconism’ appears most completely observed. The best-concealed image is a demon face hidden in an unusual flat bow and stern structure called topengan, a reference to the famous topeng masks of Javanese and Balinese drama which depict noble, coarse or evil characters. Its eyes take the form of flowers. Its tusks appear in a gaping mouth. This could be Kala-Makala, the Tantric guardian giant whose fearsome face glares over the entrances of Hindu architecture.
The notion of the living vessel is widespread throughout Indonesia, and all Madurese boats have eyes to watch for danger. Their Muslim builders deal with the heresy implicit in humans creating a living entity by disguising the eyes as flowers or spiralling swirls of foliage. Obscuring them even further, they are called ogelan or ongel – untranslatable in Madurese but cognate with Dutch ogen or eyes.
Prayer, ritual and magic are essential elements of these boatbuilding traditions. Each year religious teachers from the mosques lead annual fishermen’s blessings in the ports of Madura. Their prayers are required at key boatbuilding rites such as the jointing or ‘marriage’ of the explicitly male stem and stern posts to the female keel. Goats or chickens are sacrificed. Blood, holy water and flower petals are sprinkled in selamatan(blessings) to safeguard vessels throughout their working lives.
Most of this has clear roots in an animist past, and is part of an enduring system of beliefs that predates Islam and even the earlier Hindu-Buddhism of the region. So too with the decorations, paintings and carvings which transmit a magical power. This art isn’t simply a decorative afterthought. It is a fundamental element of the boat without which it would be incomplete and unfit for its enterprises.
Jeffrey Mellefont is a research associate of the Australian National Maritime Museum, where he was a foundation staff member 1987–2014. A former seaman, he has been visiting Indonesia since 1975 as a traveller, sailor and researcher. He has published widely on its diverse maritime traditions and speaks Bahasa Indonesia.