Islands of past mysteries explored at National Gallery of Australia

THE last century of the Dutch East Indies is commemorated in a beautiful exhibition of historical photographs at the National Gallery of Australia.

A Dutchman, his Javanese wife and their children, about 1910. From the exhibition Garden

AUSTRALIANS chronically underestimate the interest of Indonesia, even though it is our closest neighbour and represents, historically speaking, the most important centre of civilisation to emerge in our region.

Or perhaps we underestimate this nation precisely because of its proximity. Europeans dream of Indonesia as a distant and exotic destination. Australians all too often see it merely as a cheap destination where they can get drunk and behave like oafs.

At times we have been worried about Indonesia as a security threat and have been through some difficult episodes, from the Confrontation of 1963-66 to the liberation of East Timor (1999-2002) and, more recently, terrorism episodes. Numerous minor incidents, such as the Schapelle Corby case, loom large in the popular press.

Our preoccupation with the present of Indonesia thus tends to obscure an appreciation of its historical and prehistorical past. Early man was present in the archipelago more than 700,000 years ago, although the present population probably migrated from the north about 2000BC. Early in the first millennium BC they had mastered wet-field rice cultivation, which allowed the development of larger communities and further crafts, including ikat weaving and bronze casting. Religious life remained at the level of animism and magic.

Higher civilisation came to Indonesia from India, whose influence was preponderant for more than 1000 years, from about the second to the 12th centuries. Java had a flourishing Hindu kingdom centuries before the adoption of Indian civilisation in Cambodia led to the rise of Khmer civilisation in the eighth century AD.

It was these Indianised Javanese kingdoms that built great monuments such as the Hindu temple complex of Prambanan near Jogja­karta, and the monumental temple-mountain of Borobudur, the greatest Buddhist construction in the world.

Islam began to implant itself in Indonesia in the 13th century and became the dominant religion by the 16th century, by which time Christian missionaries were also active in the islands. But Indonesian artistic expression remained essentially Hindu. It’s remarkable that even in a mostly Islamic community the traditional mask dance and theatre and the leather shadow-puppets, wayang kulit, are all based on stories drawn from the ancient Sanskrit epics.

What had brought first the Muslims and then the Christians to Indonesia was the lure of the spice trade. For the archipelago used to be known as the Spice Islands — the source, for thousands of years, of rare and precious commodities that could make the fortune of adventurous traders, successive groups of whom carried them by sea, by camel caravan, then by ship again to great entrepots such as Venice from which they were further distributed throughout northern Europe.

This great East-West trade route, like a southern and maritime version of the Silk Road far to the north, was permanently disrupted by the European seafaring revolution. The Spanish and the Portuguese were the pioneers of the new seafaring, soon followed by the Dutch and the English, but it was in the end the Dutch who came to dominate. First Java, then eventually the whole of what is now Indonesia, came to be dominated by the Dutch East India Company, until its possessions were taken over by the Dutch government in 1800. The Japanese invasion brought Dutch rule to an end, and at the conclusion of World War II the present nation of Indonesia was formed.

The last century of the Dutch East Indies is commemorated in a beautiful and unusual exhibition of historical photographs at the National Gallery of Australia. It is apparently the first art museum exhibition of this material and represents a tiny selection from the more than 6500 items held by the NGA, many of which were acquired as part of a private collection purchased in Amsterdam in 2007. The exhibition is accompanied by a particularly elegant and informative catalogue by Gael Newton.

Photography came to Indonesia very early — as indeed to many other parts of the world, for in the age of great colonial empires it was ideally suited to documenting the newly explored or acquired lands. There seemed to be an insatiable fascination with taking pictures of celebrated ancient sites and of newly discovered locations, as well as recording the way of life, costumes and — sometimes with more sinister intent — even physical types of other peoples. Among the odder images in this exhibition is a quasi-anthropological studio compositions of villagers in native costume and a canoe posing in front of a painted jungle backdrop.

Most of these photographs initially would have been made for the benefit of the Dutch colonial population and more generally for a Dutch market at home: the Dutch had been fascinated with the exotic East since the early modern period and even those who would never see these regions would probably have had a family member living in the colonies for a time. The exhibition includes, in fact, a set of large-format photographs of the East Indies produced for display in Dutch schools, while colonial schools had a corresponding set of pictures of significant sites in the home country.

The extent of this photographic documentation naturally makes the NGA’s holdings a very important resource for the study of Indonesia before independence, and the coverage is enormously enriched by the plethora of personal snapshots of life in the colonies, gathered into photo albums by officers and administrators to commemorate their time in the East — a period that they, like many who spent their youth in the colonies, would no doubt recall in retirement at home with considerable nostalgia.

Particularly interesting in such albums are the pictures of families, often with servants, in which one can discern many nuances of distinction and intimacy, for although we have forgotten this in an age of subcontracted service providers, servants in an earlier time were people who lived with us and thus became, at however subordinate a level, a part of the family.

Wealthy and aristocratic Javanese also had themselves photographed, sometimes in Western clothes, even Dutch colonial uniforms, and sometimes in traditional costume. In the group portraits of rulers surrounded by retainers one may at first have the impression of looking into a world that has hardly changed for centuries and on to which the light of the new technology is being shone for the first time. In fact, however, the portrait of a Balinese prince on a state visit to the Dutch governor-general in 1864 and of the defeated rajah of Lombok in 1901 each speak of very different and historically specific circumstances.

The conjunction of the two worlds and the two peoples is recorded at many points but never more touchingly than in mixed mar­riages. The exhibition includes a set of three pictures of an unidentified couple, a tall, thin, rather melancholy-looking Dutchman and his Javanese wife and two daughters, taken between about 1910 and 1917. In the first two im­ages, the father is holding on to his younger daughter, while in the third she is poignantly missing. As for the older girl, conceivably she could have been alive until a decade or two ago.

Some of the most beautiful pictures are of landscape or archeological monuments. There is something especially striking about the very first photographs of such places, which had stood there for a thousand years, surrounded by the ebb and flow of human life, until suddenly and almost at random an impression of one of them has been registered at one moment in the continuum of its existence. Yet because the early cameras demanded slow exposures, the moment is longer than the instant of a modern camera, and the image seems to have a little more time to impress itself on the negative, giving it a subtle density and substance.

There are many developments to be glimpsed throughout the exhibition, as much in the perception of colonial life as in that of the land and its people, but especially after the horror of World War I and its aftermath in Europe, there was a tendency to view the East Indies in a more romantic light.

This was also the time when numerous Western artists, such as Walter Spies, settled in Bali, which will be the subject of another exhibition at the NGA later in the year.

There was a new fascination with traditional artistic expression, such as gamelan music and mask dances, and above all a new tendency to idealise the people themselves. Swiss Gotthard Schuh photographer produced the most memorable pictures of this period, such as his extraordinary Mother and Child, Bali (1938), in which he emphasises the beauty and solemnity of the child’s gaze, as though she were looking through the world of illusion and communing with a timeless reality. As the Dutch East Indies was coming to its end, Schuh’s pictures were published in 1941 as Inseln der Goetter — Islands of the Gods.

Garden of the East: Photography in Indonesia 1850s-1940s

National Gallery of Australia, until June 22