John Keay, one of my favourite traveler-historians, wrote “Indonesia, from Sabang to Marauke” (1995), his 1990s account of a trip he made from the westernmost point of Sumatra to the easternmost extend of the country, towards the border with Papua New Guinea. In fact, he traveled Sumatra and Java, which occupy the bulk of the book. Keay intersperses his travel experiences, light and witty, always observing and almost never judging, with a whole lot of historical information, both factual and in the form of anecdotes. A delight for travelers like me, although it must be said that the vast majority of Keay’s subjects and sources are limited by English language – the notes of Raffles, the books of Laurens van der Post, the American anthropologist Margaret Mead, Mata Hari, Surabaya Sue. Wouldn’t it be fabulous if someone with Keay’s erudite scholarship would dig into the Dutch colonial legacy, and perhaps early Portuguese works, too? But as it is, English language provides more than enough information, and not in the least about Indonesia’s independence struggle and early post-war history, with all its gory elements.
In the end, Keay hurries through Sulawesi, The Moluccas and Irian Jaya, even skipping his last station, Merauke, all together, perhaps because he was running out of time, or maybe the enormous diversity of the country overwhelmed even him – he admits so much in the last chapter: about Irian Jaya, he says that “the place was just too big and too unmanageable, too new and too vulnerable”. Here no written history which can be used to spice up the travelogue, and perhaps no energy left to discover.
Still, great book for those with interest in Indonesia. ( )