That – that is how good it felt to sit on a little wooden stool in Ganesha Bookshop in Ubud. The smell of books, the search. I spent a whole afternoon there going through their wall labeled “Indonesian Studies” (How cool is that? See photo) checking indexes and making a small pile of books relating to Timor Leste.I ended up with three: one very good, one okay and the third, which I read in the afternoon and then woke up in the middle of the night to finish, transformative. It hit me as the type of scholarship that I want to do. In Troubled Waters: Borders, Boundaries and Possession in the Timor Sea, Ruth Balint used constructivism to interrogate the assumptions – such as with the designation “traditional” – in Australian border security policy, looking at how the government rewrote the ocean landscape and the history of Rotanese fishermen in the area.
While her work looked at the interactions between a major power and a fishing community it was more than a David and Goliath tale or the regional equivalent of an ugly American story – it was about ways of seeing the world, about the conflicting realities of the precise “boxes” drawn on charts and the fluid landmarks used by fisherman, about sovereignty and ownership and colonization, and about discourses of xenophobia. I lent it to Orla (on the ship) and before it makes it way back to me I hope that others will take a look. For me, the book bridged my world as someone interested in security policy with the ship’s interest in the nuances and histories of littoral communities across the region. It brought my beloved world of the ship into a brief, close embrace with the nerd-palace of the Watson Institute.
Here is a transcript of an interview with the author on Australian radio.
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