Wallacea

Timor Leste hangs at the very end, and slightly below, a chain of islands that stretch east from Bali called Nusa Tenggara (lit. southeast islands). In the late 1850s, while definitely not doing battle with Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace drew the Wallace Demarcation Line, separating Asia from Australasia. He sorted bird and tree species and in the end snipped Bali from Rinja, and then Borneo from Sulawesi.

According to Wallace, Timor Leste (ecologically) belongs with its southern neighbor.

Before leaving Timor Leste for Jakarta, Australia had been on my mind, and in the mornings before work I had been reading The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin. Written in 1987, it is Chatwin’s story of his introduction to bush Australia and his search to understand the songlines – what he describes as the foundation of Aboriginal cosmology.*

In Timor Leste, Australians are stationed on the corners and dominate international headlines. Australia also takes the flack in this region that the US gets everywhere else – in both cases deservedly and undeservedly – so I empathize. My attention to Australian politics (J found my timeline of PMs penciled in front of my book), economics, environment, pop culture (Kenny), reflects the nation’s enmeshment in Timor Leste’s past and future (as well as the influence of good friends).

But as I sat in the Bali airport, about to jet to Jakarta, I worried that in squinting south I have paid too little attention the pull of Indonesia to the north and west of Timor Leste. Indonesia remains Timor Leste’s only land border, major trading partner and source of TV programming and music. Waiting for my plane, The Songlines, with its stories of hitting kangaroos with Range Rovers, suddenly seemed like a very strange book to be reading.

Spheres of influence do not follow the ‘rules’ of biology, and continents are much more easily articulated through tables of tree species and deep-sea trenches than by culture, history, language and power. Timor Leste is of Wallacea – sitting somewhat uncomfortably at the geographical cross roads of Asia and Oceania, and forever looking towards Portugal.

In Wallace’s time the assumption was that the border area between Asia and Oceania that now bears his name would be less diverse and ecologically rich than its coherent neighbors. This has proved false. Timor Leste occupies an area of hybridization, cohabitation, and cross-pollination.

So over these last few weeks I have traversed diverse Wallacea – from Catholic to Hindu to Muslim, from tua and espresso to tebotel, from Dili through Seminyak and Bedugal to the metropolis Jakarta. From where Australians patrol the streets, to the bureaucratic heartbeat of Indonesia.


* Chatwin writes: “Aboriginal Creation myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in Dreamtime, singing out the names of everything that crossed their path – birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes – and so singing the world into existence.” I am not sure how this analysis holds up 20 years later.