Whaleboat Dreaming

By Neil Grant

 In July of 2001, I started a two month journey through the Indonesian archipelago researching my novel Indo Dreaming. This was pre Bali bombing; I got home a day before September 11. This was a safer world, although Indonesia was in the middle and there were many other dangers.

In two months, I travelled on dodgy buses and ferries and ate questionable food. I climbed an active volcano with a spear-toting local and swam in a volcanic lake with liver flukes and giant carp. I met Bob Marley look-alikes in Flores and thought I was going to die of dangerous water and terrible transport in Sumbawa. I surfed over coral and cringed at cockfights in Nusa Lembongan, and watched shadow puppets flutter like moths in Yogyakarta. And when I sat down to write my novel in 2002, all those places, people and experiences drifted back; much like the ghost my main character, Goog, was searching for in his journey of discovery.

Although the Lonely Planet guidebook gets a gentle mocking in my novel, it was through its pages that I first tasted Indonesia. One place in particular stood out — a speck of island off the far eastern tip of Flores. Its name was Lembata and, from a tiny village on the windward-side, people still hunted the largest animals on earth from the most un-seaworthy boats.

Lembata nestles between the volcanic islands of Solor, Adonara and Pantar at the far eastern tip of the Florenese island chain. I reach Lembata by boat from the town of Larantuka on the main island of Flores. On board, motorbikes are stacked in the bow, seasick chickens lie limply on deck, the smell of clove cigarettes and diesel drifts through the cabin. The boat negotiates the Solor Strait, stopping at Waiwerang, where a gang of boys leap onboard to sell eggs, peanuts, bottled water, bruised fruit and gula merah (red sugar) wrapped in palm leaf packets. They also pinch my nose, steal my sunglasses and shout loudly in my ear. But I forgive them because they are young and happy and don't get many foreign visitors. The ferry finally moves on to Lewoleba, the dusty capital of Lembata, in the shadow of Ile Api — the Fire Mountain.

Two days later, I board the rusting truck-bus for a six hour journey over a torturous road to Lamalera. The bus is sardine-tinned with people, rice, radios, bananas, biscuits, betel nuts, chickens, thongs, candles and drums of kerosene. There is a goat stuck underneath my seat. We rumble through burnt fields and groves of guava trees. We pass villages where children call to us in tangled snatches of made-up English. The truck dies on a hill and we stand in the shade as the driver repairs the diesel tank in a mystical rite involving powdered soap.

We are dropped where the road ends at a ruined bridge. There is a further two kilometre walk to Lamalera. As we drop down the roughly cobbled track into town, women pass us with freshly butchered whale meat — rich red and marbled with white fat — balanced in plastic pots on their heads. The reality of a whale hunting town sinks in and I am suddenly unsure why I came. I love whales. I don't want to see them killed. I don't want to see any animals killed. I was a vegetarian for twelve years! So why am I here?

Lamalera boatsheds, Lembata, Indonesia

The Dalma Rogue, Bihar, India 1947

The next morning we are in bed, still digesting the previous night's dinner — terrible black cubes of whale meat with two minute noodles — when we hear the call on the beach. The whale boats are putting to sea, as they have done for two hundred years, ever since the people of Lamalera arrived on the back of a Blue Whale (the only species they do not hunt; their totem). I run through the wooden racks of drying meat, to the beach and help the crew of the Santa Rosa roll their boat over rough logs and to the waiting surf. But, before I know it, I am on that boat and we are rowing for the horizon. And I am in danger of losing my passport, my camera, my precious journal and, most likely, my life. I look back on shore to the little altar with the Virgin Mary and wish I was a Catholic-Animist like these people so I could pray to Mary and the sea at the same time, to keep me safe.

Whaleboat launch, Lamalera, Indonesia

They raise their holey, woven palm sail and we make for the whaling grounds. Others are out here, with harpoon heads slotted into bamboo poles, balanced on their ladder-shaped prows, searching. I see the fin of a Spinner Dolphin break the water and hope that the harpooner misses as he climbs onto the prow. He lunges at the water, extending his body and forcing the forked harpoon head into the sea.

The hunt, Savu Sea, Lamalera

But he does miss and we return to the beach with nothing. A huge whalebone is still lolling in the shorebreak; a reminder of how the previous catch was butchered and shared among the crew according to a traditional pattern of cuts. 

Back at Guru Ben's Homestay, I sit at the same table where Tim Severin (another, more famous, author) wrote the notes to his book In Search Of Moby Dick, and complete mine. I am not sure how this story will weave into Goog's but I know it is a powerful experience and will add drama and excitement to the novel I am about to write.

And a year later I write the chapter in Indo Dreaming where Goog takes that same whaleboat trip (but his crew harpoons a shark). At the time I don't realise how far back that story goes and what a part of me it is. And I don't see how each chapter and each story has at least as many threads stretching back through the fabric of my own history. Until today.

This story first appeared as an article in Viewpoint magazine's Winter 2005 edition.