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word warrior against the manifestations of desire—the lust represented by Wally O’Sullivan’s
pederasty; Curtis’ visits to the cemetery; Condon’s drives around the open sewage canals to
glimpse bathing women. Billy, however, is still far too fascinated by the wayang kulit. He
wants to be all of its characters and to see it from both sides of the screen at once. Before he
truly can understand the human soul, he must come to terms with his own unquenchable desire
for love and with the anger which blurs his ability to reason and feel. Master these, he knows
from the start, and the way to love opens:
He turned to a female puppet. ‘And this is Srikandi—the princess Arjuna’s in
love with.’ (YLD, 81)
Srikandi is a metaphor for Jill Bryant. The union of Arjuna and Srikandi represents the joining
of opposites to make up the whole. Arjuna, who is the model of the man of righteous action,
furthers Koch’s theme of doubleness by standing for both Guy Hamilton—the man of
thoughtless action—and Billy Kwan—the man of actionless thought. Kwan and Hamilton then
are another pair of opposites who must unite into a whole; only then can their whole unite with
that represented by Bryant.
7.5. The Wayang Kulit’s Dual Points of View
Unlike d'Alpuget, Koch is not writing down to the level of his readers, though he does
seem ‘to assume nil knowledge of wayang and of Indonesia’ in the period before the Vietnam
War (Roskies, 48). This assumption, one must admit, is entirely justified. Billy Kwan's role as
protagonist includes making sure everyone, especially Hamilton and including Koch’s readers,
have an opportunity to get a grasp on such esoterica. Guy Hamilton represents the Australian
who has neither background knowledge nor motivation to help him absorb Kwan's instruction.
He has come to escape a dead-end job in a Sydney newsroom, but avoids real interaction with
Indonesia at all costs, living in an air-conditioned room at the Hotel Indonesia and eating only
in westernised restaurants. At his first blank encounter with the wayang puppets, Hamilton
seems indeed to be a creation of d’Alpuget. They evoke in him no response at all,
neither pleasure nor dislike; they were too alien, and scarcely human. With
their black and gold faces, elongated limbs and grotesquely long noses, they
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