Volltext - ub-dok: der Dokumentenserver der UB Trier - Universität ...

Alice’s looking-glass world, these competing universes exist along the two-dimensional lines
of the Wayang Shadow Theatre, but will not adhere to the boundaries of their projection
screens. As Billy Kwan explains to Hamilton in their final meeting in Pasar Baru, it all comes
down to the forces of light and of darkness in an eternal, cyclical battle which is the theme of
the wayang kulit’s drama of shadows.
The journalists willingly bide their time in the artificial, flattened ambience of the
Wayang Bar, which Broinowski puts in the tradition of Kipling, Forster, and Orwell’s British
clubs as ‘spiritual citadel’ (Broinowski, 1992, 181), symbolising the ‘deep-rooted yearning
among 20 th century Australians to identify and become one with, the habits of the imperial
English gentlemen and clubmen they never were’ (Gooneratne, 1992, 341). When they must
step back out into the streets of Jakarta, the journalists find another strange world which can
scarcely be dubbed real, but is ruled by the organised chaos of konfrontasi. Freakish characters
police the city. The President flies around in a helicopter pretending to be the reincarnation of
the Supreme God, Vishnu. The city’s Western inhabitants, Koch’s rendition of the wayang
kulit ogres, a motley collection of imperial residue, career sycophants, pederasts, transvestites,
and alcoholic oilfield workers, to name a few, acclimatise themselves very well indeed to this
zany ecosystem which perversely thrives on their presence.
Cookie notices the disjointedness of the world in Southeast Asia, and recognises how the
wayang shadow puppets are bizarre Javanese reincarnations of ancient Indian gods and heroes.
In the same way, the colonial-era renditions of Mickey Mouse characters adorning the walls of
a cheap, all-night restaurant in Jakarta seem like strange westernised reincarnations of the
wayang shadow puppets. Even the authentic Javanese Wayang Kulit shadow theatre, which
Hamilton sees is out of joint with time and place, and said ‘to have a weird modernity: a video-
machine from an unknown civilisation’ (YLD, 201). Yet, the wayang provokes in Hamilton
the same kind of memory of things beyond this lifetime that Mike Langford experiences in
Highways to a War:
- 147 -