sign in sign up
<<
Home , Banda Arc, Buru, Leti (island), Romang (island), Tanimbar Islands, Wetar

Indonesia’s Forgotten

Indonesia’s “Forgotten Islands” — also known as the Southeast Moluccas ( Tenggara), are not a single destination, but rather a 1,000 km long chain of archipelagos stretching from to West Papua on the of New Guinea. Undeveloped, distant from population centers and far off any beaten path, these “Forgotten Islands” have been largely isolated from the rest of Indonesia and the world.

The terrain of these islands varies from forested mountainous peaks in the Inner of islands (, Roma, Damar, Nila), with peaks as high as 868 m (on Damer) to essentially flat islands of the easternmost Aru and Kei island groups, dominated by savannah, mangroves and broadleaf forests.

The Inner Arc islands are volcanic, while the island groups in the Outer Banda Arc (, Luang, Sermata, Babar and ) are mostly up thrust coralline limestone, often characterized by terracing resulting from periodic uplift and changes in sea level.

Together, the islands of Maluku Tenngara make up the eastern end of the bio-geographic province of , a transitional region between continental Southeast and -New Guinea, with flora and fauna of the easternmost islands the most similar to New Guinea.

Culturally, most of the of the islands of Maluku Tenggara appear to be closely related, sharing similar languages, myths, and traditional beliefs. They are known for their powerful woodcarvings and sculptures depicting ancestral figures, distinctive hand woven ikat fabrics, and plaited bamboo and palm baskets. The exception to this may be the people of the Kei Islands, some of whom say they are descendants of old Balinese royalty who arrived in the 14th Century, a time when the Hindu Empire was expanding from its original base on and establishing vassal states throughout Eastern Indonesia, including on the islands of Timor, , Ceram and in the Kei Islands.

Woman weaving, P. Buaya, Alor Komba

Bandanese is spoken on by people on parts of Kei Besar, supporting the contention that their ancestors were refugees fled from the at the time of the massacre of Bandanese by the Dutch forces under Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen in 1609. (Bandanese is no longer spoken in the Banda Islands.)

Boat Symbolism

The cultures of many islands of Maluku Tenggara are characterized by “boat symbolism” used as a means of spatial and social organization. Traditional houses are structured like a boat, with different living areas identified as “right pilot’s cabin” or “left helmsman’s cabin. The top leader of a village, often the eldest brother in the oldest descent line, was characterized as the “right helmsman” and represents the village to the outside world and in ritual.

Nautical terms are even used for parts of the body, with the same words used for “nose” and “bow”,“toes” and “stern”, while the shoulder blades are referred using the word for a boat paddles. On some islands, this boat symbolism is replicated at the level of the larger community,

Stephen Oppenheimer has explained that practices like these, as well as myths the creation of these islands by the destructive acts of a huge sailfish, hewing off Leti from , drowning a nearby to punish an evil elder brother, and blasting and other Barat Daya islets out of what had once been a much bigger island.

Stephen Oppenheimer has noted that these local myths share elements with the “Kulabob and Manup” myth cycles from northern New Guinea and Melanesia, and suggested that they date back to the flooding of what had once been larger and connected islands at the end of the last Ice Age roughly 8,000 tears ago.

Combined with the prevalence of boat symbolism, such stories may also represent a kind of folk memory of migrations that must have taken place throughout the region as rising sea levels drowned settlements and fields, inundating thousands of km2 of land and creating isolated islands from what had once been mountains and higher elevation areas of much larger landmasses.

(The collapse of the Laurentide ice sheet over eastern Canada discharged as much as 150,000 km3 of water into the Atlantic Ocean, enough to raise sea levels around the world instantaneously by 20-40 cm and causing a further rise in sea levels of as much as 25 meters over a relatively short period of time.)

Dongson bronze drum, Kalabahi, Alor Carving of boat with ancestral crew

Large bronze kettle drums, known as Dongson Drums, imported from Bronze Age Vietnam and China, as long as 2,500 years ago, have been found on many islands, including three on Leti, one on Tanimbar, and three on Kei, as well as Alor. They are palimpsests of era when these islands were first drawn into trade and cultural relations with the larger world. The first historical mention of these islands consists of records from of the Han Dynasty in China (206 BC to AD 220), which mention spices imported Moluccan Islands, the first incarnation of the .