January 19, 2005

A swell party 

Sri Lanka's expat elite are kicking off their high heels and rolling up the sleeves of their linen shirts with some acts of extraordinary generosity that few thought them capable of. Eric Ellis reports.

 

THEY ARE "perhaps the greatest collection of fabulous nobodies in Asia”.

That’s not The Bulletin’s bitchy description of the cliquey Galle set, the 300-strong foreign – and very vaguely aristocratic – community which the tsunami abruptly jolted from a gin-soaked neo-colonial indolence of hedonism in the town’s 400-year-old fort into an around-the-clock relief effort, raising millions and discovering an inner Mother Teresa and a compassion for Sri Lankans – and from Sri Lankans – that many didn’t know existed.

No, the remark comes from within, from former Countdown and Water Rats director Karl Steinberg, who, with his partner, former Sydney fund manager Chris Ong, has spent the past two years building Galle’s grooviest digs, the boutique Galle Fort Hotel that unwittingly – and profitably – is at the crest of a post-tsunami tsunami of aid workers, foreign troops and the international press.

“Eccentric? Moi?” poses Steinberg, as a posse of US marines tucks into his designer kitchen’s excellent pad thai and couscous salad. “I hope that we are more interesting than that.”

That depends on whom you talk to.

Ask Sri Lanka’s Che Guevara-loving cadre of the hardline Marxist People’s Liberation Front (known by its local acronym as the JVP), now a powerful member of Colombo’s ruling coalition, and they seethe at the plunge pools of the UNESCO-listed fort’s tastefully renovated terraces, and at the real or imagined bacchanalia of their foreign owners. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe is also a JVP favourite and they would like nothing more than these parvenu expats to abandon their hip hotels and retreat to London SW3, often threatening to help them do it.

But ask many of these foreigners, and more than a few enriched Lankans, and they insist they have put Galle on the map for the Condé Nast Traveler crowd – their fashionable friends – with the trickle-down into local tourism, an Asian Riviera as they like to describe it.

In recent years, Galle became a boomtown where, as the muezzin summons the local Muslim faithful to prayer inside Galle fort’s tsunami-spared mosques, the fort foreigner’s magazine of choice isn’t The Economist, it’s London’s Tatler. That’s because it’s likely someone they know from “South Ken” or the shires is featured in it, preferably not M.P.S.I.P - “Minor Public School I Presume” - the coded smart set put down for people such as Steinberg and Ong who aren’t, well, People Like Us, pace Nancy Mitford's famous class-conscious. Sri Lankans? To many in the Galle set they are the people in whose country they reside, not much anyone to invite to sundown cocktails.

If they are under 45 and English, as many are, they'll likely be desperate to be a friend of people like the 'Honourable' Jack Eden, descendant of former British Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, whose portrait hangs in Eden's house. As the mid-1990s financial crisis broke over Asia, Eden was sacked from his Hong Kong-based banker job at Coutts Bank – custodian of Buckingham Palace’s booty – returning to Galle where he had been holidaying.

Eden bought a few fort properties at prices knocked down because Sri Lanka was at civil war, renovated them for sale to friends, and began a phenomenon as grown-up Sloane Rangers, many with family connections to the British Raj that once ruled here, undertook their own sea change. Eden built a web site – www.villasinsrilanka.com – and made a living renting 20-odd plush properties along the Galle coast to various people and the beau monde. Eden’s villas also employed hundreds of jobless Sri Lankans, some of whom are now dead.

Galle has become a comfortable bolthole for foreigners in recent years, thanks to a Tamil Tiger-Colombo ceasefire in 2002 and changes to property laws by Ranil Wickremesinghe’s 2001-2004 government that eased restrictions on foreign ownership. This foreign flood was, for a time, regarded by Lankans as a hard currency bonanza until they realized that many of them gathered there visa-less and job-less because it was cheaper than renting in pricey Hong Kong and Singapore, or a bargain place – warm and untaxed too -- to while away a gap year from Oxbridge. Hong Kong might’ve famously once been the repository of financial industry F.I.L.T.H – 'Failed In London Try Hong Kong' - but Galle was where you went if you were white, English, and failed in Hong Kong.

Pre-tsunami, the fort’s gossipy social life revolved around dinner parties, often at Hong Kong businessman Geoffrey Dobbs’ Sun House and Dutch House villas on the hill behind Galle, or at the GFH. Now, after a hard day’s tragedy, foreign aid workers, media and soldiers stroke lazily around an elegant courtyard pool, the hotel to all intents a temporary US military base.

But as marines hulk through the GFH’s rarefied interiors, business jealousies have grown between it and the neighbouring Amangalla, the former colonial-era New Oriental Hotel, an old backpacker favourite before its interrupted transformation into a $US600 ($790) a night upmarket resort.

GFH rooms rent at $US200 a night and, as the hotspot of the Galle aid and media circus, its owners Steinberg and Ong are tut-tutted at by the non-Aussies for coining it in the crisis, much of that ire coming from Anglo “Amanjunkies”, rueful that Amangalla was weeks away from fully opening, when it would've coined it too. The fact is many Galleites are coining it; the town and Sri Lanka has never seen so much money wash through it. The rupee has soared 10%, the stockmarket 12%, since the tsunami.

On December 26, Aman’s offices in Galle’s Old Worker’s Building became a field office of the British High Commission evacuating foreign tourists, survivors and those less fortunate. “Our staff have been magnificent,” says Amangalla’s manager Olivia Richli, daughter of a industrial brushmaker. “It’s been extremely difficult here.”

Richli, who sniffily - and unprofitably - refused lodgings to the desperate foreign media arriving in the fort, says that within two days of the tsunami – it took days for people to actually get into the undamaged fort from nearby areas, such was the scale of the death and destruction outside the ramparts – local foreigners in the fort convened Project Galle 2005. Headed by holidaying Englishman Eric Coleman, it quickly became a skills and charity vehicle to channel the direct aid effort with local smarts.

Two of Jack Eden’s villas are now the headquarters of Project Galle 2005. They ordinarily rent for $2000 a week but today throb with energy, mobiles chirruping as chef “Woody” prepares tea and chicken biryani to the strains of Creedence Clearwater Revival. An Irish sheepfarmer, Maeve, drops by to dispense moral support, chatting with Belgian psychologist Anthe Ickx, a relation of the retired Formula One ace, Jacky, and one of just seven psychologists in Sri Lanka, a remarkable statistic given the 30 years of civil war that has killed 60,000. “There is a crying need for trauma counselling,” she says.

There is also a crying need for Sri Lankan jobs, though its unlikely the European teens on gap year from smart universities doing the storeman positions that have sprung up around the fort will want to give up the $2000 a month - 20 times the average Lankan salary - money that goes with them.

Other fort dwellers have pitched in to the tsunami relief, even among those who are 'M.P.S.I.P.' There’s Bruce Fell-Smith, the old Geelong Collegian son of a Mildura dentist who says he designs some of Asia’s most chic resorts. He has set up a fund to rebuild destroyed Lankan houses with help from the fort’s longest-standing foreign resident, Arkansas-born septuagenarian Charles Hulse, a sarong-clad interior designer with a fabulous white bouffant who arrived in Sri Lanka 20 years ago after 20 years on the Greek island of Hydra, and a 1950s stint as a dancer in the chorus line of the Paris Lido.

The fort even has its very own Imelda Marcos, former London model Anoushka Hempel, who was fortunate, Galle luvvies say, that her 'scores' of Jimmy Choo designer high-heels were “mercifully spared” by the tsunami. Her husband Eduard was the fort’s go-to guy on technology issues, while trading real estate. Now he and his wife are volunteer aid workers, donating their house to the effort. According to Charlie Hulse, Anoushka is charming and fabulous, her cupboard of shoes probably an urban myth.

Briton Nikki Harrison, 21 years in Sri Lanka, was one of the foreign heroes of the disaster. She evacuated locals and foreigners alike from the coast that horrible day, piling them high in her 4WD, braving floodwaters and blocked roads, to deposit them at a luxurious inland villa she manage.

“Doing God’s work” is the catch phrase du jour and, suddenly awash with other people's donations, the Galle set will more than happily tell you how much of it they've been doing, how many Lankan lives they've saved. What they don't much like to discuss is which of their own villas have been treated to tsunami aid renovation that foreign donors wanted bound for stricken Lankans. Eden's brother Rob Drummond admits aid money has been spent on the nearby Wijaya Beach Club, dubbed "Chelsea East' by London's Daily Mail. What he doesn't reveal is that Wijaya is where the Galle luvvies like to buy their dope. Drummond calls the renovation 'helping local business get back on its feet."

Much work along the ravaged coast being done by Dobbs, who is desperate to separate himself from the rest of the Galle crowd. Dobbs has rented four boutique villas on this coast since 1990, each ranked as some of the world’s most exclusive – and expensive – designer hideaways. Best known in Lanka for his Moët-drenched charity elephant polo tournaments, he was swimming off his rented island villa, Taprobane, with his Washington Post journalist brother Michael when the tsunami struck.

To many foreigners who visit Sri Lanka’s enchanting south, Geoffrey Dobbs is Galle. The self-styled Grank Tunku of Taprobane, Dobbs made some money trading housing accessories and bric-a-brac. Now he likes to fill his rented villas with Raj-era romantics who cavort around the island in neo-colonial splendour, often with a hauteur of noblesse oblige that suggests “Ceylon’s” 1948 independence from Whitehall was fine so long as it didn’t threaten the ever-flowing spigot of gin and champagne, tended by compliant locals serving as the exotic color for their boutique bacchanal. One of Dobbs’ trademarks is to serenade his guests by bagpipes at dinner, as if the sun never set. Somewhat melodramatically, Dobbs like to say he fully expects to be attacked, or worse, by a JVP offended by his style.

Though battered around the palms, Dobbs - about whom its said the most dangerous place in Sri Lanka is between him and a reporter - had mobilised powerful contacts around the world, many well-heeled former guests of his villas, and set up adoptsrilanka.com. It’s run out of Sydney by former advertising executive Libby Southwell, who was also on Taprobane at the time, and is emerging as an umbrella group for direct aid along the coast.

Dobbs claims that he too is a victim of the tsunami. He means the collapsed front wall of his 'Beach House' at Tangalle. Dobbs will get over it, which is more than can be said for the million-odd homeless Lankans who don't have their photos in Tatler.