September 4, 2004

I'VE BEEN TO BALI TOO

Twenty years ago, Redgum's hit song summed up Australia's unique relationship with Bali. Eric Ellis revisits it

“I've been to Bali, I've been to Bali too’- Redgum, 1984.

HAS it been 20 years since John Schumann’s caustic little tune embedded itself in our heads forever?

Millions of Australians now regard Bali as our de facto seventh state, a sovereignty acknowledged in a suburban lilypond, or yellowing photo album of slimmer, uncomplicated times. And the souvenirs – a gong, a garuda mask, windchimes –cast to a back room but we can never quite bring ourselves to throw them away.

Twenty years later, Australians are richer, and fully paid-up members of the Coalition of the Willing but probably not as happy as when they ran amok in Kuta, Sanur and Ubud. Bali’s been bombed by Islamists and overloved by Western tourists to near-ruin. Redgum, a 1975 quartet of politicised Flinders University students, flamed out in 1987 and Schumann’s almost been a politician, running Alexander Downer to preferences in the Adelaide seat of Mayo in 1998 for the Democrats (six years later, by a tragic quirk of fate, Downer is again challenged by a Bali connection, the ex-magistrate Brian Deegan who lost his footballer son Josh on that horrible October night two years ago.) And, shocking this to Redgum’s bearded hardcore of overalls-wearing, dope-smoking, tree-hugging camp(us) followers, the once-feisty Schumann’s now a ‘strategic communications consultant’ with an establishment client list and his own logo.

But despite, or perhaps because of, a riff that Schumann admits was more Caribbean than Kuta, his song has endured.

‘Qantas flight 20, Denpasar

Meals and accom', Rent-a-car

I've been to Bali

I've been to Bali too’

Took a two week course at a suntan clinic

So lying round Legian, I wouldn't look anaemic

And you can't impress me

Cause I've been to Bali too

Got a ride out to Kuta in the back of a truck

Cost me twenty dollars and it wasn't worth a buck

Hustled to a losmen down Poppy's Lane

By a Javanese guy in a tropical rainstorm, lock up your daughters

I've been to Bali too

‘I’ve Been to Bali Too’ announced Bali’s arrival in Middle Australia as our Costa Del Sol, our Hawaii, our kiss-me-quick overseas holiday destination. Through the Menzies era from the late 40’s through the 60’s, Bali had been a refuge for those who didn’t fit into Australia’s suffocating philistinism, as perhaps best exemplified by the NSW government sacking of the Danish architect Joern Utzon before his vision for the Sydney Opera House was fully realised. Bali became an exotic backdrop for gays, artists, musicians and writers, for people like Donald Friend, pilloried at home, celebrated abroad. Then came the hippies and babyboomers like Schumann, who first went there in 1976.

But by the 1980s, we were so comfortable - and Bali cheaply packaged - we could vacation in a place as culturally complex as Australian suburbia was not, without even realising it. After a planeload of Australians had been denied entry to Bali - in Jakarta's retaliation for a 1986 newspaper article that called the wife of then kleptocratic President Suharto, "Madame Tien Per Cent" - a Ron Tandberg cartoon had a suburban Shazza grizzling to boyfriend Dazza about an incident she didn't understand: "Aww, I don't even know any Sue Harto."

For Shazza and mates, Bali was overseas travel for Australians who don’t really want to leave the safe bosom of home. Many were those who booked their Bali packages and didn’t realise they needed a passport. Some of them died at the Sari Club, on their first trip abroad. I remember one stricken lady from Perth, her horribly burned daughter dying on a filthy bed at Bali’s Sanglah Hospital screaming at overwhelmed orderlies ‘whaddya mean you don’t have quinine? What sort of a hospital is this?’ That Bali was foreign, and Third World, had probably never occurred to her.

Balinese entrepreneur Kadek Wiranatha caught the VB-and-plaited-hair crowd perfectly, unsurprising as he is the Foster’s franchisee on the island. Today he’s probably Bali’s richest man, a King of Kuta turning traditional losmen into flophouses like the Bounty and clubs like Double Six and the ill-fated Padi’s Bar, places where you can watch the AFL/NRL match-of-the-day with a cold VB and burger in hand, having been cheaply bussed in on Air Paradise, also owned by Wiranatha.

Today, Bali’s coastal scene has – the October 2002 bombs notwithstanding – niched into scuzzy Kuta, fashionable Legian and groovy Seminyak, neighbouring beaches but as socio-economically separated as VB is from a Martini is from Krug.

Kuta is as raffish, rowdier and as Australian as ever, perhaps the only foreign place where Australian pop culture is more potent than American. Its where street urchins sell Delta Goodrem CDs and Herald-Suns with the footy scores to shirtless Ockers lurching home with a skinful of just about everything imaginable and, with luck, someone’s unlocked daughter (or son for that matter) to share the hangover and ‘about-last-night’ explanations over a fry-up the next day.

Few Australians lie around Legian these days and those that do tend to be the $600 a night spa crowd, attracted like moths to the stylishly minimalist The Legian. Its the preferred lodgings of wealthy media and business types, an older, usually European crowd who’ve ‘made it’ and erroneously believe Bali’s polluted beaches (they on Europe-Japan trade routes) is the place for a seaside holiday. Australians who’ve made it know their beaches and tend not to stay at The Legian because they have better ones outside their second home in Byron Bay or Noosa. And if they have the sort of money that can afford The Legian, and want exotic, they’ll take that beach holiday in Tahiti.

And now there’s Seminyak, which didn’t really exist when Schumann recorded ‘Bali’. Its enjoying a property boom where off-the-plan 4BR villas – cutting-edge design, European fittings, pool, staff – that would be $2m in Palm Beach, will cost about $500,000-$600,000 here. Seminyak caters to the globo crowd who flit between jobs and offices in Bali, Singapore, New York and Paris. When they are away for work, they rent their villa for about $300-500 a night for about 70% of the year, and this just two years after terrorist bombs two beaches away. That’s about $50,000-70,000 in the hand each year. Property prices in London and Sydney may have boomed but you ain’t going to get that type of return on the average buy-to-let bedsit in Barnsbury or Bondi.

Which may explain the boom of property agencies in Seminyak with names like Elite Havens, Exotiq Estates and O-C-N, and magazines that service them like ‘Bali’s Best Properties’ and ‘The Yak,’ insiderspeak for Seminyak and the name of a hyper-designed magazine that tells a lot about where Bali is going. It effortlessly connects Seminyak with Tribeca, Café Costes, Ibiza and Milan, its funky fonts touting fusion this and chillin’ that for the bare-midriffed, metallic belly-buttoned, tongue-studded, discreetly-tattooed, Tevas-shod, Wallpaper-subscribing spa set, who work in media, design, technology and perhaps are even bankers and investors. It advertises shops selling ‘post-atomic’ clothes, whatever they are, restaurants with radical chic names like the Australian-owned Ku De Ta and all manner of ayurvedic treatments, aromatherapy and Balinese yoghurt massages. If a magazine had a soundtrack, The Yak’s would be Morcheeba as mixed by Claude Challe and doubtless sold to its unsuspecting Eurotrash readers as ‘The Real Bali.’

QF20 no longer flies to Denpasar. Indeed, Qantas doesn't fly to Denpasar at all; that route is reserved for its cheap-'n'-cheerful carrier, Australian Airlines. As for meals and accommodation, with some of the world's finest hotels, Bali is fusion central for chefs, though you can still be blighted by a dodgy jaffle after a big night on the sauce.

Still around, however, is Schumann’s hustling ‘Javanese guy’ though he’s taken a rather more sinister turn. The Bali bomb plot’s key planners, the Jemaah Islamiah operatives Samudra, Ali Imron, Amrozi, Mukhlas – now household names in Australia - are all Javanese. To Balinese, ‘Men from Java’ have always been blamed for the island’s problems when mostly that’s been patent nonsense. That was until October 12, 2002.

Life is tragic hanging out at Kuta

If you haven't got a car, bike or a scooter

Show me the bike shop

I've been to Bali too

Got myself a Honda, had to get away

No brakes, bald tyres, five thousand

Rupes a day

I've been to Bali too.

Well I don't ride a bike much home in Australia

As a motorcycle hero guess I'm a failure

Bemos to the left, trucks to the right

The Honda was a wreck but I was alright, hello mecurochrome

I've been to Bali too

Today, 5000 Rupiah is about $A1, but in 1984 "5000 rupes" was about $4.30, expensive for a Honda scooter. These days, you can rent a Honda for about 50,000 rupiah a day (about $10). And it will likely still have bald tyres.

"Mercurochrome" is the dating lyric. Aussie mums had dabbed this on their kids for years, its red daubs a panacea for footy scars and playground knee scrapes. Today mercurochrome is mostly banned because, as the name suggests, it has high levels of mercury. But in 1984, mercurochrome was about the best hospital care you could hope for on Bali, where medical facilities were sub-standard. That neglect became almost criminal on October 12, 2002, when Sanglah was overwhelmed.

On October 13, as Balinese ferried victims to Sanglah on the backs of Hondas, I'll never forget the sight of the hospital's tiny morgue, which had room for just five bodies. Now the bodies spilled into the open-air walkways. Australia has since funded a modern burns unit there, in the hope that it will never be needed in quite the same way.

Wired home for money, short of cash

A dose of Bali belly and a tropical rash

Daddy came through - American Express

Bali t-shirts, magic mushrooms, Redgum bootlegs

I've been to Bali too

Daddies rarely wire cash to stricken kids these days, as Schumann admits his did for him in the'70s. All Daddy has to do today is transfer funds online, Junior hits the ubiquitous ATMs and the magic mushrooms are again on the folks.

In the mid-'80s, not long after I've Been to Bali Too was released, bootlegging tapes was the piracy rage du jour. Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil had asked the visiting Schumann to see if there were any Oils knock-offs in Bali. Schumann found a few at an Ubud lean-to. "The Oils were a bit bigger than us in those days so I didn't ask if the bloke had any Redgum," he remembers. "But as I was walking out I thought, bugger it, I'll ask."

The storekeeper beamed, "Oh yes, we have their new album I Was Only 19."

"We didn't have an album by that name," laughs Schumann. "I Was Only 19 had only been released as a single but this bugger had patched together a few tracks from various albums and was marketing it better than back in Australia."

So did Schumann "do a Lars Ulrich" (the super-rich Metallica drummer has campaigned against Internet piracy)? Schumann laughs. "Nah, I admired that Balinese entrepreneurial spirit."

Twenty years on, not much has changed, except the technology. Last month in Ubud I bought a pretty good DVD knock-off of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit Sembilan Satu Satu on Monkey Forest Road. The storekeeper had maybe 1000 other titles on display, and who knows how many more out the back.

Took my bag and mozzie coils to Peliatan

It's there were my Bali trip really began

Tourists from Holland, Britain and France

Late night puppet shows, legong dance

Want to see my slides?

I've been to Bali too

Schumann remembers going to Peliatan’s wayang kulit puppet shows and gamelan sessions that would start at dusk and finish at dawn, and meeting Europeans. “They were much more into the cultural side of Bali than Aussies were.”

No-one goes to Peliatan much any more these days. Not when the beautiful legong dancing and wayang kulit puppet shows the town is famous for are packaged up and deposited by mini-bus directly into the lobby of your five-star Nusa Dua hotel for the pleasure of your digital camera. Balinese tourism has been commoditised, and Nusa Dua is its arch exemplar, a purpose-built air-conditioned, well-watered golf course heaven where if you didn’t know better you’d think you were at Sanctuary Cove or Florida. And that’s its point, a sectioned-off tourism zone to keep the infidels, perhaps from Holland, Britain and France but more likely from Japan, Taiwan and Korea, - amused and spending in duty-free stores as far as the eye can see and away as much as possible from polluting delicate Balinese culture. That’s the charitable way of viewing Nusa Dua. Another is that it was the Suharto family’s private ATM machine, minting hard currency in an Indonesian Switzerland of massive five-star hotels that they mostly owned, while the rest of the country burned.

Well I wandered off to Ubud, just a little up the track

One week there didn't want to come back

Listening to Gamelan playing guitar

Tjanderi’s tacos, backpacker’s Hotel Menara, two month visa

I've been to Bali too

The song had its origins eight years earlier when Schumann, then a 23-year-old with "countercultural tendencies", made his first trip, hunkering down for three months in Ubud among Balinese aristocracy. He dossed down at the old Hotel Menara, trying to get as far away as he could from the Kuta scene. "Part of it was my acute embarrassment at the behaviour of my countrymen who could've been in the suburbs or on the beach for all the interest they were showing in the Balinese - boorish bastards they were."

The Menara had a right-handed guitar lying around. The left-handed Schumann restrung it and wrote a song called Bali Blues. "I sang it for my Balinese mates and their mates and families - to their endless amusement." Schumann became a minor celebrity among Ubud villagers for his "pisstake".

Flying Kangaroo out of Denpasar

Left me camera in the airport bar

I've been to Bali

I've been to Bali too

Touch down, touch down Tullamarine

Sprayed me on the plane so I'd be real clean

Coming though customs

I've been to Bali too

Went through my bags like McCartney in Japan

I didn't have a thing so I didn't give a damn

You can't trick me

'Cause I've been to Bali too

You've been to Paris and you've been Boston

You've been to Fiji and you've been to London

But you can't impress me

'Cause I've been to Bali too

Schumann's customs interrogators were looking for marijuana, the contraband that cost Paul McCartney six days in detention in 1980 when his stash was discovered by officials at Narita airport.

In 1984, moustachioed suburban wicketkeepers in government-issue shorts and long socks would grimly march onto the plane at Tullamarine and Sydney airport and spray your life-changing experience away. If you'd "gone local" in Bali the previous month, it was almost offensive. Perish the thought that any bacterial trace of exotica should infect white-bread Australia.

Today, the Pyrethrum defumigation is done every eight weeks by Qantas maintenance, or a version of it by John Howard, who's become skilled at keeping foreign pests from our shores.

And now he's been to Bali too, in October 2002, a few days after the bombings. It was a very Australian experience.

Been there, done that

I've been to Bali too