Australian Magazine, September 2002

Garden Guru
Made Wijaya has made his name designing some of the world’s most beautiful tropical gardens

by Julia Ross

Fragrant frangipanis, trickling water, cool courtyards and a tangle of greenery-these are some of the essential elements shared by the world’s tropical gardens.
And Brisbane’s lush climate made it an ideal city for Australian expat in Bali, Made Wijaya, formerly known as Michael White, to launch his work Tropical Garden Design (Thames & Husdon Australia) on 20 October, with a soiree in the City Botanic Gardens.
As he sips on a cup of heart-starting Balinese coffee the morning after, Made reserves some high praise for the gardens his Quay West suite overlooks.

“Honolulu is the world’s most beautiful tropical city, but many parts of Brisbane would probably run a close second, particularly these botanic gardens,” he says.
“That’s Honolulu, not northern Hawaii with it theme park hotels,” he adds.

Dressed in a batik sarong, Made, 46, reveals his wicked wit as his conversation jumps from Indonesian politics to his work as a famous landscape architect and designer.
He first arrived in Bali in 1973 and was seduced by the beautiful island.

“I was studying architecture (at Sydney University) and we all dropped out and I went to Nimbin,” he says.
“Someone offered me a passage on a 35ft ketch which was without a dinghy or a radio, and we ended up swimming ashore in Bali. I just fell in love with the people and the culture of the island.”

And there he stayed for the next 10 years. He lived with a local family who adopted him – hence the decision to change his name.

“I went back to Sydney and finished my degree, and started a restaurant (on campus), a warung,” he says. “It became quite trendy to go there after the opera and people would come back up and have an authentic Indonesian meal in an authentic setting.”

It ran for six months as part of his design project for his thesis, then Bali called again.
Made likes to say he stumbled across his career as a tropical garden designer. Today, he employs more than 500 gardeners, architects and artisans and has created more than 400 tropical gardens around the world. Just some of these include David Bowie’s former estate in Mustique, the Bali Hyatt in Sanur, the Bali Oberoi, and Bali’s Four Seasons at Jimbaran Bay.
Is there a favorite garden? “Well, the Four Seasons in Jimbaran Bay was a great experience,” he says. “The architects were really sympathetic to the cause of the landscape design as being important in a resort, which it is – people remember the gardens.”

He enjoyed his experience in Mustique, where Bowie’s friend Mick Jagger would pop over to discuss garden design. “It was a great a job … but there was no water, we had to import the water and fly in the plants!” he says.
In his early years, Made was influenced by the style of the botanic gardens in Brisbane and Sydney, which are cousins of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, London.

“I reinterpreted it in Bali, that sort of took off and received a lot of publicity and a lot of people copied that,” he says.

Made draws inspiration from a range of countries, including the English colonial period in India.

“I think good artists borrow, great artists steal!” he says, immodestly. “You know, Brett Whiteley had that scribbled on the wall of his studio in Surrey Hills … Wendy (the late artist’s wife) has just launched my book in Sydney and I did a makeover of (daughter) Arkie’s house in Palm Beach.”

Made owns a small apartment in Sydney’s Lavender Bay, and returns to the city for private commissions. His business has offices in Bali, Jakarta and Singapore and work takes Made to Hawaii next month, where he will launch his book. He is clearly a fan of sultry, summer weather.

“As we know in tropical climes, the furniture is in the garden and the plants are in the house – it’s a veranda lifestyle,” he says.

Made has published two other books, The Complete Stranger in Paradise and Balinese Architecture: Towards an Encyclopedia, and is working on a fourth. “They are trying not to be coffee table books, but they look like it.”
In Bali, Made divides his time between his home in Sanur and his small hotel, made up of cottages, near Ubud. But Australia still holds strong ties and he returns every six months or so.
One of the aspects Made likes best about Brisbane is our timber and tin Queenslanders that dot the suburbs.

“We have this brilliant tradition of the Queenslander,” he says. “I’ve included a great painting of a Queenslander by Margaret Olley in my book. It’s the ultimate tropical house and it really is in the tradition of pavilion architecture that came down from British colonial architects in India.”