TEMPO Magazine, March 24-30, 2009

Made Wijaya:
Enfant Terrible of Indonesian Journalism

Text by Bill Dalton

Now it is the stuff of legend - Made Wijaya’s splashing ashore from a 35-foot ocean-going ketchin 1973. If the story is true – and if you know the man, there’s no reason not to believe it – this dramatic first landfall on Bali perfectly befits an equally stylish and flamboyant life style and professional career that were to follow.

Anyone who has witnessed this jaunty character’s stage performances, in which he parodies the gestures and movements of the condong in the Legong Keraton dance, can attest to the fact that the man’s genteel manner and urbane conversation belies the highly theatrical personality that lies beneath. 
Born Michael White and growing up in Sydney’s eastern suburbs of Bondi and Double Bay, he led the perfect Australian childhood filled with sun and surf. His small “p” protestant upbringing was nurtured in scout halls, Sunday schools and on hot clay tennis courts.
The redheaded boy’s rigorous lessons resulted in him becoming the first Young Masters Tennis Champion of Australia (under 17). By the next year, as he turned to tap dancing and fancy cigarettes, Michael enrolled as a student of architecture at the University of Sydney. His first enterprise was operating an authentic Indonesian open-air warung on the university campus.
Made Wijaya first visited Bali in 1973 with the intention of taking only a short sabbatical from his studies, but his fascination with the island's extravagantly rich pageantry and culture eventuallyled him to move in with a Brahman family in the laid back fishing village of Sanur. Somewhere along the way he assumed the Balinese name for first-born son, Made Wijaya.
The new resident taught tennis, worked as a tourist guide and English teacher at the Conservatory of Dance (KOKAR) in Denpasar, finally landing a job as a photojournalist for the English edition of the Sunday Bali Post (1979-1981) and authoring Bali Pocket Guide andcontributing to Insight’s Bali Guide.
In 1980 Made had the stupefying good luck of being invited to revamp the gardens for the Bali Hyatt Hotel in Sanur and the Bali Oberoi in Seminyak. In what was to become his day job for the next two decades, these initial assignments ultimately led to a long and illustrious career working on more than 800 gardens all over the tropics.
Made Wijaya’s company, P.T. Wijaya Tribwana International, now employs a 300–strong team of artisans – or "garden commandos" as he calls them. His commissions to create gardens and distinctive properties take him on jobs as far field as Singapore, India, Spain, Morocco, Hawaii, Australia and Mexico. He is frequently called upon to represent Southeast Asia at international design forums. He even once accepted an assignment in Berlin to help create a tropical garden inside the world biggest dome.

Made Wijaya at Villa Bebek, Sanur, 2008

The Stranger as Writer
It’s curious that in spite of earning a surfeit of recognition as a world-class designer, Made prefers to think of himself more as a writer. Indeed, it can be said that he has gained a substantially wider reputation for his “Stranger in Paradise: The Diary of an Expatriate,” a series of articles documenting Balinese life and times since 1979.
From his earliest years in school, the young man had a fascination with creating books and magazines, doggedly schooling himself in the unteachable art of writing. In high school he was co-editor of the popular satirical student magazine “Cranbrook Sauce” from 1963 to 1964.
Starting in the 1980s and continuing for the next 25 years Made published various ‘zeens,’ including “Humour in Modern Javanese Furniture,” “Travel Diaries in the Lumba-Lumba Asmara,” in addition to assorted articles on Balinese architecture for Indonesia’s impoverished cultural magazines such as Lontar and Latitudes.
It would be another twenty more years, appropriately at the turn of the milleniusm, before Made finally would have his own cultural satire magazine, Poleng, which lasted six-years from 2000 to 2006.
But it was Made Wijaya’s regular column “The Stranger in Paradise”(www.strangerinparadise.com), inaugurated in the Sunday Bali Post in 1979, which established him as a cultural journalist to be reckoned with. For more than 13 years his signature column has been appearing monthly in first the Bali Echo, then Hello Bali, and currently in BALI NOW!magazine as well as tri-monthly in the Jakarta Post. Along with Poleng, each issue has a devoted following throughout the country.
As a bona fide member and aesthetic activist of South Asia’s design community, Made also churns out a number of ‘sister columns’ on travel, history and design in the Sunday Express(India), JAKARTA NOW! and Travel and Leisure Magazine out of Bangkok. In October 2002 after the first Bali Bomb, Time magazine commissioned him to write an essay, an assignment he considers a great honor.

A Publishing Force
Made’s literary pursuits reveal a multi-talented, multi-faceted author and publishing impresario who has either directly written or co-authored eight books. The body of his published work encompasses such diverse and dissimilar fields as interior decorating; modern, traditional and landscape architecture; social commentary; garden, fashion and industrial design; and etymological derivations.
This voluble penman can hold forth with seeming equal facility and ferocity on the follies and hypocrisy of the media, the degradation of Bali’s environment and spiritual sanctuaries, the crass commercialization of the island’s ceremonies and dances, the niceties of Javanese and Balinese court customs, minimalist architecture, arcane Indian philosophy, detailed interpretations of Indonesian language usage and slang, contemporary fashion and apparel, the pomposity of health and beauty spas, the proliferation of Bali’s boy bands, as well as more mundane subjects such as security measures, terrorist executions and airplane etiquette.
At its finest, his writing is charged with a heady mix of wit, erudition and eloquent acerbity. He is unabashedly romantic, hedonistic, sensual. His eye for detail – colours, sounds, movement, fragrances – is vivid, often bordering on hallucinogenic.
Resonant with self-confidence and authority, his pen reveals a man comfortable in his own skin, even as he openly admits to adopting a Balinese feudal approach to business management. Few journalistic voices in Indonesia are so laden with righteous outrage and a captivating intimacy at the same time.
This is a man who does not suffer fools gladly. He routinely castigates obtuse critics, stubborn readers, ill-informed editors, faint-hearted publishers. He can pass biting comment or high praise – in equal measure - on government bureaucrats or lofty members of Balinese royalty. An astute follower of Byzantine Indonesian national politics, he gives the Jakarta power elite little quarter. Since 1979 his column has been forced out of print six times.
Although Made dispenses celebrity gossip and unashamedly drops names of the rich and famous – liege lords, fashion icons, chic painters, hotel founders, surf champions, choreographers, Cinetron stars, media personalities, lifestyle gurus, international models - he possesses to an abundant degree of that admirable Australian trait of utter intolerance for high social airs and pretensions.
And amid his opinionated megalomania, he is an underdog’s hero of sorts. Made is the dogged voice of artists an scholars (lidah kleng) and a robust defender of the farmer, the shop girl, the taxi driver. He despises Malaysian and Singaporean employers of Indonesian overseas workers, and rails against those who would typecast his adopted country’s citizens as “a race of masseurs and domestics.”
Greedy real estate developers hold a special abhorrence for him as he has watched over the past 30 years his beloved Old Bali disappear under ugly urban sprawl, what he calls “a tsunami of tackiness sweeping the island.” Yet he is irrepressibly optimistic, asserting over and over that Bali is undergoing a perpetual cultural renaissance.

Made Wijaya dancing the incredible smoking condong with Madelief Djelantik for Astri and Dr. A.A. Made Djelantik at Taman Ujung, Karangasem, December 2008

Made Wijaya dancing the Bharata Bayu at Gedung Kesenian Jakarta, march 2009

Style is Everything
One of most gifted working writers on the island, revelling in an English unique to him, Made Wijaya’s writing is a study in stylistic idiosyncrasies and highly original turn of phrase. He is especially given to self-generated compounds: stud muffin, dharma bunny, Kuta Prada, mall rat fashion, proletarian battler, power blondes, Hybrid Hindu, Hawaiian Lite, Princessa de France, as well as unexpected neologisms: lifesaveros, Barongathon and clitterati (guests speakers at the Ubud Writer’s Festival), all a bit wacky but somehow ring true.
With his use of French, Latin, Italian and German phrases, as well as occasionally alluding to Sanskrit and Brahmanic ritual terms, his writing can at times be nothing less than esoteric. He skilfully employs self-caricature in order to draw the reader in, quite willing to exaggerate hiscorpulent suffering body in the hands of a merciless Thai masseuse (though never to the point of self-effacement).
He is a shrewd cultural observer, retelling awkward debates with crown princes on airplanes and surreal encounters with concierge in Indian hotels. He doesn’t hesitate to laud or castigate a competitor’s work if he feels it’s required. He will minutely dissect and then regale gatherings of every description, from wedding receptions to high fashion shows.
More than in the formal edited pages of one of his coffee table books on architecture. his talents are given their fullest and most unbridled freedom in his magazine articles and blog entires. Interspersed with illustrations, pop up dialog balloons, comical montages, vintage photos, captioned line art, one learns to expect anything and everything.
The writer’s travel pieces take readers from the casinos of Malaysia and the picturesque Indian State of Kerela (for which he seems to have an infatuation), to the elusive beauty of Mexico City and the appalling traffic of Jakarta. He seems to harbour both undisguised contempt and riveting fascination for the nation’s capital.

With author/photographer Tim Street-Porter, Villa Bebek, 1989

A Carefully Constructed Career
As a recognized authority on tropical gardens and South East Asian architecture and design - his own garden was chosen in 2008 as the finale in BBC’s “Around the World in 80 Gardens” - Made has published five books on these subjects - his literary milieu. Several of his books have been translated into foreign languages.
Authors usually have a hazy knowledge at best of publishing details since this aspect of the creation of a book is not their primary concern. Not so with Made Wijaya who personally involves himself in the design and layout of his books. It saddens him to see one of his publictions in a bookstore’s remainder bin.
With characteristic immodesty, he asserts that the superbly produced At Home in Bali, Tropical Garden Design and Modern Tropical Garden Design were but floor exercises for researching his true passion - the traditional architecture of Indonesia.
Wijaya’s most recent title, The Best of Stranger in Paradise 1996-2008, launched at the Periplus Menteng Bookstore in February 2009, is a collection of the crème de la crème of his opinionated and irreverent columns such as “Wham Bham Thankyou, Nyoman,” "Carry on Kuta," and "Ocean Views are Overrated” from the period 1996 to 2008.
It’s important to point out that this new book covers a pivotal period of Bali’s modern development – the rise of the Hindu vigilantes, gay Seminyak, and the birth of the superbules such as Peter Watts (Project Manager of the Four Seasons)  and bule aga culture experts such as Diana Darling and Jean Couteau.
Given the task of promoting and publicizing his prodigious output in all media formats, Made has even established a separate business entity, Wijaya Words, with its own website replete with bio data, reviews, cover images and lists of book retail outlets where his titles may be purchased.
As is the case with his cultural predecessors Walter Spies, Le Mayeur, Rudolph Bonnet, Donald Friend and Miquel Covarrubias, it’s surprising that a book about Made Wijaya has not yet been written. As an iconic figure and internationally recognized authority on all matters Balinese, he indisputably qualifies as a worthy subject of a biography.
That time may be near. Author’s compilations are similar to artist’s retrospectives in that they look back on work that has already been released to the public. His new Best of Stranger book can be considered a mark of distinction in a publishing career because it shows that the writer’s released work has reached such a volume that there is now a demand for it.
Made Wijaya may even suffer the oft-repeated fate of a celebrity writer. His productions could become the subject of in-depth collectors who horde every scintilla of an author’s labors on earth – photos, recordings, manuscripts, foreign translations, first-editions in every format, first appearances in magazines and periodicals and even odd ephemera such as posters and announcements.
Perhaps within his inner circle there is a Boswell lurking and recording. But so prolific and hydra-headed is the Stranger’s work that any future chronicler of his literary estate will find the task daunting, made all the more so because there is no end in sight of this man’s remarkable life and career.