Max Lane – Living in Australia, one sees almost every week a news report about some event or other in Bali, Indonesia's primary tourist destination. Bali is only 6 or 7 hours flight from cities like Sydney or Melbourne, in less than from Perth in West Australia. In 2023, 1.2 million Australians holidayed in Bali. Statistics point to similar mor more for 2024 and 2025 as well. Airlines have added new flights. In 2023 there were just over 5 million tourists visit Bali from outside Indonesia. There 9.5 million domestic tourists visit. So there were over 14 million tourists or almost 4 tourists for every indigenous Balinese – 3.9 million out of its total 4.5 million Indonesian citizen residents.
Revenue from Balinese tourism is about USD$5 billion or half the island's GDP. 20-30% is repatriated overseas to the foreign owners of hotels, restaurants, suppliers, airlines and so on. Around 15-25% flows to other parts of Indonesia, also via business operations, suppliers and so on. Maybe 2 million ordinary people, directly or indirectly, earn their livelihood from the industry.
Balinese, as once author described it in an excellent book, is a 'paradise; created", for tourists of course. I visited Bali as a backpacker in 1969-70, and then again in 1981, to do research for my B.A. thesis on Balinese political history, and a couple of times while I was Second Secretary at the Australian Embassy during 1980-81. In the more recent period, after almost 20 years, my visits to Bali have been to speak at the Ubud Writers Readers Festival. After one of these recent attendances, I wrote the short reflections below and two attempts at poems.
As regards the fate of Bali, now so dependent on mass tourism, I dnn't know what to say, except that working out some alternative to mass tourism as the basis of economic life can only be done see Bali as part of a radical popular democratic Indonesia, neither federal nor centralised, but coordinative. The ecological and economic strengths and deficiencies of different regions need to be coordinated to supplement each other.
But here are those reflections.
A Writers Festival versus real life
[Australian academic, researcher, translator, writer and veteran observer of Indonesia Max Lane attended this year's Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, his first, and gives a tick to its increasing Indonesian participation. But, he writes, he is haunted by the social distortions it highlights.]
BALI is beautiful, at least those parts that have not yet been scarred by the "growth without development" tumours of crowded buildings, shops, hotels, bars and car-jammed roads. Higher-grade chlorophyll seems to seep into the growing rice plants and every other kind of growing flora. Even the moss, carpeting the stone fences and gateways built in the style of the traditional temples and aristocratic residences, greens the stony greyness. The green is deep, and lush, and – if you stop and look closely – it is more beautiful and soothing than the initial gaze from a moving car, or even a slow walk, admits.
The wonderful, ironic and challenging reality is that none of this beauty is natural. It is all man and woman-made by the hands of that unconscious artist: the Balinese rice farmer. There are a few small valleys here and there that may be untouched by the human hand, but almost every other square inch has been crafted by the farmer.
It is all the product of bent backs and strained fingers. The genius of the naturally watered rice fields divides them into smallish, terraced squares that defy the tractor. The farmer, man or woman, feet lodged in the near black mud, bends, grasps the stalks and cuts, now with a scythe but in the past with little bamboo scissors, stalk by stalk.
The Balinese painter and traditional Balinese paintings are famous now, with a globalised fame assisted by tourism. Over the past two decades, millions and millions of foreign tourists, almost all from the rich countries, have visited Bali. The colourful and intricate traditional painting, detailed in its fealty to Hindu religious narratives, has become well-known. More contemporary innovations as well as perversions are also making their presence felt.
Yet the most beautiful pictures are those framed not by the gallery's carved wooden picture frame or by the whiteness of a gallery wall, but by the window in a hotel, or a cafe, or even a stopped car. The pictures captured in those frames breathe their beauty at you. As with any painting you must stop, wait, look, think, gaze, and think some more. Perhaps the greatest artistic skills in Bali are those of the architect who knows where to place a window.
The window is just the frame, however. It is what the window frames that is beautiful. Did the farmer build the paddy fields and plant the coconut trees and banana trees with crafting a new beauty in mind? Probably not, even though there could be little doubt that despite the pain and weariness of planting and harvesting, he or she would stop and wonder at how beautiful it was. If the chlorophyll deep green speaks life, it is also the life strength of the farmer that we see.
So we ask: what are the royalties that the farmer receives each time the tourist stops to appreciate the panorama? Will he or she receive something material, along with the photographer, each time their handiwork is reproduced and printed in magazines and brochures around the world?
The per capita income of the agriculture-based population in Indonesia, including in Bali, is unlikely ever to be above $US2-$23 a day. Whatever taxes from the tourist industry the Indonesian national and Balinese provincial governments may collect from tourism, it has not lifted this figure markedly higher than before, even after millions of tourists.
Tourism is organised on capitalist lines and the profits go to those who invest capital, rather than those without capital who expend labour.
Even less will go to the farmers who created and keep creating Bali's physical beauty and thus renew its attractiveness to tourism.
In fact, the economic distortion of tourist Bali is fundamental. Mass tourism to Bali is only possible because the Balinese are poor. A higher standard and living, and the higher costs that would go with it, would make the cheap package stays at two, three and four-star hotels impossible, as well as the even cheaper backpacker holidays.
To attend the URWF was, therefore, to be haunted by distortions: Enjoying the farmer-created vista through the window of a hotel whose comforts outstripped those of a farmers house a million times over and then departing to a discussion on the novel, or the state of Pakistan, or whether there was such a thing as Australian literature, seemed anomalous... even just wrong.
Should there be no festival? Well, should there be no tourism?
No, the festival should go on, even if one of its stated goals is to promote the tourist industry. Mass tourism, organised along capitalist lines, will go on until there is something else to replace it. And capitalist-organised mass tourism will only be replaced within an Indonesian national economic strategy based on solidarity, rather than exploitation, and which can mobilise the whole population to find the ways to raise productivity. Meanwhile, the name of the game is intervention.
In the cultural sphere: be there and speak out! If the URWF is a contradiction, it is because so is Bali. It is an advance alone that it takes place. Hopefully its organisers and participants will keep it going and keep it open to all ideas – and further broaden its spectrum of thinking.
In the political economy: be there and organise! (Indonesian, including Balinese, farmers and tourist industry workers need unions and their own political organisations.)
THIEF IN BALI
That brustling whoosh of the running river's flow,the yellow and the white butterfly escape the lizard on the tree bough,statue stillness of the great green leaves,And here sit I, one of Bali's new beauty thieves.
BALI, INDONESIA
Green, deep green
Chlorophyll blinds the eyes keen
Black earth, brown aches
Sticky mud between toes cakes.
Tears irrigate the picture
painted under the labouring harvest's stricture
Paddy, palms, coconuts, frangipanis
Creations of peasant hands canny.
Rice sold and eaten
Suffices to keep deep want beaten
But for the future there are no savings
School, culture, dignity unsatisfied cravings.
Green beauty massages the soul
A rested spirit is the tourist's dole.
The holy dollar has bought the view
Aching fingers sculpt paradise for the few.
Source: https://maxlaneonline.substack.com/p/bali-how-long-a-paradis