TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
‘A Geek in Indonesia’ Tim Hannigan’s alternative guide
A bird’s eye view: Author Tim Hannigan poses during his trip at Tana Toraja, South Sulawesi
Change Size
A bird’s eye view: Author Tim Hannigan poses during his trip at Tana Toraja, South Sulawesi. (Courtesy of Tim Hannigan)
Journalist and writer Tim Hannigan came to Bali for the surf, endured dangdut music and fell in love with punk rock. His was never going to be your average guidebook.
Cornwall is thought of by some as the Bali of Europe. Strong waves and hidden coves make the long peninsula in the Southwest of England a surfer’s paradise. But the grass is always greener on the other side.
Growing up in Cornwall, Tim Hannigan and fellow surfers would work throughout the summer in hospitality, construction or – as in the case of Hannigan – as chefs, saving up to spend their winters surfing in Bali.
“At that time Indonesia still had a reputation that you could go for nothing, there were warungs (small restaurants) where you could stay for free if you ate two meals a day,” he told The Jakarta Post.
In town for the launch of two books he wrote – A Geek in Indonesia and photo book Journey Through Indonesia – at Periplus bookstore, Hannigan also authored Murder in the Hindu Kush (2011) and Raffles and the British Invasion of Java (2012).
Deciding to venture away from the familiar beaches of Bali, Hannigan and his friend Russ found themselves on a slow boat to Labuan Bajo, Flores, sharing the small space with an enthusiastic but unpolished dangdut band that “treated” the passengers to a 24-hour gig.
Upon arrival at their hotel at the port, he heard some familiar music from another room, and his distaste for dangdut was formed.
From Bali to Sumbawa, Flores and Sumba, where they caught the Pasola horseback jousting festival, he was sucked into Indonesia’s rural culture, far beyond anything they had read about in the guidebooks that focused on temples and traditional gamelan music.
“Russ had photocopied Teach Yourself Indonesian from the library and made a copy of the cassette, so we would listen to this cassette every morning while having our banana pancakes […]; then we’d go to the market and annoy the ibu (women) practicing our Indonesian” Hannigan fondly remembered.
Between 2006 and 2012, he taught English at a school in the East Java city of Surabaya, worked as a freelance and staff journalist at various English newspapers, including The Jakarta Post, and traveled extensively throughout the archipelago.
Yet, Hannigan found there was very little written in English about Indonesia, so to quench his thirst for learning more about the country, he started to read what he could find: Sociology books, history books and anthropological texts that focus on the tribal cultures in remote parts of distant islands.
“I’m not a historian, first and foremost; I’m a history reader and someone with a real longstanding interest in history. I am a trained journalist […], so I have an interest in stories and narrative and the practice of making stories out of the hard matter of reality.”
A Brief History of Indonesia (2015) was written by Hannigan as an accessible, condensed history book on Indonesia, and the kind of book he wished he could have read when he first visited the archipelago.
“So, if 20 years later another version of me comes over from Cornwall and kind of wants a first book to read about Indonesian history, they’ve got it there already for them,” he says.
Still, he felt there was a gap out there in what visitors to Indonesia both wanted and needed to read.
-masking.img_assist_custom-780x556.jpg "Tim Hannigan (JP/Evie Breese)")
A Geek in Indonesia (2018) was written to introduce foreign readers, or Indonesians interested in the nation’s pop culture, to contemporary music, food and life in Indonesia.
“If you read a Lonely Planet guidebook to Indonesia, or really any other guidebook, what you get is temples, food and gamelan music, and a potted history; you definitely don’t get anything about Indonesian soap operas, or Indonesian film or Indonesian media,” Hannigan says.
Indonesian punk rock, unlike dangdut, sparked real joy for Hannigan, who became a frequent participant at gigs where he would rock out with the cool kids.
His greatest regret for the book is not being able to get an interview with Superman is Dead, his favorite Indonesian punk band, which hails from Bali.
He did, however, include a question-and-answer section with a jazz fanatic. The section on Indonesia’s music scene – on its “dangdut divas, its smoke wreathed jazzmen, its punks and its pengamen (street singers)” – is certainly a standout section of the book.
While Hannigan jokes that A Geek in Indonesia is “A slightly silly book […]”, it does have a message underpinning it that he truly believes in.
“It wants to say that, actually, dangdut music, or punk, or really terrible soap operas are as much culture as the Pasola in Sumba, or as much culture as an ancestral shrine in Flores.”
