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Stringing for Time Magazine
Tom Graciano / Indonesia Media
PART 4
As I mentioned in my earlier stories, I was working on my own, or I was self-employed, if you will, as a freelance journalist in Jakarta. It was not an easy means of making a living, what with the stiff competition from a lot of more experienced foreign freelancers. We were all there because the world’s attention was still pretty much focused on Indonesia following the alleged massacre of reportedly more than 500,000 people for suspected complicity in the abortive communist coup attempt.
 
Time magazine and CBS News were my major sources of income as they paid the most and gave frequent assignments. Keystone Presss, the British newsphoto agency – I don’t know if they’re still around today, also paid pretty well for the pictures they bought from me. In addition, I had done work at one time or another for the United Press International (UPI), The Associated Press (AP), Asahi Shimbun, a major Japanese newspaper, The Herald (Melbourne), Agence France Presse (AFP) and the Chechoslovak News Agency CTK.
Early in 1968 I was asked by Peter Polomka to become a reporter for the The Herald, a major Melbourne, Australia, newspaper. Peter was the paper’s correspondent for Indonesia. Dudi Sudiyo (I don’t know if I spell his name correctly) was a photographer of The Herald, with whom I worked very closely. I understand Dudi, at the time of writing, worked for Kompas, Indonesia’s largest-circulation newspaper.
We interviewed a lot of newsworthy people together. The two I remember quite well now were H.M. Mintaredja, a senior minister in President Suharto’s cabinet, and Titi Qadarsih, a singer-cum-dancer rising in popularity at the time. Dudi was a very good photographer. He was so good that later on when I became a public relations consultant I assigned him to take photos of Freeport Indonesia’s mining operations on Papua (then called Irian Jaya). The company’s president then, the late Ali Budiardjo, was very happy with Dudi’s pictures. So were the senior executives in Freeport Minerals, Inc., the parent company in New York. Freeport Indonesia was one of my major PR clients in the early 1970s.
Peter was working on a major feature story for The Herald around March. I think it was right after the weeklong sessions of the Provisional People’s Consultative Assembly (MPRS), in which General Suharto was elected as Indonesia’s acting president. The country’s head-of-state was elected by the MPRS, the highest policy-making body, at the time. Since 2004 this was changed. The current president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, was elected directly by the country’s registered voters. Peter took me on a trip to South Sumatra, Southwest Sumatra, Bangka Island in the Bangka-Belitung province and Bintan Island in the Riau Islands province to do the story.
 We first flew to Palembang, capital of the South Sumatra province. During the MPRS sessions in Jakarta Peter had met Major General Ishak Djuarsa, commander of South Sumatra’s Sriwijaya military division. The general hosted our visit to Palembang. We interviewed him and he showed us several agricultural projects in which soldiers were involved. We then took the train from Palembang traveling in southwestward direction to either Muara Enim or Lahat, or both. My memory is failing me this time. We stayed overnight in either one of them. The following morning we chartered a Land Rover stationwagon driven by a native of Mana, a town in South Bengkulu in the southwestern part of Sumatra.
We were headed for Bengkulu, capital of the province with the same name. Peter also met the governor of the province during the MPRS sessions in Jakarta, so we were his guests during our overnight stay there. During his political struggle against the Dutch colonial government, Soekarno was exiled to Bengkulu where he was under house arrest. Peter and I were put up in the house where the political leader who later became Indonesia’s first president was placed during his exile. Some of Soekarno’s personal belongings, including books and a bicycle, were still kept in the house.
There was not much to write about in Bengkulu. But there were political moves going on to split the province into two halves -- North Bengkulu with Bengkulu as its capital and South Bengkulu with Mana as its capital. This was one of the stories Peter and I were after. We interviewed government and political leaders about this. Then we went on our hired Land Rover to Mana. The actual road linking Bengkulu and Mana was very badly damaged. It was an unpaved dirt road which became muddy and slippery because of the rainy season that had just ended.
 So the driver, who was also the owner, of the Land Rover – I think his name was Effendi – took Peter and me to Mana through a land route he creatively devised. Some parts of the damaged road were still passable in short stretches because Effendi drove the four-wheel-drive vehicle on its special gear for muddy tracks. But where we really couldn’t travel on the muddy road, he went off the road and, through the vegetable gardens of villagers living along the roadside, got onto the parts of the beach bordering with the gardens. This was the higher ground where the sand contents were sparse before the beach sloped down to the edge of the ocean where it was sandy and soft, which obviously couldn’t be driven on.
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