Wonder of Wanders

Lawrence Blair’s fascination with Indonesia’s wild side is still unabated at the age of 65. On a rare trip to Jakarta from his Bali home, the filmmaker and anthropologist told Bruce Emond about his adventures, his new TV series and facing up to his biggest phobia.

Tall and lanky, Lawrence Blair cuts a striking figure, kind of a mix of Errol Flynn swashbuckler meets Keith Richards’ louche rocker, as he sits amid the chintzy décor of a Central Jakarta hotel.

Part of the look is the bandanna tied around his shock of silver hair and his white shirt unbuttoned midway to reveal a deep tan gained from boogey-boarding in the Bali surf, where he has lived for 35 years.

His eyepatch (he lost his right eye to cancer several years ago) is no common black leather number, but a striped camouflage one that fits very well his self-description as a “wild man who specializes in the wilderness”.

A bit at odds with the image of the rakish adventurer passing through the concrete jungle is his beguiling upper-class accent and the crisply worded elocution that is called “posh” in his native England.

But see it this way: The accent and his genteel manner (he is the kind of man who still opens doors for others and has a relaxed familiarity about him) is a legacy of the distant past. Indonesia is his present and future.

“I am a globalist, but I am an Englishman, it’s my tribe and I understand them,” Blair says, reverting to the terms of his academic background as an anthropologist.

“But I don’t feel I belong there anymore, I couldn’t live there.”

It is in the remote, far-flung corners of this archipelago, especially in the communities of seafarers in Flores, Maluku and Sulawesi, that he has found the subjects that, he says, “turn me on”.  For, as he likes to say, Indonesia is the last wild garden at the end of the world.

He and his late brother Lorne made the critically acclaimed documentary series Ring of Fire. Released in 1988, it relayed the wonders of Indonesian traditional societies and nature to Europe and the U.S. (curiously, Indonesia is not among the 65 countries it has been shown in).

The series’ fame also helped them cement friendships with such icons of rock-star chic as Mick Jagger and David Bowie, who exchanged the series as Christmas presents when it first came out.

Although Blair prefers a steamy rain forest to the teeming, built-up Indonesian capital, he still sometimes has to venture to Jakarta, such as for May’s premiere of Myths, Magic and Monsters, written and presented by him but produced with Sky TV. 

Already aired in Britain, the four-part series is, Blair says, “like when you are at a dinner party and someone asks, ‘what is it about this country?’

“This was my chance to go out and film things that I found most interesting, including

things that I had always wanted to film but had never been able to get to.”

There were big differences with Ring of Fire.

For the first series, the brothers set out by boat with film stock, a medicine kit and bare-basics funding provided by a few universities and, notably, Ringo Starr (they had mixed in the same circles in London in the 1960s). Their odyssey, including facing up to officials quizzical of their desire to show “primitive” Indonesia, took 10 years in all.

This time around, it was still a very personal story, but there were the big-business concerns of budget and deadlines, and, he notes ruefully, a UK crew member who did not share his love of roughing it in the wild. 

“This series was all made in two years, it’s made for commercial TV, so it’s not so academic, it’s fast-moving, it’s cut to the disco beat so to speak,” he acknowledged. “But that’s alright, it communicates [Indonesia] to more people, the kids love it, we got very good reviews in England.”

The series, following on from a program called Myths, Monsters and Hobbits, explores the complex relationship between nature and people in Indonesian communities. Among other adventures, Blair swam with the world’s most poisonous sea snake, dove with sperm whales, cuddled up to the tiny tarsier and witnessed the rare surfacing of a fish that gives off the brightest light in nature.

Holding it all together is Blair’s passion for his subjects, offset by an amusingly dry delivery about sometimes hairy experiences. But he is not some endearingly eccentric host fumbling through; he writes the series based on his opinions and observations.

One of the pioneers in the field of Psycho-Anthropology in the early 1970s, he backs the controversial viewpoint that different peoples may be more suited by their backgrounds and evolution to different capabilities, without meaning they are superior or lesser to other groups.

He says he is more interested in animals than people now.

“I think we contain all the beasts in us, all their habits, all the strange things they do, and Indonesia is a great place for discovering new species and exotic subspecies.”

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The other big difference in making this series was the absence of Lorne, whose untimely death in 1995 came after a fall into a ditch in Kuta. He compares their relationship in the field to a “marriage”, with each taking care of their allotted roles.    

“We worked together like five people would work together. We would get by with the food and the language, and put up with all sorts of misery.”

To celebrate his brother’s life, Lawrence organized a cruise with Jagger, Jerry Hall and about 40 other “crazy” people to places they had wanted to visit in Indonesia.

“They totally loved each other, but there also was sibling rivalry, of course, and they would have it out sometimes,” says writer Leonard Lueras, who knew the Blairs for many years. “They were different; Lawrence had more of the LA-Hollywood style about him, while Lorne was kind of BBC methodical in his way.”

The brothers inherited their sense of adventure from their parents, who turned their backs on lives of privilege to become actors during World War II. Their mother, now in her 90s and living in Australia, later remarried a man who moved the family to Mexico.

“He was a merchant adventurer and he set us on the road to transnationalism,” Blair says of his stepfather.

When he died, their mother moved to India and later Indonesia, studying the Javanese spiritual movement Subud and introducing her sons to the country.    

On the new series, Blair confronts his fear of snakes, including drinking the blood of an unfortunate specimen in a Chinese medicine shop (Blair’s reaction to the potion’s “kick” is not to be missed).

He dealt with another phobia earlier this year by finally marrying his longtime partner.

“We all have phobias; for some people it’s crowds, for others it’s ducks and for me it was marriage, because my family has not been very good at it … but I guess curiosity finally got the better of me!”

During our discussion, Blair mentioned the “insecurity” of filming – the hope that the subjects the team wanted to film would still be around when they arrived at the location. It underlines the vast changes that have occurred to the environment and traditional societies in the years since Ring of Fire was made.

Even his beloved Bali has changed from the romantic “childlike” purity of when he first arrived in the early 1970s; today, he says, it is like a troubled adolescent trying to find itself.

“It’s a bit distressing but then we should remember that our grandparents were always saying things were getting worse for them,” he said of the doomsday predictions about the environment. “Then again this time we may be right.”

He believes there are more adventures to be had, especially in the abundant and still little researched biodiversity of Papua.

I ask him if, despite his long absence from his birthplace, he is in the tradition of the intrepid English traveler traipsing through uncharted territory. He sort of agrees.

“It is an English characteristic to go and stick our noses where they don’t belong, and I am inveterately curious. I’m very nosy.”

He recounts a story from his childhood, when he would sneak backstage during conjurer shows try to figure out how the tricks were being done. He is still doing that today in the corners of Indonesia where fantasies are a reality.

“We live in an age of illusion and I want to see what is propping it up.”

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