Surat-Suratnya

A woman Ibu Helen (Ellen Marning) prepares a traditional Indonesian dish – sayur lodeh – her husband’s favourite and now hers too.  She is from regional Victoria, married to an Indonesian trade-unionist.  They have children.  This meal will be the last the family eats in Jakarta.  They are no longer safe.  They are leaving for Australia the next morning.  It is sometime between 1965-67, during the Indonesian military’s purge of ‘communists’ – i.e. anyone with mildly progressive ideas.  Possibly over a million people were imprisoned, exiled or killed at this time – and the US and Australia were complicit.

As Ibu Helen chops vegetables and adds spices and coconut milk she talks directly to the audience about Indonesia at that time and how her husband risks arrest, torture and death.  She is amazed – but so grateful - that he has not been taken so far when so many others have, and amazing that they have been somehow able to find the money for their air fares and that are able to escape… 

The text here is drawn from letters Ibu Helen wrote to her family in Gippsland, but it also includes material from interviews and other research.  The letters, blown-up, provide a curtain backdrop to Ibu Helen’s food preparation.

For much of the time, however, the text does not sound much like letters a woman would write to her family – even though she tells us that her letters can be confiscated and censored.  But the text on the surface is often flat, unemotional, very matter of fact.  By necessity there is great deal of history, of context, that explains the terrifying threat this family is under – even as Ibu Helen calmly prepares the sayur lodeh – the exotic smells of which drift into the audience. 

Ellen Marning’s performance lifts the text to something beyond a matter-of-fact account.  Subtly she conveys a woman keeping panic at bay, maintaining calm for her own sake and for that of the family.  She will not relax until that plane takes off in the morning.  The maintenance of ‘normality’ is emphasised by the placing of her stove behind a translucent screen.  Whenever she moves to the stove and stirs her pot, she is backlit, and the audience sees her in silhouette – thus a classic image of ‘Mother’ making dinner and in this context, an heroic image at the same time.

But most importantly, her monologue is also enriched by Ibu Helen’s deeply felt identification with Indonesia and Indonesia culture.  She lovingly identifies each ingredient of the sayur lodeh with its name in Indonesian and its significance.  An Indonesian Musician (not named in the program) sings the names in Indonesian.  So we are aware that these horrors are taking place in this culture – and also what a wrench it will be for Ibu Helen herself to leave what’s become her home to make a ‘new life’ somewhere safe but almost alien.

Michael Brindley   

Photographer: Darren Gill