Prologue
The volcanoes of Mount Agung on Bali and Mount Rinjani on Lombok, their 3000
metre peaks shrouded in cloud, stand like giant sentinels guarding the northern entrance
to the Lombok Strait which separates the Indonesian islands of Bali and Lombok. The
strait is only twenty-five kilometres wide but it plunges to a depth of 2140 metres
below sea level. Crossing the strait can be hazardous and its turbulent waters are the
result of a major flowthrough of water between the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
In June 1856, the English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace crossed the narrow strait.
During the few days when he stayed on the north coast of Bali he saw several birds
highly characteristic of Asian ornithology with which he was already familiar and
would expect to see on Lombok. After a turbulent crossing and being dumped on the
shores of the island he never saw the same birds again. He found a totally different set
of species, most of which were entirely unknown not only in Java, but also in Borneo
and Sumatra. Among the commonest birds he found in Lombok were white cockatoos
and honeyeaters which are characteristic of Australia and are entirely absent from the
western region of the archipelago. Wallace wrote in his book The Malay Archipelago:
The great contrast between the two divisions of the Archipelago is nowhere so abruptly
exhibited as on passing from the island of Bali to that of Lombok, where the two regions
are in closest proximity ... The strait is here fifteen miles wide, so that we may pass in two
hours from one great division of the earth to another, differing as essentially in their animal
life as Europe does from America.Because of the lowering of sea levels during the various Ice Ages, the main
Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Java and Borneo were connected by dry land and
it was the deep Lombok Strait which separates these larger islands sitting on the
Asian Continental Shelf from the smaller islands of the eastern archipelago. The
Lombok Strait represents part of the boundary between the fauna of Asia and those of
Australasia which was subsequently named the Wallace Line.
On the Asian side of the Wallace Line are the Asian elephant, the rare Javanese8http://www.ebook3000.com