13 Where Australia Collides with Asia
Alfred Russel Wallace had planned to travel to Macassar in the Celebes (Sulawesi),
but unable to find a direct passage he sailed from Singapore in a schooner bound
for Bali and Lombok. The Kembang Djepoon (Rose of Japan) was representative
of multicultural Singapore since it had a Chinese owner, a Malay name, a Javanese
crew and an English captain. It took twenty days to sail the Java Sea and reach the
north coast of Bali, where Wallace was delighted by the views of terraced rice fields
and astonished by the highly cultivated nature of the land and its intricate irrigation
systems. He wrote that in such a well-cultivated country he did not expect to do much
natural history and he only had two days to do some collecting before the Kembang
Djepoon sailed on for Ampenan in Lombok. Significantly, the bird species he saw in
Bali were those he already knew such as the Asian golden weaver, wagtail-thrushes,
orioles and starlings, but in Lombok it was a different matter and as he wrote in The
Malay Archipelago:
During the few days which I stayed on the north coast of Bali, on my way to Lombok I saw
several birds highly characteristic of Javanese ornithology ... On crossing over to Lombok,
separated from Bali by a strait less than twenty miles wide, I naturally expected to meet
with some of these birds again; but during a stay of three months I never saw one of them,
but found a totally different set of species, most of which were entirely unknown not only in
Java, but also in Borneo, Sumatra and Malacca. For example, among the commonest birds
in Lombok were white cockatoos and honeysuckers, belonging to family groups which are
entirely absent from the western region of the Archipelago.This was an amazing discovery. The islands of Bali and Lombok are almost identical
in terms of soil, climate and position in the archipelago but belong to two distinct
zoological provinces. During the lowering of sea levels during the various Ice Ages,
the main Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Java and Borneo were connected by dry land
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