Stephanie Belfrage, the Australian woman who gave her beautiful batik textiles back to Indonesia, is "one of the warmest and most generous spirits you could wish to meet" according to a friend of hers. This warmth has shone through all of the correspondence that I have had with her.
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| Stephanie Belfrage with her husband and one of her hand-made quilts. |
In addition to this, I know her through a short blurb that she wrote for the big repatriation event in Pekalongan. Here it is:
In 1971, I left
Australia, newly married, for Paris.
Seven years later, we packed up our young family and set out for
Jakarta. There was a marked contrast in
lifestyle but the whole family fell in love with the people, the landscape and
the vibrant Indonesian culture, and embraced it all with open arms.
We wasted no
time in learning Bahasa Indonesia, and quickly made friends among both
Indonesian colleagues and fellow expats.
I became involved in a number of projects, all related in some way to
textiles. I joined a quilting group and
through it learned about the different batik textiles. I was on a committee that set up a shop, ‘The
Red Feather’, to provide skills and income for the paraplegic residents of the
Wisma Cheshire Home in Cilandak, Jakarta.
We taught the residents basic English and Accounting. The girls learned to cut and sew patchwork
items. The boys made superb dolls’
houses. The shop was very successful and
enabled the residents to achieve a degree of independence, which would not
otherwise have been possible for them. (I
am not sure whether or not the shop is still functioning).
Batak textiles
from North Sumatra were first introduced to me through the Ganesha Society (now called the Heritage
Society??) where I also met Batak people living in Jakarta. I then began to collect their textiles, learning about the significance of ulos within Batak culture. This study became part of a lecture programme
of the Ganesha Society
Double ikat
weaving, unique to the village of Tenganan, was introduced to me in regular
sojourns at Ibu Oka’s Ashram in Candi Dasa, East Bali. A visit to the Batak
homeland of Samosir in North Sumatra expanded my knowledge of their textiles (ulos).
Attendance at a traditional funeral ceremony in Sulawesi resulted in the acquisition
of one of the most valued textiles in my collection, which has recently been
most welcomed by the Jakarta Textile Museum and is now, as I understand
it, part of the current exhibition of
Torajan textiles. Travel to Cirebon and
Linggar Jati in 1985 to visit the home of the beautiful Pekalongan batiks and
to watch them being created in the traditional workshops, led to my exposure to
yet another variety of Indonesian textile.
Everywhere we
went, we collected textiles. The
everyday ones, were cut and used in patchwork quilts as shown in the photo
attached. When we left Indonesia in
1986, the textiles and patchwork quilts came with us. They have been much admired and much loved
since then.
However, life
goes on. This year we have moved to a
smaller space and foremost on my mind was what to do with the textiles. Of the options available, returning them to
their original home seemed by far the most satisfying. Indonesia had been so welcoming to us,
introducing us to wider cultural
perspectives, which in turn invited us to reflect on our own. Thanks to
modern technology, I ‘met’ Dr. Sandra Niessin, who told me about her Pulang
Kampung project, which I immediately identified with. With Sandra’s guidance and the help of Mrs.
Mara Soekarno, Dr. Anne Conduit, Mr. Greg Roberts and Mr. Ian Reed, all the textiles are now returning home.
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Stephanie's photograph was projected on the wall behind us as I
spoke about the spirit of repatriation in Pekalongan's
Batik Museum
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