It was the sort of rich, deep-dust-carpeted silence you get after a bomb, part real, part derived from the fact that your eardrums have been stunned by what went before. Mural techniques were relatively new to me but this was no Michelangelo fresco – just painting on a wall as I might have painted on a canvas. I had had the odd public commission before but never anything on such a grandiose scale, evoking such grandiose themes and executed on a wall lit by chandeliers, a triptych, rather in the style of one of the old voyages of discovery, de Bry or some such. The idea was more or less the same “unity within diversity” that the Indonesian Republic would take – suitably classicised with Sanskrit – as its own original motto. One province, three peoples. Over to the left, were sturdy Makasarese, their fisherman role conveyed by ankle-deeep foam and the shells and starfish disposed about their feet – bearing nets, baskets of sprats and great barbed, pouting fish. In the distance, we see their bright outriggers.
