Spice and Magic: A Memoir of Java and Bali

In 1974, composer, Betty Beath and her husband, writer and visual artist,David Cox, funded by a fellowship from the Literature Board of the Australia Council, travelled to Indonesia to make as much contact as they could with the musicians, visual artists and writers of that nation . They arrived in Denpasar loaded with a large reel to reel tape recorder, a typewriter, a camera, much music manuscript paper and many sketchbooks. They had, also, a basic knowledge of Bahasa Indonesia , the Indonesian language, and certainly a great amount of curiosity. The Indonesian Department of Culture and Education was generous in providing many letters of introduction to artists of all disciplines. They met many poets, Betty has set much Indonesian poetry to music, they formed friendships with musicians and painters who inspired them to write and illustrate books and music drama for children. Here and there they found themselves in a pickle of some kind or another and here and there, they found great joy. In Ubud, Bali, then a village, now a town, they had the good fortune to meet with Cokorde Agung Mas, a noted musician and an authority on gamelan music. He and Betty formed a lasting friendship.
Bali and Java have changed a lot since those times. Betty and David have revisited Indonesia many times and have gained a deeper knowledge of what is a very diverse and complex culture. This memoir describes their first introduction to that culture. A Sumatran friend described Indonesia, in the simplest of ways: 'a green land, full of smiling children.' And that was pretty well what Betty and David found.