An Englishman goes Makassan G E P ‘Pat’ Collins 1904–1991
Whatever happened to this Oxford drop-out after he ran away to the East, found love and a passion for ‘native’ sailing, became a best-selling author and built his dream boat – a Makassan prahu? Museum honorary research associate Jeffrey Mellefont pieces together a forgotten life.
THE MAKASSANS OF THE INDONESIAN ISLAND called Sulawesi are of special interest in the study of Australia’s pre-colonial contact history. They were a ship-building, seafaring and trading people who had centuries-old, commercial and cultural relations with Aboriginal societies during annual fishing voyages to Australia’s northern coasts. Their chief catch was trepang, edible sea slugs that abounded in the shallows of Arnhem Land and the Kimberley. Starting long before British settlement, Makassans dried and smoked the trepang on Australian beaches, sailed home on the monsoon winds and traded them on to China where they were a prized delicacy believed also to be an aphrodisiac. This story of cooperation between Indigenous communities and seafarers from the Indonesian archipelago is the first that visitors encounter in the museum’s exhibition Under Southern Skies.1 When I first began researching Indonesia’s diverse, unique but little-recorded maritime traditions, 40 years ago, information was hard to come by. But in the State Library of New South Wales I encountered two remarkable books published in the 1930s about the Makassan clans of South Sulawesi and their distinctive sail-trading craft, or prahus. 42
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East Monsoon (1936)2 and Makassar Sailing (1937)3 were written by a young English adventurer who had lived and sailed with the fierce Makassans of the remote and arid south-western peninsula of Sulawesi – the island widely known as the Celebes during colonial times, when the Dutch ruled the East Indies. In East Monsoon the author, George Ernest Patrick Collins, relates his experiences voyaging as a guest on a Sulawesi trading prahu called a palari pinisi in the Makassan language. He relishes the utterly spartan life under sail with no engine, no safety or navigational equipment and no comforts, living on rice and dried fish cooked in a kerosene tin over a wood fire. The book introduces the Makassans’ seamanship and Muslim culture as Collins negotiates to have them build him a palari pinisi of his own. The subsequent volume, Makassar Sailing, details life in this traditional Islamic boat-building society: its stories and folklore; religion, magic and superstition; piracy, warfare and conflict. It’s a district where Dutch colonial authority scarcely extends. We read of Collins’s trials there, dealing with malaria and dysentery epidemics, plus with wily, sometimes cheating and uncooperative, boat-builders. He records the communal ceremonies of building and launching prahus and the ancient, pre-Islamic spells and rituals that were essential for a ship’s welfare.
