Indonesians in Focus: Victor Mason

By Barrie | December 16th, 2006 | No Comments

Published writer and author of many books, Victor Mason has virtually dedicated his life to butterflies and birds as freelance writer Trisha Sertori explains.

Victor Mason: A ramble through life brings happiness
Trisha Sertori, Contributor, Gianyar

Reaching the Penestenan home of Bali bird watcher and butterfly enthusiast Victor Mason through the rice fields is, he says, “a bit of a round and round the mulberry bush”. Few people find him, which is just the way he likes it.

Striding into his 69th year, the author of Butterflies of Bali (Saritaksu Editions, 2005) and Birds of Bali (Periplus Editions, 1989) along with “a dozen or so titles — half of them still in print”, Mason can’t sit still. He is like one of the birds he delights in observing, hopping from leg to leg, stepping to and fro, eyes always on the watch for some flash of color across his garden.

Mason chooses to live without electricity or a telephone. The silence allows him to write, think and watch the natural world around him. It is the natural world of Asia he encountered in 1956 that has kept him here for the past five decades, starting with Singapore, then Hong Kong and in the late 1960s, Indonesia.

“What impressed me most (in Asia) was the butterflies and birds, quite unlike what I had known in the UK,” said Mason, who shares the diversity of Bali’s butterfly and bird life with others on his Bali Bird Walks around Ubud.

Born in England a year before the outbreak of World War II, the only child of an upper middle class English family, Mason says he has been enamored with nature since early childhood. As a child he would wander the country lanes and fields surrounding his home, on the lookout for wildlife.

Mason’s love of rambling is evident in the preface to Butterflies of Bali, which includes letters sent to his parents in 1946 while he was a youngster at boarding school.

“Dear Mummy and Daddy,
I hope you are well. I have already seen a Yellow Brimstone and twelve Small Tortoiseshells and three Orange-tips, a Red Admiral and two Peacock Butterflies,” wrote the eight-year old of the butterflies he had spotted at school.

“I think being an only child had everything to do with my rambling, wandering off, just me and the dog. We’d wander the countryside and look at things. It’s still how I realize my happiness,” said Mason, springing up to watch a butterfly ply the breeze above a chaotic garden alive with flowering shrubs and trees.

“I think because I was the only child, I appreciated solitude more than anything else. I’m not totally anti-social. I like my own space and being alone, but I do like going to the pub and fraternizing with my peers to strike a balance,” said Mason. Then he bounded into the garden again with a whoop. “That’s a Common Sailer and there goes a Blue Glassy Tiger!” he said, as more butterflies flitted about.

While butterflies, birds and Nimrod, the dog, have the run of the garden, mosquitoes are most definitely not welcome.

“I generally start to write at midday and I keep on until I have had enough of it, or until those mosquitoes with the stripy pajamas come out. They go for you.”

Mason retains the clipped British accent of his parents, despite having lived “in the East” for fifty years. His father was a career officer with the Royal Air Force and his mother hailed from Shropshire. The family settled in Surrey, Richmond in the 1930s.

“I left England in 1956. I was only 18 years old and I had to do National Service; we still had conscription in those days. So I joined the Royal Air Force and was posted to Singapore, then seconded to Hong Kong.

“The year is easy to remember because I was there for typhoon Bloody Mary, which is a typhoon never to be forgotten; it was May 1957 and there was absolute devastation. I was out at Kai Fak, the old civilian airport. I remember seeing airplanes picked up by the wind and thrown through hangars and things. It was stunning,” said Mason, shaking his head at the memory.

Despite typhoons, Mason went back to Hong Kong after being “demobbed” from military service in 1958, joining the legendary John Swire import company.

“In those days in Hong Kong there was Jardines, the Hong Kong Bank and Swires, we were the Hong, the top three companies in the colony,” said Mason, who speaks Cantonese, Balinese, Indonesian, French and his mother tongue, English, but who chooses to speak English “rather than subject the local people to my Indonesian gibberish.”

Mason said his first impression of Hong Kong was the smell. “The name Hong Kong translates as Fragrant Harbor. The name, I suppose, denotes spices and flowers, but there was also a degree of night soil in that fragrance.

“What got me was the climate. Humidity at 100 per cent. It was like walking through a hot wet blanket and it suited me fine. And then there was the fact that I could spend every weekend rambling in the New Territories, called Kowloon now. Back then there was a lot of open country and I spent my time wandering about looking at new things with a colleague who ran a shipping company, Michel Gada. We’d go out together all the time.

“There were all sorts of good reasons not to go back to England,” said Mason.

A 10-year stint with Swires ended when Mason started his own company. “I decided I didn’t really want to be tied down so I went into business for myself. That was mostly in the liquor imports business, which took me all over Southeast Asia, but I got out in 1984. I realized the liquor trade could be hazardous to one’s health,” said Mason.

“You cant’ keep living like that,” he added. “It was hard going but a lot of fun and rewarding, but there comes a time when you decide whether you want to live a long and happy life or keep on flogging yourself to death.”

With the closure of his business, Mason was able to concentrate on building his second home in Bali. He had visited the island on vacation in the late 1960’s and, “like so many people, I stayed.”

“I did some deep thinking on why I continued to live in Hong Kong when I could live a far more gracious and gorgeous life here. Hong Kong had started to overwhelm me, and here were a people living as they had for generations. There were no motor cars, no roads, no electricity. It was lovely.”

Mason moved to Ubud in 1974 after living on the beach in Sanur, explaining he was “not really a beach person because going to the seaside was always an excursion” when he was a child. Still in his early thirties, Mason built his first Bali home, “a huge wooden barn of a structure” that has since disappeared. He replaced it in 1984 with a home in the rice fields of Penestenan, which became the celebrated Beggar’s Bush restaurant.

It was at about this time that Mason’s daughters, Helena Jessica and Neroli Lilian were born. Both of their names derived from butterfly species; Mason writes that the Helena Birdwing and the Orange Albatross arrived like auguries on the days of his children’s births. Mason proudly adds that Butterflies of Bali is dedicated to his daughters, whom he sees regularly along with his three grandchildren.

Like Mason’s other books, Butterflies of Bali and Birds of Bali were tapped out on his trusty Olivetti Valetion 1962 portable typewriter, a machine he said had “never let me down”.

“There is the exact same model in the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the same scarlet red color. I bought this in Ladder Street in Hong Kong in 1965 and I’ve had this typewriter for 40 years,” said Mason, adding that a portable typewriter was just the thing in a home without electricity.

And Indonesia, with its devotion to these anachronistic machines, is the perfect country for a writer who still prefers an Olivetti to a PC.

“There is a marvelous place in Denpasar, Andika. Their business is repairing ancient typewriters; they’ve got all the bits. You couldn’t do it anywhere else in the world,” said Mason as he rolled carbon and two sheets of typing paper into his typewriter, settling down to deal with correspondence.

“I like to write letters. I’m not into this email business. I like to write `em, put `em in an envelope, stick it down and go to the post office myself. Buy a stamp; preferably with flowers or birds or butterflies. We are lucky here we have nice stamps. Lick `em and post’em,” said Mason, typing away on paper headed with his Bali Bird Walks logo.

The walks began not long after the publication of his book also called Bali Bird Walks.

“That’s how it came up,” he says of the book. “Someone suggested taking people on bird walks and that was it.”

Bird watchers can expect to see around 30 different species on a good day of birding, according to Mason. Those include endemic species such as the magnificent Java Kingfisher, the Bar-winged Prinia, the Black-winged Starling, the Scarlet-Headed Flowerpecker and the Java Sparrow.

“The Java Kingfisher is a very good example of birds you will only see in Java and Bali. Every time I see one my heart leaps as it does with certain butterflies. And while I love them all passionately, which is made abundantly clear in my book, there is one, the Red Lacewing that some people call the Bali Lacewing, that is my favorite,” said Mason.

This special butterfly is occasionally seen in his garden, he added, scanning the greenery one more time before settling down to write.

For those keen to spot some of these avian and entomological beauties during a gentle countryside ramble, Bali Bird Walks meet on Sunday, Tuesday and Friday starting at 9:15 a.m. For more information phone 0361 975 009 or 081 747 333 18, or meet at the Beggar’s Bush office by the Tjampuhan Bridge in Ubud at 9 a.m.