By Eric Bellman
Southeast Asia Real Time has its spotlight on Indonesia this week, as part of the WSJ’s launch of its Bahasa Indonesia site. More on WSJ.com/Indonesia
JAKARTA–While it’s often impossible to see Jakarta’s rich history buried among the capital’s never-ending traffic jams, malls, slums and office towers, Scott Merrillees, a coal executive, historian and long-time Jakarta resident, has discovered tiny windows onto the capital’s past in the form of antique postcards.
Since landing in Jakarta from Australia in the 1980s, he has collected hundreds of old postcards to learn more about the messy megacity, which previously was the capital of the Dutch East Indies. This year, he published the best bits of his collection in a handsome coffee-table book called “Greetings From Jakarta: Postcards of a Capital 1900-1950.”
Every time Mr. Merrillees acquired a new postcard, he would research where it was taken and go to the exact location to get a sense of how the city has evolved. Sometimes the street scenes were little changed, while other times there were just a few remnants of buildings that stood 100 years earlier. More often, though, there was no trace left of what had been.
“I always thought of the postcards as a kind of a time capsule taking you back,” he said.
Most of his collection is in the form of postcards that were sent to Holland by Dutch settlers in what was then called Batavia. More often than not, the postcards didn’t focus on exotic local food or culture like postcards (or Facebook posts) today. Instead, the colonialists sent home postcards featuring the city’s big government buildings, wide roads, bridges and other infrastructure. They wanted to let their friends and relatives know that Batavia was no backwater.
“There are postcards of water reservoirs, schools, hospitals and government buildings,” said Mr. Merrillees. “They were trying to say we are modern and prosperous and doing well.”
Here is a small selection from his collection of cards set against photos showing what the locations look like today. The details describing the spots are from Mr. Merrillees’s book.