Jawa (Indonesia); Australia--part: Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands

How is the land laid out?

Jawa,¹ Asia's sixth largest island is a cigar-shaped island which sits on the Sunda oceanic shelf along with its neighbors: Sumatera,² just to the northwest and Borneo,³ north of the Java Sea. There are 115 volcanos, 15 of which are active, running the length of the island and mostly nearer to its southern shores. The rain forest has been cleared from the lowland river valleys and coastal plains, and their fertile and swamp-free soil is intensely farmed and densely settled. Near the eastern end of the island, and narrowly separated from being a peninsula, is Madura.

UNESCO honors as a World Heritage Site one natural area partly in this area: Ujong Kulon National Park. (The remainder is on islands that group with Sumatera.) Tourists enjoy the Ijen Crater and Mount Bromo (and Bromo Tenggar Semeru National Park generally.)¹²

Also included in this area are two Australian possessions well out in the Indian Ocean: Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.

Map

Who lives there?

About a hundred thirty million crowd the island's lower elevations. The center and east of the island speak Javanese--almost three quarters of the island's population--and the western third Sundanese. On Madura and near the Selat⁴ Madura people speak Madurese. Many learn a dialect of Indonesian, the old lingua franca for markets and now the language of government and the nation's capital.⁵ The island is uniformly Sunni Moslem--more than 19 in 20, but divided between the majority 'abangan',⁶ who are loosely observant and maintain cultural continuity with the pre-Islamic past, and the 'santri'⁷ or orthodox, who often dominate the leadership.

Javanese cities

Christmas Island was a major phosphate port⁸ until the mine was closed.

Who was there before?

People arrived here long ago, though perhaps significantly later than mainland Asia; in any case other humanoids persisted on Java when they were extinct in continental Asia. The ancestors of the island's four linguistic groups arrived at the Greater Sunda Islands⁹ thousands of years ago via the Philippines. By the seventh century Old Malay became the language of rule and commerce, but ancestral forms of the other three languages may have already developed.

Buddhism¹⁰ probably arrived in the second or third century; in any case Sanskrit inscriptions date from the fourth. Shaivist Hinduism replaced Buddhism beginning in the ninth century. The new religions incorporated indiginous beliefs such as the Goddess of the "Southern"¹¹ Ocean. In the 15th century Islam arrived, initially by conversion, and later through the successful wars of local Islamic states. The 'abangan' (loosely observant) tradition was the norm¹² until reformist movements in the 19th and 20th centuries established its rival.

UNESCO's World Heritage Sites that honor local pre-Islamic culture are: Bobobudur Temple Compounds, which are also a tourist attraction;¹² Prambanan Temple Compounds, within metropolitan Yogyakarta, and also a tourist attraction;¹² and the Sangiran Early Man Site.

Around the area

north
northeast
east
south
west

Footnotes

1. Java in English.
2. Sumatra in English.
3. Called Kalimantan by Indonesia and Bornea by Malaysia (and in English).
4. Selat is usually translated as channel or strait, but here it is more of a bay or small sea.
5. Indonesian is the Indonesian name since about 1930 for the Malay language. The urban dialect is sometimes called Batawi.
6. Means red or brown people.
7. Means religious students.
8. The Times Atlas of the Oceans (Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1983), "commodity loading ports" map for its former standing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Island, accessed October 25, 2017, references the phosphate mine's closing.
9. Jawa, Borneo, Sumatera and Selawesi (the Celebes).
10. Traders from southern India brought Theravada Buddhism.
11. The Indian Ocean.
12. Though the earliest preserved teaching texts are orthodox.
12. Top ten from https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g294228-Activities-Java.html, accessed February 15, 2017.