Transmigrasi: Myths and Realities - Indonesian Resettlement Policy, 1965-1985
In 1931, a few weeks after my first arrival as a member of the judiciary in the Netherlands Indies, I passed through Gedong Tataan. It was a typical Javanese village, surrounded by irrigated ricefields, in the midst of the impenetrable jungle of South Sumatra, at that time still infested by tigers, rhinoceroses and elephants. There was a strange contrast between the sedentary agriculture practised by the Javanese settlers and the slash-and-burn type of food crop cultivation on swidden land, customary among the autochthonous Lampung people.
The "colonisation'' project in South Sumatra had been started by the Dutch in the first years of this century - allegedly in order to alleviate the over-population problem of Java. But by 1931 it was already clear that the project had been far from successful.