Indonesia And The Birth of The Modern World

From the internationally best-selling writer, a masterful account of the epic revolution that sparked the decolonization of the modern world.

Padang Moonrise is the story of modern Indonesian music that emerged underneath the volcanoes of Java and Sumatra. Java, the most populous island in the archipelago of over 17,000 islands and 1300 distinct ethnic groups, and its capital city Jakarta, was where most of the post-colonial national identity, politics, administration and music production was centred.

Writer Will Millard visits the treehouse-dwelling Korowai tribe in Papua, Indonesia, to try and understand the pressures they face as they move into the modern world. Will returns for his second trip to the Korowai to spend more time with Haup (White Beard) and Halap. They are some of the last remaining Korowai still living permanently in a treehouse, without any real contact with the outside world. When Will first meets them, their adopted son August is there with them in the forest and his wife Amel gives birth one night, cutting her own umbilical cord with a sharpened piece of wood.