The woman who still beats bark into cloth in Kulawi

The bark comes from two kinds of fig that grow abundantly around her home: nunu lero, the red fig, and nunu bula, the white. Her son Syafrudin cuts them, and only at full moon, and only the branches that grow horizontally or upward — never those that droop. He brings back about thirty pieces each month, cut to a metre or a metre and a half. The bark is stripped, cleaned, and soaked for three days before it ever meets the beaters.

Then comes the work that belongs to her alone. The stone beaters are grooved and handled, used in sequence from coarse to fine, and the stone for them is quarried in Towulu Village, a short way along the same district — stone from elsewhere cracks under the pounding. Colour comes from two plants, linuro and ulakau. What emerges is the customary garment of the Kulawi people: the halili blouse, the three-layered topii skirt, the siga headcloth that once carried patterns marking a warrior's rank.

The knowledge she holds is older than any of the villages around her. Archaeologists treat grooved stone beaters as markers of the Neolithic in Sulawesi, dated to roughly three thousand years ago, and have pulled them from the ground in Poso and Donggala and along the Karama River to the west. In 1905, the Dutch missionary-ethnographers Nicolaus Adriani and Albertus Kruyt argued that bark cloth was the original clothing of the archipelago. The anthropologist Lorraine V. Aragon, working in these valleys from 1984, recorded the full set of tools and noted that the word ike for the beaters recurs in languages spoken thousands of kilometres east, across Polynesia.

Colour once carried duty. White cloth, blessed by nobles, flew as flags over the fields; red was used in offerings to spirits before a hunt; yellow, dyed with turmeric, was worn when the rice and corn ripened. Shamans kept recovered soul elements in white bark-cloth bags. A widow wore white while she mourned. When a girl was born, a set of beaters was set out beside a basket of farming tools — a life laid out in advance.

Kulawi sits inside Lore Lindu National Park, about 60 kilometres south of Palu, on ground that has not been gentle. The M7.5 earthquake of September 2018 cut the road to the neighbouring district. Mataue has taken flash floods since. Through it, the knocking behind the house continued.

Now she has organised her students the way she organises anything: two groups of ten, divided again into three teams, each with its assigned task. She holds that men cannot do this work. Her recognitions — the Ratna Award in 2022, the Indonesian Cultural Award in 2025, named a maestro of bark cloth — sit somewhere in the house while she goes on beating.