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Indonesia
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Description Wally Sander explains:
In January 1986 I was seconded to Indonesia for 16 days to make an appraisal for Foreign Affairs Department of the potential for the New Zealand Government to provide aid to Indonesian National Parks. In all I visited four national parks, one in West Java, two in East Java and one in Bali and reported on the need for better management at the grass roots level in those parks. The report was accepted and then pigeon holed as aid funds dried up for a couple of years.
Lisle Irwin remembers his assignment to Indonesia:
There was a lot of training work for interpretation, Search & Rescue, biodiversity. We brought some people over from Vietnam who also have a Javan rhino in Vietnam and they worked with the Indonesian guys. We had a group came out from the United States called “Bowling for Rhinos”, rangers from Wisconsin came and they were raising money for African rhinos and they were interested in our situation.
It was all quite a challenge, their idea of a NP was quite different from ours. There was a strong feeling for the NP idea so there was a basis to work from. But their idea of locking things up, they were more open about because the island of Java is the most heavily populated island in the world, the fact that the NP has stayed more or less in its pristine state for all this time is really luck, because the Dutch set it up as a hunting reserve which was all that saved it.
We had problems like on one of the islands where no-one was living but the rangers, and guys from the Park and told us that Tommy Suharto had decided he wanted to build a big resort on this island but we couldn’t allow that. We could see Krakatoa from where we were living.
In January 1986 I was seconded to Indonesia for 16 days to make an appraisal for Foreign Affairs Department of the potential for the New Zealand Government to provide aid to Indonesian National Parks. In all I visited four national parks, one in West Java, two in East Java and one in Bali and reported on the need for better management at the grass roots level in those parks. The report was accepted and then pigeon holed as aid funds dried up for a couple of years.
Lisle Irwin remembers his assignment to Indonesia:
There was a lot of training work for interpretation, Search & Rescue, biodiversity. We brought some people over from Vietnam who also have a Javan rhino in Vietnam and they worked with the Indonesian guys. We had a group came out from the United States called “Bowling for Rhinos”, rangers from Wisconsin came and they were raising money for African rhinos and they were interested in our situation.
It was all quite a challenge, their idea of a NP was quite different from ours. There was a strong feeling for the NP idea so there was a basis to work from. But their idea of locking things up, they were more open about because the island of Java is the most heavily populated island in the world, the fact that the NP has stayed more or less in its pristine state for all this time is really luck, because the Dutch set it up as a hunting reserve which was all that saved it.
We had problems like on one of the islands where no-one was living but the rangers, and guys from the Park and told us that Tommy Suharto had decided he wanted to build a big resort on this island but we couldn’t allow that. We could see Krakatoa from where we were living.
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Indonesia. National Parks and Reserves Rangers Archive, accessed 21/03/2026, https://parkrangersnz.recollectcms.com/nodes/view/504