East Kalimantan

Really, it should be the changing of the guard and the time to be blooding a completely new and exciting bunch of people to put into the Australian cricket side.

Has anyone here heard of Nusantara? Nusantara is Indonesia's new planned capital being built on the island of Borneo in the province of East Kalimantan.

I'd never heard of it.

And I understand that Jakarta, Jakarta, that she came here by herself, but I do understand Jakarta is virtually so overcrowded and unlivable, you cannot get around.

Key facts about Nusantara.

No one's ever heard of it, have they? Well, it's the new capital of Indonesia's location.

As I said, it's in East Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, between Balikpapan and Samarinda.

Never heard of them.

He also picked a site that sent a message.

East Kalimantan, Ambronio, sits away from Java's volcanoes and much closer to the middle of a country of 17,000 islands.

Java is only about 7% of Indonesia's land, but more than half of its people live there.

And most of its money and power sit there with them.

Sure.

I absolutely wanted to, before the end of the panel, talk about the fires in East Kalimantan and though they've spread into other islands in Indonesia.

I'm only recently, like maybe in the last couple of days, started to see those stories break through into actual press, but it's been going on for a couple of months.

And the reason it's breaking through is that the level of particulate matter in the air is so terrible in East Kalimantan and in Indonesia.

But it's spread into Singapore and Malaysia, and those governments are now making a huge fuss, which is why I think it's getting the press it's getting.

It is, as you mentioned, deeply connected to the plantation system in that island.

I would first say that this is a piece of work that we've been doing for more than a decade in Indonesia.

If you want to educate yourself more about it, there's a movie that's coming out called Saving the Last Place on Earth, which talks about very similar issues, but in Sumatra in the Lasur forest region.

about it.

Well, one person that did something about it, Steve, was East Kalimantan Governor Rudy Massoud.

Now, he did something very, very, probably very smart, which was he got out of East Kalimantan.

Where did he come? He came to Singapore, to Marina Bay, to have ostensibly for a medical checkup at Mount Elizabeth in Orchard.

And ironically enough, it just happened to be over F1 weekend.

And he and his wife were photographed having a leisurely brunch at Marina Bay Sands, which, of course, lighted up the socials.

And needless to say, his people back in East Kalimantan are none too pleased that Governor Rudy Massoud is in Singapore, although the air is not great here, much better than it is in East Kalimantan.

It's hard to believe that a government official – in a region like that, would make an amateur mistake like this and leaving the scene of a real crisis.

When Leahy finished, we went up.

And Tees had just taken over all of BHP's coal operations in Borneo, in East Kalimantan and South Kalimantan.

Yep.

And I went over there as the project director, so I had all of those reporting through me.

And then also on that same job.

So was this at, which mine was this at?

It was in East Kalimantan on the Mahakan River.

It's like one of the biggest rivers in the world, halfway up Borneo, but no one's ever heard of it.

In March 1993, Walsh flew to Jakarta, meeting Felderhof in the lobby of the five-star Saripan Pacific Hotel.

Using a combination of creative financing and his son's American Express card, Walsh managed to scrape together $80,000 to purchase the exploration rights to a remote, untested parcel of jungle land near the Busang River in East Kalimantan, Borneo.

To run the operation on the ground, Felderhof insisted on hiring his close friend and fellow geologist, Michael de Guzman.

Now, de Guzman wasn't a guy who was easy to ignore.

When Genie, sensing his growing paranoia, begged him to leave the cash with her, well, he refused.

By one AM on March eighteenth, de Guzman arrived in Jakarta.

By four AM, he was on a domestic flight to Balikpapan, a port city in East Kalimantan.

There, he was met by his colleague, Rudy Vega, a fellow member of the Filipino core exploration team.