The Last Dugong Hunter
- Pamela Ng
- 3 hours ago
- 13 min read
This post was written by an external contributor. If you are interested in writing a guest post for our blog drop us a line here.
Words by Pamela Ng and photos by Joshua Irwandi
Pamela visited us through Tulisan Nusantara, our writers’ residency program. Each year, published writers from across the region are invited to spend time on the island, drawing inspiration from the natural world and the stories of the Riau Islands. During their stay, residents explore ideas connected to place, identity, and culture. Guests may spot them working in quiet corners of the island or join open readings and informal discussions when held. Each residency leaves behind a piece of writing, which will be gathered into an anthology over time.
The hunter paddles into the night, hook-blade spear close at hand. Panning his head from side to side, he casts his eyes across the water, looking out for the slightest of ripples. His ears, too, await a signal in the enveloping silence. But he detects no major sign of movement—not here, not yet. He navigates further into the darkness, tracing invisible feeding trails. He waits. Minutes roll into an hour, and then two. He moves to light a cigarette but suddenly stops, catching his own restlessness. Finally, he hears them. There they are, a dozen-odd underwater blimps with mermaid tails undulating towards a patch of abundant seagrass. The herd has gathered at the meadow to socialise after a long period of solitude. Trills, squeaks, chirps. The silence dissolves as the sea mammals surface with their young and begin grazing. Crouched above them on his sampan, the dugong hunter’s icy focus pierces through the water. His body forms a gnarly silhouette as he slowly raises his spear.
Sitting on the prow of a speedboat, the wind blew my hair into wild tangles as I squinted, nearsighted, beyond the white-capped waves towards the horizon. It was warm and a sheen of humidity glistened on my skin despite the winds of the southwest monsoon. I was in the Riau Archipelago, a cluster within the Riau Islands Province of western Indonesia, for a month-long writer’s residency on Cempedak Island. The tiny island was just one of over 2,400 scattered between Sumatra, Borneo, Peninsula Malaysia and my city, Singapore. Stuffed with books and a laptop, I had arrived intending to absorb the stories and philosophies of the islands’ inhabitants—of lives shaped by the ocean. I had not expected the discomfort with the sea, but that was three weeks ago. I had since sojourned to several smaller islands near Cempedak and now approached the wooden houses that lined the shores of Air Gelubi, a fishing village. My translator and guide, Jaslan, led me towards a home on stilts with a corrugated zinc roof and walls of weathered planks. He did not wait to arrive at the door before calling out, “Pak Munsa!”
An old man who looked older than his 67 years appeared in the doorway. Slight in build and wrapped in a checkered sarong, his skin carried the burnished tone of someone used to long hours of weathering by the sun and sea. Deep lines scored his kindly face and gathered at the edge of his eyes. A stubby kretek cigarette—the clove-scented ones popular in Indonesia—was tucked snugly between his fingers as he shuffled outdoors. He welcomed us with a slight nod and Jaslan took his hand in respectful greeting.
The heat pressed heavily that afternoon and Munsa shifted, loosening his sarong slightly so he could sit more comfortably. His electric blue shorts popped unexpectedly against the grey floor of his patio as he settled across Jaslan and I.
“This is Pam, our resident writer on Cempedak. She is here to gather stories and wants to understand more about you,” Jaslan said. Munsa held me in his gaze, serious but not unfriendly. I said hello, squeezed out a flat smile and, still hindered by the language barrier, maintained a respectful silence. He lit another cigarette and took a drag, filling the air with the aroma of cloves. It was quiet enough that I could hear the satisfying crackle—the “kretek”—of the burning paper. Finally, he said, “Apa yang ingin dia ketahui?” and Jaslan translated: What does she want to know?
“The dugongs,” I said. “I want to know about the dugongs.”
Pak Munsa. Photo: Joshua Irwandi
Dugongs or “sea cows” are herbivorous aquatic mammals that can be found in rivers, intertidal bays and warm coastal wetlands. Together with three types of manatees, they are classified under the order of the Sirenia and typically grow to about two metres in length. A dugong has a grey blubbery body like a seal and a big bulbous snout that flares into an inverted beaker when it grazes on seagrass.
These giant herbivores are touchstones of marine environmental stability. While they have an enormous appetite for seagrass, consuming between 30 and 50 kilograms per day, they also travel vast distances and spread faecal deposits that support the growth of their food source. Their slow-moving grace on the meadows of the Riau Archipelago tells a story of ecological harmony: thriving aquatic plants provide oxygenated water and a sheltered nursery for a plethora of fish, crabs and shellfish. Conversely, the sea loses natural filtration when seagrass beds vanish. Far from being mere consumers, these animals are ingenious architects of their marine habitat.
Before this trip to Indonesia, my only exposure to dugongs was what any curious city dweller with a phone might discover via Google or read on a placard at the Singapore Oceanarium, a theme park with hundreds of marine animals kept in giant plexiglass cylinders and, maddeningly, a school of Indo-Pacific dolphins sequestered in a pool, swimming in restless circles to the peals of children’s laughter.
What I didn’t know, in the world I inhabited, were the myths surrounding the dugong, which vary from culture to culture, from the northern coast of Australia to East Africa and the Persian Gulf.
Dugongs feature prominently in Austronesian folklore. In various Southeast Asian languages, including the Yakan and Tausug of the Philippines and the Kadazan Dusun of Sabah, the name for dugong is synonymous with “mermaid”. The creatures are also sometimes referred to as perempuan laut—“woman of the sea”—in Malay, or putri duyung—“princess mermaid”—in Indonesian. I found it such a darkly fascinating metaphor, a twist on the western Madonna-whore complex in which the dugong becomes a feminized creature either to be revered or butchered.
Pak Munsa’s account on dugong hunting spanned the breadth of vivid superstition and grim practicality: they were killed for their meat and their magic. “Macam sapi,” he said. “Like cow,” sought for its taste, texture and nutritional value. The oil from their blubber was also of value, he noted. Not too long ago, dugong meat was sold at 30,000 Indonesian rupiah or US$2 per kilogram, which, depending on how you looked at it, was either too expensive or too cheap. For the humble communities of the archipelago, the meat was unquestionably a luxury. Yet from my point of view, it seemed strange, even disturbing, that the meat of so exotic an animal could be more affordable than some cuts of beef at the neighbourhood supermarket.
Pak Munsa also spoke of the animal’s medicinal and magical properties. To many indigenous communities in Indonesia, the dugong’s tusks, teeth and bones were gifts of nature filled with healing and even mystical, life-giving power. The tusks were used to make religious artefacts and tool handles. The teeth and bones were used as medicine to treat common ailments such as fever, diabetes and high blood pressure. The tears were the most fascinating. When a dugong was removed from the water, its lacrimal gland secreted a fluid, which was carefully collected and stored in little vials. With a sombre chuckle, Pak Munsa mused that a small vial of dugong tears could fetch as much as 500,000 rupiah, or US$30. They were potent love potions, offering a magical conduit to human connection for those who felt unloved or isolated.
So, this was what the dugongs symbolised too: love. How understandable, in a way, that humans were so willing to kill for it.
I listened with grim fascination as Munsa described the panic he caused among the animals when he launched his spears into the seagrass meadows. It was a skill he had sharpened by the age of fifteen, honed from a God-given talent that none of his six brothers were endowed with. Few in his extended family, among hundreds of families, could do this.
A hunt began under the cover of night. Pak Munsa would travel out to sea on a motorboat, finding a spot approaching lush seagrass meadows. Once certain he was close to a feeding trail, he met the silence at sea by transferring to a paddle boat, or sampan. “Why the need to transfer to a sampan? Why not stick to the motorboat?" I asked. My thinking was still hitched to ideas of speed and machine-assisted efficiency, to the big-city attitude that time is money. “Because the dugongs can hear you,” he explained, his sentence light and quick, exposing the myopia of my questioning.
But he, too, could hear them. There was a poignant overlap between the dugong’s innate traits - a sharp sense of hearing making up for poor vision - and Pak Munsa’s method. The sea is a black sheet in the dark of night and the hunter is as blind as, if not blinder than, the hunted. Pak Munsa’s hearing was sharpened on a hunt. Seeking out his prey through auditory signals, he also knew it was important to define his target. “Never the calves,” Pak Munsa said. I would need to process this principle, but for now I had a more practical question: “How did you tell them apart in the dark, the calves from the adults?”
I was not prepared for the explanation. Munsa stubbed out his cigarette. His eyes widened, his jaw lowered slowly as he let out a ragged exhalation, a deep, guttural “haaaaahhhhh” that scraped the silence raw. The ground seemed to fall out from under my feet. Munsa pointed to his nose and said, “Hidung.” Dugongs need to surface for fresh air. Simply from the sound of the dugong’s breath, he could tell the difference between an adult and its young.
By now, awe and magic brewed and crackled in the air. I was not on Air Gelubi in the daytime. I was somewhere out there on the sea in the dead of night, witnessing a hunter’s pact with nature, his instincts wrapped up in an enigmatic bond with the creature he was anointed to kill.
Three hooked spears, three attempts in the dark, were usually enough to do the job, Pak Munsa said. In his youth, he could launch a spear across thirty metres - more than half the length of an Olympic-size swimming pool. His accuracy was not luck, but a combination of instinct and mastery honed from years of practice. As day broke, Pak Munsa’s hunt concluded with a bloodied mermaid trailing behind his boat, which to my mind held its own tragic beauty.
All of this was conveyed in the past tense, for it was impressed upon me, ahead of my visit to Air Gelubi, that Pak Munsa no longer hunted dugong. Seven years earlier, in 2018, Pak Munsa had reluctantly entered into an agreement with the local government and a non-profit organisation, the Dugong and Seagrass Conservation Project, to cease his trade. Thereafter, he fell into hard times, struggling to support his large family with the comparatively modest returns of fishing, and simply missing the activity he had been practicing his entire life. Though he was also offered some recompense for conducting conservation and heritage tours, the situation left him feeling bitter.
As we chatted outside his home, Pak Munsa’s wife Amai and his son, Bahar, along with a few neighbours and a small group of giggling, grubby-fingered children, gathered around us. They interjected occasionally, chiming in with their own candid thoughts or anecdotes.
Despite forming an oral storytelling circle that seemed almost ancient, the people on Air Gelubi had not made the island their home quite so long ago - only since the 1980s. The older ones had spent the better part of their lives on the water, on floating settlements, with fishing their primary livelihood. Access to the sea was not recreational but necessary for survival, to sustain their families and the community. Each fisherman deployed his skills with an essential and meagre toolkit, comprising no more than a sampan, spears and nets.
The community’s connection to the sea could be traced back to the Orang Suku Laut, the indigenous and nomadic “gypsies of the sea”. Their lives, set between seasonal cycles of calm and turbulence, were challenging but in sync with a habitat they were highly attuned to. After centuries of a largely roving existence, the pressures of the modern age - the pull of government incentives, industrial jobs and narratives of a more secure future - led the Orang Suku Laut to transition from living on the open water to setting up permanent homes along the archipelago’s coastlines. Pak Munsa, his family, and the people of Air Gelubi were swept ashore by these historical forces.
But there was a problem, a palpable disjoint between the promised stability of living on terra firma and the volatility of living off a fast-changing sea. As in so many places around the world, the demands of economic development in urban centres produced huge but largely unreported ramifications on the lives of small island communities such as that of Air Gelubi.
Bahar, the only one of Pak Munsa’s five sons who had previously also hunted dugong, said switching to fishing was not difficult - provided there were fish to catch. But fish populations in regional waters were dwindling and, in recent years, their daily catch earned them a mere 200,000 rupiah, or US$12, a day.
I let that figure sink in. Twelve dollars. In Singapore, that would barely cover two breakfast sets at the local Toastbox.
Three weeks earlier, as I travelled from Bintan, where the capital of Riau Islands Province is located, to the writer’s residency on Pulau Cempedak, I noticed a cluster of crane barges leering menacingly over the sea. Huge cylindrical tanks peppered the shoreline, emitting plumes of black smoke. Built on dozens of kilometres of coastline, the scale of the factory was frightening. The prospect of a month of writing in a quiet marine arcadia was suddenly punctured by this grotesque scene of mass industrial activity.
Soon after, I learnt that the steampunk operation on Bintan’s shores was part of a special economic zone created by the Indonesian government to attract foreign investment. In 2017, Nanshan Group, a Chinese manufacturing giant, developed the PT Gbkek Industri Park in southeast Bintan, with its local subsidiary, PT Bintan Alumina Indonesia, focused on bauxite mining and processing. Since then, reports boasted of an annual output of four million tonnes of alumina, with eleven new refineries slated to follow, pushing total capacity to sixteen million tonnes in five years.
There was more. On his phone, Jaslan showed me the company’s further expansion plans, which included the blueprint for a new industrial park on Pulau Poto, a small low-lying island barely a kilometre from Cempedak island, and ten minutes from Air Gelubi.
Thus, two contradictory things happened at around the same time in 2017 and 2018.
On the one hand, the Dugong and Seagrass Conservation Project had worked with the local government to persuade Pak Munsa to stop dugong hunting in the name of ecological conservation. On the other hand, that very same government had set the conditions for a scale of industrialisation and shrinking of marine protected areas that made a mockery of efforts to promote greater environmental awareness in the Riau Archipelago. Incidentally - and tellingly - not one person in the NGO’s leadership, technical advisory or project coordination teams came from the local community.
The insistence by foreign advocates that Pak Munsa stop his supposedly destructive trade while the government enticed multinationals to supercharge manufacturing activity was a twisted combination of neo-colonialist control and capitalism that paid little heed to the region’s indigenous life. Having spent nearly a month getting to know people from the local community, this was a glaring realisation that filled me with disgust.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) currently classifies dugongs as “vulnerable” under its Red List of Threatened Species, and so they are. But which was the greater threat to the survival of the dugongs, and indeed of the islanders too? A few individual hunters with spearing sticks, or ruthless excavations and mass reclamations of coastlines for industrial machinery, maritime traffic and a deluge of chemical runoffs and sedimentation?
As brutal as Pak Munsa’s trade was, his skills were honed over a lifetime of practice and underscored by a deep reverence for the sea and its gifts. His kills were earned and, what he took from nature, he took with a practical eye on sustainability: never the calves. If that sounds inadequate, he has nonetheless lived with the criticism from animal rights advocates and the stain of the mermaid’s blood on his hands.
By comparison, no one individual will bear any personal responsibility or shame for the destruction caused by the ever-expanding industrial park burgeoning near the shores of Pak Munsa’s home as it emits its poisons, wipes out swathes of indigenous land and rips the seagrass bare.
Pak Munsa is the last living dugong hunter in the Riau Archipelago. Some environmentalists may feel the end of his ilk will help ensure the survival of the Sirenian mammals, but when he passes from this earth, something more than the knowledge and practice of his trade will be lost.
For the Orang Suku Laut, storytelling is akin to an ancestral mapping. The memory of their traditions, so inextricably tied to the sea, shifts with the emergence and disappearance of cultural practices, in this case the hunting of the dugongs. Cruel as Pak Munsa’s livelihood may seem to outsiders, it comes with a profound understanding of the ocean and the delineation of boundaries. He oscillates between the hunter, the hunted and the sea. His immersion in and astute reading of the ocean’s rhythms and habitats, unrecorded in any manual, speaks of an intimacy with nature that no city dweller can ever truly understand. The sacredness of this intimacy is not part of some fairy tale, and the philosophies of those born to the sea can never be truly transmitted to those living in concrete jungles.
I looked at the rows of homes on Air Gelubi and took Pak Munsa’s hand as I bid him farewell. He grinned and extended an invitation for me to come visit him and his family again, should I ever have cause to return. “If we are still here,” he added with a wry nod. This parting was not delivered in a maudlin way, but matter-of-factly, and it broke something within me.
I walked away, smiling but stricken. On the journey back to Cempedak Island with Jaslan on our speedboat, I cast my eyes on the smattering of small islands surrounding the southeastern elbow of Bintan. Again, I saw the looming factories, the smouldering smelters of the industrial park that had already killed far more than Pak Munsa’s hook-blade spears.
The fate of this archipelago remains uncertain, but the changes in recent years have already fundamentally reshaped habitats and lives. With the narrative of modern progress told in the gleam and power of metal behemoths, how long will the stilt houses stand? How long will the stories of old be told around that ancient circle? My thoughts were a jumble of worry and frustration as I imagined the bulldozers and barges approaching, the omens of a coastal rupture. Pak Munsa and the dugong seemed to recede in the wake of these forces, their future unknown.
In the last week of my residency, I walked to the edge of the Cempedak jetty, again and again, to stare across the sea. My eyes searched for every single isle in the distance, just to make sure they were still there. I felt a grief that had nowhere to go - a grief I would take back to Singapore and hold in my heart for many days to come. Here on a beautiful, cloudless night, however, all I could do was gaze at the stars and retreat into my own imagination. I recalled Pak Munsa’s voice as he let out that long, primal exhalation of the dugong’s breath. I imagined his spear narrowly missing its target - once, twice, three times. I imagined a mother and its calf squeaking and trilling, before disappearing into the depths.
