ARI Working Paper Series

The tectonic interface between the India-Australia plate and the Eurasian plate has been shown to be one of the world’s most dangerous in its Sumatra-Andaman section, by research subsequent to the 9.2 earthquake and horrific tsunami of 26 December 2004. No comparable research has been conducted on the south coast of Java, the most densely-populated part of the Pacific “ring of fire”. There were seismic megathrust events in 1994 and 2006 which produced destructive tsunamis on Java’s south coast from only moderate earthquakes of magnitude 7.8 and 7.7 respectively. The basis for Newcomb & McCann (1987) proposing Java as aseismic needs urgent revisiting since these tsunamis and the spate of recent megathrust events in Japan, Sumatra and elsewhere. The historical evidence on Java also merits further investigation.

The existing literature is reliant on Dutch reportage for the record before 1900, although this was very sketchy. Javanese sources are more opaque, but essential. Fear of the southern ocean, and the magically powerful queen who lived there (Ratu Kidul), is attested from the eighteenth century.Javanese chronicles from that era assert that the founders of the Mataram dynasty, Senopati (d. 1601) and Sultan Agung (reigned 1613-46) attained their power to rule by their mystic union with Ratu Kidul, though ordinary mortals who provoked her would be carried to a watery grave.The popular story of Mataram does not mention a flood in this connection. But a less well known dated chronicle, Babad ing Sangkala, suggests that an extraordinary flood affected the Mataram area (around modern Yogyakarta) in the Javanese year 1540, which began in February 1618. This historic evidence renders still more urgent the need for scientific testing of the Javanese subduction zone.