The Construction of an Historical Boat in South Sulawesi (Indonesia): The Padewakang

Padewakang was a type of long-distance sailing vessels that, since at least the early eighteenth century, was mainly built in South Sulawesi and used throughout the Malay Archipelago and beyond for blue-water trading and fishing ventures. In 2019, the Abu Hanifa Institute in Sydney commissioned the construction of such a boat, Nur Al-Marege, for a documentary film at a shipyard in Tana Beru, a village in the district of Bontobahari (South Sulawesi, Indonesia), that in 2017 was inscribed into the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity for its historic tradition of an extensive wooden boat industry. This was the occasion for a team of scholars, both independent and from the Universitas Indonesia and Universita di Napoli "L'Orientale" to analyze iconographic sources and historical documents relating to the padewakang and to document a contemporary process of wooden boat construction by interviewing people involved in this activity. The article aims to summarize previous and current studies on shipbuilding activities in Tana Beru, to present the iconographic study which led to the reconstruction of the padewakang, and present a description of the conception and actual execution of the Nur Al-Marege construction and its representation.