Here and There – Sarawak
The man who lived next door to us was posted to Sarawak for three years. I think he was a colonial administrator. I was seven years old, and imagined Sarawak to be a small, idyllic island, somewhere off the coast of Africa, with beaches, palm trees and amazing parrots. For a short time, I wondered if I should aim to get a job where you were sent to places like Sarawak for a few years at a time. Whatever vague thoughts I had were replaced by the stamps I was given by his wife, who had remained in London, from the envelopes of the letters he sent her. My neighbour was very thoughtful, as each envelope would have three or four different stamps, some with animals, and some with natives, and all of them with a portrait of King George VI to the side. Instead of contemplating a future career working in far off places, my collecting gene swung into action, and I became a philatelist overnight!
We moved when I was a teenager. Stamp collecting remained a hobby but had to battle for time against all the other collecting hobbies I’d developed. Sarawak retreated from view. It was something of a shock, four decades later, when I was offered the opportunity to do some work there. It was an even bigger surprise to discover it wasn’t the idyllic little island I had imagined off the coast of Africa, but one part of the vast island of Borneo. No longer within the British Empire, it is one of the two states that made up Eastern Malaysia, so large that it is greater in area than all the eleven states combined that comprise peninsular Malaysia.
I was going to run a workshop for senior staff at an oil terminal in Bintulu. Accompanied by my wife and youngest daughter, we flew into Kuching, the capital city, and I left them there to enjoy a short holiday while I travelled on. They got the best part of the deal, staying in a nice hotel by the river, while I continued my journey to Bintulu, some 600 kilometres to the north-east of Kuching, where I was booked into the Kidurong Inn. It wasn’t quite as classy as the hotel in Kuching!
Recently I discovered there are a couple of stories about the name Bintulu. These stories take us back to James Brooke’s time (which I discussed in an earlier blog), when the local indigenous people were said to practise headhunting, throwing the heads into the Kemena River. Collecting the heads from the river was ‘Mentu Ala’. Mentur means ‘picking heads’ in the local dialect. Alternatively, two warriors would throw severed heads into a stream, known as ‘Mentu Ulau river’. Over time the name was shorted to ‘Mentulau’, then ‘Bentulu’, and now ‘Bintulu’. Perhaps I should add that most research on headhunting has revealed the practice frequently involved just one child captured and killed by a large team of young men, the one head became the headhunting trophy for each and every one of them.
When I arrived at the tiny airport at Bintulu, I was met and driven through the town and on to Tanjung Kidurong, a port some 15 minutes from the centre of Bintulu, comprising the industrial area for the town. Kidurong is a petroleum gas centre, now the largest single gas manufacturing complex in the world. I had been invited to run a workshop for senior staff at the gas operation’s Bintulu Port, critical to the town’s oil and gas industry operations. An oil terminal and its associated port are uninviting places, huge tanks, complicated systems of pipes, and very few people. Oil terminals in the tropics aren’t just uninviting, they hum with danger, all that explosive material in the heat, and it was very hot in Bintulu Port. Why wasn’t I running a workshop in Kuching!
I was in Kidurong prior to its expansion in the latter part of the 1990s. Earlier and before the multinationals’ presence grew and expatriate housing and better hotels were developed, the place to stay was the Kidurong Inn. It was adequate, and my evenings there gave me the opportunity to learn a little about the area. The north coast of Borneo, from Sarawak through to Sabah, was close to vast oil and gas reserves. Inland was forest, slowly being demolished by Indonesian and Malaysian logging companies. Today, most of the original forest has gone, and palm oil plantations cover a large area. The other industry was mining, with Borneo an important source of diamonds. When I was there, rough diamonds were said to be easily found in the soil. Alas, my brief visit precluded any opportunity to do some digging!
The head of Bintulu Port was a Malay, a forward-looking and dynamic member of a local titled family, very businesslike in his approach. I quickly discovered the senior team was motley crew, ranging from the competent and committed CEO and a couple of his colleagues at one extreme, to several staff at the other extreme, where any enthusiasm was scarcely measurable, except when it came to smoking breaks and mealtimes. The most distinctive member of this second group was the chief of security. He would ‘pop out’ every so often, and I was told by one of the staff in the workshop these were times when he needed to be down at the port gate to collect his cut from whatever bit of dubious practice was being undertaken that day. If I wondered, as you might, as to why he wasn’t let go, the answer was provided by the same informant. He was an ex-policeman, with links with all the police and associated personnel that mattered: the organisation couldn’t afford to have him offside. Oh, and by the way, his suspicion radar shot up when he met me, an outsider. Most unfair!
I think the workshop was reasonably successful, even if the pace was slow. It was humid, and everyone was listless for an hour or so after an early lunch break. After a couple of days, I realised that most members of the senior management had two bosses, the likeable CEO and the security chief. The latter made me think of a crocodile: he was big, slow moving, always watching, and you had the sense he might suddenly snap up an unruly person, never to be seen again. Probably a fanciful and illusory view, but it was quite clear that several of the workshop participants were afraid of him, and he knew it.
The image of a crocodile wasn’t random. Sarawak is world-renowned for its man-eating crocodiles and there are frequent attacks. When they can be, crocodiles are captured in riverside kampungs (villages), to be released away from living areas. They do kill humans. Deaths are regularly reported, especially of locals who have been travelling along the coastal brackish waters, among the mangrove swamps and mudflats in the river deltas. These crocs are big. Those found in Sarawak are from the largest of the species. Frighteningly big: body lengths range between 3.5 and six metres, and they can weigh anything from 200kg to over 1,000kg. That image of a crocodile almost totally submerged in the water and then suddenly rising up fast and grabbing its prey, well, that isn’t cinematic nonsense, it’s true.
Back in Kuching, my wife and daughter had also heard about crocodiles. Their hotel room overlooked the river, and my daughter would watch to see if she could spot a crocodile making its way along the river. I think my wife was unconvinced there were any, but there were, as I told her on my return from Bintulu Port. That night we all took on window watch but still we didn’t see any. Australia has 21 varieties of poisonous snakes, Sarawak has crocodiles, crocodiles in Kuching, crocodiles in Bintulu. In both places it is good to be reminded of the natural world and be cautious. We all need prey. In Canberra, we get our prey from the Woolworth’s supermarket; in Kuching, you snap up any passing morsel!
There are many other examples of exotic fauna in Sarawak, and while I was running a workshop, my wife and daughter had taken a one-day visit to an animal sanctuary. Just 20 kilometres south of Kuching, the Semenggoh Wildlife Centre and Nature Reserve is a major Orangutan rehabilitation centre. It had been established back in 1975, as a sanctuary for Orangutans who had been injured, orphaned or been kept captive as illegal pets. The centre served as a recovery habitat for them, but it was also a place for visitors to learn about this endangered and relatively rare species. The reserve’s population comprised growing adolescent and young adult semi-wild Orangutans. They spend most of their time roaming the forest but are trained to return to the centre during feeding times where they will be able to get a free meal from the caretakers. They continue to return until they’re fully recovered and matured. Once they’ve reached adulthood, they disappear into the Borneo jungle. As my wife later explained to me, the Nature Reserve had many other creatures to be seen, some rare, including several stunning birds. However, it is the Orangutans that draw the visitors.
When they arrived at the Centre, they joined a small group being taken on a tour of the area open to visitors. Apparently, the others in the group were noisy. The tour leader stopped a colleague at one point, who came over to my wife and daughter and explained they would never see an Orangutan if they stayed with the group, but he would take them to a hide, just nearby, and if they stayed quiet, they might be lucky. In the next part of this account, I always think of three people, me, my wife, my daughter. I would have had my camera out, ready to take as many photographs as possible. My wife would have calmly sat and waited, quiet, relaxed and hopeful. My daughter, who was around five years old, would have been rather excited, no, very excited, but would have accepted the need to be silent.
As they waited, an Orangutan appeared, some 50 feet away. It looked at the hide, and they looked at this huge, rather unusual ape. Then, suddenly, a tiny youngster appeared from behind its mother (they guessed it was the mother). My daughter couldn’t help herself. She slipped out of the hide and stood looking at the youngster. For a minute, maybe longer, neither moved, transfixed, and then the pair of Orangutans moved off. I think my wife said my daughter laughed with happiness, and that elicited some kind of response. It was a truly special moment, two individuals absorbed in looking at each other.
I often recall what I was told about that day, not without a little envy, and think about the privilege of being able to really ‘see’ another creature like that. There’s probably more to be told about that day at the Nature Reserve, but my wife died several years ago, and what my daughter recalls is more what she has been told than actual recollection. It doesn’t matter: that minute or so was special, a kind of contact beyond words. It was magic.
It is increasingly hard to find the opportunity to be in touch with the natural world, to really see it. When I was living in North Carolina my house had an outside balcony, and if I sat there, I sometimes would see birds close by. I bought a nectar feeder, and hummingbirds would arrive, occasionally hover a foot or so away from my face, before going to get more to drink or fly back to a perch in one of the nearby trees. Those moments were precious, brief encounters that were more than mere watching. I have yet to find the same kind of place in Canberra where I will be able to feel some sort of understanding or communication has taken place. I’m working on it.
The challenge, of course, is obvious. Humans are noisy, busy, with no time or inclination to stop doing things and allow the world to flow by uninterrupted. We seem reluctant to be quiet, to stop talking, to stop the noise of humans at work and play and give ourselves the luxury of experiencing that ‘more than human world’ I have commented on before.
A television series was running in Australia while I was writing this blog: Australia Remastered. It is the third season, looking at wildlife The first focussed on some of the iconic Australian fauna, the kangaroo, wombat, platypus and echidna, among others. The second looked at regions like the wetlands, the Australian alps and the deserts. Now the third series was looking at ‘Australia Remastered’: this examined what are described as the forces of nature, including cyclones, drought, fire and floods. Narrated by Aaron Petersen, a rather terse actor with an unsympathetic voice, it provided outstanding images and stories about life in a tough environment. Crocodiles appeared in one program, and it was the same huge saltwater crocodile to be found in Sarawak. Australia does have a second smaller crocodile, the Australian Freshwater Crocodile, which can grow to 3.0 m (and rarely to 4 metres) and weigh in up to 100kg or more. Just a baby!
What the series does well is bring home two issues. First, life is marginal, increasingly so as global warming and climate change more generally is upending established ecological niches. These changes are shifting habitats for some animals, and destroying them entirely for others, so the second issue becomes even more evident. Many creatures in Australia are carnivores, only surviving by eating others, and those that are vegetarians are prey to others that are not. When we get close to the natural world, we see it bears little relationship to familiar images of beautiful creatures stalking through the Australian outback. There is beauty, but beauty balanced against aggression, ‘red in tooth and claw’, that evocative phrase from Tennyson, in a poem counterposing man as nature’s greatest creation against the reality that nature doesn’t offer anything special about humans, and might even consider them weak and puny:
Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law—
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—
In Memoriam, Canto 56
Aaron Pedersen’s narration was clear and unsparing. What we learn is that the country is dominated by many species in an unrelenting a fight for survival against others, against predators, against the environment. Humans have been successful in that fight because we protect ourselves. We push back the dangers that lurk in the environment, keeping the jungle out of the city. Now we are trying, rather patchily, to push back the impact of climate change on the environment. Unlike many of the fauna Pedersen reviews in Australia Remastered, our biggest problem might be our own species, however. There are fights for domination within various animal species, usually between two individuals over the leadership of a troop or for control over females, but we have managed to take that up to whole new level. Our fights for domination are over whole communities, and we kill large numbers to that end.
My daughter was young, possibly five years old, as she looked at the young Orangutan, innocent of the dangers that lurk in forests and rivers, and innocent of the dangers that lurk in other people. I know it is only a foolish dream, but wouldn’t you like to be able to have her experience, to look at another creature, both like and unlike a human, and enjoy the sense of unmediated communication and engagement, even giggle as she did that day?
