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BORNEO Australia’s Proud but Tragic Heritage

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They were volunteers, aged between fifteen and fifty at enlistment. Many were married men with children. They all came together as comrades in arms, described by one of their senior officers as “… the finest cross-section of Australian manhood that has ever left our shores”. In Malaya and on Singapore, these men of Australia’s fighting 8th Division were in action continuously for four ferocious weeks. Of 2,030 Australian POWs sent to Borneo after the 1942 surrender at Singapore only 218 survived to return home. The rest were dead from starvation, beatings, innumerable diseases and illnesses, malnutrition and murder. Whole networks of mates perished in Borneo with none left alive to tell their story of stoic courage. During the first year in Sandakan POW Camp there were subversive links with a local resistance movement, but an offer by Filipino guerillas to aid mass escapes was not accepted. Eventually, however, there were ninety escapes and attempted escapes, from which twenty-one returned home. From late 1943 members of “Z” Special Unit were in North Borneo on reconnaissance operations PYTHON and then AGAS, based within 140 and 70 km of Sandakan. In 1945 there occurred the infamous death marches to Ranau. A lethargic incompetence among the secret planners of a rescue mission led to its abandonment. This KINGFISHER operation would have been carried out by the highly-trained 1st Australian Parachute Battalion. The book brings together into a coherent narrative the scattered evidence of what was happening in Borneo during those desolate years of captivity. The author has followed steadfastly in the footsteps of the Australians who were sent to Sandakan and the 789 of them who were sent in 1945 towards Ranau. He has delved deeply into the extensive archival records, and has interviewed persons in both Australia and Borneo who vividly recall some of those events of 1942-45.

Borneo The Land of River & Palm

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WELCOME a new edition of this book. It tells of a land everyone must love who knows it. Its future is very much in front, not in the past! In twenty years there must be marvelous openings both for good and evil in Borneo. Let us serve our generation by aiding the advent of “the best good” into the parts wherein we have the best of rights to work-in Sarawak, in Labuan and Brunei, and in North Borneo. The Dyaks, too, possess a charm which all acknowledge who have lived among them. Koreans, Dyaks, Karens-may all these races in their different lands receive of our best in the next few decades at the hands of the Christian church.

Check List of Sabah Trees; Preferred

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This pocket check-list replaces North Borneo Forest Record No. 6 “Check list of the Forest Flora of North Borneo” by G.H.S. Wood and J. Agama, first published in 1956, with subsequent editions. It is intended primarily as a definitive list of preferred vernacular names for those trees of Sabah which are commercially, ecologically or horticulturally important. With species from 80 families represented it takes into account most of the known big trees in Sabah forests and as such should provide some assistance in identification. Some families can be fairly readily identified: Leguminosae nearly always has compound leaves and often smooth grey bark; Sapotaceae has a white creamy exudate, and Guttiferae a yellow one; Burseraceae has a characteristic resinous smell; Dipterocarpaceae always has damar; Ebenaceae has black outer bark, often hard and brittle like charcoal; Lauraceae yellow sapwood and characteristic aromatic smell; Annonaceae has prominent rays, sweet scent and the slash tears easily into strips, and Fagaceae (Quercus and Lithocarpus), tanniferous bark with broad rays. Each family has characters, which help to identify it, but without a long key, spot characters might be confusing. This is not a flora and in order to keep it as a truly “Pocket” check-list, keys, diagrams, etc, have not been included. These may be found in the different identification manuals now available. The taxonomy of the trees of Sabah is still developing in respect of many families and work continues in the herbarium at Sandakan and at various other herbaria throughout the world, in particular the Rijksherbarium, Leiden, and Kew Herbarium, London, from whom many of the names in this book originate and whose continued help is gratefully acknowledged. Only one vernacular name is given for each species, this is the Preferred Vernacular Tree Name. The object is to standardise the use of vernacular names so that all officers of the Forest Department and other interested persons will know the species being referred to. Many of the names are taken either form Forest Record No. 6 or Forest Record No. 2 (A Preliminary List of North Borneo Plant Names by H.G. Keith, 1952). The basis of choice of name is that whenever a well known local name exists in one of the languages widely used in Sabah (Dusun, Bajau, Murut, Bisaya, Suluk or Malay) it is adopted as the preferred name. Where there is more than one well known local name preference is generally given to a name in one of the indigenous languages rather than one of the introduced ones. In some cases where a suitable local name does not exist then a name used in Peninsular Malaysia, Sarawak or Brunei has been accepted. Many of the Dipterocarps of the Keruing and Red Seraya groups have been given coined Malay names as used by Meijer and Wood in “Dipterocarps of Sabah”, Sabah Forest Record No. 5 (1964).

Dipterocarps of Sabah (North Borneo)

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Early Picture Postcards of North Borneo & Labuan

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“A picture is worth a thousand words” goes the ancient saying. One of the best ways to portray the history of North Borneo and Labuan is to look at the picture postcards of the olden days. The historical scope of this book is confined to those picture postcards published in the pre-World War II period, from the 1890s to the 1930s. Hundreds of North Borneo and Labuan picture postcards were published locally and in Singapore, Hong Kong and Europe. As most of these picture postcards were posted to overseas countries, especially Europe, it is rare indeed to find such early picture postcards in Sabah among the collectors or those in the trade. So far, there has been no publication on the subject.

Flora of Mount Kinabalu in North Borneo; On the

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Fresh-water Fishes of North Borneo; The (reprint)

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North Borneo (now the Malaysian state of Sabah) is situated at the northern tip of Borneo Island (the third largest island in the world). It lies between 5′ and 7′ north of the Equator. It covers an area of 73,711 sq. km. (29,388 sq. miles) or about 10% of Borneo’s total area of 286,699 sq. miles, yet it has nearly 40% of the fresh-water fish species now known from Borneo. One hundred and sixty eight species of fresh-water fishes are described in this book; among them 62 species which are endemic (only found in) to Borneo and 29 species endemic to North Borneo. The most interesting groups of the endemic fishes are the clinging fishes, which are found in the mountain streams, especially in the Kinabalu Park, which comprise Gastromyzon (8 species), Glaniopsis (4 species), Protomyzon (4 species) and Neogastromyzon (I species). The Giant Gorami or Ikan Kului, Osphronemus laticlavius, is perhaps the most spectacular fresh-water fish endemic to Sabah, which has found its way to the lucrative global ornamental fish trade in recent years.

Kinabalu Guerrillas

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An Account of the Double Tenth Rising against the Japanese Invaders in North Borneo.

Masa Jepun

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The Japanese occupation of Sarawak, Brunei and North Borneo during World War Two is one of the big gaps in the writing about Borneo history. Apart from official Australian and British military accounts of the invasion and liberation, the main body of writing consists of first-hand narratives by European prisoners of war and members of the Semut Allied guerilla parties. Borneo has been passed over in the academic analysis of Japanese rule in Southeast Asia. From Sarawak itself, apart from the reminiscences of a handful of Sarawakians and brief accounts by John Chin (1981) and Sanib Said (1985), there is only Gabriel Tan’s anecdotal compilation (1997). The general secondary accounts are in Runciman (1960) and Reece (1982; 1993). In addition, there are references to the period in Lockard (1987). Few of these works remind us that Sarawak was administered jointly with Brunei and North Borneo by the Japanese army as an entity known as Boruneo Kita (northern Borneo) and that its experience has to be seen within the wider context of Japan’s Dai Toa Kyoeiken, or Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Most of what has been written about what things were actually like during the occupation has tended to portray it as a kind of nightmare, a grim aberration which came to its inevitable end when Sarawak was liberated by Allied forces between March and September 1945. The tacit wish of most Sarawakians who lived through that era has been to erase the memory of what was a generally unhappy and difficult experience. For some, their war-time activities were also a potential source of embarrassment. These attitudes were encouraged after July 1946 by the British colonial government which traded on the negative aspects of Japanese rule to enhance its own initially tenuous position

Plants of Mount Kinabalu 4; The

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The primary objective of this project is to provide an inventory of all vascular plants in the flora of Mount Kinabalu. Three books on the flora, covering the ferns, fern allies, orchids, and gymnosperms and non-orchid monocotyledons, already have been published. The Plants of Mount Kinabalu, 4 enumerates the dicotyledon families Acanthaceae to Lythraceae, roughly half of this major group. A final volume on the dicotyledons is expected to be completed in about three years. The Kinabalu flora includes over 5000 species of vascular plants, and is one of the most diverse if not the most diverse flora in the world. Additionally, Mount Kinabalu has been a centre of extremely active plant evolution and speciation and presents a spectacular natural laboratory for studying these processes. This fourth volume in the series contains sections on the historical aspects of plant collecting on Mount Kinabalu, a biographical sketch of two of the most important collectors, Mary Strong and Joseph Clemens, to whom the book is dedicated, analysis of the collections, elevational distribution of the dicotyledons, a list of cultivated and introduced dicots, enumeration of the species, and indexes to numbered collections. Information is provided for each species on literature, habit, habitat, elevation range, and specimens upon which the study is based. These dicotyledons include 83 families, 430 genera and about 1575 species, subspecies and varieties. Almost 20,000 specimens were examined and recorded for the project. These were collected over a period of 150 years (1851-2000) by about 282 naturalists, explorers, botanists and local people, and are the basis for virtually all the accumulated knowledge of the Mount Kinabalu flora. The book is particularly authoritative because of the collaboration of 25 noted specialists in various plant groups. The last comprehensive works on the Kinabalu flora were 0. Stapf’s monumental 1894 account, On the Flora of Mount Kinabalu, in North Borneo and L. S. Gibbs’s 1914 work, A Contribution to the Flora and Plant Formations of’ Mount Kinabalu and the Highlands of British North Borneo. Stapf’s paper listed only 90 taxa in the families covered by this volume. Thus the present work includes a 17-fold increase in taxa since Stapf’s time, and has the advantage of being based on about a century of advances in knowledge of the flora and improvements in the scientific methodology for conducting such a study. The project involves new and innovative procedures for conducting floristic inventories, and is serving as a model for similar projects in other parts of the world. Specimens have been examined in some 36 different herbaria, including all relevant specimens at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Natural History Museum, London, and the National Herbarium of the Netherlands, Leiden Branch. Gibbs had about 229 collections available for the dicotyledons in this group in her account, and Stapf had only about 155. In contrast, the present study is based upon nearly 20,000 specimen records representing 12,125 collections accumulated over the 150 years since Mount Kinabalu was first explored by Hugh Low in 1851.