Merdeka and Much More: Reminiscences of a Raffles Professor, 1953-67

1 Home Port

HOME PORT 1 1 1 Home Port S ingapore, early morning, July 22, 1953. Engines stopped, we wallow on a sluggish sea. A signal “Pilot Wanted” flies from our masthead. Tropical warmth with the dawn, banks of clouds to the east. Singapore stretches some miles along her waterfront, waiting for us. A white-painted Messageries Maritime troop ship crosses behind us as she heads for the South China Sea; her cargo of conscripted soldiers to be unloaded in Saigon in French Indo-China. Ahead, already entering Keppel Harbour is a new post war P&O passenger liner returning to England from Hong Kong, another outpost of Empire. A score of ships are at anchor in the Roads, a stream of Tongkangs entering or leaving the river to service them. A Malayan Airways twin engine DC3 — the peace time adaption of the Douglas Dakota, so well known to me — descends over us, her flight from Penang and Kuala Lumpur now ending, to land at the city’s pre-war Kallang airport, just ahead of us. A busy scene. A two-masted Bugis or Macassarese schooner drifts round St. Johns Island, one of a fleet that has traded annually with the port since it was established in 1819. A Hokkien-manned junk, overloaded with mangrove cut up a Johor river creeps down from Changi point. Its smuggled opium passed before the dawn to a Hakka fisherman crouched at the end of his lighted kelong, the lines of stakes running out to sea with his hut at the end just visible from the deck of our ship. MERDEKA AND MUCH MORE 2 Leaning on the rail I reflect on Singapore’s famous free port status established by Stamford Raffles. Where, I wondered, did he get the idea? I had heard, rather faintly, of a Dutch Island in the West Indies that had made a fortune in the 1770s by opening its port to ships of any nation free of any import or export charges. The American Revolutionaries in particular obtained large quantities of much needed powder and shot from it. St. Eustatius — that was its name. Did Raffles hear of it from the Dutch while he was in Java? I never did discover what had inspired him to go against world common practice (nor has anyone else, as far as I know); but looking now at the bustling waterfront and a crowded city behind it I can see the result. A pilot launch nudges alongside. We — a small coastal steamer of the Blue Funnel line on her regular run back from Fremantle in Western Australia — edge into our accustomed home port berth near the entrance to the three miles of wharves, passing close to the line of wrecks, salvaged after the recent war to form a breakwater to the harbour. A small kampong of orang laut, Singapore’s original inhabitants , juts into the water off Pulau Brani, on our port side. One of its koleh sails near as we make fast. Tamil labourers swarm on board, hatch covers are removed, our cargo of sheep is hurried ashore. Another Singapore day has begun, another expatriate has arrived; but this one in all humility anxious to learn, and to understand and help the Asian youths entrusted to his care, an innocent Australian, half in love already with his new home. After three years of post-graduate study on Southeast Asia at Oxford and in London, I am a new lecturer in history at the new University of Malaya. The head of my department, Professor Cyril Northcote Parkinson, meets me as I come down the gang plank. So too am I welcomed by a tremendous cloud burst, thunder, lightning and torrents of tropical rain, “a Sumatra” so called. As his syce drives us into town along Collyer Quay, skirting the crowded slum that is the town, round the padang and past the Shaw Building, Singapore’s only high-rise, all of 16 floors, HOME PORT 3 and then up languid Orchard Road to our leafy Tanglin campus well out of the crowded city, I seek some details from Parkinson as to my future. He gives cursory attention to this domestic chore — “world history with an Asian emphasis” is all I can gather. I gulp, then listen, as he launches into a survey of today’s Asia, at once depressing and exciting. I give it to you 60 years later, the big picture as...