Bornean Diaries, 1938–1942 (review)

After graduating from Cambridge in 1909, Ivor Hugh Norman Evans spent slightly more than a year in the North Borneo service from 1910 to 1911. He was first appointed as a cadet at the Secretariat and later, an Assistant District Officer at Tuaran and Kota Belud (Tempassuk), on the west coast of Sabah. He left the service in August 1911 and returned to Cambridge for further training before taking up an appointment as Assistant Curator and Ethnographer at the Federated Malay States Museum, Taiping in 1912. Evans was to spend his entire official career at the museum until his retirement in 1932, building up the collections and also undertaking anthropological studies on the Malays and the Negrito Orang Asli—these works made him a well-known authority on the Malays and Orang Asli. Even though his initial stay in Sabah was extremely short, it left a lasting impression on Evans who developed a keen interest in the indigenous society, particularly the Dusun people. He returned in 1915 for a long vacation and undertook further work with the Dusun. It was his work among the Dusuns at Tempassuk and Kadamaian (the upper reaches of the Tempassuk River) that made him a renowned ethnographer.

After retiring from the FMS Museum in 1932, Evans spent the next five years in Suffolk and Cambridge before returning to Sabah in 1938. It was during his prolonged stay in Sabah from 1938 to 1942 that the present diary was kept. Much of the information collected during these three and half years formed the basis for his magnum opus, The Religion of the Tempasuk Dusuns of North Borneo (Cambridge, 1953). In many ways, the diaries were his research notes; they cover the period between 6 November 1938 and 3 May 1942.

It is a diary that contains rich and intimate information on the Dusun community studied by Evans. Far from being mere subjects for his study, the Dusun villagers were like his close friends. Apart from the many entries and anecdotes about the lives of his study subjects, Evans also recorded many events and his meetings with people from all walks of life. Through this, the diary has provided us with a glimpse of day-to-day life in what was considered an outstation in North Borneo during Chartered Company days.

The diary, however, was interrupted by the Japanese occupation and Evans' internment together with the rest of the European community in the prisoner-of-war camp at Batu Lintang, Kuching. For researchers working on the initial stages of the war on the west coast of Sabah, Evans' diary entries for the period between the beginning of the Japanese occupation on the west coast on 9 January 1942 until 3 May 1942, two weeks prior to his internment, are most informative. That period coincided with a strange arrangement made between the Europeans on the west coast and the Japanese Army—the Europeans remained free while under Japanese rule. The diary entries provide a view of the period from an interior (Kota Belud) perspective. Between May and September 1942, Evans and the other European residents were interned at the Police Barracks at Batu Tiga before being transferred to Kuching where they spent the remainder of the war. After the war, Evans returned to Sabah and lived on Labuan Island from where he made visits to the Dusun villages in Tempassuk.

The diary is one of a handful of diaries from Sabah which have been edited and published. Among those published are those of Frank Hatton (1882), William Pretyman (Sarawak Museum Journal, 1956–1959), Ada Pryer (Hutchinson, 1893), Woolley (Sabah Society Journal, 1971), to name a few. But thus far, Evans' diary is the best-edited and presents readers with a most useful reference to the Dusun community in Tempassuk and Sabah between 1938 and 1942.

Dr. Horton did a most remarkable work in editing the diary. In fact, he did...