Rice in Malaya

Introduction: The Making of Rice in Malaya

xix Introduction The Making of Rice in Malaya Of the many strands that have gone into the weaving of this book, the longest has unquestionably been an enduring interest in both agriculture and its history. Both of my grandfathers were agriculturalists in their, and my, native New Zealand. My maternal grandfather Joseph Gwyn had been an itinerant labourer, but after he married he was allocated a section of heavily wooded land in South Otago from which he was expected to make a living. There he built a house, raised dairy cows and a family, and became something of a community leader, important enough to meet the Prime Minister. The cold and damp, and the unremitting labour of a dairy farm, got to him in the 1920s and he and some of his family removed to Hastings, the New Zealand one, where I would later be regaled with stories of the pioneer days and see at first hand the hard work that went into obtaining a living by growing vegetables on a few acres of superior land. My paternal grandfather, Thomas Hill, retired as a district roadman and took up a small-holding on the outskirts of Dunedin where he grew vegetables and soft fruits, kept a cow while grandmother raised chickens, sold eggs and made butter by hand for sale and family consumption. Both were latter-day “peasants”, and what I saw of their lives and heard of their earlier doings made a lasting impression. At primary school I was deemed “excellent” at both geography and history. At secondary school both went by the board, compulsorily, in favour of languages, Latin, French and German, but history was permitted as an interest in the 6th form. Here my teacher was Ray Watters, later to enjoy a long and distinguished career in the Geography Department of the then Victoria University College. From 1954 I was a student there, again under Watters, in historical geography, and encountered some of the classic works in the field. Among them were Carl Sauer’s Agricultural Origins and Dispersals, Ralph Brown’s Historical Geography of the United States, Derwent Whittlesey’s work on “sequent occupance” and the concept of a landscape as a palimpsest, and for the South Island of New Zealand Andrew Hill Clark’s The Invasion of New xx Introduction Zealand by Plants, Animals and People. Studies for an MA and Honours in the Wellington Department led to a dissertation on the earliest phase of pakeha (European) agricultural settlement in the Wairarapa district and to a number of publications based thereon (Hill, 1961, 1963, 1965). The Wellington Geography Department was nothing if not outwardlooking . The Professor in human geography, Keith Buchanan, perennial student, wide-ranging writer and spell-binding lecturer directed his students towards what was then customarily called the Third World. At one point four of his exstudents worked in Malaya, Terry McGee and Robert Eyles at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Warwick Neville and me at the University of Singapore. But it was Donald McKenzie, the Wellington Department’s geomorphologist, whose student I had also been and under whom I had worked as Demonstrator in charge of the entire first-year practical programme, who, in late 1961 bore the offer of a post at the University of Singapore. Previously I had graduated both from the University of New Zealand and from the Auckland Teachers’ College and was lecturing at the University of Auckland under Kenneth Cumberland, another who had an interest in historical geography, albeit of a strictly chorographical kind. Early in 1962 I thus joined the Geography Department at the newlyrenamed University of Singapore under Rudolph Wikkramatileke, whose nose was immediately put out of joint by my spending two fascinating weeks attending a regional conference of the International Geographical Union, a meeting and field excursion organized by his arch-rival, Robert Ho. My attention was thus early directed to rice-farming and especially in the Malaydominant regions of the north-east, then two days drive away from Singapore. Study of the language was quickly undertaken and studies in that region begun, self-financed, for the feeling that Singapore money should be spent in Singapore was already apparent. Indeed, as relations between Singapore and the central government deteriorated late in 1964 and in 1965, I was told, by the Professor of Geography and supervisor of my doctoral studies, Ooi Jin Bee, that I would get plenty of support were I to study agriculture there rather than in distant Kelantan and Trengganu. But...