North Borneo

Conditions in Britain’s New Crown Colony

An American journalist, writing in March, recently provided this des cription of the new British Crown Colony of North Borneo:— RINGED by strife-torn South-East Asian territories, the British Colony of North Borneo is a peaceful, pros perous, placid land, stirred only remotely by the violence that surrounds it.

High-priced rubber, timber and coconut exports have brought into the territory a flood of new money. Nationalism has sa far scarcely been thought of, and among the relatively contented inhabitants com munism has few roots and little appeal.

Under Colonial Office administrators North Borneo is preoccupied mainly with post-war recovery, export production and the manifold problems of educating and adjusting to modem times a population that is largely illiterate and includes some of the most primitive peoples in the world.

At the same time, the colony is trying to live up to expectations that it could be made an alternative outlet for British enterprise and become the capital and flourishing new bastion of the Empire in the East.

Only 350,000 people live in North Borneo, a country of jungle-cloaked mountains, un even and often marshy coastal flats, narrow inland valleys and short, flooding rivers. In area, North Borneo is the size of South Carolina (approximately 30,000 square miles).

Immigrants from China makes up one-seventh of the population. As every where in South-East Asia, they are Industrious, usually well-to do rural small holders and town-dwelling retailers and artisans. Most North Borneo Chinese were born in the colony and their links to the homeland have loosened with the years.

Some 400 Europeans, nearly all British, do the governing and the big business jobs of North Borneo. They still are housed for the most part in temporary palm thatch bungalows on the outskirts of ruined towns devastated by the Japanese’ and the Allies during the war.

They, too, relish the peace and remoteness of Borneo in a troubled world, and flourish in the coolest year-round climate of any tropical territory in South-East Asia.

Predominantly rural, with no fabricat ing industries of any size, North Borneo lives within a pattern of palm-shaded nipa shacks set on poles, of paddyfields wedged between patches of jungle and rubber trees, of sleepy coastal ports served by a single jetty, of trackless rainy forests and sparkling communities clustered about a nucleus of cluttered Chinese stores.

Craggy, 14,000-foot Mount Kinabalu, the loftiest peak southeast of Everest, towers over all. Orchids grow in wild profusion, food is plentiful, and the weather is a perpetual round of warm sun and cool rain.

High prices of consumer goods and manpower shortages have caused some hardship, but no real privation exists.

Serious crime is a rare phenomenon, and the Pax Britannica is kept over the vast territory among the melange of races by a police force of a few hundred men and the consistent justice of British and native magistrates.

When Mr. G. Simmons, of the Solomon Islands Land Survey Service, arrived in Auckland in June, he told the newspapers there that when the rich tourists on the luxury liner Caronia were in the Solomons lately, they paid Guadalcanal natives five dollars (45/- Australian) each for the skulls of Japanese servicemen who lost their lives there during the War.