The More Colourful

Side Of Malaya

The term game reserve conjures up, for most people, visions of South and East African safaris. Ronald McKie— better known for his political writings about Malaysia—puts the record straight with The Company of Animals, which is not only the story of King George V National Park in Malaya but of the last white Chief Game Warden there, James Alexander Hislop.

IN between his newspaper assign ments McKie learned of a dif ferent Malaya through Jim Hislop— a Malaya that is still 80 per cent, rain-forest, unroaded and sparsely populated, or not populated at all except by jungle animals.

Hislop began his working life on the estate of the Earl of Moray but after taking a diploma of forestry at Edinburgh he went to Malaya, as a rubber planter, in 1937.

He learned Malay and Tamil until he “spoke Scots with a Tamil accent . . . began his first butterfly collection, began to gather his first books on the trees and animals and birds of this new country. . .

Special Unit

After the fall of Singapore he escaped to Ceylon, joined a special unit and was parachuted behind Japanese lines in Malaya where he spent months organising Malayan Chinese Communist guerrillas who were then fighting the Japanese.

Three years later they were fighting the British and Hislop was a com mander of a unit of Ferret Force during the so-called Emergency that dragged on for almost a decade.

When Ferret Force was disbanded, Hislop became Game Warden for Perak and, in 1957, in the year of Malayan independence, Chief Game Warden. But not for long— two years later the job was “Malayanised” and Hislop was forced to retire.

He could not, however, bring himself to leave Malaya and became, of all unlikely things, a stockbroker in Kuala Lumpur where his home is still within sight of the mountains and from where he can visit the bush as often as possible.

Although part of this book covers McKie’s and Hislop’s journeys into the bush together, a great part of it is devoted to Hislop’s earlier ex periences as a game warden, pro tecting the country’s wild game—still something comparatively new in

Malaya, where the firs fauna protec- *0" measures were taken only in 1922 and where Malayan man had traditionally regarded animals, no matter how decorative, as natural enemies A ' £ , T i Apart from the George V National OCCup r ng - a , rea f a^°ut 2 500 sq. miles just east of the centre of the mountainous country, there are only a few small sanctuaries and, as m Africa the wild herds now seem doomed to eventual anmhilatlon ; Since 1900 when the Malay Peninsula began to be opened up for tin and later for rubber the elephant at OPU leasr «nt estimate is that no more than 1,500 . o oao t i a o „ i,'l of these an.mals and those ‘ y f ast ,u° f * he , d , lVld,ng range > remain in the country.

The seladang or wild ox that originally ranged in large herds on the coastal plains and river valleys has been driven to remote inland

areas and today probably numbers no more than a 1,000 and these are facing extinction.

Of the two types of rhinoceros that once lived in the peninsula, the Javan rhino is extinct and the Sumatran rhino nearly so.

Admired

The Chinese and the Malays, who (says McKie) have always admired the tiger for its strength and beauty and have incorporated it in their coat-of-arms, have for generations shot the beast on sight until there are probably no more than 2,000 left in the whole country and these only in the rugged and undeveloped north and north-east.

The smaller animals and the deer are going the same way. Nor are they entirely safe in the National Park or the few reserves, which are not regularly patrolled and which are continually being nibbled at for land development. Yet Malaya still has the time and the territory to do something about saving her remain ing animals and conserving some of her natural resources. Whether she will is something about which both the author and the man he writes about appear pessimistic.

To those of us who think of Malaya only in terms of interminable argu ments between the Tunku and the Prime Minister of Singapore, this book about a wild and still untamed country comes as a welcome and interesting surprise.—JT.

(The Company Of Animals. Angus

and Robertson. 37/6.)