Previously, the missionary had spent three long days bumping along the Baram, living on crackers and warm Coke, dozing whenever the boat allowed and watching the jungle slide past like a green wall. At last the river bent wide and the Long San mission appeared—St Pius X with its twin spires, the fathers’ house, school, convent and clinic—most of it put up by Brother Alex, a quiet grafter who built from memory and sweat. He’d settled in, learned the place ran on a small generator and two overworked priests, and seen how the bishop kept the whole remote outpost afloat despite the cost and the chief’s untapped wealth. Then came the Naming Ceremony in the Paramount Chief’s longhouse: children lined up, heads patted, faces smeared with pig fat for prosperity, and dancing fierce enough to impress the outsiders. When it was time to leave, he packed with that odd certainty it wasn’t goodbye at all—because Long San, and bigger changes, were waiting downriver.
So this was the famous Long San Mission. Soon we had to go back. When I got myself packed ready to leave and say goodbye to all the staff, I knew it was not to be goodbye but au revoir. I just knew that, no matter how remote and difficult of access it might be, I would see it again. I came back to Long San, the following year, on a fateful day for the Catholic Church. On this day the new state of Malaysia was officially promulgated. Very few people, certainly not churchmen, had any idea what the implications of this would be. Most dismissed it simply as a change of flag. Instead it was to be a turning point in the history of the Borneo mission.
When I look back on my early days, I have to be grateful to God for the many little “treats” He gave me. In a way it was like the honeymoon years preparing for the hard slog that lay ahead. I was never to be so “foot-loose and fancy-free” again, compared with the long years when it would be impossible to put a foot outside the State because of immigration difficulties.
In the second term holidays in August I thought it would be nice for me to pay a return visit to Frank Cowan in British North Borneo. He had come to see me in Kuala Belait the previous December. But first I had to go with the altar boys to a picnic at the beach. These boys were really the pick of the parish; punctual, responsible, very alert. In those days, the priests strove to encourage them to consider a vocation to the priesthood. I had the head boy in my sights. Edmund Cheong was very bright at school, the eldest boy of a family of eight. I broached the subject one day and I was glad that he had obviously considered it already. It was very topical then for the bishop was about to open his own seminary. Rome was very particular about each diocese having its own and it even gave great assistance towards its upkeep. My joy was short-lived. The following Sunday after mass, his father came to me and advised me that I did not quite understand the Chinese mentality and culture, that Edmund as the eldest son had obligations to the ancestors and the upkeep of the graves. I was too young and inexperienced to counter this and I let the matter drop. The father was a very new convert. He was not annoyed and remained good friends with me, nor was he aggressive in any way; in fact he was a very gentle and humble man. Looking back, I could have swept his objections aside. Who knows what might have become of Edmund. To this day, where he now lives in West Australia, he remains a stalwart Catholic layman, dedicated to his family and to his church. I never took this up with him again in all the years that I have known him. But I used to joke with his wife, changing the circumstances, saying that, but for her, Edmund would have been a priest, perhaps even a bishop. Two of his sisters are nuns in the local order.
Something similar happened just about this time. The big girls from the convent school were able to go to Kuching to continue -what we might call today- their “A” levels. One day I got a letter from the superior of the Carmelite Convent there asking me to give a recommendation for one of these girls. I was glad to comply. Again, as with Edmund, the father intervened. He was quite nice about it; his point was that his wife (the girl’s stepmother) was a Methodist and did not understand all this talk about the girl wanting to be a nun, especially an enclosed nun. It was hard for me to find the right approach, with the poor man, pulled between his wife and daughter. Of course I had to disabuse him of the idea that I had encouraged the girl in the first place-though I would have been proud to have been the author of such a venture. I explained that I was merely responding to a request from the Carmel. He was happy to hear this. Thus in a few short weeks, I had experienced disappointment concerning the growth of the local church. There were no angry words, or breaking of friendship with either family.
Picnics were a common pastime, either families, or school friends, or church groups. Usually they would set out for the beach at about 8.a.m, find a sheltered place under the trees-which was not so easy, the “Christmas trees” (pines) and the casuarinas being sparsely leaved-and settle down for a meal. The proceedings would end about 11.30 because most people could not stand the intense heat of the sun after that time. The altar boys were different; they spent the whole day at the beach, swimming, racing one another, going far out into the water. It was not dangerous, since the South China Sea is shallow here. I used to go swimming by myself after a hard day in the school. Further out the sharks were busy cavorting and hunting for food but I did not mind too much for it seems they were not man-eating. Later there were several incidents of sea-wasps being spotted, a species of jelly fish. They were really bad news. A sting caused paralysis and death would follow inside the hour.
The shallow shelf was where Shell were exploring for oil, so that in a few years all the rigs were closed down on land and everything was concentrated off-shore. This ease of extraction makes Brunei Shell one of the most profitable of the Shell companies. I had thought in my inexperience that being immersed all the time in the water I would escape the sun. I knew different that night when I lay down, to find that my back was very painful. Still the next morning, I had to be on my way, sunburn or no. Leo drove me to the airport, where I got on a Dakota which did the trip to Jesselton in about half an hour. This flight traversed the whole of Brunei Bay.
I stayed the next day or so with Bill Smit in Penampang, the chief station of the Kadazans, the natives of North Borneo. Bill I had got to know from his visits to Seria, where there was a sizeable community of Kadazans working for Shell. He always played the simple priest -which he was not- and had great stories to tell. He was very quick-witted. Once we were all gathered for the opening of the new church in Kuala Belait. Jan Dekker had come up from Miri. He was a famous builder of schools, halls and houses. Finally he had got round to building the cathedral in Miri.
“Jan”, said Bill, “you remind me of Sara (the wife of Abraham); you have conceived a child in your old age.”
Penampang was one of the biggest mission stations-if not the biggest-in the whole of the Mill Hill territory. It had many outstations which had lovely churches and schools, with of course no resident priest. The main church was built of stone, high-roofed, spacious and so cool. This was previously the residence of the Prefect Apostolic of Jesselton; the house had a good many rooms, for it was a great meeting place. It is true that there were two parishes in the town of Jesselton, but accomodation was limited and the priests there were busy as priests would be in any populous urban area. Monsignor Wachter who had built the church and house before the war was an Austrian Tyrolese; under him were the usual components of any Mill Hill community-Dutch, British, Austrian. When the Japanese came, the Dutch and British priests and sisters were immediately interned, eventually in Kuching on a site which became the Teachers’ Training College. The Austrian priests were permitted to continue their ministry, because Germany had annexed Austria in 1938-which meant that Austrian passport-holders were technically allies of the Japanese.
This state of affairs came to an end in May, 1945 when Germany surrendered. The Austrian priests were immediately rounded up by the Japanese and marched off into the interior. They were never heard of again. They are remembered in Mill Hill each year on the 6th August, which was just a week or so before the Japanese surrendered. By this time, the prison camp had been liberated by the Australian troops and all the British and Dutch priests, brothers and sisters were released. This is just one of the many little tragedies that so filled the big horror film of World War 2. Every endeavour has been made over the years to find the site of their death with no success. A story once came out about a police sergeant on a jungle patrol making some reference to this, when he was in his cups, but later he denied all knowledge of it. Perhaps the Japanese had involved him in some way in the priests’ capture or in their death and he feared the consequences of being a war criminal. May be some day a word will be dropped or even a death-bed revelation; there is still time but it is running out fast.
Now I had to go into the interior, where Frank was at a place called Bundu Tuhan, on the slopes of Mount Kinabalu, the highest in south-east Asia. This meant a jeep ride on a corkscrew track up the mountain. When I got to my destination, there was no Frank; he had gone on further to take up an appointment in Ranau, a new mission. William Roetenberg made me most welcome, wanted me to stay while they tried to contact Frank and get him back, rather than have me make another trip to a poorly furnished little house. William was one of those people who surface in our Society with great frequency-the men with the “million-dollar brains”. He had taken this wilderness on the mountain slopes, started an agricultural venture, trained young farmers in co-operatives, transported the produce, fruit and vegetables, to an insatiable market in Jesselton, and even as far as Brunei. Tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage and all the other vegetables which are associated with temperate climates, grew in abundance. Having proved their reliability, the young farmers were given the land for their own use. William master-minded the project with four Mill Hill brothers. In such a house, the food was plentiful. At night, on the mountain slopes, it was cold, but there was a heating system and plenty of blankets. It was such a contrast to the sticky heat of Brunei, a mere 20 minutes flying time away.
I had come too far to turn back. Although we could not contact Frank, I decided to push ahead and got a lift in a jeep going in that direction. No doubt today Ranau will be a big town, with big government buildings and shopping centres for it is geographically central in the interior, but that day, it was a simple bazaar, with a few offices. I was directed to a little house standing by itself just outside the village and here I found Frank. It is true he had not expected me for he had just come back from a trip, but he made me welcome to his tiny place, with limited accommodation. My room had no bed. I had to sleep on the floor, which in itself was no great hardship but there was the added dimension of a very sunburnt back. Next day Frank and I went off to the local clinic, where the dresser (medical assistant) kindly lent one of his beds for the length of my stay. At least I got some sleep for the next few nights.
Ranau is notorious as the destination of the infamous Death March, on which almost 1,000 Australians perished near the end of the World War 2. These and similar atrocities are burned into the minds of the older Australians, whose war losses were mostly in the Far East.
One other old seminary friend was on my visiting list. Desmond McAlinden was the genial, avuncular dean of the students in Mill Hill in my time; he had an unlimited capacity for thinking up sketches for concerts, practical jokes and was the editor of the famous in-house journal, “The Daily Dismal” which among other articles carried letters purporting to be from various superiors warning individuals of their behaviour in class, church and football field. The cartoons were very humorous, contributed by one of the Irish students. I had to return to Jesselton to catch the train-the only one in all our territory-to take me to Keningau where Desmond was parish priest.
The engine was old-fashioned-I have never seen the like before or since-with a big funnel, chubby body and cowcatcher, hauling carriages which were open to the sea-breezes. It had been built for the timber companies for its route lay through the camps. The railway station in Jesselton had platforms, officials in uniforms, with flags and whistles. When the train pulled out surrounded with officialdom, it drove round a little bend, out of sight of the station as it were, and then got itself on to a single track which ended 30 miles away. Huge trees towered overhead, branches down to the level of the train; the Papar River thundered alongside rushing through the gorges. I never saw it in any other way.
Often it would overflow and flood the tracks, and all communication would be cut until the water subsided. Storms would uproot the trees and block the line. With all this, it was quite something to travel any distance. The train was slow, perhaps about the speed of the old tram cars if that. It wended its way through the rubber estates which were no longer as profitable as they had been before the war. They had been the basis of the economy; Indians and Sri Lankans had been brought in to work. Inter-marriage with the local people had produced quite a sizeable colony who formed an educated body and were great church people. The train passed through Papar, where the mission and the school are right there at the station and on to Tenom, the end of the line. I do not know whether the train is still running or whether some Malaysian Beeching excised it from the landscape. I waited here at the mission for Desmond to come and pick me up.
Keningau was a fair-sized town, the centre of a huge area of evangelisation, stretching far south to the borders of Kalimantan Borneo, which is in Indonesia, occupied by Muruts. These were farmers and hunters and had to find a living in very thick jungle land. The importance of Keningau was recognised by Rome in 1993 when it was made a diocese, the 6th in East Malaysia. When I arrived in Borneo, the third vicariate, that of Miri, had just been created. A diocese is the recognition that a church is self-supporting.
Desmond made me very welcome in the homely atmosphere of his house, which he shared with two other priests-all three were men of many parts. George Bauer had set up a band which gave great entertainment at any local function with a variety of instruments imported and local.
Next week, he’s swept further into North Borneo’s uneasy new order: a polite commission with sharp questions, leaders who smile as the ground shifts, and mission stations holding their nerve as politics and faith start pulling in opposite directions—until one man’s overreach sets off a chain of consequences no one in the interior can ignore.
