A letter from Lundu (19 October 2004).

Otto Steinmayer

P. O. Box 13 94500 Lundu, Sarawak Malaysia

The official name of our kampong is "Stunggang Dayak" but I constantly drop the "Dayak" as our Kpg. Stunggang is the real Kpg. Stunggang, the site of the huge Rumah O.K.P. Jugah where James Brooke first touristed to a longhouse back in 1839. We orang Stunggang held our biggest and most boisterous bash in decades last Friday evening. The occasion of this gawai was the 151st (and a half or so) anniversary of the arrival of Rev. William Henry Gomes and the establishment of Christianity and the Anglican Church in Lundu in January 1853.

Preparation took months. We held extra gotong royongs to cut the grass, repair the road, build steps from the church to the hall, paint walls. Since I am the resident scholar here, Father Jackson Jarau assigned me to researching and writing up the history of the Mission and of Christchurch. I rummaged and scratched all over for material. My wife Nusi was in charge of the cake, which we ordered from Kuching.

Christchurch is our local church, and the present concrete building is its third incarnation, after Father Gomes's first atap-roofed church, then the belian one built by Bakih anak Negi in 1863. By dark the church was packed. Then a cheery service, Father Jarau preached a sermon on the history of the Mission, and everybody listened attentively, naturally enough, because everybody in the room (except me) was a descendent of one original convert or another. Rev Gomes's great-grandson, George Gomes, who works at SESCO, was there, beaming with delight; but unfortunately none of the many Zehnders, descendents of Rev. John Lewis Zehnder, our second priest, showed up. Two Iban political higher-ups attended. They had been at daggers drawn in the newspapers but here they had to be reconciled for an evening. Andrew Jika anak Saban got a round of applause after Fr. Jarau told us how he had cleverly prevented the registers and papers from being destroyed by the Japanese. The baptismal register goes back to the very beginnings, and is a gold mind for the genealogy-conscious, which we all are.

After the last hymn there was a quick grace, and we poured out to dig into the food. 1 only got one plate, I was so busy selling copies of my Christchurch History. When everybody was full, we all grabbed our Stella Artois and listened to the kampong band and the singer with the ukelele from Kuching, and after enough Stella we began dancing. Nusi and I left at 3:00 a.m., while the jogetting showed no signs of ending.

This was the most genuine kind of gawai, and everyone knew it and was happy for it. We had religion and thanksgiving, and remembrance and reverence of ancestors-my son's if not mine--and lots of food, beer, and fun. The only difference from a gawai of 200 years ago was that the feat's patron was now Jesus Christ.

The other hot event here in Sarawak also involved history, in a tragic way. In the wee hours of Thursday 7 October the cables of the old suspension bridge at Satok over Sungai Sarawak parted and the roadway and the aqueducts went to the bottom of the river. This old bridge, built in 1926 by PWD engineer A.S. Lowe, was the marvel of Kuching in its time, and remained in use and beloved well after the big concrete bridge was put up. Kuchingites poured out their feelings of regret in the papers and over the radio, and of dismay that the poor thing had not been properly maintained. A good many people were left without water. The bridge meant a lot to the orang Lundu also, those of us who had been in and out of Kuching, or lived there, over the decades. And bridge collapses especially concern us, who are watching the new cantilever bridge slowly go up over the Batang Kayan. We want it to stay safe.

Just to put the final nifty detail on my perception that so many of the past was con-ring together during this last week, while I was playing the organ during the anniversary service--we of course sang "Mansang kitai kristian" (Onward Christian Soldiers)--I noted for the first time the author of that hymn, S. Baring-Gould, the same Sabine Baring-Gould who co-wrote A History of Sarawak under its Two White Rajahs with Charles Bampfylde.