D.H. Robinson, A Mild Man In Borneo.

Kuehing, Sarawak, The Author, 2002, pp. 298. [Available from the author, Les Arnauds, St Foy le Petit, 47120 Duras, Lot-en-Garonne, France]

Published reminiscences of British colonial officers from Sarawak are surprisingly few. I can only think of Ward (1966), Digby (1980), Morrison (1993) and Archer (1997). Consequently it is gratifying to see that "Robby" Robinson has taken the trouble to relate and self-publish his experiences as a road engineer in the mid- and late 1950s. As much as anything else, the book reveals the crushing, long-distance colonial bureaucracy which meant that all his detailed plans for the Serian-Simanggang Trunk Road Project had first to be vetted by various British government departments in London. The building of the road was nothing less than a saga of ingenious improvisation and Robinson regales us with some interesting details of his experiences. In order to run things effectively, he had to become the White Rajah of his own bureaucratically autonomous kingdom. How successful his engineering was can still be seen today, particularly when it is compared with the disastrous stretch of road from Simanggang to Sarikei. As Robbie's classicist friend Otto Steinmayer notes in his Foreword, the Roman engineer Gaius Cervesius Otho (no relation) once observed: "Tria quae sunt praecipue observanda in viis construendis sunt colliquitio, porro colliquitio, et denique colliquitio " [The three most important things in road-building are drainage, drainage and drainage.] How important the Simanggang road was to the opening up of agriculture and small industry in the area neighboring the road would be difficult to overstate. It was the first major breakthrough from a river-based to a road-based transportation system.

Robbie also has some good anecdotes to relate about some of his fellow officers and the general life style of expatriates of the period. Inevitably, one of his drinking companions at the Happy World Cabaret (predecessor to the Aurora Hotel as Kuching's favorite watering hole) was the bibulous and splenetic Tom Harrisson. He explains that they were able to get on very well after their first meeting when the crusty curator "asked what the hell a newly arrived engineer ... knew about the bloody country." Robinson's retort didn't make its way into Judith Heimann's biography but it is a fair summary in its way: "I know you, a bloody journalist, and a failed one at that." (Bob Reece, Murdoch University, Western Australia)

ABSTRACTS

Editor's note: Abstracts marked EI have, with the permission of its Editorial Board, been reproduced from the abstracts journal Excerpta Indonesia, P.O. Box 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands. We thank the Editorial Board for kindly allowing us to reprint them here (with minor editorial changes) as a service to our readers.