Heritage Snippets of Sarawak
By Lim Tze Tshen
THE Natural History Museum in Kuching is also known informally as the Butterfly Building among local museum-goers. It is so affectionately called for the large and spectacular full-coloured model of a Rajah Brooke’s birdwing butterfly that adorns the façade of the building.
If you visit the museum, it is also hard not to notice a pair of guardians of rather unusual appearance as you approach the inner entrance that leads into the exhibition galleries. Standing guard on their respective wooden pedestal on each side of the inner entrance are two big real skulls of Asian elephant (Elephas maximus). These two museum specimens are known collectively in their Iban name as the Pala Antu Gerasi (meaning, skull of the giant).
If the skulls had left an everlasting memory to visitors, it is due more to the dramatic decorative drawings painted on them than to anything else. The visual impact created by the colourful traditional drawings as well as the sheer size of the skulls are simply stunning, to say the least.
Decorative drawings on the skulls
As background, a sooty-black colour was painted over on almost all visible surfaces of the two skulls and on the associated lower jaws. Against this ‘canvas’ were added other artistic elements of traditional motifs. The drawings on both specimens share the same general design and arrangement of the various elements, but the styles are somewhat different between the two. This may indicate that the drawings could be the products from different artists.
The overall drawing on both skulls is dominated by a grotesque face-figure adorned with huge eyes, big nose, and tusks.
This was centrally placed above an equally impressive hole on the front surface of the skull. The big oval-shaped hole is a natural feature known as the nasal cavity, from which protrudes the trunk in living animals. In the past, well before people were familiar with the skull anatomy of elephants, the hole was very often mistaken as the eyehole, and thus may have become the basis of the myth of a legendary giant with a single eye.
Radiating from the central face-figure, there appear a number of arabesque elements of scrolling tendril designs, all boldly painted in yellow, green, red, and white. These spiralling designs can also be seen at the back of the skulls and on major surfaces of the lower jaws. Altogether, these rhythmic ornamented designs reminded me of a recent wall painting I saw in a local hawker centre.
One can also notice a certain degree of similarity between the drawings on the skulls and those that adorned the car used by Tom Harrisson, the curator of Sarawak Museum from 1947 to 1966. A reproduction of a picture of the curator’s car can be seen in one of the explanatory panels in the upper floor gallery of the old museum building.
Surprisingly, a photo recently found among the museum archival materials shows that in the original collection of the museum there was a third skull of Asian elephant similarly adorned with traditional drawings! The black-and-white photo is thought to have captured in the early 1960s in front of the Natural History Museum (at that time served as the office building of Sarawak Museum).
Who were the artists?
The museum explanatory board associated with the two skulls identifies the painters as a group of Kenyah artists who came from the upper Kayan River in Kalimantan. Additionally, it mentions that the painters were also responsible for producing the ‘Tree of Life’ mural inside the old museum building in 1959/60 (more information about the mural — https://dayakdaily.com/the-murals-of-the-sarawak-museum-luar-biasa/).
An article written by John Walker in 2015 (The Heritage of the Segu Bungalow/Banglo Segu in Sarawak History; Sarawak Museum Journal) recorded that these artists from Long Nawang who painted the museum murals had also produced the dazzling murals found on the walls and ceilings of Segu Bungalow, the official residence of Tom Harrisson in his capacity as curator of the museum. The bungalow still stands on its original site in Kuching at the top of a small hill next to present-day Park Lane, and the vivid murals with their rich and unrestrained designs never seem to fail to amaze the occasional visitors. One can’t help but wonder, the same group of creative artists didn’t also paint the curator’s car with traditional drawings?
However, other groups of native artists were also employed by the museum during Tom Harrisson’s time as the curator. Therefore, if contemporary records were lacking, it may not be a straightforward matter for later researchers to ascertain the exact authorship of museum art pieces produced during this period. That is exactly the case for the three Pala Antu Gerasi in the museum collection.
The true identity of the artist(s) may remain elusive, but perhaps not so for the origin of the elephants.
History of the two skulls and other elephants
The same explanatory board indicates that the two skulls on display were from elephants imported from Thailand by the Borneo Company in the early 1950s for use in the upland logging operations on the Bah River of the Belaga district. Contemporary news reports, however, showed that the imported working elephants (a total of five animals) were sourced from a circus in Britain:
- Britain Exports Jumbos Now; The Singapore Free Press (20 Nov. 1951)
https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/freepress19511120-1.2.36?qt=sarawak,%20elephant&q=Sarawak%20elephant - Circus ‘Babies’ to Haul Timber; Singapore Standard (24 Jan. 1952)
https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/singstandard19520124-1.2.127?qt=babies,%20circus,%20borneo&q=babies%20circus%20borneo
The whole event must have caused quite a sensation at the time in Sarawak as a cartoon depicting it was deemed worthwhile to be included in one of the pages of the 29 Feb. 1952 issue of the Sarawak Gazette (https://www.pustaka-sarawak.com/gazette/gazette_uploaded/1402645633.pdf).
Coincidentally, the same issue of the Sarawak Gazette also carried the news of a recent birth of a baby to one of the working elephants imported earlier by the Borneo Company in 1938. This happy news was relayed by the company’s manager, who also proudly proclaimed that the birth represented “…the first known instance of an elephant being born in this Colony!”
According to a paper published in the 2007 issue of the Sarawak Museum Journal by the Earl of Cranbrook and his colleagues (Origin of the Elephants Elephas maximus L. of Borneo), the five animals imported in 1952 from the Chipperfield’s Circus (Britain) ranged in age from 11 to 17 years old, and the herd of working elephants in Sarawak ultimately reached 22 in number. But, by 1966 only five animals were still working in Sarawak.
Renewed scientific investigation
Close examination of the two skulls during a routine documentation work in April by staff from the Sarawak Museum Department had enriched our understanding of the specimens by providing important new clues to substantiate previous thoughts about their origin.
No tusks from either of the specimens were known, but the tooth sockets which held the tusks in living animals are relatively well-preserved in both skulls. The size of these sockets can be used as a proxy for the size of the missing tusks, and, in turn, it can be used to determine the gender of the elephants. The specimen with the museum catalogue number “SMZ 1960b” (Figure 2) was determined to be an adult female, whereas the other specimen “SMZ 1960a” (Figure 3), with larger sockets, an adult male. The female individual (Figure 2a and 2b) also shows a more delicate and gracile profile of the skull than the male (Figure 3a and 3b). The artists may have noticed these major differences between the two skulls, and the different styles of the drawing appear to reflect their keen observation—the designs on the female seem to be more reserved and constrained, whereas on the male, these are not only more vibrant, but also are filled with more curling tendrils.
It was also revealed that not all surfaces were painted. In both specimens, all the upper molar teeth and the inner parts of the lower jaws (surfaces not visible from the outside) still retain their natural colouration (Figures 2c, 2d, 3c, and 3d), though the lower molar teeth were all painted over in alternating bands of yellow, green, and red (Figures 2d and 3d).
Molar teeth that are used for grinding foods are very often the most telling parts in the whole skeleton of an elephant one way or another. Just like any forensic scientist dealing with human skeletal remains, elephant biologists frequently use the eruption sequence, wear and replacement patterns of these grinding teeth to gauge the biological age of an animal when other means of age determination is not available. Employing this time-honoured method to the two skulls in the museum, it was found that both animals had reached the same growth stage of about 20-25 years old when they died. Despite the fact that the female individual was slightly smaller in size than the male, it was the older of the two.
To sum it up, findings from the renewed investigation suggested that the skulls in the museum very likely belonged to two of the five circus animals originally imported to Sarawak in late 1951 or early 1952.
Firstly, from the 2007 paper by the Earl of Cranbrook and co-authors, it is known that these circus animals were thought to be between 11 to 17 years old when they first landed in Sarawak.
Secondly, the two skulls most likely became part of the museum collection sometime in 1960 after the animals died. This is supported by the fact that both skulls bear the museum catalogue numbers which suggest that 1960 is the year of acquisition. Furthermore, a painted number of ‘1960’ is clearly visible on one of the skulls (Figure 3a). It is also the time frame during which the Kenyah artists were working on the museum and Segu Bungalow murals, whether or not they were the true painters of the skulls. That is about eight or nine years since the Chipperfield’s Circus animals first arrived and set to work in Sarawak.
Lastly, the estimated biological age of the two skulls when the animals died, independently derived based on observation of the molar teeth, tallies well with the previous two points.
Elephant-related exhibition items are few in the Borneo Cultures Museum, limited to two elephant gold foil pieces found at the Bongkissam shrine in Santubong in 1967, and a Lord Ganesha stone statue found at Bukit Mas in Limbang in 1921.
Therefore, the two existing Pala Antu Gerasi with their striking traditional drawings are truly the rare gems among the Bornean cultural-natural objects with outstanding heritage value.
Acknowledgements
This article is based partly on materials used for a public talk “The Historical and Prehistorical Pasts of Elephants in Borneo” organised by the Malaysian Nature Society Kuching Branch on 22 April 2024. I sincerely thank the organiser for the invitation for me to give the talk in Kuching. I greatly admire the passionate team spirit of the staff members of the Sarawak Museum Department (Sitty Nurhamiza Mohd Hamdan, Bonnie Umpi, and Muhammad Zulfadhli Zulkipli). I wish to thank for the kind permission for me to join their recent documentation work on the two elephant skulls. I also like to thank Louise Macul for her insightful views on the drawings and for bringing my attention to a third decorated skull. My gratitude to two friends from Kuching Chung Hua Middle School No. 1 who brought me to the unique hawker centre that serves local Dayak delicacies.
Bio
LIM Tze Tshen, honorary secretary of the Friends of Sarawak Museum, is a vertebrate palaeontologist and zooarchaeologist. He is reachable through limtzetshenyahoocom.
“Heritage Snippets of Sarawak” is a fortnightly column.
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