Hear talk on ‘The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrison’

KUCHING: Friends of Sarawak Museum in association with Tun Jugah Foundation will be presenting a talk on ‘The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrison, Curator of the Sarawak Museum, 1947-1966’ at Level 4, Tun Jugah Tower from 2pm to 3.30pm today (Mar 27).

The talk, according to a publicity release received here yesterday, would be presented by Judith Heimann, a retired senior Foreign Service officer and a nonfiction writer.

One of the first Foreign Service spouses to become a diplomat in her own right, Judith spent most of her adult life abroad – chiefly in Western Europe but also in Southeast Asia and Central Africa.

In the mid 1960s, she lived in Kuching with her diplomat husband, John Heimann who was an American Consul for East Malaysia and Brunei and their two children who went to the Lodge School.

With 15 years as an accompanying spouse followed by 20 years as a fellow officer of her late husband and 15 years as a rehired Foreign Service annuitant, she has also written non-fiction books, chiefly about Southeast Asia.

Two of her books, ‘The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrison and His Remarkable Life’ and ‘The Airmen and the Headhunters’ have been made into TV documentaries.

She speaks French, Dutch and some Indonesian/Malay. Signed copies of her books will be available for purchase.

The theme running through the talk will be that Tom Harrison – cantankerous, eccentric, often drunk and disorderly - truly loved the people of Borneo, especially the Orang Ulu, with the passion of a lonely man who had never before in his life found a whole bunch of people whom he liked and who liked him on sight.

His core ethical belief was that knowledge is not only to be acquired and discovered, but it must be used for the benefit of ordinary people and must be shared with them.

With that core belief always in mind, this wayward, unconventional man made the Sarawak Museum, as well as spinoff museums in Brunei and Sabah, into a place everybody liked to go and felt welcome.

Under his direction, the Sarawak Museum also became an institution that scientists from around the world in a bewildering number of fields regarded with respect. The talk is opened to the public and registration is not required.