Old Sabah in photos
Celebrating the work of a real-life indiana Jones couple that captured Sabah at the turn of the last century in images and film.
WILD elephants and exotic proboscis monkeys. Mudskipper fish that walk on land and great apes with the strength of several men.... In 1921, moviegoers in the United States were awestruck by the incredible creatures showcased in Jungle Adventure, shot in the untamed jungles of Sabah (then British North Borneo).
The film was created by Hollywood filmmakers Martin and Osa Johnson, a husband-and-wife team who made two trips to Sabah, in 1920 and 1935. The pair made many compelling films and photographs of the people, wildlife, and environment of the region, both at the turn of the century and just before World War II.
Many of their photographs, some previously unseen by the world, have been compiled in Spirit Of Borneo: Martin & Osa Johnson’s Journey 1920 & 1935, a coffeetable book by James Sarda and Dr Danny Wong.
“Sabah will forever be indebted to this visionary couple for their pioneering work in recording its natural history on film, and also making it famous through their images, books, lectures, and museum,” the two authors write in the book’s foreword.
Photographers, explorers, naturalists, and authors, the Johnsons captured the American public’s imagination with their films and books of adventure in exotic, faraway lands. They studied the wildlife and peoples of East and Central Africa, the South Pacific Islands, and British North Borneo, and shaped the way Americans in the first half of the 20th century viewed Africa and Asia.
Their most famous films include Congorilla (1932), Baboona (1935), and Jungle Depths Of Borneo (1937), while Osa’s autobiography, I Married Adventure: The Lives Of Martin And Osa Johnson (1940), is still in print today.
According to Sarda, Jungle Adventure has been certified the world’s first wildlife documentary by Jacqueline Borgeson, curator of the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum in Kansas, United States. “The world’s first wildlife documentary, and it was on Sabah! The tourism value is fantastic. Why aren’t we capitalising on this?” Sarda says during a recent interview with him and Wong.
Sarda is the chief editor of Sabah newspaper Daily Express, and an award-winning journalist previously with the National Echo and The Star. His other works include editing A White Headhunter In Borneo (2004) by Stephen Holley, a signatory of the Malaysia Agreement.
Wong is currently an associate professor in Universiti Malaya’s Department of History, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. He specialises in the history of Borneo, Vietnam and South-East Asia, and is the author of several books pertaining to Sabah.
Sarda says he was inspired to put Spirit Of Borneo together after reading about the Johnsons in Land Below The Wind (1939), a classic work of literature on Sabah by Agnes Newton Keith, an American author who once resided in Borneo. He contacted the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum for more information, and was duly informed the museum had about 2,700 images of the Johnsons’ travels in Africa and Sabah. Enlisting Wong’s help, Sarda then spent three years compiling the photos into The Spirit Of Borneo, eventually finishing it in 2009.
The photographs are a glorious testament to Sabah’s past, capturing the natural beauty and diversity of the state’s urban and rural scenes, as well as its wildlife. One chapter details the Johnson’s encounters with the Tenggara people, while another depicts their journey up Sungai Kinabatangan on a “boathouse on a raft”.
“There’s a picture of Osa Johnson in a hand-pulled rickshaw during her 1920 visit. This is the only piece of evidence we have today that Sabah had these at the time!” Sarda says.
“The photos are very well put together. You can see that the Johnsons had a great eye for detail,” Wong adds.
Sarda and Wong say many of the most striking photographs feature contrasts between the East and West, with one of their favourite images being of a tribesman in a loincloth trying his hand at using a movie camera. The book also contains the only existing aerial images of Sandakan before the town was bombed during World War II.
About 5,000 copies of Spirit Of Borneo have been printed, and most will be presented to schools and VVIPs by the Sabah Chief Minister (a copy was given to William and Kate when they visited Sabah in 2012). However, limited copies are available for purchase from the authors at sardahthisa@gmail.com or the book’s publisher, Kuala Lumpurbased Irah Communications, at www.irah.com.my/book.html.
The authors say they hope the book will help readers understand the Sabah of the past, which was a thriving, diverse region that achieved modernity in its own unique way. They also hope the legacy of the Johnsons will be remembered.
“I think they were very brave people. They were a couple from the US Midwest, urbanised, coming into the jungle. It’s not like today, when you can travel to almost any part of the world and not feel threatened. In those days, everything was unknown,” Wong points out.
“They were a real-life Indiana Jones couple,” adds Sarda.