An Excerpt from Carl Gibson-Hill: Boats, Birds, Photography, and History in Late-Colonial Malaya

Abstract

An Excerpt from Carl Gibson-Hill: Boats, Birds, Photography, and History in Late-Colonial Malaya Brendan Luyt Ed. Note. Carl Alexander Gibson-Hill edited JMBRAS throughout the 1950s, and made notable contributions to photography, ornithology, museology, and the writing of Malayan history. In another era, Gibson-Hill might have been accounted a major figure in colonial scholarship, but he lived in Singapore at a time when British authorities were putting an end to British rule and overseeing the localization of their own positions, and the achievements of this somewhat eccentric individual went unheralded. As Brendan Luyt shows in his biography, Gibson-Hill found many opportunities in Malaya and took full advantage of them, becoming director of the Raffles Museum in Singapore, helping initiate a photographic society, surveying the boats plying Malayan waters, studying Malayan birds, editing the journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, and conserving information about the region's past. But the Malaya he inhabited as a member of the colonial elite was crumbling, and independence marginalized both the colonial past and those who served it. The Federation of Malaya became independent in 1957, and while Singapore remained a colony until it joined Malaysia in 1963, the powers and authority associated with colonial rule were eroding. Gibson-Hill's work at the museum gave him influence and access to information, shaping not only his daily activities but also his very identity. In August 1963, at the age of 52, facing the prospect of early retirement and suffering from failing eyesight and bouts of depression, he took his own life. The following excerpt from Luyt's biography is part of a chapter discussing Gibson-Hill's work as a historian. Gibson-Hill anticipated the Asian-centric history that began to emerge in the 1960s, but a second transition in the discipline—a shift in the 1950s towards the institutionalization of history writing in the hands of the academy—diminished the impact of his work. Those employed in the history department of the University of Malaya all had advanced degrees in the subject, and the Museum could no longer claim to be the centre of knowledge production for regional history. Furthermore, other publications competed with the JMBRAS for submissions, including the Far Eastern Quarterly (renamed the Journal of Asian Studies in 1956) and Pacific Affairs, while locally the Department of History at the University of Singapore launched the Journal of Southeast Asian History in 1961. Similarly, academic publishers began to handle greater amounts of material on Southeast Asian history.1 Gibson-Hill showed little interest in new approaches to history. As we have seen, he did not publish a monograph with a major university press, contenting himself with the Memoirs series of the Raffles Museum for a few of his larger works. Neither did he bother to publish in journals other than JMBRAS. In the field of historical writing, he was entirely reliant on the publishing resources of the Museum that he ran from 1955 to 1963, not a good way to win wider recognition in any discipline, especially when the JMBRAS itself [End Page 89] was under something of a cloud, with John Gullick reporting that at the London School of Economics it was always the target 'of a jibe or two at its superficiality'.2 His focus on character, biography, and genealogy also had limited appeal for mainstream historians, who were abandoning these earlier forms of history writing in favour of studies that subordinated individuals to social forces. Gibson-Hill remained fascinated by individuals in history, something he made very clear in a 1952 piece on John Clunies-Ross and Alexander Hare where he observed that in dealing with Hare, he had to discipline himself to write empirical history. 'I have tried to keep the fragments of him on a 2-D plane, presenting only the facts so far apparent and the conclusions that can legitimately be drawn from them. Anything else would have been fatal: had Hare been allowed one breath he would have bulged out from the page, taken possession of the pen, and turned the whole into the picaresque novel to which he really belongs'.3 These are the words of a...