Sarawak is extraordinarily diverse... We've known this for a long time, but today's event at the Borneo Cultures Museum, organized by Swinburne University, underlined the truism with a few extra strokes.


The presentations brought together disparate tales of Sarawak's heritage -- a fort that hardly anyone knows about any more; the Gawai festival as celebrated by the Salako community in Pueh; the Pua Kumbu weaving that's done by Iban experts; the making of serao, the classic Melanau conical hats (known as terendak in Malay); and the way Chinese calligraphy expresses memory, identity, and tradition -- and the initiatives currently under way to record them.


There's lots more information on the various projects here, but the idea throughout is to bring people, heritage, and technology together, exploring new ways not only to document skills and customs that are passing into disuse but also to capture the stories of those whose lives are bound up with them.

Particularly interesting was the use of vertical video to document the Gawe ka Padi. Fascinating: You turn your camera 90 degrees, and you get a really interesting effect...

What the Swinburne team is doing is taking on more and more urgency. When elders die, great swathes of knowledge can be lost; and some of the crafts discussed in these sessions just don't seem to be attractive to the young -- but maybe they will be in the future, if they haven't died out in the meantime.



There's always something humbling about these encounters. You realize what a new and tiny dint on the surface of Sarawak you are, and how you will never even begin to understand the layers of history and culture that make up this place.