We visited the site of Batu Lintang Japanese internment camp not long after we settled in Kuching (so long ago, in fact, that the post predates the Heritage stories series...).

This beautiful green area now houses the Batu Lintang Teacher Training Institute.

Friends of the Sarawak Museum hosted a talk there today, given by Dr. Peggy Day, a Canadian researcher who has studied the history of the camp for many years. Her topic was Agnes Newton Keith (1901-82).



Born in the US, Keith journeyed in 1934 to Sandakan, in what is now Sabah, after her marriage to Henry George (Harry) Keith, who worked for the British North Borneo Company. She wrote about those early experiences in Land Below the Wind, published in 1939.


When the Japanese invaded Borneo, Agnes and Harry, with their small son, George, and many other "Europeans" (the general term used then, Day explained, for Americans, New Zealanders, and Australians, as well as actual Europeans), were rounded up, and put in camps. Eventually, they ended up at Batu Lintang (which was strictly segregated into different compounds for different ranks, ethnicities, and genders, so that husbands and wives were separated).

Keith, having survived this ordeal, wrote another book, Three Came Home, about their experiences as detainees. (It's very remiss of me not to have read either of these books; I must put that right when we return to Sarawak later in the year.)



Three Came Home was also made into a film.


Anyway, so far, so reasonably well known. Less widely known, however, is that Keith was commissioned by Colonel Suga, the camp commandant, to write an account of camp life, which she called Captivity. It was a stroke of luck for the Keiths that Suga was already familiar with Land Below the Wind, which had been translated into Japanese. And the task he gave her meant that Keith was spared some of the rougher camp labour, while her family also enjoyed a measure of protection.

The manuscript was found (albeit with some pages missing) in the house where Suga had lived in Kuching. (After the end of the war, he was arrested as a war criminal, and taken to a surrender camp in Labuan, where he committed suicide.)

Day showed how Keith trod a fine line in writing Captivity. Clearly, she couldn't lambaste her powerful reader for the basic inhumanity of internment. But she was able to make a point on occasion. It was not an entirely bland and innocuous account.

The notes of her "real" account, meanwhile, the one that would eventually become Three Came Home, had to be carefully secreted. She was not exempt from the searches the Kempeitai carried out, and she, as an author, was automatically suspected of writing things she shouldn't have been...

It was an interesting session, all the more poignant for being held on the spot, as it were -- on the actual site where the camp used to be.



For a look inside the museum, and some testimonies from people whose relatives were interned here, see Ben Thiko's video. And this article, by Peter Grant, offers some fascinating insight into the Keith family.