JY 00:05
Hi everyone, welcome to latest episode of Lecture Theatre. With us today we have Tim Barnard, associate professor of history at the National University of Singapore. His early research focused on the history of the Malay world and and the film industry here. But in recent years, his work has taken a turn to environmental history. His new book, Imperial Creatures, will come out sometime later this year, and will focus on the history of animals on this island. Thank you so much for being with us.
Tim 00:44
Thank you for having me.
JY 00:45
So Tim, tell us more about your life story. How did you end up becoming a historian in Singapore?
Tim 00:52
Well, I grew up in the state of Kentucky in the United States. And my father was an academic, he was a professor at the University of Kentucky. And I have one older brother who's 12 years older than me. And he also became a academic. He was a professor of literature at the University of Kansas. And so in my own childhood, it was just normal to be around academics and an academic atmosphere—you know, being at the university, going to my dad's office, things like this. I went as an undergraduate to the University of Kentucky, and I was a major in anthropology and biology. And when I was getting ready to graduate, I really had not thought beyond my last semester, and I had no idea of what kind of job I would want. And it was the mid-1980s. And in that last semester, I heard of opportunities to teach English in Indonesia. And so I signed up, and it was very easy. The requirements that they required was that you'd be a native speaker of English and have an undergraduate degree. So I had that, or I was going to have that.
I graduated, and two weeks later, I was in Palembang, Indonesia, taking intensive Bahasa Indonesia classes and teacher training courses for two months, essentially. And then I was assigned to the University of Riau in Pekanbaru in Sumatra, where I taught agricultural lecturers English, so that they could qualify to pass the TOEFL hopefully, and go to America and get a masters or PhDs under the sponsorship of the US Agency for International Development. So while I was on Sumatra, I became increasingly interested in a place I had no understanding of. I was a typical suburban undergraduate in the middle of America, who did not know anything about Southeast Asia. And then a month later, I'm living there. And as I was going to work, and just living in this society that was very alien to me, I wanted to learn more about it. And so I just began, studying more about the culture, reading up, meeting people in the town, asking them questions. And then eventually, I learned, wow, you can go get a master's degree in Southeast Asian Studies.
03:39
Being a Southeast Asianist in the 80s and 90s—it's post-Vietnam, you have Benedict Anderson and James C. Scott, doing very important theoretical work with Southeast Asian as a empirical base. What was it like being in the middle of that?
Tim 03:59
Southeast Asia had a very important place in area studies at the time because of the Vietnam War. During the Vietnam War, the US government had begun to realize they didn't have enough people who are knowledgeable or understood other societies. And so they started a series of scholarship programs and other support to try to create people knowledgeable in other cultures. For example, when I was getting my master's degree, I received what was called a FLASS—a Foreign Language and Area Studies Scholarship. And that paid for my entire master's degrees, both of them—as long as I studied Bahasa Indonesia. And so I studied Bahasa every semester. I even went for a special program—an entire summer where I was in East Java studying at a university there. And so this helped me develop my language skills, but also helped me live in the society I was interested in. And now this all came from government support. Now much of this has waned in the period since. Since 9/11, of course, focus has shifted more toward the Middle East or Islam, and to the detriment of Southeast Asian Studies. And so it's not as popular as it used to be. But in the 80s and 90s, you had people focused on theories such as Scott, or Ben Anderson, or even Clifford Geertz, who were known globally for their work. Nowadays, probably not so much, you know, for Southeast Asianists, at least.
JY 05:43
So in recent years, your work has taken a turn toward environmental history, or what has been called the history of the nonhuman. So how did you become interested in those issues?
Tim 05:54
Well, a lot of it has to do with living here in Singapore. When I first arrived here, in 1999, I had in hand a dissertation on 18th century Sumatra, which at some point became a book. But living in a society, you see different sources, you see different perspectives. And that first manifested itself in a shift I had in research on Malay film. So for example, just watching local television or going to local stores, you would see these VCDs of various Malay films made in Singapore in the 1950s. So I could use my own interest in Malay culture, Malay language, and just learn more about the society I lived in, by watching these films from the 50s and 60s. In the first few years I lived here, I became just a very interested collector. I bought hundreds of hundreds of VCDs of early Malay films and I would watch them. And this then turned into a series of articles and book chapters on Malay film in the 1950s and 60s, and how it was related to issues such as gender in the period, decolonization and modernization, other important things. Now, that idea of focusing on a different source such as these old 1950s films, then came to become a kind of a way of looking at the society in the sense of looking for new sources.
Beginning in the year 2010, I began teaching a module a course at NUS, titled, Sources of Singaporean History, in which the students go to the archives, go to the National Library, go to the library in NUS, and they try to discover everything they can about a particular year. And what that meant, as the instructor for the course, is I also had to know what was in the archives and what was in the sources. Now, I also taught another class called environmental history. And I've always interested—because of my own background in biology, though it was more of ecology and anthropology— in the environment in this region. Even my dissertation had environment in the subtitle: Society and Environment of Eastern Sumatra. Now, the thing is, when I was teaching an environmental history course, I could teach all these things in global environmental history. And there was nothing from Singapore. You know, I wanted to offer something to students that could read about their own society. But there was very little on offer, frankly. And so I combined my own kind of rummaging through the archives with the students and my interest in environmental history.
This came together with me becoming more interested in the idea of: well, if I'm going to complain that there are no environmental histories of Singapore, then I shoul do something about it. So I just began by slowly putting together the materials I could find. The first thing I did was I edited the book, titled Nature Contained: Environmental Histories of Singapore, in which I went out and I thought to myself, what would I want to see in such a book? And then I went to people I thought could write a chapter for that. And so if you look at the book, there are essentially no historians in the book because no one was doing this type of work in Singapore. So there's, for example, Nigel Taylor, the director of Botanic Gardens. There's a man Tony O'Dempsey, who's actually a geographer; Cynthia Chou, who's an anthropologist at the University of Iowa, who wrote her honors thesis and master's theses in the 1980s on farms and affordable "out" housing. And so, in other words, I went to anthropologists, botanists, and geographers, and a variety of different specialists, not historians, essentially. And I asked them to write a history piece, which they all embraced and did, I think, a very good job.
In my own case, I wrote two chapters in the book, one was on tigers in colonial Singapore—with a good friend of mine named Mark Emanuel. And that was an example of me going into the archives and finding these unusual mentions of tigers, whether it be in newspapers, whether it be in government documents, and then, in a sense, putting together the picture of tigers in the 19th century. The second chapter is on a history of the Raffles Museum—in a sense, what is today the National Museum. But originally, it was a combination of a natural history museum, and an ethnographic museum. And I wrote about the natural history side of it, using records from London, using records from Singapore, about the history of the collection. And so that book allowed me to begin my initial exploration of these sources, and then also put it down on paper. So that I would have something I could assign students to read, for the class. A little self serving, but it works. And the book worked pretty well.
From that, and the friendship I developed with Nigel Taylor, who is the director of the Botanic Gardens, I began to realize through Nigel's chapter and my own friendship with him, that, wow, there is a lot of material about the Botanic Gardens, and very few people in Singapore realize the important role at play in society. You know, it's not just a park, where people visit on Sundays. And so with the coming of the World Heritage accolades and such, I taught an honors class for NUS at the Botanic Gardens. The honors students went to the Botanic Gardens, and Nigel and I were the teachers. So you had a historian and a botanist, who taught them about the Botanic Gardens and the history. And students worked with the various sources in the archives, and they wrote papers. One of the assignments was to create a guide, like a history of rubber in the garden, or a history of orchids or whatever. And through that module, through Nigel's interest through the World Heritage thing, I decided to then write a history of the Botanic Gardens, which I did. It's titled Nature's Colony; it came out in 2016.
And, in a sense, each step of the way, it's just when I finish one project, I think, okay, what's the next one? What would make sense? Or what am I interested in? Because each time I try to follow also what sustains me. If I don't like the topic, it can be hard to finish. And so when I finished the edited book, and then did the class with Nigel, it kind of pulled me toward the Botanic Gardens. After I finished the Botanic Gardens book, I realized that the greatest and funnest chapter to write in that book was a chapter about a zoo in the Botanic Gardens. It existed from 1875 to 1905. First zoo in Singapore. And I was very interested in that. I thought, well, if I've already done the flora of Singapore, why don't I do the fauna?
And so I began working on the history of animals in Singapore. Now, the thing about it that I also liked is when you do something like the Botanic Gardens, people have written books about the Botanic Gardens, and it's easy to divide it up chronologically. You can do it by various directors, I decided to do it by very important moments and important plants. For example, the development rubber and reforestation of Singapore in the 19th century. Or orchids—kind of urban modern Singapore. You know, it's chronological, but a particular aspect of the gardens dominates, instead of individuals. But the point is there's relative easily understandable chapters or breaks. Whereas when you do animals, there is no real understanding. And that's what I liked about it. It's not necessarily 1819, not necessarily 1867.
JY 15:40
Yes, because that makes no difference to an animal.
Tim 15:46
Exactly. And so what interested me was I had to gather all the material, whether it be in newspapers, or documents, or writings, scientists, geographers, and then kind of put it before me and go, "Okay, what stories come out of it?" And I like that, because it challenged certain chronological breaks. And so you could write what I consider to be relatively fresh approach to Singaporean history of last 200 years.
JY 16:20
Because the normal markers are not there.
Tim 16:25
Yes, exactly, and in the book there was a lot of overlap in certain chapters, because, for example, a lot takes place between about 1880 and 1900. But there are different themes and different stories to be told. Within all of this, whether it be 18th century Sumatran history, Malay film, Botanic Gardens, animals, some of it has to do with my own curious nature, but also my inability to focus long term. In other words, I move around to different things, which keeps me interested as well. I'll focus on something for a few years, three, four or five years. And then okay, I'm done. I'll move on to something else. And that's fine.
JY 17:19
Let's talk a bit more about Imperial Creatures. What is the big argument that went to make?
Tim 17:26
The the big argument in the book is that this idea of looking beyond the normal markers of Singaporean history. It's the idea that if we actually take animals into consideration, we can think about the entire imperial enterprise, if you will, in a new manner. Traditionally, in Singapore, historiography just focuses on this idea that Raffles arrives in 1819, and then they establish a port, and then all history is economic and political. Now, that is important, you can't deny that. But we keep repeating this tale over and over and over again, to the point that I'm finding I get less and less out of the tale each time it is told.
And so by focusing on animals, we'll be able to actually question, what was the real impact of imperial rule? What did it mean to the society? To give you an example, when imperialism began, in 1819, you had a massive change in the landscape. When the British came in, they promoted agriculture plantations, which within 60 years deforested the entire island. 92% of Singapore, lost its forests cover. I mean, Singapore is more green and forested today than it was 130, 140 years ago. They literally cut everything down for plantations. And it was replaced mainly with lalang grass, which is not very useful or productive. And they this really created an environmental change in the society. And it not British, it's not Chinese, it's not Indian, or Malay. It's that humans came and changed this environment. And that meant you had a loss of biodiversity in plant life, animal life. There are estimates that 73% of the animals in Singapore became extinct. And this all happened in the 19th century. This is not something new.
This is all because of the imposition of colonial rule. And so what you imagine or begin to realize is you had an island that was covered in forest jungle with a very small community—maybe up to 1000 people on it, near what today is the Padang in 1819. And within a century, they had cut it all down, transformed it, destroyed the biodiversity, and simply replaced it with animals and humans they wanted—those that can fulfill the needs of the functions of that imperial society, whether that means importing Chinese labor and Indian labor, whether it means importing horses and cattle or pigs or whatever, dogs for pets. You replaced the native life with foreign or alien life. Now, there were different cultures in that show. Back to the original question, by focusing on animals, you can get a better appreciation of what this meant. Asthe imperial government begins to impose control over this society, they issue regulations, they monitor and control these animals, just as they will eventually do with humans. And so what you have is the development of bureaucratic structures. And by looking at it through the stories of animals, I think you gain a better perspective or appreciation of what that meant.
JY 21:27
I have an interpretive question for you. Do you think it's possible to write and recover the experiences of animals themselves? Or is it always going to be filtered through the lens of humans?
Tim 21:43
This is a very commonly debated question right now in human-animal studies: can you write the history of an animal? And from their perspective? I am sorry, I fall on the human side, okay. You know, I'm a human supremacist, if you will, in the sense that, because I believe this is all interpreted through human eyes, the stories are recorded by humans. And so it's to fit into our understanding of the past and how society functions. So I basically say, you can't write a history from the animals' perspective. There are interesting attempts at it I and I find them very good. But at the end of the day, they're about telling you the human side.
JY 22:39
Or maybe to reframe it, humans are animals too.
Tim 22:44
The subtitle of the book is a history of humans and other animals in colonial Singapore. So yeah, humans are animals, but because it's humans who are reading the book, if you will, I'm sorry, I'll give them a little bit higher status.
JY 23:08
So what sort of sources and archives did you use in writing Imperial Creatures?
Tim 23:12
Uh, well, there's a range of sources, because in environmental history, you need to call upon not only historical writings, but geographical and natural history, sociology, anthropology, biology—a range. And so I gather materials from, in Britain, the National Archives, the British Library, but also the Natural History Museum and the Wallace collection, which focuses mainly on medicine.
JY 23:48
Are these diaries or papers?
Tim 23:50
There were diaries of people who stopped in Singapore. At the Natural History Museum, I actually looked at specimens sent from Singapore in jars or dried. And I look through ascension books—in other words, the record of the animals being sent. I've been to the London Zoo, where they have records of when animals were sent from Singapore.
JY 24:14
Which was foudned by Raffles.
Tim 24:15
Which was founded by Raffles. Exactly, the London Zoo was found by Raffles. In Singapore, there's an excellent resource called newspapers.sg. I believe that's the website newspapers.sg, in which you can essentially Google, keyword search. And that helps a lot. Because if you type in a word like dog, and particularly rabies, for example, you can then narrow it down to particular periods and go, "Oh, okay, there's all these stories about rabies." And then once you kind of narrow that down, you can then go to the archives, to the government records, and look in those years and find writings.
So there's Colonial Office records, which the NUS library wonderfully has all PDF-ed. So as long as you're a member of NUS, you can go in and download the PDF, okay, and then read through them from the comfort of your home. So you don't even have to go to London for that. And so there's newspapers; there were Colonial Office records; there were records from the National Archives here.
There's also travelers accounts and memoirs—a lot of travelers in the 19th century stopped in Singapor and , would write up about, "Oh, I saw this animal owner, this was happening." And so you had a lot of firsthand accounts, eyewitness accounts about what was going on. And then you combine that with medical reports, and various things are happening. You bring this all together, and you can then create your story. But one thing I like about that is, you have to go to a number of different institutions, you can't just go to, for example, the National Archives in Britain.
The story is there, but the complete story itself is elsewhere. You need to bring together these different sources. And I personally like that challenge, if you will, or that task. No, I find it boring, just go to the same place all the time, and look up materials. Whereas in some of these smaller archives, or if you go to the Natural History Museum in London, they have very good archivists. When you tell them what you're working on, they go, mmhm, that's interesting. It almost interests them to the point where they help you. And so it's good. Also, I've taught courses in in us on environmental history of Singapore. And students have directed me toward sources. They have said, "Oh, I found this story." And I was like, I do not know that story. And I thank them in the book,
JY 26:56
The ideal synnergy between teaching and research.
Tim 26:59
Exactly. And so these honors modules or classes I've taught and the opening up of archival sources being in PDF or on newspapers.sg, and the advent of the digital camera has changed things. When I did my dissertation research, I had to spend months in the Dutch archives, looking up Sumatran materials, and slowly tightening them like that. Now you go into an archive with a camera, and boom, boom, boom, you have everything. You go home each day, and you have hundreds of photographs, and you just have to collate them, put them on file. The problem is you feel like you're done, where you actually have to come home and read everything. Don't fool yourself. It's easier to gather. But you know, in other words, the gathering process has changed from taking months, if not years, down to literally weeks. And which means you then can spend more time writing and shaping and working and developing your ideas, which is great.
JY 28:05
So I want to go back to something you said earlier about how the interdisciplinary nature of your sauces and the whole project. Has that been challenging at all?
Tim 28:24
Not so much with Imperial Creatures, the animal book—but with the earlier book on Botanic Gardens. I will say my knowledge of animals is much greater than my knowledge of plants. My knowledge of orchids is non-existence or was, I should say. It was non-existent . It came to a point where in the Botanic Gardens book, there was a chapter on the origins and the development hybrid orchids in Singapore. And going in the first day I said, "Okay, I'm going to start gathering material. Going to work up this chapter." I realized man, I don't know what I'm doing. So I had to go out and buy several books on orchids. I had to go and talk to orchid specialists at the Botanic Gardens. And they schooled me, you know, they taught me "Okay, this is what's important. This is not this is okay, this is good." And I slowly developed a understanding of it. And then eventually , I went to a colleague of mine at NUS. He's in another department, in my faculty. His name is John Eliot. And he has been a longtime leader, if not the president of the Singapore Orchid Society. And he kindly read the chapter for me and said "No, wrong. Wrong. Okay. This is correct. Okay. Yes. Oh, I didn't know that." You know, there were certain things he didn't know. But there was a lot I was wrong about. He helped correct things—and that was good. But that's also one of the things. When you're doing environmental history you need to be open to other people. Nobody knows everything. And so for example, for the animal book, I had to read up a lot on rabies, because when rabies was in it. I had to figure out how rabies infected people, how it moves to the body.
JY 30:15
Because it's social and cultural phenomena. But also a biological phenomenon.
Tim 30:18
Exactly. Or another one is, how does a slaughterhouse, an abattoir operate? Because there's an entire chapter on the abattoir in Singapore. And you know, I don't know. But I had to learn what the process was, and particularly during the colonial era. Or another example would be the effects of biodiversity on deforestation and biodiversity. So the thing is, you do have to head over to the Science Faculty, and check out some books, and read those books and, contact people at the institution. And people are, you know, interested in telling you what they work on, or helping you if you ask politely. And people were, and so it helps. When you go out, you just admit, I don't know anything about this. Explain it. Yeah, make an idiot like me understand it. And then hopefully, I can translate that so everyone can understand it in the book. And so that's another reason I like environmental history is because it requires a range of disciplines. And we can't master all. But it requires us to read a variety of material and to understand a variety of material eventually, so that you can create this story that breaks beyond the normal political, economic, military affairs that traditional history has focused on. I'm not a tremendous advocate of that. I'm not a good proponent of that kind of history, and I have nothing against it. It's just not my style, not my cup of tea.
JY 32:06
Well, so one of the things that has happened over the years is there's so much attention to Singaporean history, with the Bicentennial, and actually SG50. A lot of it has been highly political. In a sense, environmental history occupies an almost non-political space. Do you think that's true? Or do you think it's an intervention?
Tim 32:29
I think it's more subtle. To give you an example, there's been a lot— over the last few years—there has been a lot of sniping back and forth in Singaporean historiography. And a lot of it revolves, frankly, around political issues, whether it be Operation Coldstore, or or the place of Lee Kuan Yew or the gap in Singaporean history and society. And there's a lot of pushback on both sides, about everything from the use of sources to the emphasis on political figures or the party. And you know, does the party equals Singapore and things like that?
Now, my work itself doesn't deal with those issues in the sense that I ignore Lee Kuan Yew, or the PAP for that matter. But they're just not central to what I'm trying to argue. Imperial Creatures ends in 1942, so there shouldn't be any controversy. But in the Botanic Gardens book, I do bring it up to the present to the achieving of the World Heritage status. And, and then, during the early years of independence, the government clearly shifted the Botanic Gardens from a research facility to a park. Oh, interesting. And they clearly took away a lot of this colonial scientific research, understandably so in a newly independent society, and directed scientists to things that were more related to traditional development activities, whether it be industrialization, and so on, and that's understandable. But they did deemphasize the Botanic Gardens; it was a colonial institution. How does it fit into an independent nation state? That's a difficult question to deal with, from the government's perspective. And so I had to write about them, about the government, in a sense, lowering the status of the Botanic Gardens to a park. Which is how, let's be honest, most Singaporeans view it. But as long as you state your story and tell what's going on, I don't see there's any problem. And I don't question the government's status and how they can came to power.
And so I've never had any pushback, if you will, on my own. On the Nature Contained book, the one that has different chapters by different people, there's a chapter I co-wrote with Corrine Heng, on the City in a Garden, in other words, greening policies in Singapore. The planting of trees and bushes on the roadsides and kind of how the government begins to equate itself with green— the very lushness of Singapore, if you will. And I've had positive feedback about that one, I haven't anything negative said about it. Nothing. Does the government use its environmental policies to promote its own ends? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. But I don't think I've pushed any buttons. I don't try to avoid anything. It's just what I look at.
Maybe what I write doesn't merit a response, because it's not of any importance. But it seems that a lot of the pushback is when it involves the very foundation of political legitimacy. And Operation Coldstore is part of that; some of the writing about it questions the political legitimacy of the Singaporean government today. I suppose environmental the history reminds us that there is a world outside politics. The tiger doesn't care. If you think about it— he reduced biodiversity, you can blame that on the British, on the imperial.
All the damage I'm talking about and the formations that I am talking about—for the most part is an imperial and colonial thing, which leads to the Bicentennial. And a sense of, there's very few people who actually work on colonial Singapore. That's the one thing, though it's not why I went into it. I went into it because I found these interesting sources in my own modules, there was an opening up of resources, my own interest in it. But when you start working on colonial Singapore, you begin to realize, I don't hae anybody, you know, to kind of sit around and chat about it with. I mean, you had, for example, the works of James Warren, who did very good work on social history, rickshaw coolies and prostitutes. But a lot of the current research takes place after 1945. And that's fine. But if you have someone like a Loh Kah Seng, or a Ho Chi Tim—their work is focusing on different issues. But these are things have happened since 1945. And, these things do need to be studied. I'm not against that.
But it's the colonial era that is a grossly under studied era in Singapore history. And I think some of that is because of this adherence to a kind of political and economic history in which it's been written over and over again—Raffles, whatever it may be—to the point that I find that extremely uninteresting. And I think maybe students or young scholars do, too. And so hopefully, through looking at some of these sources, environmentally, it could spur an interest. And now the environment would complement other approaches, new approaches to that colonial material, which would I would love.
JY 38:46
I guess it fits into the wider historiography of the British Empire.
Tim 38:49
Yes. It brings you also beyond Singapore, to larger global issues. So for example, in the Imperial Creatures book, it runs parallel with the development of imperial cities. Now, it would be Hong Kong, Calcutta, Batavia—in the sense of how does an a new imperial power set up shop? How does it set up its business in that city and what kind of transformation occurs through that? And so, hopefully the book will be of interest to people not only who study Singapore or say, animals, but also who study imperial urban centers.
JY 39:34
For the animal lovers tuning in, can we have two or three prize stories about animals in Singapore?
Tim 39:42
Sure. Why not? I would say the one that shocks people the most is the story of the introduction of rabies to Singapore, in which rabies came to Singapore and was originally introduced in 1884. And it was brought to Singapore by well-bred pet dogs. And what happened was there was a ship called the Oxfordshire, which arrived. I believe it was April 1884. It brought these well-bred dogs—poodles and terriers— ashore and auctioned them off. So the well-to-do of society bought them. The problem was they had rabies. And these dogs then proceeded to bite all the local dogs, which were kind of just pariahs and menagerie dogs. But these rabid dogs, these rabid pets, really rabid terriers and poodles were the ones which introduced rabies to the society. And this led to the development of things such as dog registration and a requirement to have a collar. Control your dog laws related to the importation of dogs; quarantine, for disease and such, which then was translated into various things for humans to try to limit people who came into Singapore, who might have cholera, for example, or the bubonic plague.
JY 41:18
So that started with dogs?
Tim 41:21
So rabies, yeah. Another interesting fact, which a lot of people don't realize, and I was startled to find out myself, was that in the 1930s, the three most popular pets in Singapore were, number one, dog. Easily, dogs were the most popular pet to own in Singapore.
JY 41:45
What is the reason for that?
Tim 41:46
Um, well, dogs had always been in this society. The difference is they had become elite dogs, if you will— bred. You know, when we think of terriers, or Dachshunds or the dogs we have today, Bulldogs or poodles—people wanted those because they represented eugenics. Those were only developed in the 19th century, they did not exist before the 19th century. They were developed in England. And so it was a mark of your status, that you could have a dog as a pet in your house. And then people also had the local strays and things like this, but dogs could provide not only companionship. They could be look-outs and guard dogs. They could provide small functions in the household, if you will. But the the second and third most popular pets, were songbirds and monkeys.
JY 42:38
Monkeys? Really?
Tim 42:41
Yes. And so cats weren't on the list, it was dogs, songbirds and monkeys. And so people would have a pet monkey. And you could buy a macaque, often from Java, called Java monkeys, and just keep it chained in your house or your compound. And it was very common for people to have a pet monkey.
JY 43:02
And was it about monkeys being a symbol of the exotic?
Tim 43:07
Well, they're not only exotic, I think. Also by having it under your control and chained up you're controlling the savage, if you will, a kind of a savage manifestation of the human.
JY 43:22
Colonial racial thinking?
Tim 43:23
Yeah, sure, why not?
JY 43:26
So one final question. What do you think you'd be working on in 10 years?
Tim 43:30
Well, I'm already working on my next book, which is on water and colonial Singapore. The basic question is, where do people get their drinking water? Whether it be wells, whether it be a small reservoir at the foot of Fort Canning Hill, which is what originally was put there. Wells, the development of the reservoirs, whether it be Macritchie, Upper Lower Pierce, the reservoirs in Johor, Bedok reservoir—it will basically survey how drinking water developed in Singapore, up till 1959. Okay, once again, I don't want to get involved—maybe that's me being cowardly—but I really don't want to deal with the water agreements and their political nature. Because that, to me, descends into, he said, she said backbiting, and I'm more interested in the actual development of the facilities, and what it meant for the delivery of water. Not who owes what.
But I imagine that developed out of when I was doing the animal book. Once again, when I finished one, I can kind of see the next on. Like, "I should look at this or I should look at that." Now, I can't say what's going to happen at the end of the water book, but I'm interested in a variety of things. One of them is an edited book on animals since 1945. So Imperial Creatures is until 1942. So there should be a follow up book from 1942 to present, but maybe probably an edited book with people contributing things much like Nature Contains. I'm also interested in studying—I'll use the phrase— 1819. But what I really mean is kind of the Malay world or this area from about 1800, or 1780 to 1823. And the idea would be to take a different chapter, and each chapter would do a different perspective, whether it be a British perspective, a Dutch perspective, Malay perspective, Chinese perspective of what's going on, and how they see the different groups coming together. Up until Crawfurd signs the agreement with the Temenggong, which essentially gives the whole island to the British or the East India Company. That's another idea. There's also an idea of putting together a reader on durians. But that's all hoping and wishing. The water one is definitely being worked on. I'm already working on that. Yeah, kind of flora, fauna, and water—we'll call it a trilogy of Singaporean environment. And after that, I gotta move on to something else.
JY 44:11
Do you have a pet?
Tim 46:36
No, I don't have any pet. A good question. I don't have any pets. And I've never had a pet in Singapore. In America, at one time I had a cat. And when I was a child, I had a parakeet. But in Singapore, I've never had a pet. One part of that is because my wife and I travel a lot. And I don't think it would be fair to another creature to abandon it every couple months for a few weeks.
JY 47:09
A songbird would be okay.
Tim 47:11
A songbird might work. Yeah. Take it over to a friend or something like that. Yeah, a dog or a cat—I wouldn't want to under the conditions that I wouldn't be around enough to take care of it. That's not fair.
JY 47:29
All right. Thank you so much for being with us today. To our listeners, thank you for tuning in to this episode. Please leave a review on iTunes or share this with your friends.
