Hedda Morrison

In 1947 Alastair Morrison was offered a government post in Sarawak, on the equatorial island of Borneo. Sarawak was then passing through its transition as a colony, after a century of rule under the Brooke Rajahs and prior to its incorporation into Malaysia in 1963. For some years Hedda and Alastair lived ‘upcountry’, in
the various places where Alastair was a District Officer; and later, for many years, they were
in the capital, Kuching. They remained there
until they left Sarawak in 1966.

Established in Sarawak Hedda Morrison’s photography was enriched by tropical places, people and customs which, in her first years there, were largely unchanged from
much earlier times. Along Sarawak’s coasts,
up its jungle-clad rivers, around Borneo, and also across Southeast Asia, through India and elsewhere, Morrison pursued and sustained
her lifelong interest: photographing people and places, recording their particular ways of life.

Hedda Morrison on tour in Sarawak with a group of Lun Bawang people in the headwaters of the Limbang River in 1950.

Reproduced courtesy of Alastair Morrison.

Invigorated, challenged and caught up by Sarawak, Morrison – admittedly with regret
– put aside her earlier images. But her China and Hong Kong negatives were not forgotten. She checked them, and also her accumulating Sarawak negatives, each week. They were kept in airtight trunks, together with silica gel, a desiccant. Each week she would remove the damp silica gel, bake it dry, and then return it to the trunks with her precious negatives. Thus she preserved her cherished photographs despite Sarawak’s penetrating humidity.

One senses, through the intimate portrayals of people that enrich her Sarawak period and books, that there – amidst a quite different culture to that of China – Hedda Morrison found her deepest attachment to any one place. Sarawak, she wrote, ‘has had its troubles’. But overall it was ‘an oasis of calm and orderly progress, where a diverse, multi-racial society has established an exceptional degree of inter-racial harmony’.

Hedda Morrison relished her travels amidst Sarawak’s longhouse peoples, capturing
in warm and telling detail the patterns of their semi-communal life: elderly story-tellers with absorbed children at their feet; families on jungle treks; nursing mothers; village headmen; women adorned in traditional dress. ‘To all my Iban friends I extend my gratitude for their unfailing kindness and hospitality’, Morrison wrote in one of her books. ‘No people have a greater or more warming sense of friendship. I hope my photographs (of Sarawak) will help others to understand what I have enjoyed.’

Life in a Longhouse.
Sarawak. For book details see References.