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| The History of Dayak: A definitive and foundational volume that serves as a comprehensive guide to understanding Borneo and the Dayak in their full complexity, across multiple dimensions. Exceptional. |
Now, more than sixty years after Morrison wrote his account, the Bidayuh people, the heirs of the Land Dayaks, continue to wrestle with issues that are, at their core, unchanged: land, identity, and survival.
Modernization in Sarawak has brought highways, schools, and churches into the interior, but it has also opened the door to large-scale plantations and development projects that displace customary lands.
Land once passed down without title deeds has become the subject of disputes between Indigenous communities and corporations. In this context, Morrison’s notes feel like more than ethnographic nostalgia; they stand as a record of a world still being defended against the powerful currents of change.
Morrison wrote that the Land Dayaks “had no urge to wander,” yet in the twenty-first century they wander in a new sense, seeking their place within the global economy and national policy frameworks.
Dayaks may work in cities and earn university degrees, but when harvest season comes around, they go back home, back to their villages, their fields, their rice, their forests, because that is where their roots still run deep. Their spiritual connection to the land has never been broken; it has simply evolved. Churches now rise at the center of their villages, yet the presence of their ancestors endures, in prayer, in song, and in the quiet, deliberate way they plant and tend their crops.
In the hill regions of Padawan, Bau, and Serian, the Bidayuh are forging a renewed identity that weaves together tradition and modernity. They celebrate Gawai with the dances and music once recorded by Morrison, but now with stages, sound systems, and digital cameras.
Young Bidayuh filmmakers produce documentaries about their village histories, reclaiming narratives once told by outsiders. In movements like these, Morrison seems to come back to life, but from the other side of the camera. Those who were once photographed now photograph themselves.
The legacy of colonialism still lingers, in administrative boundaries, in the language of the law, even in the state’s tendency to treat land as a commodity. Yet the spirit Morrison described as a “spiritual attachment to the land” has become the foundation of a renewed Bidayuh movement to defend their customary rights. Land is not merely an economic resource; it is part of their very existence as a people born of the soil of Borneo.
When Morrison wrote The Land Dayaks, he may not have realized that his work would become an important archive for the future. His photographs are now preserved in several university libraries in Australia and Germany, silent witnesses for a generation seeking to trace the footsteps of their ancestors. He wrote in a gentle tone, free of rigid academic pretension, yet with a keen eye that cut across ethnic and temporal boundaries. Through that lens, we see the face of today’s Bidayuh, a community still holding fast to an old conviction, that the land is mother, the river is lifeblood, and the forest is home to the spirit of life.
Morrison closed his chapter with a simple sentence: “They live in peace, and will remain so as long as their land is left to them.”
Today, those words read almost like a prophecy. In a changing Sarawak, in a Borneo continually opened and exploited, they stand as a reminder that true peace does not arise from grand development schemes, but from justice for those who tend the earth with their own hands.
(More to come)
