Review of Semut

I reviewed Christine Helliwell’s Semut for the Canberra Times back in July last year. Review was published in the print edition but not on-line. Putting it up here for posterity. It’s a real achievement of a book.

“The white soldiers came. They were good, brave. But we were also brave. I hope that white people’s stories remember us too.” So says an elderly Dayak man called Basar Paru to Christine Helliwell close to the end of her thoroughly researched and absorbing story about a forgotten special forces operations behind enemy lines in Borneo at the tail-end of the Second World War.

The old warrior was right to be concerned. Many war histories – the official versions and the ones that constitute a thriving cottage industry for publishers – demote people from the place on which the war is waged to bootless bit players working in the shadow of doughty young Allies. So completely edged out from the story are local populations that it is easy to forget just how they make up so many of the war dead. In parts of New Guinea, for instance, around one-quarter of the local population perished in a war they didn’t ask to have.  

Christine Helliwell, a Professor Emeritus at the Australian National University, has dedicated a significant portion of her last decade working on this project that ensures that neither the stories of Basar Pasu nor the hush-hush Operation Semut in which he participated are lost in time’s fog. An anthropologist who has spent more than thirty years researching and living with the Dayaks, the indigenous people of Borneo, Helliwell is uniquely placed to tell this story. She interviewed many from the island who remembered that time as well as all the Australian operatives still kicking around. Previously shackled by the Official Secrets Act the old Diggers make a calculation with the light fading on their lives that ‘there’s nothing they can do to me now’ and unburden themselves. Combined with extensive archival research, the result is a story as textured as jungle foliage which feels qualitatively different to so many war histories.

It is March 1945 and the game in Asia is focused on manoeuvring for pole position for whatever comes next. Prior to the war, this part of Borneo was administered by descendants of an English privateer known as the White Rajah and the British are determined to wrest the possession back from the Japanese, drawing on the services of an Australian covert operations unit. Illustrative of the imperial pecking order, the officers were British with the grunts Aussie volunteers.

The plan – codenamed Semut, after the Malay for ‘ant’ – was to parachute handfuls of Australian soldier-ants behind enemy lines to gather intelligence and inveigle the local population into supporting their cause. No easy task given previous operations ended calamitously and there were no accurate maps of the thick rainforest the men would be dropping into. This was supremely dangerous work, the men promised ‘nothing but a wooden cross’ and enacted on the cheap. The parachute material that the men hopped out of the planes with had been used many times already. 

A lesson learned from earlier fiascos was the need for at least some of the party to be able to speak a common language. Semut included a few old Borneo hands and Malay speakers who it was hoped would bridge chasmic cultural mores with the Dayaks, most of whom had never seen a white person before. With patience and respect as well as long nights of negotiation-cum-epic drinking sessions in Dayak longhouses the soldier-ants convince Dayak leaders to rally to their cause.

Where Helliwell succeeds triumphantly is rendering human the people that the Semut parties interacted with. Many Dayaks threw their lot in with the Australians not for jingoistic reasons but because they made a calculation that the tide was turning already against the Japanese. There’s an illuminating sequence in which Helliwell explains the dim view Dayaks take of fighting in doomed military endeavours of the like we venerate on Anzac Day. “Only a stupid man keeps fighting when he has already lost”, one tells her. That the Allies dropped the White Rajah’s prohibition on head-hunting might also have helped although as Helliwell indicates this was no more ghoulish an act of war than anything else that went on.

As well as vivid blow-by-blow popular history, the book works as a portrait of a lost time. The great jungles of Borneo Helliwell describes so vividly have been logged into obsolescence. The imperial forts as well as the longhouses in which much of the parlaying between chiefs and soldiers took place no longer exist. One can still journey down rivers but it’s easier to fly or drive these days. Descriptions of the pre-war times of the White Rajah feel dipped in sepia. The book ends poignantly with four blank pages, each one representing the hundreds of unknown Dayaks who died and whose names we will never know.

If I had my druthers, I wish there was a bit more of the author herself. The text really comes alive when Helliwell drops her academic guard to talk about the friendships she formed with the old Semut hands and the Dayaks. She’s writing a sequel; how wonderful it would be to have even more of her captivating voice within that.