Other Lives 1996

WORK PORTFOLIO
Summer Research St. Martins college project
Other Lives: The Orang Asli of the Malaysian Jungles

(Cover in hand-made pulpa)

(1st spread: the trails of an aborigine)

Middle of nowhere up Fraser's Hill. A dark-skinned man in shabby T-shirt, shorts and blue slippers, hops off our bus and walks over the edge of the cliff into the jungle.

My curiosity was aroused from that brief incident:
Who Are These People?

The great rainforests of Malaysia is home to 50,000 Aborigines (official estimate). The ancient writings of Ptolemy in AD 150 and the Chinese who found them around 8th century AD, place them as the Original People of Malaysia.

This is their backyard.
The world's oldest rainforest is at their doorstep.

This is their kitchen.
Cooking in bamboo trunks in a communal area. Other methods are grilling and roasting.

This is their wallpaper.
Beautiful weavings form their walls.

My idea was to compare the difference in lifestyle between the city-zens of modern society and the Aborigines, by featuring daily nouns that form our basic needs, and theirs. For example:

Their pharmacy is the forest's rich supply of medicinal roots. Sap from the Rengas tree, is used in a deadly cocktail to tip their blowpipe arrows with. Their flowers are the sweet smell from the belly of pitcher plants known locally as 'monkey pots'. They make their rafts from bamboo poles and rattan, and travel in wood dugouts on their river highways. They believe that the glorious Rajah Brooke Brookewing butterfly (a delicately sculptured mosaic of white, emerald green and white) is the earthly form of a great spirit, someone like their great grandfather. Their general knowledge is from centuries of observation, for example how the river-tortoises fake predator trails to safe-guard their eggs. Their first aid method, as experienced by a zoologist, can be peeing onto your eye if it happens to get spat on by angry Spitting Cobra.