GAZING AT HOME FROM THE BEACH: A PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF DISRUPTION AND RELOCATION IN THE SOUTHERN ISLANDS, 1970S TO 1990S

Abstract

Intertidal heritage and communities within the contemporary international boundaries of Singapore have received scant scholarly attention. Several communities once inhabited the islands south of mainland Singapore – collectively known as the Southern Islands – since the early 19th century. Their experiences under intensifying national development initiatives from the late 1960s, their traumatic involuntary relocation, and the aftermath from the late 1970s onwards have been overlooked. National historiography neglects their intertidal heritage and homogenises them with a wider body of supposedly ‘nationalised’ rural ‘squatters’. My thesis attempts to historicise the islanders’ experiences from the most distant locale in the Southern Islands: Pulau Sudong, Pulau Semakau, and Pulau Seking from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Employing the three islands as exemplars of the wider littoral network in Singapore, I attempt to construct a ‘partial transcript’ of their experiences (observable to outsiders) under national development by tracing how these three island communities tried to negotiate or resist the erasure of their geo-cultural spaces and ways of life. My attempt interrogates the still unutilised accounts by islanders. I approach oral sources for how the interviewees narrated their past and the accompanying audible emotionality: the orality of those sources is employed to closely read and interpret various transcribed interviews of the islanders in the Malay newspapers from the period. I investigate two periods: the islands’ attempts to ‘modernise’ in their own ways before involuntary relocation and attempts after involuntary relocation by the ex-islanders to re-establish access to the intertidal spaces and communal and cultural experiences they lost. The islanders’ experiences offer an alternative way to map a ‘Singapore’ and its past beyond the metropolitan and multiracial paradigm; to highlight the area’s longer entanglement with the intertidal world. Thus, I seek to demonstrate the islanders’ tenacity to preserve their maritime belongingness whilst grappling with their cultural trauma.