Looking for oil but finding Borneo

The pictures and Leupold’s notes provide useful ethnographic information and give some hints as to how some groups, including some Europeans, lived, worked and traded together..

KUCHING: A Swiss geologist who scoured for oil in Kalimantan in the 1920s ended up recording his memories of Borneo on camera.

Wolfgang Leupold’s romance with Borneo – comprising Kalimantan, Sabah, sarawak and Brunei – began the moment he arrived in 1922.

Leupold was among a group of Swiss geologists hired by the colonial government of the then-Dutch East Indies to conduct geological research on petroleum.

He arrived in Tanjung Selor in the north of Kalimantan in 1922 before moving to Tarakan and later relocated to Bunyu Island.

Leupold, a photography enthusiast, took many personal and work-related pictures.

“He documented everything that interested him [and] a large portion of photos are of landscapes that he visited and explored,” said Swiss Ambassador to Indonesia Heinz Walker-Nederkoorn.

Many images he took were portraits of people Leupold met, including local residents he recruited to help during his expeditions.

Leopold took pictures of the members of several indigenous tribes, such as the Kenyah and Kayan, as well as the nomadic Punan and Basap people who guided him on expeditions to explore the island’s waterways and rain forests.

Most of the pictures were taken between 1922 and 1924 during his stay, researchers were not able to date pictures from later periods.

“The pictures and Leupold’s notes provide useful ethnographic information and give some hints as to how some groups, including some Europeans, lived, worked and traded together,” Walker-Nederkoorn said.

After six years in Indonesia, Leupold and his family returned to Europe in the summer of 1927.

Many items and photographs that Leupold collected while in Borneo were donated to Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich by his family to make them accessible for researchers and the general public.

“All these documents were very important in bringing to life the experience of a Swiss family — and to explore a small but very descriptive chapter of the entangled history between Switzerland, the Netherlands and Indonesia in the colonial context,” said Walker-Nederkoorn.

Sixty-four photographs taken by Leupold, from the collections of his family and the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), are now on display at the Eramus Huis cultural centre in south Jakarta.

FMT Borneo Plus