\u201cJanuary 23, 2012 to February 9, 2013 marked the Year of the Dragon. According to tradition, the dragon is the fifth animal in the Chinese zodiac and symbolizes loyalty \u2014 it is noble, gentle, and intelligent, but also tactless, stubborn, and dogmatic. \u201c<\/em> New York Public Library
2012 was the year a nascent community from different disciplines and interests – IT engineers, journalists, a pharmacist by degree, a librarian, academics, artists, teachers, students, nature lovers, heritage proponents, authors, film makers, lawyers, the tomb keepers, the former residents of the Kampong at Lorong Halwa, a cartographer, descendants of the stones and the local and international media – emerged, each to play their part in generating awareness that there is this 100 year old municipal cemetery called Bukit Brown, that sits in the center of our island where the stones tell stories of the past and the flora and fauna breathes life into it. And the government wanted to build an eight lane highway that will cut Bukit Brown in half, cleaving apart 100 years of heritage, habitat and history.\u201d It is a rare original WWII site that saw one of the last and fiercest battles on the rolling hills of the land.<\/p>\r\n
Chapter I: How it began…..<\/strong> Chapter II Letting Go……<\/strong> Along the way, the new kid on the civil society block, picked an award from the inaugural Singapore Advocacy Awards celebrating the best and most promising in civil society. It was more than encourage, it sealed, resolved.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n The inaugurals Singapore Advocacy Awards with members of the community.<\/p><\/div>\r\n But it was the\u00a0 international media who took up the gauntlet to source alternative views, different angles to the issue The BBC, CNA, and Reuters had correspondents based here.\u00a0 Brownies were interviewed on air and quoted in print. They sent in questions to the government but they had no comment. The Economist correspondent and the family of husband and wife with one young son and a mangy and lovable Singapore special lived near Bukit Brown. They treated Bukit Brown as their backyard and had joined the brownies in their explorations, \u201cbush bashing \u201c together in areas tight with above and under growth. He blogged it in The Banyan. A Singapore artist and former photojournalist with the local media and her partner, a Pulitzer prize winner for journalism who flew in from New York for the Singapore Writers Festival, arranged to visit the site with brownies and an academic in tow, and somehow managed to gained access to the storage where the tomb artifacts of exhumed graves were stored and snapped a few choice photos. And so that was how Bukit Brown Cemetery and us found ourselves in The New York Times in a feature article.<\/p>\r\n Chapter III Gaining Traction &\u00a0 The Message in the Bottle\u00a0<\/strong>
The first official engagement with the government under the Ministry Of Development went badly. While the Minister was abroad, his senior civil servants were engaging with civil society\u00a0 on a date to meet him. We wanted a consultation and an opportunity to ask what were the alternatives that had been considered.
By the time a date was found – it took about three weeks – the circumstances of the meeting had changed. First there were \u201coutsiders\u201d those in heritage circles but Bukit Brown was not necessarily a priority. This was not the scenario we had envisaged when we met at the Nature Society\u2019s HQ at Geylang. We came from roughly seven different organisations\/communities\u00a0 including one newly minted,\u00a0 all things Bukit Brown, feeling their way in tentative steps through civil society.
The response to the meeting or more accurately the briefing by the then Minister of National Development was an immediate media statement calling for a moratorium on the roadworks signed by The Nature Society of Singapore(NSS), The Singapore Heritage Society (SHS), Post Museum, Green Drinks, The Rail Corridor, API, (paranormal group) and all things Bukit Brown.
Both NSS and SHS had led the email negotiations to pin down a date and an agenda to bring up to the Minister. And the way the emails were going, we knew that was a 99 percent chance, we would not get the meeting we requested. Instead the Minister announced the plans from exhumation to construction of the highway in a PPT, with a concession that the whole process would be documented. A suggestion that a heritage advocate had suggested to the CEOs of URA & LTA when they invited him for a morning prata to ask his opinion. It was indeed a prata flip.\u00a0 Aside from the seven groups, there were heritage bloggers, representatives from clan associations, The Peranakan Association government agencies,\u00a0 , the Preservation of Monuments Board and the National Heritage Board.
The fact that seven groups from civil society including the two most established the nature and heritage societies,\u00a0 issued\u00a0 a statement disagreeing at the haste the decision was reached without genuine consultation, made headline news.\u00a0 Bukit Brown was after all, one of our oldest Chinese cemeteries and the mother of all cemeteries with many remains reinterred there because of major developments where they were first laid to rest. Their burial grounds , had made way for HDB estates such as Queenstown,\u00a0 and so\u00a0 in the past time and time again, the dead had to make way for the living. This was different, an 8-lane highway. In today\u2019s context with climate change a critical and\u00a0 existentialist issue, questions would have been raised why\u00a0 are we encouraging car ownership? Could nothing be done with the then Lornie Road, only eight years in existence ? They were raised then, almost prescient.\u00a0 Back and forth, like a ping pong game, with the ball falling into the government\u2019s side of the table in a staccato volley.\u00a0 We were called naysayers, unsympathetic to motorists and asked to offer solutions to solve traffic jams.
Then the government announced that they had taken on feedback and as a concession to civil society realigned part of the highway as a bridge. It was the most natural of realignments as the previous plan would involve building the highway into a valley. What had happened was that the Nature Society of Singapore had submitted the proposal independently to allow space under the bridge for animals to pass and shady plants that did not need much sunlight, It did save a few graves from certain “death”. The concession by the authorities was much lauded in the media as an indication that the government of the day was not recalcitrant and was responsive. With that, the first chapter of our journey came to a close.<\/p>\r\n
Two communities, Post Museum and all things Bukit Brown moved on and forward, to continue to conduct public guided walks to spread awareness, the latter community branched into themed walks such as World War Two at Bukit Brown hooking up with a war archaeologist from the UK,\u00a0 whose family was stationed in Singapore because of his wife\u2019s career. He had found himself living on the doorstep of the battleground around the black and white houses in Adam Road and later explored the Mount Pleasant black and whites the Japanese had occupied. He started to conduct WWII guided walks detailing battlegrounds that covered the Island Club links into Bukit Brown proper including the names of soldiers who are still missing and their last known locations. Their remains may very well lie under the highway – grist embedded in the concrete –\u00a0 even as their names are acknowledged\u00a0 at the Kranji War Memorial.
Outside of Bukit Brown, Post Museum which is an arts group helmed by a husband and wife team, secured a grant for an exhibition\u00a0 held at SAM, the Singapore Art Museum. They were to curate other exhibitions at the Substation and the exhibition space in Bencoolen Street of La Salle College. And they have taken the Bukit Brown \u201cindex\u201d to the USA. Days before the exhumation exercise was to start, they arranged a candlelight remembrance and lit up the entrance into Bukit Brown. That entry into the cemetery is no longer, absorbed now into the Lornie Highway.
Particularly poignant in Post Museum\u2019s first exhibition at SAM was an installation where the names of the deceased who had to make way for the highway were written in chalk on a big wall by volunteers and the public, with a photo collage of some of the volunteers at their special\/favourite spot in Bukit Brown. The GOH for the opening was Ms Jane Ittogi, the present First Lady who was Chairman of SAM then. Ms Ittogi was to later be the GOH for a brownie event, – brownies, that\u2019s how the community of volunteers under the banner of all things Bukit Brown are known to the public. It was to be a much bigger event over a weekend with exhibitions of artifacts including a letter written in romanised Hokkien, presentations on nature and heritage, and a screening of\u00a0 a documentary, Light On Lotus Hill about the efforts here to assist in logistics in support of the Sino-Japanese war. It was a collaboration with the Chui Hway Lin Teochew Club. It followed very soon after\u00a0 atBB also curated the first exhibition at The Substation partnering the Singapore Heritage Society and the Sub. In the meantime, an 8 part TV series called “History from the Hills” debuted with Bukit Brown as the central space, telling the story of Singapore from pre colonial times to independence. It was to be dubbed into both Mandarin & Malay in years to come.<\/p>\r\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bukitbrown.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/SAA-with-walter-.jpg\")
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\u201cPeople with Chinese zodiac dragons born in 2012 have great vision and ambition. In addition, they are full of patience and persistence. Therefore, they can achieve success in their career field easily. They are bold people full of justice and energy, and they like to help people who are in trouble. They have good interpersonal relationships, because they care about friends carefully. They have a unique style and can give everyone an interesting chat when they are in a low mood.\u201d<\/em>
We are not sure that accurately describes the community but time has proven we are patient and persistent. An application was made to the World Monuments Fund, to have Bukit Brown Cemetery recognised as a historical and heritage site under threat from an impending highway. We got it, the first site in Singapore to gain this recognition. It was for two years\u00a0 2013 an\u00a0 2014. When the news broke, most of us were at a temple dinner.
We held a media conference in Bukit Brown and had fairer coverage. Meetings followed with the National Heritage Board, there was to be no u-turn for the highway, so we simply went with tapping grants from the Board, and the result was a book, WWII@Bukit Brown<\/em><\/strong> launched in 2016, an anthology of stories with contributions from heritage enthusiasts who charted the military movements from both sides of the divide. And the brownies themselves shared stories they researched and encountered on the grounds of Bukit Brown. But the heart of the book were stories from the descendants whose young men had been taken away by Sook Ching – <\/em>and the equivalent of a pogrom. It also\u00a0 included other tragic deaths, the story of how an elder sister and also an aunt, was killed by shrapnel from a bomb, protecting her mother, a younger brother and a niece.\u00a0 She was only 19 years old, with a steady boyfriend. The chapter was called \u201c Lost Promises\u201d And that was exactly what WWII had wreaked on the island, a palpable loss.
We followed the book with Wayfinder@BukitBrown,<\/em><\/strong> a curated trail with directional signage and information boards for graves both prominent and poor in easily accessible areas, by pathways and areas where descendants clustered around a set of tombs had their tomb keepers maintain the tombs of the ancestors.
And sometime after Wayfinder was launched, we witness the sea burial of the unclaimed remains of those exhumed for the highway into the waters with a message in a bottle. By sheer dint of fate, a last minute claim was made on the eve by a friend of the brownies, so one less went into the waters. The same waters where their ancestors once sailed through perilous journeys borne by uncertain winds and currents until they reached safe port in \u201cSin Chew\u201d<\/em> <\/strong>a sobriquet popularised by the poet Khoo Seok Wan as the \u201cisland of stars\u201d; their first glimpse when they arrived at night, the lights from the vessels, necklaced the island. Khoo was himself affected by the highway. The Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall made a claim for his tomb. So he is memorialised, ironically by his tombstone.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n