C.A Gibson Hill: Photography, History, Boats and Birds in Late Colonial Malaya and Singapore

Dr Carl Alexander Gibson-Hill (23 October 1911–18 August 1963) was the last expatriate director of the Raffles Museum. His work in Singapore straddled the period between World War II and Singapore’s independence, when British defeat at the hands of the Japanese and the rise of nationalism reshaped the landscape of Malayan politics and history. 

A trained medical doctor, Gibson-Hill was an avid naturalist since childhood. He won awards for entomology at school and was a keen photographer and illustrator of animal life since his teenaged years. Gibson-Hill served almost three years as the resident medical doctor at Christmas Island and the Cocos-Keelings Islands.

Meanwhile Frederick N. Chasen, the then curator of the Raffles Museum, and an ornithologist himself had tasked Gibson-Hill to build up the Museum’s bird specimen collection. Today, Gibson-Hill’s Christmas Island birds, labelled in his own hand, are found at the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research.

Gibson-Hill arrived in Singapore on 12 December 1941, just weeks prior to Singapore’s fall to the Japanese. He was hastily appointed curator in the absence of his predecessor and within a few days was interned at Changi and Sime Road Camp.

But Gibson-Hill did not stop his academic pursuits. He took notes and drew sketches of local birds he observed at the camp. This resulted in several articles on local birds, including the Malayan Long-tailed Tailor-Bird and the Spotted Munia with his illustrations added to an in-house publication by G. C. Madoc entitled Malayan Birds 

Whilst at the camp, he also mentally reworked his manuscript on the Cocos-Keelings Islands. Unfortunately whatever was left of the original draft on the Cocos-Keelings Islands was found as wrapping paper and mere loose scraps, a loss which Gibson-Hill lamented in his introduction to his article on the Ross’ documents

C.A Gibson Hill was one of colonial Malaya's last scholar administrator. As Director of Singapore Raffles Museum in the 1950s and editor of Malayan Branch of Royal Asiatic Society, he made a significant contributions in diverse fields. His publication both display artistry and intellectual rigour, but perfectionism combined with depression and illness made it difficult for him to carry the project forward.



MBRAS. 2023. 150pp