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Kota Kinabalu: Creative players need more than praise from the Government whenever they elevate Sabah on the national or world stage.

“They also need government support. 

“The State Government can help by setting up a welfare fund of say RM1 million in this year’s budget through the State Youth, Sports and Creative Economy Ministry to assist registered members during times of hardship,” said Daily Express Chief Editor Datuk James Sarda.

He said this would help practitioners facing health challenges like dialysis treatment and disabilities from strokes, among others. 

“There is nothing like knowing that the Government cares for them at the moment that matters,” he said, adding that many journalists facing difficulties have been similarly helped by the Hawana Fund under the Communications and Multimedia Ministry which makes one-off payments of RM3,000 to the deserving.

James pointed to the admissions of people like Velvet Aduk who said the public think they are rich when they hardly make anything at the end of the day.

“Creative people are either very rich, have little money or no money. Because their income is not guaranteed or regular, when they fall on hard times facing health issues, the Government should be there to ease their situation,” he said, when closing the Creative Minds Forum. 

He noted that many practitioners operate on a freelance or project basis, making them particularly vulnerable during periods of financial uncertainty.

James also said creative practitioners are uniquely positioned to ensure important events, experiences and community stories remained accessible even if they were not formally recorded in history books.

He said many stories from Sabah’s past risked being overlooked if efforts were not made to document them through creative mediums.

He said Daily Express set up by late Tan Sri Yeh Pao Tzu which was around before independence and the formation of Malaysia, being Sabah’s only heritage paper, has been playing its part.

He cited the recent documentary Double Six: The Untold Stories produced by Dexter Yeh, grandson of the paper’s founder, which revisited the 1976 Double Six tragedy through interviews with surviving witnesses and individuals connected to the incident as an example.

“There was a lot of new information that we gathered from many people who were still alive that we spoke to. We put everything together and the documentary has been very well received.

James said doing the script for that documentary was his first attempt and it led to another called “The Queen’s Hospital in Borneo” exploring the history of Queen Elizabeth Hospital, also in YouTube.

He has just completed the script for a Finas-funded documentary on the discovery of the world’s first wildlife film shot in the Kinabatangan in 1920 by the Martin and Osa Johnson.

Called “Jungle Adventures” it was a blockbuster when screened in New York and western theatres during the silent movie era in the 1020s and 1930s.

“Martin in the early 1900s was one of the first who perfected producing nitrate film and his father had a franchise for Kodak in the Midwest in the United States. 

“He perfected himself on how to make films which was still an evolving industry by first capturing images of the vanishing Native American Indians.

“He perfected the skills to film the cannibals in the Solomons in 1890s before coming to Borneo where he developed his documentary in makeshift huts in the Kinabatangan rainforest.

“So can you imagine, he brought all the bromide chemicals, everything from America, Kodak and the people backing him were some big names in the US like the Kennedy family and Natural History Museum,” he said.

James said the Johnson’s fascination with North Borneo was so profound that they returned to the territory 15 years later in 1935 to make a second Borneo film, with an amphibious aircraft capable of landing on Kinabatangan.

James praised two women, Noraini and Norhayati, who are based in Kuala Lumpur for taking an interest in the work of the Johnsons and is certain that their soon to be released work, “Borneo’s Lost Film” would reiterate Sabah’s position as the ultimate ecotourism getaway.

He said Rye Production, which is producing it earlier made another Sabah documentary called “Saudin the Orang Utan Whisperer” about the experience of Saudin Lambadou from Keningau who followed the Johnsons back to America in 1935 and returned to tell his tale. It was shown on History channel.

James said such stories demonstrated the importance of research, filmmaking and documentary production in preserving Sabah’s rich heritage for future generations.

He urged members of the creative industry to continue exploring untold stories and historical records that could help deepen public understanding of Sabah’s past while strengthening the state’s cultural identity.

Among the stories he believed deserve attention is the Sandakan Death March, one of the darkest episodes of the Second World War in Borneo and the Petagas massacre.

In the case of the Death March, about 2,600 Allied prisoners of war were forced to march from Sandakan to Ranau by the Japanese occupation forces and only six survived.

“Daily Express reporter Kan Yaw Chong had interviewed the survivors when they returned to Sabah for remembrance events.

The Petagas massacre is about how a rag tag band of civilians with hardly any army training defeated the Japanese in Jesselton for two days, including killing 60 of them. 

It was led by Albert Kwok, a Sarawak Chinese traditional medicine man. The ring leaders were beheaded and about 170 others were machine gunned before an open pit in Petagas where the memorial is.  

After Pearl Harbour in Hawaii, it is one of the few memorials built over the site where the incident happened, but was never told in detail in Malaysian history books.

“This is where you people come in. Forget about the history books because what’s found there may be forgotten when the school exams are over but your accounts will serve as real and living history,” he said.

“These are powerful stories. They deserve to be told and remembered,” he said.