Semut

The Untold Story of a Secret Australian Operation in WWII Borneo

Christine Helliwell

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This is the story of Operation Semut, an Australian secret military operation launched by the organisation popularly known as Z Special Unit in the final months of WWII.

March 1945. A handful of very young Allied operatives are parachuted into the remote jungled heart of the Japanese-occupied island of Borneo, east of Singapore, there to recruit the island’s indigenous Dayak peoples to fight the Japanese. Yet most speak next to no Borneo languages and know little about Dayaks, other than that they were once headhunters who might kill them on arrival. For their part, some Dayaks have never before seen a white face.
This is the story of Operation Semut, an Australian secret military operation launched by the organisation popularly known as Z Special Unit in the final months of WWII. Anthropologist Christine Helliwell has called on her years of first-hand knowledge of Borneo, interviewed more than one hundred Dayak people and all the remaining Semut operatives, and consulted thousands of military and other documents to piece together this astonishing story. Focusing on two of Borneo’s great rivers – the Baram and Rejang – the book provides a detailed military history of Semut II’s and Semut III’s brutal guerrilla campaign against the Japanese, and reveals the decisive but long-overlooked Dayak role in the operation.
But this is no ordinary history. Helliwell captures vividly the terrors of the jungle environment into which the operatives are plunged. And she takes us into the lives and cavernous longhouses.of the Dayaks on whom their survival depends. The result is a truly unique account of the meeting of two very different cultures amidst the savagery of the Pacific War.

Published: 2 July 2021
ISBN: 9780143790020
Imprint: Michael Joseph Australia
Format: Trade Paperback
Pages: 560
RRP: $40.00

Categories:

Sociology & anthropology

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About the author

Christine Helliwell

Christine Helliwell is a New Zealand-born anthropologist, author and academic, currently Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University. She has been carrying out fieldwork among Borneo’s indigenous Dayak peoples – including living with them in their communities for months at a time – for almost forty years, and has written widely on Dayak social and cultural life.

Since 2014 Christine has been researching WWII in Borneo, with a particular interest in the special operations conducted there by the Australian secret organisation codenamed Services Reconnaissance Department, popularly known as Z Special Unit. As part of this research she has travelled extensively throughout Sarawak, in the north of the island, and spoken to hundreds of elderly people who still remember the war. She has also interviewed almost all the remaining veterans from these operations, forming friendships with several in the process. In 2016 she was instrumental in organising a ceremony to honour the men and women of SRD/ Z Special Unit, at the Australian War Memorial. In 2018 she co-curated an exhibition at the Memorial on SRD/Z Special Unit operations in Borneo.

Christine lives in Canberra. Her book Semut – on the most important of the Borneo ‘Z’ operations – took her almost four years to write.

Praise for Semut

The incredible, little-known story of Australia’s top secret ‘Z’ operations deep inside Japanese lines in Sarawak in 1945 – aided by Dayak tribes who, with Australian approval, had resumed the ancient practice of headhunting . . . against Japanese patrols. Christine Helliwell records the dying months of the Pacific War, the terror of the Japanese, the world of the indigenous tribes, the intensity – down to the very smell and taste – of this jungle conflict with such menacing immediacy that this book will possess you long after you lay it down. A superb read, brilliantly researched, written in prose as sharp as a machete
Paul Ham