Singapore has been of particular interest lately , partly due to the considerable number of readers Little Darwin has in the Lion City .
Another reason for Singapore coming to our attention are forgotten letters retrieved while trying to get this blog's files in order, even culled in parts , sent from Singapore in l955 by a former Northern Territory News editor, Hugh Mabbett, a Kiwi , who had only recently moved up there to work on The Straits Times.
Mabbett attended several parties in Darwin before he flew out to Singapore and reported he had arrived there with a headache .
Early impresssions of Singapore and disparaging remarks about the southern management of the Northern Territory News were included in his correspondence .
He wrote a book on Bali , another on an American couple who started a hotel at Kuta Beach from scratch in the l930s.
Then , in a large offering of books in a Townsville op shop , a solitary hardback -The Singapore Grip - a 1978 novel by British Booker Prize winning author J.G. Farrell demanded attention.
Why ? Because loosely inserted in the back was a large black and white photograph of the author and his cat outside an isolated farm house he had bought in south-west Ireland in l979. Soon after , while fishing from a nearby rock, he was washed into the sea and drowned.
The Singapore Grip was in a trilogy he wrote about the declining British Empire , the others about the Irish War of Independence l919-1921 and the l857 Indian Mutiny .
Based on the Singapore book , a six part television series was made which followed a family of wealthy Britons in Singapore in the Second World War .
It was described as harmful and upsetting by an advocacy group for British East and South East Asians, a kick in the guts .
The writer said it was actually "an attack on colonialism" and showed "the corrupt practices and casual racism of the ruling elites." Screenwriter Sir Christopher Hampton was quoted as saying "any fair-minded viewer" would "easily understand" this.
The trilogy of books to which The Singapore Grip belongs is "perhaps the most celebrated attack on colonialism by a British novelist in the 20th Century, " he added.
(Singapore , Darwin , Booker.)
