Transcript
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An all new season of the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney.
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Mom Talk has just been blowing up.
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Whitney and Jen are on Dancing with the Stars. Taylor is a bachelorette.
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Saying that out loud is crazy.
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Like that is huge.
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But all the cool opportunities could pull us apart.
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It's causing issues in everyone's marriage. My whole world is falling apart right now. It's chaos. Watch the Hulu original series the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney for bundle subscribers to from supply. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Age Review of Books podcast and in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in, around and about the Asia Pacific region. Borneo, split between two countries, home to some of the world's oldest rainforests and a vast array of animal and plant life, is back in the news. The island is set to be home to Nusantara, Indonesia's new planned political capital, set to maybe open in 2028. And the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak, different from the rest of Peninsular Malaysia, are griping for more rights and authority to control their own wealth. Author Olivier Heine tackles the long history of Borneo in his latest book, titled appropriately, the History of an Enigma. He tackles the island's indigenous communities, the spread of Hindu, Chinese, Muslim and European influence, the rise of the White Raja, and how Borneo is treated by today's modern nations. Former diplomat with the un, the OSSE in the uk, Olivier Hein has undertaken postings in Kosovo, Turkmenistan, the USA and France. He is also the author of Star and the Historical Adventure of Mauritius and Mother of the the Remarkable History of Turkmenistan. He is also a regular contributor to the Chap magazine. So, Olivier, thank you for coming on the show to talk about your book Borneo the History of an Enigma. You know, let's talk about the geography of Borneo first. You know, the island's kind of known for its deep jungles. It's got Kota Kinabalu on it. But how does the island's kind of geographic structure affect the development of human society on the island?
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Sure. Firstly, Nicholas, thank you so much for having me on on the program, which is great. Let's talk about Borneo. It' let's not forget this is the third largest island in the world. It's huge. It straddles the equator. It it covers nearly 750,000 square kilometers. And it's right pretty much sat fat and plump in the middle of the Southeast Asian archipelago. I think there's probably four things you can say that dictate its. Its landscape so that it has a surprising mountainous interior. The famous Mount Kinabalu, which is over 4,000 meters, is the. Is the island's highest point. But of course, it's. It's sort of famously defined by its dense and incredibly ancient rainforest. The oldest rainforest in the world, actually sort of 130 million years old and incredibly biodiverse. We'll talk about that in a minute, I think. But it has vast river networks sort of flowing from the interior, and overall a very humid equatorial climate. So it has a lot of heavy rainfall and it's pretty hot all year round. So I think when you put all these things together, you can say Borneo is immense. And it was always, and actually still is, difficult to traverse. So there were always, you know, geography was formed some pretty natural barriers between communities. But I think it's also worth stressing something else about. You know, people have been there for tens of thousands of years, but until 12,000 years ago or so, Borneo wasn't an island at all. It was part of this huge peninsula which we now call the Sunda Shelf. And it was only sort of rising the sea levels after the meltings of the ice caps around that time, that sort of turned it into an island. So as a consequence, you could say that there was never a huge number of people on the island then. And in many ways it's not very densely populated now until quite recently, because of the challenges I think that the island presented. There was only five people per square kilometer. And, you know, I'm recording this from, from the UK and we have 290 people per square kilometer. So that gives an idea about the sort of lack of density. But, yeah, fundamentally, with that interior, which is so mountainous and heavily rainforest, those rivers became the primary highways for sort of cultural development and trade and settlement that came thereafter.
