Interview 20952 – Caption Index: 22

So you’ve talked about how your career began, but were there any other series of events that led you to the first zoo job and what was the position?… Read More

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And tell me something about the zoo that you started in. Read More

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The PhD was in social behavior of the long-tailed macaques in Singapore. And I’d done that because my father had died a year before. And so I wanted to be back, spent some time with my mother. So I chose macaques because there’s a big colony in Singapore, wild colonies. Read More

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I’m not gonna get your job, but you could get an interview.” And so I went down with her and I interviewed. The chairman whose name was Dr. Ong Swee Law, he interviewed me, asked me to write an essay on something or other, and told me many, many years… Read More

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We each place a pebble as a remembrance for those people and just talk a little bit about celebrating their lives. So it’s a very, very powerful to me. Anyway, it’s a very powerful reunion that we do. It’s something that I really cherish, actually, and look forward to it. Read More

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Then you move on to other schools?… Read More

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Yeah. I went off to University of Manchester. I studied animal behavior that was a double degree in zoology and psychology and never went to the Belle Vue Zoo in Manchester. Couldn’t stand zoos. I thought they were really not very nice places. And that’s not really my father, I… Read More

Interview 20952 – Caption Index: 13

Yeah. Okay, well, in Australia where I was in a primary school, then we went to Singapore. My brother was sent to a boarding school in England. I stayed in Singapore and did two years in a prep school, which prepared you for a British education. My mother was not… Read More

Interview 20952 – Caption Index: 14

I just came from there. Every two years, we have a reunion. It’s a boarding school, a mixed boarding school. So you have a girls’ boarding house and a boys’ boarding house. Boys started at 11, I was there at 11. And you go into a dormitory of 12 boys… Read More

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And as I say, we’re now 70s, early 70s. And through Facebook 20 years ago, we got together. And we’ve really been meeting. As I say, literally every two years we go there. The actual school is shut down, but we stay in hotels and we celebrate. And we celebrate… Read More

Interview 20952 – Caption Index: 10

You could say consciousness, yeah. It certainly honed a great interest for wildlife. In my brother, it honed an interest for botany. My brother studied botany at Oxford, and we always had this difference in our interests. I mean, he was not particularly interested in animals, but he really liked… Read More

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We went to boarding school in England. When we finished school, we both opted to go into biological sciences. So you mentioned school. Read More

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Could you tell me a little about your formal education as you moved up you were in boarding school?… Read More

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He would go into the forest, cut down saplings, make a kitchen off the ground where you could all sit down and cook and not have to be on the ground because it would be wet, rainy, and make some other basic facilities. And then the students would come in… Read More

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And some of those students I know today, they’re probably maybe 10 years my senior, zoologists in Singapore. Read More

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So in these trips, did your father then help you shape your consciousness about nature and wildlife?… Read More

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And did these trips help shape your feelings about nature?… Read More

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Yeah, so as a professor of zoology in Singapore and Malaysia, although they had split as two separate countries, there were very great connections between the two universities, University of Singapore, University of Malaysia. And so we used to go up every year with his students to a place called… Read More

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Were animals and nature part of your life?… Read More

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Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so my father being a zoologist, basically, used to bring back a lot of wild animals, which were given to him as a zoologist, sort of roadkills, fruit bats getting electrocuted on high pipe cables or so the young, so I had fruit bats, owls, in… Read More