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Service and was posted to the British Consulate in Beijing. He was interned by the Japanese during World War II but was then exchanged for Japanese diplomatic staff and made his way to India. He spent the War serving in various capacities with the Indian Army. In 1940, he met the German photographer Hedda Hammer and they married in Beijing in 1946. Due to the increasing instability of the political situation in China, they left Beijing soon after. The Morrisons spent six months in Hong Kong before relocating to Sarawak, in the north-west of the island of Borneo, where Alastair was appointed to the British Colonial Service and later became a district officer. Throughout her 20-year residence in Sarawak, Hedda accompanied Alastair on all his official journeys and made numerous independent photographic tours. From 1960 to 1966 Hedda was employed by the Sarawak government to work part-time in the photographic section of the Information Office in Kuching. Her duties included taking photographs, establishing a photographic library and training government photographers. Hedda wrote two major books on Sarawak, Sarawak (1957) and Life in a Longhouse (1962).
Jennie Morrison, 1912, (Mitchell Library)
In 1967 the Morrisons settled in Canberra, Australia. Hedda died in Canberra in 1991, at the age of 82. Alastair lives in Hughes, Canberra. His Fair Land Sarawak: Some Recollections of an Expatriate Official (Ithaca, Cornell University) and The Road to Peking (Canberra, Highland Press, private distribution), both appeared in 1993.
Mr. Morrison's other brother, Colin Morrison was born in April 1917. He joined the Administrative Service in Hong Kong and was also a member of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps, which held out valiantly for 17 days against the Japanese in December 1941.2 He was interned by the Japanese at the Shamshuipo camp for the