Much of the farming in our area of Borneo was swidden agriculture; slash and burn. It sounds terrible, but careful rotation made it a viable lifestyle. There’s been much written about this kind of farming and I’m not going to rehash it here. It was simply a fact of life back in the day.
My father took a lot of pictures over our time in Borneo, and sure enough many of them were of this sort of farming, clearing the land, and more. Here’s a selection from a set of slide processed in November 1962. They had no other marking, but I’ve grouped them by their process date and the style of the font on the slide. Neat, eh?
Slower, cheaper, less useful…