The Beginning of this Journey

When one desires to search out ‘history’, where should they go? 

A museum 

A library

Wikipedia

There is a grand plethora of outlets for us to engage with and ingest history in it’s many manifestations. All of the above options generally market themselves as places available for anyone to gain a deeper knowledge about how the past has shaped the present. But all of them maintain a level of separation from the actual ‘history’ you may be searching out. 

Sure you can look at an artefact in a museum but you can’t pick it up, feel it’s power in your hands and practically experience it’s history. Books can transport your imagination to another country or time period, but you remain in your bed or chair, or wherever you happen to be whilst you’re reading. Wikipedia has a robust analysis of every single event to have had even a minor impact on the course of humanities story, but it’s all just text on a screen. 

My answer to the question posed at this post’s beginning is to go into your nearest city. Whether it be a capital or a backwater, go there and walk around. Look at the things that you have always passed by or taken for granted as merely existing. Look at the statues, read the plaques, observe the buildings. Feel yourself stand where declarations, protests, battles, agreements, speeches, or any other event of importance actually took place. Everything that you see in a city is there for a reason, because cities are not just places that people go to live and work. They are in themselves a type of museum and their selected area of display is their own story. 

I’m Lachlan, an Australian student in Singapore whose eager to stroll around this vibrant, sophisticated city and soak up it’s history in a way that few people do. Singapore is a crossroads of many ethnicities, religions and languages, all of which maintain their own unique history that has impacted how the nation operates and functions. This history has been manifested across the city in statues, markers and historic sites, all of which tell a story that Singapore finds worthy enough to be recognised and observed every single day by the thousands of people who walk, stroll, run, sit, eat, laugh or work around them. 

On this blog I’m going to post these historic sites, markers, statues and whatever else I may happen to find, delve into the story behind them and see why these events were considered so important to the past that they deserve to be observed by those of us in the present. My expertise mostly centres on the British Empire, the Commonwealth of Nations and the two organisations interactions with various colonies and states across the world, so many of my posts will likely focus on this aspect of Singapore’s history, but I assure you that I will try to diversify my selections for this blog as I find more and more markers across this island worthy of coverage. 

Now fair warning, I am no photographer, so if you feel as though you’re not seeing the best sides of these landmarks, you’re probably right. But nonetheless, I hope this blog will give us all the opportunity to learn a bit more about the rich history of Singapore and explore the psychology of this city, state and nation, to see what from it’s own history it values. 

Stay tuned for more, and I hope you’ll join me as I explore the Lion city in all it’s glory!