Julau

Julau is a tributary valley in the Rajang basin of Sarawak. Its river enters the Kanowit system, connecting inland country with the greater Rajang waterway. The setting is the changing society of the river basin.

Iban traditions trace migration from the upper Kapuas country into Sarawak from around the middle of the sixteenth century. Early routes led through Batang Ai and the Batang Lupar country; by the early nineteenth century migrants were moving into the Rajang basin and its southern tributaries. Longhouse households combined rice grown under shifting cultivation with hunting and gathering. River-based identities, kinship, warfare and the search for cultivable land shaped settlement. The basin consequently contained changing communities and claims to land, not an unvarying population defined by fixed district boundaries. Julau's early history belongs within these movements between forest clearings and interconnected rivers.