Among the Islands

by Tim Flannery

  A downhearted Lester, who had hoped to bring the lizard alive to Port Moresby, went off to do this dismal duty, but soon emerged in a state of astonishment, saying that he could see nothing but a large goanna turd adorning his pillow. When Mipi heard that the goanna had done a runner she fled to her cabin, refusing to open the door until the monster had been searched out and ejected. Despite a thorough examination of the boat, however, the goanna remained elusive. Considering the situation, Lester stood outside Mipi’s cabin and opined loudly, to nobody in particular, that it was most likely a sea-going species and had jumped overboard of its own accord and was even now swimming to land. Not entirely convinced, it was some time before Mipi emerged. But in the bustle of shipboard life the goanna was soon forgotten, and things carried on as before.

  Alcester Island is high, so it’s visible from a long way off. When first spotted, the green speck on the horizon seems delightful, but the closer you get the less inviting it looks. The island’s basalt core is all that remains of an ancient volcano. It resembles a gigantic, angular stone, flat on top with sheer sides crusted at the base with limestone cliffs. With no fringing reef to hold them back, waves beat fiercely against the cliffs, carving them into caverns and spires. They reminded me of the redoubts of the cartoon wizards of my childhood.

  Alcester’s geology is revealing of its history. The island formed when a volcano rose from the sea. Presumably, it was initially cone-shaped, like Japan’s Mount Fuji, but then erosion by waves steepened its sides, giving it a more block-like shape. As the magma chamber that fed the volcano cooled, it became heavy and began to sink into the sea, until it lay at sea level. The volcano’s summit was then planed off by the waves, forming the plateau that exists today. Then, awesome geological forces gathered strength, thrusting the island skywards once again. This would have happened in stages. The limestone cliffs were clearly once fringing coral reefs that formed as the island paused in its ascent, but which have now been elevated high above the sea. In all probability Alcester is still on the rise.

  As we sailed along the island’s northern coastline we could see no sign of human habitation, but then, in an open cove towards the island’s western end, we found a neat, if tiny, village. As we entered the calm waters of the cove and prepared to drop anchor, the Sunbird was surrounded by small outrigger canoes manned by curious women and children. The deep blue sea was so clear that we could see corals growing twenty metres or more below. But the submarine slope was only slightly less steep than the island’s cliffs, making placement of the anchor—so that we were safe from drifting onto rocks or out to sea—a matter of some difficulty and precision.

  The women in the canoes were dressed in traditional grass skirts, and were accompanied by naked children. This was very different from the situation on Woodlark, where everybody wore western clothes—except on every second Tuesday when the schoolchildren donned traditional garments. From what I could see of this village, which was tucked away among the coconut palms, it was entirely traditional. The evident lack of western influence made me feel a little like I’d arrived with James Cook on Tahiti. Later, the women told us that most of the men of the village had gone on a great Kula voyage, and that the few who had remained had gone to Woodlark to seek treatment for the boy with the broken arm. Alcester was thus a tropical paradise temporarily inhabited only by women and adorable, energetic children.

  As idyllic as the tiny island community seemed to us, it had its problems. When two small boys climbed aboard the Sunbird they asked for just one thing—a glass of water. It was the height of the dry season in a very dry year. The villagers had just a few litres of water in the bottom of an old tank, which they were holding as an emergency supply. They were subsisting on the juice of coconuts and they were very thirsty. We gave them some water, but our own supplies were limited, so we could not do as much as we would have liked. The villagers were delighted, however, when we produced a huge tuna from the freezer. It was enough to feast the entire community.

  I was curious to learn whether any other ships had called recently at this remote place. A woman told me that the last vessel to anchor there was a yacht hired by one of the major cigarette companies. It was, according to her, luxurious, and its crew had given away free cigarettes before screening romantic films in which the actors looked sexy, fit and powerful as they puffed on their cancer sticks. This example of modern capitalism sowing addiction and death in paradise sickened me and left me wondering just how long the traditional culture of the island might survive.

  That afternoon, after setting mist-nets and rat-traps, we rested or entertained ourselves by snorkelling and diving from the Sunbird. I had never seen water so clear, and as I dived towards the bottom my ears crackled and popped as the pressure increased. Without a weight belt, it took most of my energy just to get down, but once there I was amazed at the abundance of tiny fish and the brilliant colours of the corals and worms. Cooled by currents sweeping up from the ocean depths, Alcester Island’s corals had remained untouched by pollution or coral bleaching. Little did I realise back then that, due to climate change and coral bleaching, I’d not see its like again.

  As evening drew near we went ashore to search for the island’s mysterious quadoi. I’d been feeling slightly off colour all day, with pains in my legs and a headache. I knew the feeling all too well. It was the onset of malaria—a disease that had been a constant companion ever since I’d begun work in Melanesia. By the time we’d started the climb to the plateau I was sweating and finding it difficult to walk. Lester and Tish suggested that I rest in a hut in the village. Feeling frustrated and angry that my only chance to see the island had been taken away, I tossed and turned in a bush-materials bed in a pitch black hut, cursing my bad luck.

  As I began to feel increasingly nauseous and fevered, a slight click at the door alerted me to someone’s presence. Scared and not knowing who it might be, I turned my torch towards the door and saw there a girl in a grass skirt. She looked to be around fourteen years old, and to my fevered eyes appeared as if she’d just stepped off the film set of Mutiny on the Bounty. Her innocent face was framed in a halo of curly black hair and she was carrying a fan, a bowl of precious water and a moist cloth. Without saying a word she sat down beside me and began mopping my body. In the darkness and silence I could hear her breathing quietly beside me, and as I cooled the nausea retreated. How many people, I wondered, would trust their teenage daughter to a total stranger in a darkened hut? Yet some woman, who may not have even spoken to me, had clearly told her daughter to sit with me. Overcome with gratefulness for the kindness of that stranger, I eventually drifted into a deep sleep.

  It was the small hours of the morning when Lester woke me with news of his very successful night. He had obtained samples of both quadoi and the island’s flying fox. I was feeling much better, so I helped Lester skin the catch with the intention of giving the meat to the villagers, whom the drought had placed on short rations. As I set to work, it was immediately obvious that the cuscus of Alcester Island was indeed extremely similar to that of Woodlark. But on Alcester, Lester reported, the creatures were exceptionally abundant. So much so, he said, that he had taken aim at a flying fox in a tree, and out of it had fallen both a bat and a quadoi. They must have been in line with his rifle, feeding on the same bunch of figs. Laboratory studies later revealed that Alcester’s quadoi had most likely been introduced to the island in relatively recent times—probably in the last few thousand years—from Woodlark. Archaeological studies later suggested that such inter-island transfers had been a common practice among the people of Melanesia for thousands of years, and were presumably a deliberate strategy to supplement the meagre larder of game animals found naturally on many of the islands.

  The following day Tish and I packed up the nets and traps. If the TAMS volunteers were to meet their flights in Cairns we had to depart the island by lunchtime. There was time for just one more piece of work. We had been told of a sea cave where small bats roosted, and Le
ster had set out by canoe to examine them. He returned just as we were preparing to up anchor, and was still somewhat shaken. The approach to the cave was perilous, and if the lakatoi, which was crewed by children, had capsized, the waves and jagged limestone would have turned him to mincemeat. Thankfully, the kids were expert seafarers, and he returned with news that the cave contained sheathtail bats belonging to two species. These tiny brown creatures are so named because the bony part of their tail is encased in an extensive skin membrane. They are common in Melanesia, and are often found roosting in sea caves.

  When we tallied the discoveries made during our twenty-four hours on Alcester, we realised that we’d documented six mammal species. Over the previous century of mammalogical research, just a single specimen of a flying fox had been recorded from the island. All in all it wasn’t a bad day’s work.

  As we left Alcester in our wake and set course for Alotau, the capital of Milne Bay Province, my mood was tinged with sadness. Travelling the islands of the Solomon Sea by catamaran had been a sublime experience, but in Alotau I would have to bid adieu to the Sunbird and most of my companions. We had formed genuine bonds of friendship and had shared amazing adventures. Now they would sail back to Cairns, while Tish, Lester and I went by air to explore one of the most extraordinary islands in the Pacific—Goodenough in the D’Entrecasteaux Group.

  We approached Alotau and began to sort through our piles of equipment, deciding what should follow us to Goodenough and what should return to Australia. As Lester lifted a large box of traps that had been stored just outside the head, a familiar figure emerged. It was the goanna that had left its calling card on Lester’s pillow. I was amazed that a creature over a metre long could go unnoticed for so long aboard a crowded vessel the size of the Sunbird. It was a lesson in how easily stowaways like the Pacific rat and the house gecko could travel unnoticed on outrigger canoes piloted by the ancestral Polynesians, and so spread themselves to every inhabited island in the Pacific.

  We tried to keep news of the goanna’s re-emergence from Mipi, but she noticed our attempts to catch the animal and promptly locked herself in her cabin once more. After a scramble Lester finally grabbed the stowaway, and placed it securely in a large plastic box. Matt then took pity on it and fed it with leftover chicken bones. This had an astonishing effect. The hitherto wild lizard became as tame as any lapdog, reaching up to take the bone almost from Matt’s hands. With each bone it gulped down, our captain’s heart visibly softened. Words were said about it becoming the Sunbird’s mascot, but much to Mipi’s relief Lester informed Matt that, now that Papua New Guinea was an independent nation, it was illegal to export wildlife without a permit. Then Lester announced that he too had become fond of the reptile and could not make a specimen of it. Fed and recovered, it made an assisted leap for freedom into Alotau Harbour, its skill at swimming proof that Lester’s initial identification of the beast as a mangrove monitor was correct. The species is widespread in coastal Melanesia, and it would have been quite comfortable in its new home among the Alotau mangroves.

  CHAPTER 4

  Goodenough Not Near Enough

  So it was that Lester, Tish and I stepped off the Sunbird planning to survey one more island before returning home. In contrast to Woodlark, Goodenough Island is close to the mainland and accessible by a regular air service. Indeed I had seen it once previously. A few years earlier, when flying along the mountainous spine of southeast New Guinea, cloud had obscured all but the three highest peaks at the eastern end of the range. I soon identified two as Mount Suckling and Mount Dayman—the highest points on the tail of New Guinea’s mountain backbone, if you imagine the island as a gigantic bird. But I struggled to identify the third peak. It was an abrupt rocky spire, lying to the north of the others. Only later did I realise that it was not part of the mainland at all, but the summit of Mount Goodenough.

  Goodenough Island is the westernmost of the three islands that comprise the D’Entrecasteaux Group, and it must be one of the tallest islands for its size on the planet. All three are old fragments of continental crust that became detached from New Guinea some time between two and five million years ago, and although the strait separating the islands from the mainland is narrow, it is very deep, as are the waters separating the islands from each other. Each island in the D’Entrecasteaux Group is thus a separate experiment in evolution, and none is more intriguing than Goodenough. Zoogeographic studies show that large, high islands have a far greater chance of retaining a diverse fauna than do small, flat ones, and because Goodenough is so ancient, large and high, we felt that it might reveal species that are effectively living relics from an earlier stage of New Guinea’s development.

  Goodenough’s mammals had been investigated on just two previous occasions. In 1896–97 the redoubtable Albert Meek had spent a few weeks there, but he’d had a terrible time of it. He desperately wanted to ascend the peak that dominates the island, but hostile locals prevented him. In that understated way that is so typical of nineteenth-century explorers, he wrote that:

  On the way up the mountain, going through the garden of a village, I encountered a native who threatened me with a stone axe and tried to turn me back. I kept going steadily forward though he brandished the axe in my face. He came so close that I feared one time that I would have to shoot him.5

  Such hostility ensured that the peak remained terra incognita, and almost sixty years would pass before another mammalogist would attempt the climb. In 1953 the Fourth Archbold Expedition landed on the island and spent a month there. The Archbold Expeditions—which ran from 1933 until 1964—were tremendous affairs involving dozens of people, mostly researchers from the American Museum of Natural History, who could be away from home for up to eighteen months at a stretch. Financed by the millionaire philanthropist Richard Archbold, who participated in the heroic expeditions in the 1930s, they represented the most concerted effort ever to document the fauna and flora of Melanesia. Often using seaplanes, the early expeditions specialised in penetrating unknown territory, making first contact with tribal people, and discovering dozens of new species of birds, mammals, reptiles and plants.

  The 1953 expedition was a sedate affair compared with its predecessors. It visited regions made newly accessible by the frenzy of airstrip construction that accompanied World War II. After collecting in the lowlands of Goodenough, the mammalogist on the expedition, Hobart Van Deusen, ascended the mountain and camped for around two weeks on a forest ridge-top at 1600 metres elevation. In the official expedition report he noted that:

  Results in the mammal department would have been very poor, but for the success of a Garuwata man named Vilaubala who, with a small boy as helper, spent 11 days with us and hunted in the forest with dogs. Secured only this way were a small black wallaby … a black-headed bandicoot and Dobsonia [a fruit bat].6

  The wallaby caught by Vilaubala was like nothing known from anywhere else, and Van Deusen named it Dorcopsis atrata, the black gazelle-headed wallaby. Five-million-year-old fossils of similar creatures have been found near Waikerie in South Australia, but today gazelle-headed wallabies survive elsewhere only in the lowlands of New Guinea. So why was this species found only in the mountain forests of Goodenough? It seems likely that vast geological movements stranded its ancestors there when the island separated from the mainland millions of years ago. Perhaps, we speculated, Goodenough’s mountain forests were a relic of the original habitat of the genus. This was enough incentive for a visit. But we also had secret hopes. If such a large and mysterious creature could remain hidden on Goodenough Island until 1953, what else might lurk there?

  A year or two previously I had travelled to New York to examine Van Deusen’s specimens, which are all housed in the American Museum of Natural History. It’s an extraordinary institution, holding what is arguably the world’s largest collection of biological specimens. At the time of my visit, travelling scholars were given extraordinary freedom. I was even given my own key to the collections so that I could co
me and go as I pleased—a welcome change from the strict regimens of European museums. Moreover, the mammal collection was splendidly curated and laid out, making it easy to find and examine the specimens. I soon realised, however, that no tissues suitable for DNA analysis or skeletons of the wallaby had been collected by Van Deusen. And, extraordinarily, the collection did not include a single female. This meant that nothing at all was known of the species’ reproduction. More collecting was essential if fundamental questions were to be answered.

  The opportunity to visit New York had come about in an unusual way. A man who worked in a jewellery store in Manhattan had read of my work in a newspaper and posted me a cheque for $1500 to help. I decided to use some of this generous donation to go to New York, and wrote saying that I’d like to thank my benefactor in person. It turned out that his name was Eric Fruhstorfer, and he worked at Van Cleef & Arpels. He mentioned that the store was holding a party during my visit, and that I was welcome to come along. An extremely tight budget saw me staying at the YMCA, in a tiny, stiflingly hot room that stank of stale urine. Knowing that appearances counted, I carefully conserved my sole respectable shirt for the night of the party, but alas discovered that I’d forgotten to pack any trousers other than blue jeans.