Among the Islands

by Tim Flannery

  Agevagu had brought his wife and some other women along with him, providing some welcome female company for Tish, as well as a little local culinary expertise. They cooked the wallaby meat, wrapped in leaves and spiced with mountain herbs and fiddle-heads of ferns, in traditional stone ovens. At first I was uncomfortable eating the meat of such a rare creature. But our provisions were precariously low, and it was so delicious that I quickly set all qualms aside. Although we could have used its meat, we preserved one wallaby whole in formaldehyde. It is the only specimen of its kind in the world and, nearly a quarter of a century after we collected it, it yielded a remarkable secret. In 2010 researchers published a report on their examination of some of its stomach contents. Viewed under the microscope, the stomach contents were seen to contain the spores of a diversity of fungi, including truffles. Evidently the black gazelle-faced wallaby digs up and consumes these fungi, so spreading their spores throughout the forest. Truffles and other fungi are important parts of the forest ecosystem, without which much biodiversity cannot survive. So the wallabies are vital to the forest’s health.

  While camped at Boitutudiadobodobona we encountered other strange creatures. One, a bandicoot of which we obtained just a single specimen, eludes identification to this day. Because Kiriwina was joined to Goodenough 20,000 years ago when sea levels were lower, I had hoped to find Echymipera davidi there. It, however, appeared to be absent, being replaced on the mountain by a bandicoot species that differed in size, colour and dentition. I had not found the time to describe and name this species before moving on from the Australian Museum. Perhaps I’m destined to play Troughton to some as yet unborn mammalogist, who will be inspired by the creature I collected to visit Goodenough Island or search the world’s museums for more samples so that it can be properly described.

  More common in the mountain forests was a reddish-grey tree-dwelling rodent known as Forbes’s tree-mouse. They are fluffy-furred creatures that spend their days sleeping in densely packed family groups in tree-hollows high in the canopy, and sally forth at night to eat fruit, buds and leaves. The entrances to their nests are difficult to detect, and it was only with the assistance of the sharp-eyed local boys that I saw them. Sometimes the hollows are made in the vertical trunk of a vigorous young forest tree. The rodents somehow gnaw their way into the sheer trunk, leaving only a tiny entrance. Inside, the hollow widens quickly into a large cavity which is packed with leaves, moss and other bedding and which is soaking wet—something the tree-mice are clearly inured to.

  These rodents have an interesting family structure. We invariably found the nest-hollow to be occupied by a pair, which was sometimes accompanied by what looked to be two generations of young, the older of which was adult-sized. The tree-mice never attempted to bite, and it may be that these gentlest of rodents form lasting pair bonds and strong family ties, allowing offspring to remain with their parents into adulthood.

  As the days went on the chronic lack of food at the boulder camp was forcing us to become inventive. One evening a youth proudly carried a hornbill into camp. Normally hunted for their spectacular beaks, which are used as body ornaments, the hornbill is a tough old fowl at the best of times. Tish, however, offered to try to turn it into hornbill-a-leekie soup. Perhaps it was testimony to our starving state, but Lester and I still remember Tish’s creation as the best soup we had ever dented a tooth on!

  Towards the end of our stay, when our rations had completely run out, Lester and I were astonished to see Tish produce a tin from the depths of her pack. It was haggis, and Tish said that it was an early St Andrew’s Day present. Despite having reservations about the Scots national dish, we scoffed it down. But finally, sheer hunger forced a retreat from boulder camp. We were all very sorry to go, for we had made the place comfortable and we would have liked more time to survey the fauna of Goodenough’s high forest.

  When we arrived back in the lowlands we found a tense and unhappy situation. Hunger and the seemingly endless drought were fraying everyone’s nerves, but now a grave social upset had added a volatile element to the mix, the evidence of which assaulted our noses the moment we entered the village. The night before our departure for the mountain a man had died. Now, over a week later, a platform had been erected on the edge of the village, atop which lay the bloated corpse. Placing the deceased on such a burial platform is part of the traditional funerary practices in the area, but the body is supposed to be buried before it becomes offensive. In this case the deceased was a senior and respected man, but nevertheless he remained unburied due to a deep disgrace in his family. The councillor explained that the deceased’s eldest son had failed to turn up for the funeral, and without him the burial could not take place.

  The son had been sent to Port Moresby some months earlier, entrusted with the community’s savings to buy a new fishing boat. The villagers had waited and waited, but neither man, money nor boat had ever shown up. The stress and disgrace of being related to such a notorious thief had driven one of his brothers insane, and his daughter had become very ill—perhaps, it was said, due to sanguma (witchcraft) wrought by a vengeful neighbour. Then, to top off the family’s misfortune, the father had died.

  We boarded the aircraft that was to take us back to Alotau with the smell of decay heavy in the air. The corpse was being kept above ground in an attempt to force the prodigal son to return to the village. In this test of wills being played out around the corpse I wondered who would buckle first. Just as we were leaving, there had been a move by part of the community to bury the corpse. It had been frustrated, however, and the man who waved us off predicted that fighting would erupt as a consequence. ‘Like sitting on a powder-keg’ was how I described, in my diary, the tension I felt while awaiting the flight.

  Arriving back at the Australian Museum we had enough materials to write descriptions of the mammal faunas of the islands we had visited. This would provide useful information for the conservation of the species that occurred there. But our ambitions were greater than that. If we were to understand the patterns of zoogeography that prevailed in the region, we would need to visit many, many more islands. Planning for those expeditions occupied much of my time in the following year.

  CHAPTER 5

  Island of Lepers

  The Sunbird had proved an ideal platform for island research, and the following year she set sail again from Cairns, this time as part of a far more ambitious research program. She would cruise as far north as the west coast of New Britain, dropping scientists on Normanby Island in the D’Entrecasteaux Group, and Sideia Island near Samarai, on the way. That way we could cover four islands in a single field season. Regrettably, I had other fieldwork commitments, and so command of the complicated expedition was left to Tish Ennis, who was now a highly competent field biologist and expedition organiser. She set out with Lester Seri, who had flown from Port Moresby to Alotau to join the researchers coming from Sydney.

  The idea was to drop an experienced researcher, or a small team, on each island as the Sunbird travelled north, and to pick them up on the return journey. George Hangay, the Australian Museum’s taxidermist and an experienced field collector, was to disembark on Sideia Island, which lies just east of Samarai. We could find no records at all of any mammal collected on Sideia, yet in terms of zoogeography it was a very significant place. At just eighty-nine square kilometres it lies immediately east of the New Guinea mainland, which it was almost certainly part of when sea levels were lower 20,000 years ago. Back then it must have supported all the mammal species found in the lowlands of New Guinea. The question I wanted to answer was how well various species had fared. Had any, for example, become extinct as a result of their isolation on such a small landmass? Such studies are central to the science of zoogeography. They are particularly useful for designing national parks and reserves, which in effect become islands in a sea of land modified by humans. If the parks or islands are too small, such studies show that it’s unlikely that certain species can survive. But how big does
a patch of New Guinean rainforest have to be to preserve its fauna? Sideia might just help us answer that question.

  As many of the specimens in the mammal section require the attention of a taxidermist, I worked closely with George Hangay. I’d developed a great respect for his abilities, as well as a fondness for the man himself. George told me that he’d been stuffing things ever since a passion for the art came to him at age twelve. A Hungarian by birth, he’d travelled widely as a biological collector, having made trips to the New Guinea highlands, Borneo and other places. With a strong, muscular physique, a dense black beard, hooked nose and dark, deep-set eyes that glowed like coals, George cut an impressive figure. I recall one evening dropping by and peering through an antique window while he was at work. There he stood in his dimly-lit workspace—which was cluttered with bones, models of organs and fabricated dinosaur heads—wearing an apron and perched over a steaming vat containing the skeleton of some large creature. His assistant was peering respectfully into the mixture. For a moment they looked for all the world like a pair of warlocks intent on concocting some fearsome brew.

  Life at the museum was not always smooth sailing for George. He took on a number of after-hours jobs that some people in the museum frowned on, despite the fact that they were done at no cost to the institution. He was once commissioned to make a full body cast of a woman. She was in her thirties, and wanted her shape immortalised while at its peak. But it was the little jobs that proved most troublesome. One day an old lady arrived at the museum door in tears, asking to see the taxidermist. Her pet budgie Cyril, who was her sole companion, had died, and she carried the corpse in her handbag. ‘Could the museum have it stuffed?’ she asked. George was notoriously soft-hearted, and he agreed to do the job at a minimal cost. It was the beginning of a long weekend, and in his rush to get home George left Cyril on the taxidermy bench, rather than in the freezer. When he returned to work on the next Tuesday, the corpse was completely rotten.

  In the thick of a busy week George pushed this seemingly small misfortune to the back of his mind. But then the old lady returned. Playing for time, George explained that the job of stuffing such a tiny creature was turning out to be rather complex and difficult. Not impressed, and perhaps sensing his evasion, the woman threatened to speak to the museum director. George was horrified. What if the director thought he was using museum materials for his own gain? That afternoon he scoured pet shop after pet shop for a budgie that looked like Cyril. But Cyril had a rather unique pattern of feathers, and George could find none resembling him.

  When the phone next rang and George heard it was the old lady waiting at the front desk for him, he burst into a sweat. Walking slowly to meet her, he had no idea what to say. He had almost decided to tell the truth and face the consequences, when a flash of inspiration came to him. With a downcast look he said that as he was skinning the poor demised creature, he had noticed certain signs of ill health. Concerned that whatever had killed the bird might be infectious, he had called the quarantine service, and to his horror the officer had confirmed that Cyril had died of the plague! Despite George’s protests, the quarantine officer had taken little corpse away to be incinerated at a special facility. Feeling rather guilty later, he made a small wooden coffin and placed some ashes from his barbecue in it. These he gave to the old lady.

  Next to taxidermy and beetles (a group he is a world authority in), George’s greatest passion was wrestling. Not the Olympic type enjoyed by Greg Mengden, but the glitzy, televised, world-championship style. Indeed, George was so enthusiastic about it that he had purchased his own wrestling ring, which he would set up in outer-suburban shopping malls. Then, he would emerge as ‘gory George’, a baddie wrestler, and would tangle with his friend and fellow wrestler, Attila, a bodybuilder. As George explained it, the only problem was that Attila was the timidest person you could find. His nerves were so bad that he occasionally threw up in the ring, which was particularly unfortunate because he habitually swallowed twenty to twenty-five raw eggs, sometimes more than once a day, in order to maintain muscle mass.

  Sideia Island appeared to be the perfect place for George—a tropical paradise in which both beetles and mammals abounded. We all expected him to return relaxed and happy, with notebooks full of biological insights. But when, after several weeks, the Sunbird called in on its return journey to pick him up, George was nowhere to be found. I was by this time back at the museum, where I received a phone call from a deeply worried Tish, reporting that George had vanished and that nobody on Sideia seemed to know what had become of him. For several days I feared the worst, and was plagued by dreams that George had been devoured by crocodiles or abducted by raskols. To our great relief, however, he turned up at the Australian Museum a day or two later, well in advance of the Sunbird. Over a cup of tea he handed me his notebooks, which were meticulously kept and full of important information, and told me what had happened.

  Initially he was delighted by Sideia, and had set up camp a little distance from the main settlement. Over a week or so he collected evidence that eleven species of mammals were native to the island, of which six were bats. He was also able to determine through interviews with islanders that several mainland species were unknown there. I was delighted that he had completed a reasonably thorough survey of the island, as we could now estimate the extinction rate of mammals since Sideia’s isolation. Even at first glance, I could tell from George’s data that the rate must have been high, for an equivalent survey on the adjacent New Guinea mainland would have yielded twice or three times the number of species. George too, was happy, as the limited mammal fauna gave him time to pursue his own interests, such as collecting beetles and, I was surprised to learn, preserving hundreds of the enormous cane toads that roamed the island.

  While on Sideia, George told me that he had dined like a king. Each evening a woman from the village would bring him delicious cooked mud crabs that she would break up with her own hands to save him the trouble. Despite the idyllic setting and delicious food, George’s field notes reveal that even at this stage he was not enjoying complete tranquility of mind. ‘This is not a healthy place,’ he had written, perhaps in response to the large number of islanders who seemed to be suffering afflictions of the skin and limbs. Even his cook was missing a few fingers, but then that’s a common sight in New Guinea, where women often cut off digits as part of the mourning ritual for close relatives. But she was, he had assured himself, exemplary in her cleanliness.

  Perhaps it was the crabs, but something was having an ill-effect on George’s constitution. The villagers told him that a clinic was held each Sunday morning at a mission nearby, so he went there in search of a treatment. To his astonishment he discovered half the island’s population lined up in front of a table set up outside the clinic doors. On the table sat a large glass jar, full of pills labelled ‘lerpesy’. ‘What is this lerpesy?’ George wondered aloud as he sought something to settle his tummy. Then he remembered his cook, with her friendly smile and stumps of fingers, cracking open the mud crab claws by the light of his camp fire. With dawning horror George realised Sideia was a leper colony. He had been living for weeks, unaware, among lepers!

  A small insight into the discomfort the discovery caused can be found in George’s notebook: ‘The leper colony has been closed down and the lepers disbanded everywhere. One should be careful staying in the villages and accepting local food.’ He feared, he confessed to me, that he might already have contracted the dreaded illness. Whatever the case, he felt that there was not a moment to lose. So he packed up his materials and collections there and then, and hired a canoe to carry him to the nearest island—anywhere but Sideia.

  Then, in the midst of all this activity, George found that he urgently needed to ‘spend a penny’. The only toilet in the vicinity was a tiny wooden cubicle perched precariously atop sticks in a mangrove swamp at the end of a long, rickety and perilous walkway. Perhaps George was thinking again of the mud crabs as he strode along the walkway to
wards the box. Whatever the case, he wasn’t paying attention to the rotten boards, for when he had almost reached his easement he heard an awful crack. The frail wooden structure, which was never built to support the weight of a wrestler, was giving way, and George found himself plunging from a great height into a stinking mass of mangrove mud and human faeces. As he put it to me, ‘I vas plunged into de lepers’ toilet up to de neck, and had to be pulled vid a rope through de stinking mess in order to reach solid ground!’

  This final exposure to the awful leprosy bacterium was just too much for our intrepid collector. He set out, still somewhat bespattered and in an excited state of mind, and almost immediately found himself in further trouble. To make matters worse, he had encountered some nasty ants earlier in the day, some of which had entered his ear. He sprayed Mortein into the orifice, but obviously not quite enough because, he told me, ‘One of the bloody things came alive in the middle of the passage between the two islands.’

  The currents in China Strait are strong and George’s canoe was overloaded. As hard as he rowed with his one paddle, he failed to make headway. In fact he found himself being carried by currents away from Samarai, and with darkness rapidly falling he was beginning to despair. For hours he was at the mercy of the tides, but towards midnight they slackened, and he saw a tiny light in the distance. He decided to paddle towards it, and soon realised that it was the glow of a cigarette. Someone was enjoying a solitary fag on a beach on an island adjacent to Sideia, and it was this that saved George from his nightmare. But it was not quite over. He stepped out of the canoe right onto a huge saltwater crocodile, and as he leapt back into the canoe he nearly capsized it, much to the entertainment of the local on shore. After resting, he found his way to Port Moresby and thence by air to Sydney.