by Tim Flannery
Because it’s difficult to get to many islands I was happy to collect samples of birds or reptiles if requested by my colleagues at the museum. A number of bird species are unique to Manus, and the curator of birds at the Australian Museum was particularly keen to get DNA samples of the Manus friarbird. I was delighted one afternoon to see one fly into a mist-net we had set up within sight of the research station. I got up to search for a phial with which to take a blood sample, but Lester beat me to the bird. He shot out of his chair like a rocket, rushed to the net and released the creature before I could sample it. The species was, he said, regarded as very special by the local people, and we should not interfere with it. Lester is a university-educated biologist, but he is also a Melanesian. He has his own totem bird—the Papuan crow—which he refuses to harm in any way. His guidance in such matters was invaluable, helping me to avoid many difficult social situations.
Our stopover on Manus was too brief for a full survey, so I was delighted that it had yielded a new species: the large, red, tree-climbing rat, Melomys matambuai. There wasn’t time, however, to track down the ground-dwelling rat species known to the local people for its white-tipped tail. At first I thought it might have been the water rat, which is found on many islands. But in this I was proved wrong: soon after my visit, jawbones, possibly belonging to this species, turned up in five-thousand-year-old archaeological layers on the island. They tell of the existence of a formidable, hitherto unknown rat with a powerful bite.
There was no way to know whether it was the species the islanders talked about inhabiting the forests today. But then a student from an American university, who was visiting Manus in the 1990s, collected a skeleton of a recently dead rat whose jaws matched those in the archaeological deposits. To this day the species remains undescribed, and no biologist knows what the creature looks like in the flesh. That such an impressive rat, which should be relatively easy to find, remains unknown to science and unnamed in the early twenty-first century illustrates how much we have still to learn about the mammals of the Pacific Islands.
Surveying for large, ground-dwelling rats like the mysterious species of Manus often necessitates the use of conventional rat-traps. They’re lighter and easier to carry than the box traps I preferred that trap creatures alive. Conventional rat-traps, in contrast, kill any creature that enters them. Their other disadvantage is that they quickly disappeared from our trap lines, the local people finding them highly useful to control rats in their homes. Despite this we usually carried a few hundred, giving away any that we had with us at the end of a trip.
Because we used so many traps I had wanted to buy them in bulk from the manufacturer. The only local maker was the Supreme Rat Trap Company in Mascot, a Sydney suburb. I decided to make a visit, and was surprised by what I saw. The premises was a Depression-Era tin shed near the airport, and as I entered through a creaky door, it looked as if nothing had changed in sixty years. A glass case served as a counter, in which were displayed hundreds of rat-traps of various makes and models, and a sign saying, usefully, ‘rat-trap museum’. Clearly, rat-traps, and the inventiveness behind them, were taken seriously here.
Behind the counter sat a man who bore a faint resemblance to the British comedian Benny Hill. ‘How can I help you,’ he said softly. As I explained what I wanted, I noticed that most of the shed was taken up with an extraordinary Heath Robinson type of machine made up of bicycle wheels, belts and seemingly endless coils of wire. In one end went wood, flat metal and wire, and as it clacked away from the other end emerged rat-traps. A counter above recorded the number produced. As I watched it turned over, with a precise click, from 23,735,491 to 23,735,492.
Astonishment must have showed on my face, for the man explained with some pride that the machine had been running since 1931, and had supported three generations of his family. It was built by his father, who took literally the saying that if you could invent a better rat-trap you’d make a fortune.
As he showed me around I noticed an old man sitting in front of an electric heater at the back of the shed, a blanket over his knees. His eyes were fixed on the machine’s counter, and as he watched it record the total number of rat-traps made, a young girl brought him a cup of tea. ‘That’s my father, the inventor,’ the man said, ‘and my daughter.’
The Supreme Rat Trap Company is long gone, and the area where it was located has been redeveloped. It’s hard to know, sometimes, what’s changing faster: my own culture, or the cultures and fauna of the Pacific Islands.
CHAPTER 7
New Ireland, and Travelling in Time
After bidding farewell to our new friends on Manus, it was only a brief flight to Kavieng, the capital of New Ireland in the Bismarck Archipelago. At around 7000 square kilometres, New Ireland is a substantial landmass, but it is nonetheless dwarfed by its southern neighbour, New Britain—which, at 35,000 square kilometres, is one of the largest islands in the Pacific. Prior to our work, the mammal fauna of these islands was believed to be similar, for many old museum specimens were simply labelled ‘Bismarck Archipelago’ and could have come from either place. But geological studies of the islands revealed that they have had rather different geological histories. They were never joined by a land bridge during the ice ages, which should mean at least some difference in fauna. Tish had previously sampled giant rats and bandicoots of New Britain. Could they be found on New Ireland? And did New Ireland shelter unique species not found on New Britain?
At about 360 kilometres long, New Ireland is shaped somewhat like a club. Its end terminates in the wild mountains of the Hans Meyer Range of the southeast. Near the handle’s tip, at the opposite end of the island, perches the sleepy town of Kavieng, the provincial capital and old headquarters of the German administration of the region. In the town’s sandy graveyard stands the imposing tombstone of Franz Bulominski, the most vigorous of the German administrators. He has been described as having an ‘iron hand … fiery eye, awful presence and ruthless energy.’7 You get a sense of the German colonists from historic photographs. Moustachioed Teutons clad in immaculate white suits lounge under immense figs or in crisp tropical interiors, peering at the camera through their monocles.
Judging from their legacy they do seem to have been diligent if stern administrators, and their ways doubtless left a deep imprint on the people of New Ireland. In Kavieng the colonial administrators created a model colonial German town, evidence of which remains to this day. One relic of the era is the Kavieng Club. With its dress rules, kitted-out dusky waiters and clubbish atmosphere, entering it felt like stepping back in time. We enjoyed more than one gin-and-tonic there.
Leading eastward out of the town is Bulominski’s master-work—the Bulominski Highway. It winds through coconut plantations and past seaside villages on its way southeast, connecting the scattered communities along New Ireland’s northern shores. In 1988 I found myself travelling down that highway in the company of Lester Seri, Tish Ennis, Peter White and his student Tom Heinsohn. Tom was a handsome young giant, and as we slowed to pass through villages, young women would sometimes call out ‘saizo’. The cry really is a question, deriving from the English ‘size-o?’, and meaning something like ‘do you fit me? ’.
Even for us less physically attractive types the journey had its charms. As we wound through traditional villages and past magnificent white beaches, we encountered old plantation houses—some still operating, but most derelict relics of a colonial past. The most intriguing sight was an old house perched atop a cliff, beside which was a capacious garage full of Jaguar cars of varying vintages, all slowly rusting away in the sea air. The owner seemed to have purchased a new model every few years, and then left its predecessors languishing among the coconuts, before finally abandoning his enterprise.
Our centre of operations was to be Madina village, a rather modern-looking settlement by the sea, whose chief attraction, for us at least, was Balof Cave, where Peter was carrying out his excavations. Balof was a huge, natural cathedral, lit by
sunlight from above, and with a dry floor. It was located in limestone cliffs just behind the settlement, and since time immemorial has made an excellent campsite. Although the villagers no longer used it, they had taken refuge there as recently as World War II, and there were vestiges, including empty food tins, of that occupation. Just a few centimetres under the dusty cave floor, however, were clues about the lives of far earlier tenants.
To the astonishment of archaeologists, Peter had discovered that people had been using the cave for at least 30,000 years. The island those first settlers lived in was, however, very different from the New Ireland of today. Back then, Balof Cave stood on a ridge more than a hundred metres above the sea, whereas today it is almost at sea level as the sea has risen since the last ice age. As we found while examining the bones Peter had dug up, the fauna of the island was very different too. It was, however, only with patient sorting and identification back in the lab that the full story emerged.
In the lowest levels in Balof, Peter unearthed a layer of mustard-coloured clay containing no evidence of humans and just a few scattered animal bones. This had been laid down more than 33,000 years ago—before people had arrived on New Ireland, and the bones of the animals it entombed had been either washed in, or carried into the cave by predators, such as owls. Apart from bats and birds, the fauna represented in it was meagre indeed, for it seems that just two kinds of rats—one of which had never been described and was now extinct—were the only land mammals present on the island. This astonished me, for New Ireland is a vast landmass with the potential to support a much more diverse mammal fauna. It was our first indication that New Ireland might have a very different faunal history from neighbouring New Britain.
The discovery made us wonder where all of the other mammals that we encountered on the island—such as wallabies, possums and rats—had come from. The answer came from the higher levels in Balof, for those layers were composed largely of the debris discarded by prehistoric hunters who had camped and cooked in the cave. At levels dating to around 10,000 years ago the bones of the common cuscus first appeared, indicating that the species had arrived, most likely carried by humans, from nearby New Britain. This amazed us, for it represented the earliest example, anywhere in the world, of humans deliberately translocating fauna. To judge from the thousands of jaw bones present, the cuscus established itself quickly, and must have been a godsend to those stone-age hunters.
Balof also preserves a record of plant pollen, and it suggests a downside to the introduction. At around the time the cuscus became abundant, a great disturbance of the forest canopy took place, allowing understorey plants to grow, their pollen thus increasing in the sediment. Peter initially thought that this might mark the onset of agriculture, and the felling of the primary forest by people with stone axes. But I suspect that New Ireland suffered from the introduction of a possum much as New Zealand is suffering today. In New Zealand, Australia’s brushtail possum, which was introduced in the nineteenth century, was the culprit, killing entire forests and letting the understorey plants grow.
Peter’s excavation revealed that around 8000 years ago the New Irelanders made a second addition to their living larder—a wallaby known as the dusky pademelon. It offered a large packet of meat, and it must have come from even further afield than New Britain, most likely from the mainland of New Guinea. Anyone who has nurtured a joey will know how easy it is to tame them. But even so, keeping a wallaby alive in an open canoe on such a lengthy sea voyage would have been a considerable achievement. Sadly, wallabies have been exterminated in the Balof area by overhunting, but the oldest island residents remember that half a century earlier the wallabies abounded.
In levels dating to the last 3000 years, Peter discovered evidence that a whole swathe of species was introduced to New Ireland—including dogs, pigs, and two kinds of rats. One, the appositely named large spiny rat of New Guinea, probably drove one of New Ireland’s two original rat species to extinction. All of these creatures arrived with a new people. Known as the Lapita Culture, they are most likely the ancestors of the Polynesians. They had originated in Taiwan, and after sweeping through Melanesia went on to colonise the entire Pacific.
There was one species, however, that was abundant in the forests of northern New Ireland, but was strikingly absent from the cave sediments—the spotted cuscus. In order to uncover its history, we needed to consult one of the oldest residents of Madina village. Sanila Talevat was in his eighties when we met him. He was short, stocky and always smiling. With intensely black skin and a scarlet-stained mouth from a lifetime of chewing buai (betel nut), he cut a striking figure. But what you noticed first about him was a splendid pair of snowy-white sideburns. They were real mutton chops, the likes of which I’d only seen in nineteenth-century photographs of self-satisfied European gentlemen. As a child Sanila had attended a primary school run by the Germans, and perhaps he’d received his preference for facial hair straight from the Fatherland. He could certainly shout raus, along with a few other phrases of German, as authentically as any Teuton.
Sanila had served with distinction as premier of New Ireland before retiring to his village. As the owner of Balof Cave he had welcomed Peter and his team to the area. In his retirement he was assisting young Papua New Guineans who had run into trouble with the law. Among those we met during our stay was a murderer, newly released from Bomana Prison, who was from a remote village in Chimbu Province. He’d been jailed for his part in a traditional revenge killing. Such killings are considered an honour rather than a crime in his society, and the youth would have had little choice about participating. Sanila had somehow met him and, seeing the good in him, had given him a new start in life. Despite being locked away for a decade in a notorious prison, under Sanila’s tuition the young man was flourishing. I was deeply humbled by Sanila’s sense of humanity and his disproportionately high contribution to the world.
When we asked Sanila about New Ireland’s spotted cuscus, his answer was precise. The creatures were, he said, descended from a pair or two that had been brought to Kavieng from Mussau Island in 1929 by a New Irelander employed by the police department. They had escaped when their cage was upset one night and had vanished into the jungle. By 1998 the population had extended its range to about ten kilometres south of Kavieng, and their distribution continues to expand.
Sanila also told us how cane toads arrived on New Ireland. They were brought by a health officer, Mr Levi Matarai, in 1938 or 1939. In Sanila’s experience, the numbers of both snakes and mosquitoes declined substantially as the toads became established. Most Australasian snakes are highly sensitive to toad toxin and often don’t survive attempts to eat young toads, so I wasn’t surprised to learn about their decline. But I’d never heard about toads leading to a reduction in mosquitoes. Perhaps the tadpoles fed on the mosquito larvae. Whatever the case, Sanila considered the toads a blessing.
These stories brought me a great sense of the continuity of the human traditions of New Ireland. The first settlers had arrived on an island of unfulfilled potential. It might have been an enormous landmass, but it had arisen out of the sea relatively recently and was remote. Chance rafting and drifting had brought it just two kinds of land mammals—both rats of modest size. Over the millennia the islanders had introduced one species after another, until the island was a well-stocked larder for hunters. Because there were so few native species in the first place, the disturbance (except possibly to the bird fauna, whose history remains poorly known) caused by the introductions was minimal. I was learning that not all islands are equal in terms of their biodiversity or history.
In order to identify the bones Peter was excavating from Balof Cave, I needed to collect samples of the modern island fauna. The most common mammals on New Ireland today are bats, and many bat bones were being unearthed in Balof. But conditions in the shelter must have changed over the years, for we saw very few bats there during our stay. This meant that we had to seek out other caves, which might still harbour specie
s like the ones whose bones were being excavated in Balof, in order to collect our samples. Such caves, it turned out, were widely scattered, and we had to travel as far as the Lelet Plateau, around a hundred kilometres south of Medina, to obtain a good variety of bats. This plateau, which lies at around 1000 metres elevation, is riddled with caves, and Lester and I split up to scout them out. My caves were all pretty tame—being easy of access and with few or no bats. But Lester had a very different experience. When we met up he told me that he had entered a cave that was shaped like a funnel. Once inside, he found himself on a very slippery, steep slope heading swiftly towards the centre of the earth like Alice in Wonderland. He had only stopped himself from falling further by hanging on to a passing stalagmite.
I had an unpleasant experience of my own in a prodigious cave located in the hills a few kilometres east of Madina. It contained so many bats that a man could go deaf with the noise of their cries and flapping about, and the stench was awful. I had set out with Sanila’s adopted son. He led me to a huge cavity in an abrupt limestone face. From it, a tunnel led to a steamy chamber the size of a cathedral and there, just as Sanila had described, roosted an immense colony of bats. There must have been tens of thousands of them. It seemed they were all common bare-backed fruit bats, adequate samples of which we had already collected. But in the distant torchlight on the rear wall of the cave, I could see a few smaller ones fluttering. The trouble was that in order to get to them I would have to pass through the fruit bat colony, whose screeching and flapping made the place insufferable enough. But it was the ten-metre-high pile of bat faeces that constituted their toilet that had me thinking twice about going further. The cauldron of filth had overflowed into a pool on the cave floor, and the stench was about all I could bear. Even from a distance I could see that the pile was heaving and writhing with a multitudinous army of maggots, beetles and other shit-loving creatures working across its surface.