Among the Islands

by Tim Flannery

  When I returned to the Solomon Islands in 1987 I was intent on taking up the challenge, but fate waylaid me. I’d been lucky enough to meet up with an Australian photographer, Mike McCoy, who was married to a woman from Malaita and knew the Solomons intimately. Indeed he was a bit of a celebrity among the islanders, having produced many of the iconic postcards sold in local shops. Over the years Mike and I were to have a lot of fun together. When I explained that I wanted to climb the mountains, he said that a great deal of planning would be required, and that while he put feelers out we could fill in time exploring places closer to Honiara. The first place he led me to was the Gumburota Caves behind Honiara, where there might be bats. The caves had been the scene of heavy fighting during the war, and Mike had recently found a thigh bone in the bush there. It was from a very tall person—probably an American soldier—and it had a sword cut passing almost through it. As we stood before the caves I could imagine the tall G.I. standing where we now stood while a Japanese officer rushed suicidally out of the darkness, raised samurai sword in hand. The American, who must have been alone, had probably bled to death in the bush. For half a century he must have been missing in action, his family having had no idea of what happened to him. The tragedy of a war whose wreckage I had seen everywhere in Melanesia suddenly became very real to me.

  The Gumburota Caves on the Kehove River near Honiara are deep and wet, with a rivulet running right through them, and they are full of bats. One of the many shapes I saw flitting through the torchlight was that of just about the largest insect-eating bat I’d ever seen. We strung a mist-net across the cave and it quickly snared what turned out to be a Solomons giant horseshoe-bat. It’s the largest insect-eating bat in all of Melanesia—and is found only on islands of the central and northern Solomons.

  The horseshoe in its name refers to a fleshy growth that dominates the face. Roughly horseshoe-shaped and made up of three layers of ‘leaflets’ that help to capture and interpret the soundwaves that the animal uses to navigate and find its prey, it looks like a fleshy flower and it dominates the face. The wingspan of these magnificent bats approaches sixty centimetres, and they can weigh almost eighty grams. With truly formidable teeth and jaws giant horseshoe bats are capable of crunching the largest and toughest of beetles. Yet the one I drew out of the net was a gentle creature that was not inclined to bite me at all as I measured and photographed it. Later surveys revealed that it was a rare species indeed, and one that is possibly declining due to deforestation and other human impacts. Sadly, I would never again encounter as large a colony (consisting of a few dozen individuals) as I saw that day.

  You never know what you are going to bump into in caves, and as I made my way back to the entrance I was surprised by the sound of something striking the cave wall beside me. Flashing my torch around I saw an enormous frog, its eyes reflecting in the beam. Known as Discodeles guppyi, this Solomons speciality is the size of a soup bowl and has eyes larger than marbles. The largest frog in all of Australasia, it’s a striking example of island gigantism, and it provides an ample meal to villagers wherever it occurs.

  On that trip I was to see other strange reptiles, including frogs that looked like brown leaves that had fallen from rainforest trees and a sinister-looking creature known as the giant crocodile skink. These weird lizards had been collected by Mike in the Shortland Islands—the very northernmost islands in the political entity that is the Solomon Islands. Black, and around twenty-five centimetres long, they were covered in knobbly, crocodile-like scales, and the skin surrounding the eyes was blood red. Their jaws looked powerful, and Mike said that they could give a nasty bite.

  As interesting as they were, the crocodile skinks and the frogs and bats of the Gumburota Caves were a sideshow. It was the giant rats that I was here for, and I was determined to search those fabled mountain forests where they might still reside. Mike suggested that the easiest way in was to follow the road up to Gold Ridge, where there was a mining camp. Located at 600 metres elevation behind Honiara, it seemed like it would be a simple matter to ascend the peak from there. But the goldmine has brought great social disruption to the mountain people, as well as a greed that, from what I heard, sometimes rivalled that of the old would-be conquistador Mendaña himself.

  The track to the mine winds up deforested ridges until you reach the cool of the middle elevations where the operation is located. People from all over the mountains were beginning to congregate there, and a messy squatter camp, with all its attendant social problems, was beginning to form. We pulled the car up near some huts and tried to locate the head of the local village council. But we had hardly begun speaking before a large, overweight and dishevelled man emerged from a hut. With bloodshot eyes and bandages on his legs and arms, he looked as if he’d had a big night. Clearly unhappy with our visit, he explained that he owned all the land above the camp, then vehemently refused us permission to go any further unless we paid him $2000. This was a large sum of money for us—indeed it would bankrupt my grant—so we asked if we could just cross his land for a lesser sum. Louring and clenching his fists like he wanted to punch me on the nose, he angrily refused. In the Solomons, local landowners reign supreme, and in the face of such hostility there was nothing that we could do but return to Honiara and plan again.

  On mature consideration, Mike suggested that we explore elsewhere in the Solomons for the time being, deferring the trip to the mountains until another visit. I reluctantly agreed, while dismally beginning to feel that Woodford’s luck might also be my own. One good thing did seem to come out of the visit, however—in the camp we met a young man called Peter who came from a village called Valearanisi on the far side of the mountains. Known as the weather coast, parts of the region receive in excess of eight metres of rain a year, and they remain about as inaccessible as they were in Woodford’s day. Peter reckoned that if we could just get to Valearanisi our problems would be over. The people were friendly, he assured us, and the place was crawling with giant rats. One old man who lived there was even known as Hue Hue, the local name of the Emperor rat, on account of the vast numbers he had captured.

  Contemplating a visit to the weather coast, I began reading all I could about the place, and what I learned worried me. The region’s reputation for lawlessness was second to none in the southwest Pacific, life there largely being controlled by warlords for whom violence was as much a way of life as it was for Guadalcanal’s warriors of old. Going there to climb Mount Makarakomburu would, I feared, be a bit like stepping back to the days of headhunting and cold-blooded murders.

  If the politics of the region were bad, the logistics of visiting the weather coast were no less daunting. There was no airstrip, and the weather, as its name suggests, is treacherous. Time was needed to plan properly, and I had to acquaint myself more widely with the Solomons and their people before making such a trip. Guided by Mike McCoy, I decided to visit the islands of Makira and Malaita before trying the ascent of Mount Makarakomburu. These islands are located at the eastern end of the main Solomons chain, and both were poorly explored biologically, promising rich harvests of unknown species.

  CHAPTER 10

  Makira’s Mysterious Rat

  The island of Makira, previously known as San Cristobal, is the most far-flung of the larger Solomon Islands. Lying far to the southeast of its nearest neighbours Guadalcanal and Malaita in an immensity of ocean, it’s a rugged, vast and thinly populated realm of limestone, dense jungle and isolated fauna. Despite the distances involved, the ancestors of most of the creatures inhabiting the island must have arrived there from Guadalcanal or Malaita, just as I did on my first visit in 1987.

  Among those lucky founders were a number of birds that would go on to populate Makira with unique and striking species. They must have arrived a million or more years ago, and over time evolution had transformed them. One distinctive endemic is Sclater’s honeyeater, a large honeyeater with brown feathers, a long ivory bill and a pale eye. It has been exceptionally successful
, and is commonly seen, even around villages. Other species unique to the island, however, are rarer and little known. The Makira flying fox and the Makira horseshoe-bat were each known from only a handful of museum specimens, most of which had been collected in the nineteenth century. But there was one other creature that drew me. This one was almost a complete mystery, for nobody knew which island it came from, or even what it looked like. Solomys salamonis is known from a single damaged skull, which had been collected over a century earlier. There were good reasons, for anybody interested in solving the mysteries of its appearance and habitat, to begin their search on Makira.

  Everything we know about this enigmatic rodent we owe to a murder. In 1880 Lieutenant Bower of HMS Sandfly was cruising the Solomon Islands, searching for miscreants on a lawless frontier. Bower had a magnificent physique and a reputation as a first-class front-row forward in the intensely physical game of rugby. Reckless, arrogant and racist, just before his death he was seen swinging a native club vigorously above his head and shouting, ‘I say, you fellows, just think of an Englishman among a crowd of these Johnnies armed with one of these.’12

  Bower was caught, literally, with his pants down—killed while bathing on Ugi Island. His head was added to the islanders’ trophy collection. HMS Cormorant was dispatched to avenge his death, and the Australian Museum’s taxidermist Alexander Morton managed to find a bunk on the vessel. We can only imagine the conditions Morton worked under, but somehow amid the shelling and slaughter he managed to collect a giant rat and to preserve its skull and skin. It was described by an early curator, but lamentably the skin decayed and was eventually discarded. All that remains today is the skull, which is so distinctive that it could not possibly be confused with that of any other rodent.

  But where, precisely, had Morton collected the rat? Was it from Ugi Island in the Nggela Group (near Tulagi), or Uki Ni Masi (also known as Ugi) adjacent to Makira? Nobody knew, but Makira was as good a place as any to start looking, for it was far larger than the other islands and, if the creature was indeed from Uki Ni Masi, it would surely occur on Makira as well. At the time I lacked the finances to mount a large expedition—especially one premised on such slender evidence—so I decided to travel to Makira on the cheap, and alone.

  It’s always an interesting experience to arrive in an unknown village unannounced and unexpected. But on this occasion a stroke of good luck befell me, for sitting next to me on the plane was a man who announced himself as Makira’s Minister for Sport. Before we touched down he’d asked me for a pair of Dunlop Volley sandshoes. When I said I’d post them to him, he agreed to assist me in my work.

  That night I slept on the porch outside the government offices, which consisted of a few bush-material huts, beside the airstrip. The next morning, as I set about making breakfast and arranging my equipment, I was approached by a tall man dressed in an immaculate white shirt, slacks and shoes, holding a clipboard. His manner was polite, though very official. He began by asking to see my passport and collecting permit, the latter having been issued by the Department of Environment in Honiara. After carefully noting the numbers on both documents, he asked me where I had come from and where I lived. But as the conversation proceeded his line of questioning took a peculiar turn. ‘What is your religion?’ he asked. This is a standard question from officials in Indonesia, so I wasn’t too taken aback, answering that I’d been brought up Catholic. He took care to note this, then asked very seriously if I had ever had sex with my wife. Flabbergasted, I looked up and caught a glimpse of a group of children peering from behind the offices. When they erupted in gales of laughter, I realised I’d been had. The supposed official was in fact the local village clown, and he’d taken me in hook, line and sinker.

  This introduction to Makira left me wondering whether the only duty of the island’s Minister for Sport was to cadge tennis shoes from visitors. He did, however, turn up later that morning and invited me to stay in Sesena Village, just a few kilometres walk from the airstrip. With the help of some young lads, I relocated, set up mist-nets and rat-traps, and began to sample the island’s unique fauna.

  Being close to the administration centre, I soon discovered that a British magistrate by the name of Shipley and his wife and brother lived on the island. They welcomed me into their company and over convivial lunches explained why they were there and what they knew of Makira. It may seem strange that British circuit magistrates were still being dispatched to the Solomons a decade after the islands had gained independence. But the new nation still laboured under British law, and if it was to be properly administered then British magistrates were required. In the 1980s they were still being dispatched from London to sit in judgment in villages whose inhabitants would have found the Old Bailey as alien as the dark side of the Moon.

  British law sits uneasily with most Solomon Islanders. Offences that they considered most grave—such as adultery and witchcraft—are not even considered criminal under English law, while acts that they considered valiant deeds, in fact obligations—such as the killing of a man who has had sex with a female relative—are punishable by long stretches in prison. In colonial times an appearance in court must have been truly puzzling to them. As the eminent anthropologist Roger Keesing and historian Peter Corris write:

  An assassin in a blood feud, whose homicide was culturally legitimate and even a duty, would find himself before a bewigged and unintelligible magistrate, then imprisoned in Tulagi [the colonial capital] for weeks or months while his crime of breaking an alien law he had never heard of was reviewed in Fiji, then led to the gallows.13

  Even by the 1980s the court process could still prove confusing. Over one lunch, the visiting magistrate on Makira told me of a case he had presided over on Guadalcanal. A young woman had brought a charge of theft against her stepfather. The magistrate was surprised to learn, through an interpreter, that the theft had involved milk, for fresh milk was all but unavailable locally. As the facts unfolded it became clear that the woman had recently given birth to a baby girl whom she was breast-feeding. She had awoken one night to discover her stepfather, rather than her baby, contentedly suckling at her breast! The magistrate expressed uncertainty whether theft was the best description of the crime committed, but nonetheless levied a stiff fine, and issued a stern warning to the errant stepfather.

  Pigs are a prime source of litigation in Melanesia, and cases involving damage to gardens by marauding swine can become the focus of deadly feuds which can last for generations. Mike McCoy told me about one such trial on Malaita, which seems to have caught the spirit of confusion at the heart of the administration of British justice in Melanesia. A villager had ‘courted’ his neighbour for damage inflicted on his garden by the neighbour’s pig. The case was heard in the sleepy regional centre of Auke, in a courtroom improvised from a local bush-materials classroom. With no air conditioning, the elderly bewigged and garbed magistrate was hot, impatient and much bothered by the flies that swarmed through the open windows. As he understood no pidgin, he was entirely reliant upon a translator.

  Mr Serana, as we will call the complainant, was in his fifties, short and nuggety and dressed in only a pair of ragged shorts. He spoke no English—only the pidgin of the islands—and to him the issue was deadly serious, for, if not settled in court, it would end up erupting into rough-and-ready village justice. He began his testimony with a long description of his fine garden with its taro, sugarcane and sweet potato, and the great effort he’d gone to in fencing it to keep out pigs. Only a truly evil and determined pig, he averred, would dare breach those defences. With increasing anger he told how, while sleeping in the garden after a long day’s labour, he was woken late on a moonless night by the sound of a snuffling swine. ‘Thief!’ he cried as he raced towards the noise. But this was a sneaky pig, rotten to the core and very experienced in stealing from other people’s gardens, and it had silently slunk off, leaving only hoof-prints in the mud and a distinctly male piggy odour in the air.

  At this
point in what was becoming a long story, the magistrate impatiently intervened. ‘But Mr Serana, did you actually see the pig?’ Serana had to admit ‘me no lukim’—he had not seen it. But then he had no need to. He knew precisely who was guilty, for the size and temperament of every pig in the small village herd was familiar to him—and, he related with rising passion, the smell of this particular pig was unmistakable! The offender already had a bad reputation and, without the curb of British justice, the errant swine would doubtless turn down a criminal path bringing strife to the whole village. Not a garden would be safe from the trespasser, he prophesied!

  With a superior English air, the magistrate said that he was inclined to ignore Mr Serana’s testimony as mere hearsay. Nobody had seen the pig, so nobody could know which pig had done the damage. ‘Case dismissed,’ he proclaimed in a loud voice, before ordering the courtroom to be cleared. Mr Serana had all the swagger of a man utterly convinced that his case was watertight, and as the verdict was translated he was rendered first incredulous, then furious, by this outrageous miscarriage of justice. He ranted and raved against the pig, its owner and the courts, who were clearly in cahoots, and vowed to have his satisfaction of them all.

  With the court in uproar, the irate magistrate thundered, ‘Another word, sir, and I’ll hold you in contempt of court.’ Stiff with fury, Mr Serana made his way between the school desks to the courtroom door. When under the lintel, inspiration came to him. He turned to face the magistrate, lifted his leg and let rip with a thunderous fart. This was all too much for the aged magistrate, who screamed out, ‘That’s contempt of court, sir. Three weeks in gaol for you.’ At which Serana said politely, yet firmly, in pidgin English. ‘What do you mean? You heard it, and you smelled it—BUT YOU DIDN’T SEE IT, DID YOU?’