by Tim Flannery
With such tensions inherent in the justice system, it’s inevitable that visiting magistrates occasionally fall foul of villagers who feel aggrieved at a perceived miscarriage of justice, and I was deeply dismayed to hear, some months after I had returned to Australia, that Mrs Shipley had been attacked by a man carrying a machete, and the family had been forced to leave the islands.
Working on Makira was challenging. The region around Sesena was formed of jagged limestone and was riddled with sinkholes. This made trekking into the bush slow, difficult and highly dangerous. One morning, while attempting to set a mist-net several kilometres from the village, I broke the rotting vegetation coating the rock and plunged into a sinkhole. It was a sickening feeling, falling in slow motion towards I knew not what. Perhaps I’d land on jagged limestone tens of metres below, or in a swollen underground river. Thankfully the sinkhole was only three metres deep, and I emerged from it shaken and covered in cuts, but otherwise unhurt.
Almost immediately, however, it became evident that the effort of setting the nets far from the village was worthwhile. At first light the following morning I trudged out, and found many bats hanging in the distant nets. Most were common species, but in one pocket hung a black bat with a body as long as my palm. Inspecting it closely, I saw that it bore bright pink spots on its ears and forearms. And when it opened its mouth I glimpsed four large canine teeth, each with a distinct groove running along its front edge.
It was a kind of blossom bat—a relative of the ‘poison bat’ that Sanila Televat had told me about on New Ireland. The blossom bats are an early offshoot of the flying fox family. They cannot echo-locate as do the insectivorous bats, instead they find their food—which is principally fruit and nectar—by sight. It would take me six years to collect enough blossom bat samples to identify and name the black blossom bat of Makira, and part of the funding for that work was provided by Emmanuel Fardoulis, an Australian who wanted to help environmental conservation. Ultimately I would name the species Melanycteris fardoulisi in his honour.
The study of the blossom bats revealed some fascinating insights into island biology. It turns out that every island in the southern Solomons has its own kind of blossom bat. Those inhabiting Makira are not only the largest and blackest, but they also have the greatest difference in size between the sexes. So great is the difference indeed that at first I mistook the females, which lack the large, grooved canines and are much lighter in build, for a different species.
Several island species exhibit strange sexual differences, among them the huia bird of New Zealand, whose males have short stout bills while the females have long curved bills. Makira lies far enough south that its resources may be more limited than those of the other islands in its group. Rather than having the sexes compete for the same resources, species whose sexes specialise in exploiting different ecological niches may be favoured in such circumstances. But what do the males do with those enormous, grooved canines? My best guess is that they eat a lot of fruit, and use the canines not only to carry the fruit, but to puncture it and drain the juice. The females may be more strictly nectar feeders, visiting flowers for their food.
One morning some village boys shyly approached me holding a bagful of bats. They had collected them in a cave a little way from the village that they often harvested for bats to eat. The bag contained a kind of horseshoe-bat which had been long known from a single specimen collected in the nineteenth century and classified as a variant of one of the most common horseshoe-bats in the region. But the bats the boys had collected were strikingly different from any known horseshoe-bat in that the sexes differed in colour, the males being grey and the females bright orange. That, along with their small size relative to the more widespread diadem horseshoe-bat, was strong evidence that they should be classified as their own species. Following studies back in the lab I recognised them as another species unique to this increasingly intriguing island.
Meanwhile, areas nearer to home also were yielding surprises. Some boys from Sesena village had spied and captured a female flying fox that was roosting in a banana plant in a garden. She was carrying a single young and was covered in dense, tawny-golden fur. The only species she could possibly be, I realised, was the Solomons flying fox, which had been recorded from Uki Ni Masi in the nineteenth century. But, as with the horseshoe-bats, she was so different from flying foxes found elsewhere that she too had been misclassified. Now known as the Makira flying fox (Pteropus cognatus), the species is part of a growing list of fauna recognised as being unique to Makira and its nearby islands.
For all of the success I was having with bats, I’d not caught sight of the object of my search—the mysterious rat of Ugi (or Uki Ni Masi). I questioned villagers closely about rats, and it was clear that they knew of both large and small kinds. I was somewhat handicapped, however, by not knowing what the creature looked like. At first, villagers said that large rats were everywhere, but it turned out that they were referring to the common black rat, which had arrived on the island when a trawler sank there in 1984. This rat is indeed larger than the common (and also introduced) Pacific rat, but it was not what I was looking for. Then I discovered that a few people knew of an even larger kind of rat. It was restricted to the rugged inland plateau and ranges of the island, which rise to around 1000 metres above sea level. This creature may have been my mysterious rat but, by the time I’d sorted all this out, the expedition was coming to an end and I needed to return to Australia.
For twenty years I thought that I’d blown my chance of seeing the mystery of the identity of the giant rat of Ugi solved. But then, in 2009, an ornithologist sent me a photograph of some rat footprints in a muddy puddle. He had taken the picture whilst birding high in Makira’s mountains, and the tracks had without doubt been made by a giant rat. They were, apart possibly from the mystery skull collected in 1881, the first solid evidence that the giant rat of Makira actually exists. As I write I have a student who is on the track of this elusive creature. Perhaps I’ll yet live long enough to see the one-hundred-and-thirty-year-old mystery solved.
The small aircraft that carried me back from Makira set out for Henderson airfield on Guadalcanal at dusk. Flying away from the red rim of the sunset into the engulfing dark of the Pacific night, I could imagine the feelings of a bat or bird blown off course over the ocean or a rat stranded on a floating tree. For them, nothing but a lucky current carrying them towards a new land and their own ability to endure could save them. Despite the fact that we had navigation equipment aboard our small plane, I felt scared once the last few lights of Makira slipped past us, for ahead there was nothing but an ocean of blackness. What would happen if we somehow missed Henderson Field? Would we too be swallowed up by that blackness, like countless birds, bats and other creatures that were blown or wandered off course in aeons past? Thankfully we did arrive safely, but the experience left me with a new respect for the vastness of the Pacific and for those species that have conquered it.
CHAPTER 11
Malaita
I’d heard from Mike McCoy that he planned to visit one of the most inaccessible places in the Solomons—the land of the Kwaio on the island of Malaita. When he suggested that we make the visit together, I jumped at the opportunity. The chance had arisen when Mike met Simon, the son of Folofo’u, an important Kwaio man now living in Honiara. Mike had given Simon his Swiss army knife, and the Malaitan had reciprocated by inviting him to visit the hamlet of Naufe’e in eastern Malaita. Malaita is the most densely populated island in the Solomons archipelago. Even its mountainous spine, which rises to around 1000 metres, supports a fair density of settlements. But Naufe’e lies in the most inaccessible part of the mountain chain. There was a chance that primary forest, and therefore unique fauna, still survived there.
The great tub of an inter-island ferry that makes the crossing from Honiara to Malaita’s administrative centre of Auki normally takes only half a day. But on the trip we made the vessel broke down repeatedly, drifting helplessly fo
r hours at a time in an increasingly foam-whipped sea. On each occasion it was a relief to hear the great diesel engines throb back to life, as the risk of being blown onto a hidden reef or rocky shore was very real, and it was far from certain that our overcrowded ferry had sufficient life rafts and vests for all. At last the tiny harbour of Auki hove into view. From there we would cross the island by road, then travel by canoe into Sinalagu Harbour—the gateway to the Kwaio territory—on the east coast.
The Kwaio had remained cut off from the world. They were a proud and independent people, and the mountainous centre of their homeland was almost entirely inaccessible to the colonial government. From that jumble of abrupt mountain ridges, valleys and dense jungle, warriors would sally forth on raids against their neighbours. Their most powerful and influential leaders were known as ramo. Each a combination of strong-man and bounty hunter, their prestige and wealth depended upon collecting and distributing blood money. Such bounties were frequently offered by the relatives of women who had been seduced in violation of the island’s strict sexual code, and the ramo would sometimes even kill their own kin and followers to get a payment.
By the colonial period ramo were using antiquated Snider rifles, often firing them at point blank range. Examples held in museum collections reveal the esteem in which they were held. Decorated with intricate shell inlay, these functional firearms had been turned into extraordinary artefacts. To the ramo, treachery was a way of life. Inviting a victim to a feast and, when he was relaxed, pressing the barrel of the Snider to his ribs and pulling the trigger was a favourite technique.
To be recognised as a ramo you had to kill a person with a bounty on his head in personal combat. Then, with a great show of bravado, the ramo and his henchmen would storm into the settlement that had offered the bounty and collect the payment of shell valuables from a pole in a clearing for all to see. Frequently, relatives of the slain man would offer another bounty, and so the vicious cycle would continue. The Kwaio ramo were the toughest of the tough, and by the early twentieth century they were killing blackbirders (labour recruiters for Queensland sugar plantations) and missionaries alike. As an anthropologist explained, at the time it was ‘tremendously dangerous for any European to land on Malaita or expose himself to attack in any way.’14
So it was that Malaita came to be the ragged edge of what was just about the most remote and forgotten part of the British Empire. Yet such attacks could not be tolerated for long. Sporadic, failed attempts were made to extend the Pax Britannica into Malaita’s mountains and by the mid-1920s things were coming to a head. The British colonial administration began collecting taxes in the area, and the ramo understood that this was a direct challenge to their authority. One ramo, a man named Basiana—arguably the most fearless of them all—who lived in the mountainous Gounaile area, was determined to do something about it.
It fell to district officer William Bell to undertake the 1927 tax collection. On Tuesday 4 October he, his European assistant Lillies, a Malaitan clerk called Masaki and thirteen armed Solomon Islands policemen occupied a crude tax-collection hut in Sinalagu Harbour and waited for the mountaineers to deliver their payments. Bell, an Australian, was a highly experienced administrator who knew the Kwaio and their ways well. He understood that this would be a test of strength, and he had deliberately come ashore, rather than collecting the taxes from his boat, for to do otherwise would be a sign of weakness. When the hundreds of fully armed Kwaio males arrived in the clearing before the tax hut Masaki said, ‘They’ve come to kill us. I can see the blood in their eyes.’15 Bell’s response to the crowd was coolly professional:
I’ve come to collect taxes today. My police say they can see you’ve come to fight with us today. But I don’t want to fight with you. I told them if you wanted to make trouble with us you’d have to start it yourselves. We’ve come in peace.16
While one of Basiana’s men distracted the Malaitan policemen with a string of very valuable old shell money, others were stealthily cutting through the cane fastenings that held the wall panels of the tax hut in place. Then Basiana stepped forward, paid his tax and quietly walked away. As his henchmen lined up to pay, Basiana strolled back to the edge of the clearing where he’d laid down his pouch, and he stealthily removed from it the barrel of his Snider rifle. It had been consecrated to his ancestor Ma’una, and was full of spiritual power. Basiana concealed the barrel between his arm and body and walked once more towards Bell, who remained at his desk receiving payments. Basiana got to the head of the queue as Bell was looking down, writing in a tax roll. Swiftly raising the barrel he struck Bell’s head, which exploded with an awful sound, spattering brains and blood everywhere.
Almost instantaneously another warrior struck Bell’s assistant Lillies. But it was only a glancing blow to the skull, and Lillies rallied. Then Basiana jumped onto the table and rushed into the tax hut, knocking aside the police rifles before they could be used. With its stays cut, the hut was collapsing, trapping Lillies and the police who were inside. Within seconds, two Europeans and thirteen Solomon Islanders lay dead. It was an overwhelming victory by a force armed largely with traditional weapons against colonialists equipped with the latest rifles. Only one attacker had been killed and half a dozen wounded. Yet the massacre would bring cataclysm to the Kwaio world.
The dead would later be buried by a revenge party beside Sinalagu Harbour. But Lillies’ left hand, which was severed by Fenaka of Ailai, was never recovered. It was, the Kwaio say, taken into the bush, where it was smoked and kept as a talisman. As far as anyone knows, it remains in Kwaio possession to this day.
By 10 October, just six days after the massacre, the cruiser HMAS Adelaide, carrying nine six-inch guns and numerous smaller armaments, was on her way to Sinalagu Harbour. The Kwaio must have watched in awe as her huge bulk steamed into view. Seeing photographs of the great vessel at her destination, it’s impossible to avoid an overwhelming sense of European power. The vessel landed tonnes of supplies and a large punitive force, but the Europeans were almost entirely ineffective in the steep terrain and dense bush. So another approach was tried: arming the Kwaio’s enemies.
These people lived adjacent to the Kwaio and had suffered under the Kwaio ramo for decades. They knew the land, their enemies and their ways, and were thirsting for revenge. They also knew that the best way to destroy the Kwaio was to desecrate the ancestral shrines. They smashed ancestral skulls, or tossed them into the women’s menstrual huts. The bark mats upon which menstruating women sat were draped on the sacred sacrificial stones. Ancestral relics and other sacred objects were burned, the intention being to bring down the wrath of the ancestors on the Kwaio. Although it was forbidden by the Europeans, Kwaio men, women and children were massacred wherever they were encountered. It was said that for every two prisoners the revenge parties brought down from the mountains, one Kwaio was shot. To this day the full tally of dead is unknown, but it seems that at least sixty Kwaio died in the weeks after the original massacre.
Basiana surrendered and was taken to the colonial headquarters at Tulagi where, on 29 June 1928, he was hanged in front of his two sons, fourteen-year-old Anifelo and his younger brother Laefi. Before climbing the scaffold Basiana placed an ancestral curse on Tulagi, saying to the resident commissioner and commandant of police, ‘Tulagi, where you have your flag, will be torn apart and scattered.’17 Taken as something of a joke at the time by the Englishmen in their club, it was a curse perhaps remembered by Solomon Islanders when the Japanese drove the British from Tulagi fourteen years later.
The impact of these events on the Kwaio were long-lasting. As Riufaa of Kwangafi said:
When they destroyed our shrines, they destroyed all the good things in our lives … Everything was bad after that … The ancestors’ consecrated pigs had just been eaten, the sacred things had all been defiled—how could our living be straightened after that? How can we live at all? We are finished.18
But the Kwaio were not finished—just hardened and determi
ned to turn their backs on the world. They repulsed all efforts at Christianisation—their mountain fortress was an inviolate retreat where the old ways would persist. As late as 1962, when anthropologist Roger Keesing and his wife first went to live among them, he was warned that his life would be in danger—a warning only amplified when a missionary in the area was speared to death soon after the Keesings arrived.
It was into the heart of this world that Folofo’u’s son had invited us. He was an impressive man—all two metres of him—with a broad chest and bearing that would do any sergeant major proud. When he met us in Sinalagu Harbour on that bright morning I got the sense that here was a person the outside world had not yet bowed. As we set off up Sifola—the coastal slopes lying behind Sinalagu Harbour—the heat was stifling, and Mike and I were soon puffing and sweating under the weight of our packs. Having walked for several hours we reached a clearing at an elevation of around six hundred metres, and we rested. Then an amazing thing happened. A young woman, puffing on a homemade corn-cob pipe and dressed in nothing at all, came striding down the path towards us. She casually took my overstuffed pack from my shoulders and set off up the slope. For a moment I wondered whether heat stroke was taking its toll or whether I had died on that kunai slope and gone to Kwaio heaven.
I was roused from my reverie by three similarly un-clad young women, none of whom were lucky enough to possess a corn-cob pipe. As they passed they flashed brilliant smiles, and went on to relieve Mike and our Kwaio helpers of their packs. I followed the young woman with the corn-cob pipe. She puffed clouds of smoke as she strode up the hill with my heavy pack on her back, her pace putting me to shame. As I struggled upwards I turned to Mike and asked why the young women were naked. ‘Kastom bilong Kwaio’—just the way they do things up here—he replied. The unmarried Kwaio females had never worn any clothes, he added, but when they married they donned a tiny patch of material to cover the pubic area—that was all.