by Peter Ryan
I remember these Amyen carriers with affection. They were manly, dignified, and utterly unaffected. They treated us from the first as equals, unaware of the white man’s traditional arrogance with native peoples. The greatest boon I could wish for them is that they be left alone for ever in their wild, fantastically beautiful mountains.
Towards evening we set up the radio to see if there was any reply to our message of that morning. There was, and we decoded it breathlessly, for it would tell us what our future was to be. To our disappointment it instructed us to withdraw altogether from the Huon Peninsula, since headquarters considered the risks of remaining there not commensurate with the value of any information we might be able to secure. It seemed that things had become just as grim for parties like ours on the north side of the range as we had found them in the Wain, for of the two men we had hoped to meet they could tell us only that one had disappeared and the other was at that very moment withdrawing. The message ended by telling us to use our discretion about the route we chose to escape by, and suggesting that we should either try to get back across the Markham where we had crossed it, or make our way to Bena Bena in the Central Highlands. There was a landing-strip there, and an aircraft would be sent to fly us out.
To go to Bena Bena we would have had to pass through the country of the Markham headwaters – country neither of us knew – so we resolved to try to cross the Middle Markham and return to Wampit, whence we had set out. If we failed in this, we would try to walk up the Watut Valley to Harry Lumb’s camp, and thence to Wau.
The following morning there was another wireless message, which disturbed us a good deal. It read: REPEAT INSTRUCTIONS TO WITHDRAW OF MY PREVIOUS MESSAGE STOP HARRY LUMB KILLED BY ENEMY NEAR KAIAPIT STOP MOVE QUICKLY STOP GOOD LUCK.
As we decoded it, letter by letter, our hearts sank. We looked at each other grimly.
‘Well,’ Les said at last, ‘they don’t put “good luck” in radio messages unless they think you’re pretty much in need of it!’
We sent for Watute and Kari and told them the bad news. They clicked their tongues with vexation, and looked glum.
‘If Master Lumb was killed in the Upper Markham we had better keep clear of that country,’ Watute said. ‘For Master Lumb knew that country better than anyone else.’
Kari started to speak, and then hesitated.
‘Go on. What were you going to say?’ I prompted him.
‘I know,’ Watute said abruptly. ‘He was wondering if it was the same party of Japanese who surprised Pato and me at Wampangan. They said they were going to Kaiapit.’
Les and I looked at each other.
‘It could have been,’ Les said.
‘I wish we had put a warning to him in our message.’
‘Well, we have no way of knowing that he wasn’t warned, if it comes to that. You know what Harry was like. He never seemed to be afraid of anything. He was quite capable of staying over there regardless of warnings.’
I thought of the last time I had seen Harry, when we parted cheerfully on leaving Wau a month or so earlier. It was a pathetic memory now. We would never keep our assignment to drink the remainder of the case of beer.
We made it clear to Kari and Watute that our work was now ended, and that our orders were to save ourselves if we could. They, as the senior men, would have to see that there was no deterioration in the morale or discipline of the others. They replied gravely that they understood their responsibilities, then saluted and withdrew.
Despite the injunction to move quickly, we made no attempt to travel that day. We still could not stand steadily, and would only have collapsed on the track.
The following day we made our first move, to Imom village. It was only five hours’ walk away, but the country was rough and we seemed permanently short of breath. Walking downhill was more difficult than climbing, our knees frequently giving way and bringing us to the ground. Watute was still suffering a good deal from his injured foot, which had been made worse by the roughness of the track.
We found that Imom was under strong mission influence – which is tantamount to saying that we found a non-co-operative attitude among the people, if not open hostility. When the war with Germany broke out, a number of German Lutheran missionaries had been interned; apparently the idea had been conveyed to their congregations that this was a blow at the missions as such, rather than a legitimate rounding up of enemy aliens. Then, at the outbreak of war with Japan, when all missionaries were evacuated, the native mission teachers – or ‘black missions’, as they were called – fled from their stations to their home villages. During this period the native situation from our point of view was satisfactory, and the black people were friendly and helpful. After a time the black missions began returning to their work, and the attitude of the natives changed. When we found them aloof and disagreeable, it was a pound to a penny that a black mission teacher was resident in the village. The contrast, for instance, between the helpful courtesy of remote, heathen Gombawato and the churlish behaviour of Christian Imom is only one illustration which could be multiplied many times.
Mission interests in Australia have vehemently denied that the German Lutheran mission played an unhelpful role in New Guinea. The evidence, I feel, does not support them. After all, the Germans, with their mission, were established long before Australia took charge of the Territory. Again, as rivals with the civil authorities for ascendancy over the natives, they had no particular reason for supporting an alien government which, at best, merely tolerated them. Something of this attitude communicated itself to the natives, and some of them talked openly, though not very intelligently, about a return to German rule.
At Imom we made a tolerable meal from locally bought food, but Dinkila brought our tea to us with a long face.
‘Master, no got some-fella tea more. Sugar ’e got lik-lik.’
‘It had to come,’ Les said philosophically. ‘But, all the same, I’m not looking forward to the next few weeks – or months, as the case may be – without any tea.’
‘It’s not only tea we’ll be without,’ I replied. ‘All we have is a few tins of bully beef and a huge tin of powdered milk. That’s going to get pretty monotonous.’
‘Never mind. The trade goods are holding out, so we’ll be able to buy plenty of native food.’
‘That’s where the razor-blades are going to be handy. We’ve got enough trade goods in them alone to survive a six months’ siege.’
When we had eaten, we spread our maps before us for what seemed to be the thousandth time since we had set out from the Markham. Our object was to find a place where the mountains could be re-crossed, and so get back to the Markham. We had a vague notion that there was a dip in the country between the end of the Saruwageds and the beginning of the equally formidable Finisterres. We intended to move westward looking for this, and traced out a tentative course from village to village, as they were shown on the map.
‘One thing I’m bloody sure of,’ Les said as he folded the maps and pushed them back into his haversack. ‘Even if we go kanaka and spend the rest of the war with a bit of bark round our middles, eating sweet potatoes in Gombawato, we aren’t going over the top again at thirteen thousand feet.’
The next night we spent in Kosuan, a pleasantly situated villag
e. Three tame hornbills fluttered round the houses, swooping to catch any morsel of food that might be thrown to them. The people sold us enough to eat, but were not disposed to enter into closer relations.
In the morning we lined the few remaining loads of cargo in front of the house, and I called for men to come forward and carry it. As I spoke, silence fell, and one by one the men started to drift away into the bush that fringed the village.
‘Quick!’ I called to Les. ‘Grab some of them, or we’ll be stuck in this joint for the rest of our lives!’
Les sprang down from the house, pistol in hand, and we were about to rush after the vanishing natives. We need not have bothered. Suddenly, from behind trees and bushes, the police appeared, together with old Pato, rifles held ready. They closed in on the village in a circle, forcing the kanakas into a group in the centre. The villagers saw the trick had failed, and made no further attempt to escape, though they carried with surly faces and unconcealed ill-temper.
There was now no doubting the un-co-operative attitude of the natives of this part of the country, and as we walked along the track to Hamdingan, our destination for the night, Les and I discussed how best to handle them. We felt that at any moment the people might refuse to carry for us, and go bush at our approach. We decided to make a surprise entry into Hamdingan. Leaving the carriers under the guard of a couple of the police outside the village, the rest of us swooped down on the houses and had the populace locked inside their large new church before they realized what had happened. We selected enough young men for carriers and kept them under guard all night. Once the women saw that we had their men in custody they brought us plenty of food, for which we paid in razor-blades.
The road over which we had walked from Kosuan to Hamdingan was, for New Guinea, a great highway. It was at least twelve feet wide most of the way, and in some places up to twenty feet. Drains and culverts were neatly dug, and bridges had been built across all the streams. It was but another example of the way in which the ‘black missions’ had exercised their new-found supremacy. As natives told us afterwards, they had made the people of each village devote a certain amount of time each week to work on churches, schoolhouses, and roads. The work on churches and other mission buildings was harmless enough, but the road construction was in direct defiance of the orders of the government and of the few white men who had been through the area. It also showed that the pamphlets in pidgin English dropped from our aircraft, instructing the natives to allow any tracks to revert to bush, had been ignored. The purpose of these instructions was of course to make it as hard as possible for the enemy to find his way into the back country. It was plain that if he had chosen to come this way he could have marched twelve abreast with the greatest of ease.
In Hamdingan there was one man who spoke pidgin, but unfortunately he seemed half stupid, and it was with great difficulty that we secured any information at all from him. He gave us a very garbled account of another white man having left the Huon Peninsula by the same route, and from his vivid description of the red hair of this man we recognized ‘Blue’ Pursehouse, who had been doing work similar to ours behind Finschhafen. The fact that he had pulled out indicated that things had got tough in his area too, and we tried to find out how long ago he had left, and whether we had any hope of overtaking him. Our half-witted informant was no help. One minute he would raise our hopes by saying the man had gone two days ago, and then infuriate us by saying two years ago.
We were able to pick up a certain amount of useful information, however. He told us Hamdingan was only about a day’s walk to the coast, and that news of Japanese activities often came up to them. Sometimes, he said, the Japs walked round the beach, and sometimes parties in charge of barges pulled in to hide from our planes during the daytime, to resume their journey to or from Lae at night. This news was disturbing, for we had not realized how close to the sea we had come. At nightfall, however, when all was quiet in the village, we heard the surf breaking on the beach, and we posted double sentries on the track in case the Japanese should hear of us and hurry inland to cut us off.
We told our pidgin-speaking native that next day we intended to go to Boksawin village, the place which seemed to lie nearest to the route we had in mind. He replied that it was at least two days’ walk and that we would have to spend a night in some bark shelters on the way.
We had become so irritated by his silly and self-contradictory statements in other things that we told him flatly we did not believe him, and that we intended to walk without resting until we came to Boksawin, however far away it might be. Then Kari locked him in the church to keep him safely out of the way till morning.
Next day, at 4 a.m., we started our walk to Boksawin. There was no moon, and daylight was about two hours off, but the first part of the track was well defined and even. Shortly after sunrise the limit of the good road was reached, and we began to climb a steep mountain. Half an hour later our pidgin-speaking native paused beside a small stream, which, he said, was the last water we would see for another day. It seemed that he spoke the truth, for the carriers – about half a dozen of them – filled small bamboo receptacles with water and, having stoppered the tops with wads of green leaves, tied them to their loads. Les and I had no waterbottles with us – they were among the gear we had abandoned in crossing the range. In New Guinea mountain country one usually crosses a stream of some sort every mile or so, and we had not expected to need them. We took a good long swig, and then resumed the climb, hoping to make the distance to the next drink.
Before long the track, climbing steeply, became more difficult. Hundreds of huge trees had been felled across it and were lying in all directions. We progressed by walking along the trunks and springing from the end of one onto another, but they were very wet and slippery, and we often fell off. It was only through good luck that none of us was badly hurt.
Our boots had worn to paper thinness, and the nails, sticking through, were gouging holes in our feet. As the boots were more hindrance than help I threw mine away and walked mostly in bare feet, putting on an old pair of sandshoes occasionally, when the track was specially rough. In spite of my assurance that one soon became used to bare feet Les stuck to his boots until they dropped apart.
At midday we were still climbing steadily, and before entering a dense moss forest caught a glimpse of the sea across to Rooke Island, off the coast. We thought we could also distinguish the outline of New Britain on the horizon, but were not certain. Shortly afterwards we found the hunting shelters, where our guide urged us to spend the night. However, the cryptic ‘Move quickly!’ of the radio message rang in our ears, and we decided to push on.
The track became very bad as it led us along the crest of a narrow, level ridge which seemed to stretch on into eternity. It was clothed in dense forest, which prevented us seeing more than a few yards ahead or catching any glimpse of the surrounding country. The carriers were making very heavy weather of it, so we sent Kari and Constable Witolo, both strong walkers, to move ahead as scouts.
About half past four Les had a sudden violent spasm of vomiting, which left him so weak that it seemed he would have to be carried. However, with a great effort he managed to continue, from time to time holding on to me or one of the police. By nightfall he had recovered completely.
Shortly before dark we found a small stagnant pool of green, slimy water. The smell was revolting, but w
e plunged our hands and wrists into it and swilled it about our mouths and throats. Foul as it was it revived us and gave us heart to continue.
We plodded painfully on, wet through from a short, sharp downpour that had come about seven o’clock. It began to seem as though we would spend the rest of our lives struggling along this ridge as it stretched on and on endlessly into the blackness. We were worried about our hearts, which were pounding in a most alarming fashion – even worse than they had behaved crossing the Saruwaged Range.
Then, at ten o’clock, the track took a slight downward turn, and by half past ten the moon had risen and we came out of the forest into more open country with alternate patches of jungle and grassland. The condition of the track also improved, and it was now a well-graded zig-zag carved out of the steep mountainside.
Just before midnight, with the moon shining brightly, we came out upon the flat, open country near the Uruwa River. We were all barefooted now, and on the stony ground our footfalls made no sound. It was as if we were already dead, shades without weight or substance drifting through space. We had not the energy to look about, but plodded drearily, half consciously, forward. Suddenly two ghostly figures rose from a patch of shadow, saluted, and one said in a clear voice, ‘Master, place belong me-fella close to now!’
Les and I were too tired to be startled by their sudden appearance. When one of the two men told us he was the tultul of Worin, and that Worin was the village we were approaching, we were too weary even to protest that we had been heading for Boksawin. Kari and Witolo had arrived a couple of hours earlier, the tultul told us, and were waiting in the village. We seemed hardly to have heard his encouraging news, and staggered silently, drunkenly, along the track behind him.