A New Place

by Andrew Wareham

  The four officers stood at the edge of the ravine looking down and using their binoculars to scan the sides in the faint hope of discovering an easy route across.

  “What do they trade that’s worth that amount of effort, George?”

  “Bush knives and kina shells, probably, Blue. Tobacco, maybe. Anything light and valuable going up from the coast. Coming down? Greenstone for ceremonial axes; pig tusks, maybe; spark-grass for sure. I’ve heard that gold dust is moved sometimes – from the creeks, I would think. It’s supposed to turn up in Moresby occasionally.”

  “Ah… what exactly is ‘spark-grass’, Captain Hawkins?”

  “Trying to remember the English name, Carter. Parkinson, the naturalist, told my father what it was called – it grows up in the Bainings as well, gets sold down to the Tolai villages on the Gazelle. Grows everywhere there’s mountains in the Tropics, apparently, all over the world. Cannabis, that’s it. The locals reckon it’s good stuff – a couple of smokes gets a man half drunk and happy, no fighting like when they get hold of alcohol. Fair bit of it gets sent Down South – most of the ships out take a few sacks on the quiet. Don’t cost much up here but there’s a sale for it in Brisbane and Sydney. Used to go through Lae as well. Customs had a down on it, but sod them.”

  Lieutenant Carter had never heard of cannabis and was little concerned about it.

  “What do we do next, sir?”

  “Send the reports down to Konny. Move our base camp this far and then get walking. One platoon up, one down. Get the leading lot set up on the far side and then close up on them. Leapfrog our way, marking out the best route. We’ve finished the easy bit now, Carter, and I don’t think you will want to accompany us for the hard. I want you to take the reports down to your bloke and then see what Billingham is doing, if anything. Tell them we can’t get an airstrip in without a lot more men.”

  Any flat stretches were covered with erosion gullies, five or six feet deep and wandering in random zigzags. A strip as little as a quarter of a mile long would require drainage first and then filling in of the crevasses; it could be done, but not by forty men.

  “When you get down to Konny I want you to order up rope from the QM. As much as possible. Long and strong for getting across the creeks.”

  “Yes, sir. I am to walk back down the mountain side, sir? On my own?”

  “No. Take Mather with you. I’ll send the four sick back as well. They ain’t too unfit, they can walk.”

  “If they can walk, should they not remain here to do their duty, sir?”

  “No, they bloody should not! They’ve got something that’s weakening them, one of the minor fevers. If they stay up here then they’ll die within a few weeks – they’ll pick up something else as well, dysentery most likely, and be too weak to throw it off. I’ll put a couple of fit blokes with them to help with their gear; they can stay down at the bottom for a couple of days to get their breath back and then return to me. The escort will have orders to remain in company with the sick men and that they ain’t there to carry your packs for you.”

  “Thank you for your confidence in me, sir. Once again you intentionally humiliate me in the eyes of the men. When do we set out?”

  “First thing in the morning. Walk back to the Sogeri base tomorrow and then go down the gorge the next day. There should be transport at the bottom. Make sure the sick men get into it and are sent to the hospital.”

  “What do you think I would do? Take the lorry and leave the sick men to walk?”

  “Yes. You are an officer and a gentleman, you have told me, but I’ve not seen you willingly pull your weight yet. You have volunteered to do nothing. Without an order you just sit down on your arse and expect to be waited on. You’re a bludger, Carter. Now get out of my sight, down the hill and out of the way. You can give your report to that equally useless general of yours, and I’ve no doubt it will be as full of shit as you are. I hope to hear that you’ve managed to fix a posting South – you don’t belong up here where the men are.”

  Carter stamped off, bitterly angry and convinced that he was unfairly treated.

  Lieutenant Arkenshawe-Mather remained.

  “I say, sir. I think that was jolly unkind, you know. Poor old Carter has done his jolly best.”

  “That’s what worries me. His best is bloody useless. So are you. I put you in charge of Three Platoon, Mather. Do you know their names?”

  “You did not tell me to learn them, sir.”

  “You are an officer. Knowing your men is your first responsibility. When there are so few, you should be able to memorise their names and skills within the first day. How can you give them orders if you do not know them? You have not tried to do your job as an officer. I have had to waste my time watching over you. Get out, Mather. Go back to your little office in Konedobu where you can hide away out of sight and at least stop annoying your betters – who include every other soldier in this army. Get back home, ideally, then you can tell mummy that the nasty men were cruel to you. Bugger off!”

  Blue had stood to one side, wandered across as Arkenshawe-Mather tottered away, stunned to discover that any man could be so mean as to dislike him.

  “He’ll come back and haunt you, George. After the war. He’ll be a polly, you can bet. State government at least, might be Federal. He’s so bloody useless that he’s bound to go into politics rather than try to earn his living. He’ll have a down on you, that’s for sure.”

  “Sod him, Blue. If need be – and if I live that long – I’ll get involved meself, and if I can’t stitch him up, I’ll deserve the shit that comes my way.”

  “Yeah, well, you got the money to go into politics. You’re too bloody honest to get far, but…”

  “I’ll worry about that when the day comes. For the while, I want to see that’s possible. We might be able to get across the ravine without a bridge.”

  “Only one way of finding out, mate.”

  “Right. You hold up here with Three and Four. I’ll take One and Two down to the bottom. If we can get across, I’ll leave Two to hold at the bottom while I go up top with One Platoon. If we can find a sensible place at the top, I’ll call Two up. When you see Two at the top and settled, bring Three and Four to join us.”

  “Slow, mate, but it means we can have the guns in cover if you got to run back.”

  “That’s the aim. I don’t reckon there’ll be a Jap within a hundred miles of here yet, but I ain’t wandering along hoping that might be true. Wish there was bloody air to see what was happening. There ain’t, so we go slow.”

  The path down to the creek was precipitous. Bare foot, it might have been walkable. In army boots the men slid more than they stepped.

  “Couple of days work and we could cut a stairway in the rock, George. It’s soft enough.”

  “I’ll note it on the sketch, Pat. ‘Steps needed for carriers to walk in safety’.”

  “They won’t care about the boys, George.”

  “They won’t want their loads dropped and rolling down into the creek, Pat.”

  “Yeah. Right, mate.”

  The creek bed was steep, the water running white between boulders. It was easy enough to walk across, stepping from one rock to the next, while the water was low. The men passed from one bank to the other dry-shod and started to climb. Uphill was easier than down, they found, the far side of the ravine a harder rock, for some reason that a geologist might have explained. At the top they stepped straight into rain forest with almost no visibility. There was the faintest trace of an irregularly used path. George leaned out over the edge, shouted Two Platoon to come up. He waved across to Blue, watching through glasses, to join them.

  “Three hours, Blue. Distance covered, roughly half of a mile. Good going for the bush. Take the lead through the rain forest, mate. Try to trim the path back.”

  They marched slowly, bush knives swinging, climbed perhaps fifty feet in a mile and entered an area of bamboo. It was normal for the vegetation to change with height; the three who w
ere used to the bush in the Territory were unsurprised. There was still a faint track, marked more by cut bamboo stumps than by any trace on the ground. Occasionally a man gave a yell as a snake or spider passed in sight; mostly they walked in near silence, the only sound the bush knives slashing cane back.

  The word was passed of another valley in front.

  “More open, sir. Smoke in sight.”

  “Must be a village. Can you see gardens?”

  “Up on the top a bit, boss.”

  “What shape are the huts?”

  “Round. They ain’t the same as the ones we saw yesterday.”

  “Different clan then. Stop at the edge of the garden land and shout. Let them know we’re here and wanting to be seen.”

  “They’ll have spotted us already, won’t they boss?”

  George nodded to the rifleman.

  “Bound to have, Dick. If we were raiding, then we’d be trying to hide.”

  “But we’re whiteskins.”

  “Not that many years since there was blackbirding up here. Anyway, they might fancy the chance of taking a poke at us and then telling the kiap they mistook us for raiders when he came to investigate. This way, they know we’re onto their tricks.”

  The men could not understand why the locals might wish to attack them.

  “You’re rich, that’s why. You’ve got guns, which they want. You carry bush knives and we have an axe with us as well. We must have food in our packs – meat in tins, which they know about and don’t see once a year. You carry waterproof ground sheets, which they’d love to put under the thatch in their huts and make them dry. You wear fancy clothes, which would keep them warm in the cold nights – and it does get cold up here, sometimes. The women could wrap their babies up in your shirts, and maybe fewer of them would die. This is poor country and a long way from any place they can earn money.”

  “Then why do the Japs want it, boss?”

  “They don’t, not really. But if they get down to Moresby then they’re one step from Queensland, and that they do want. Stop the Japs up here and Australia is safe. Let them get a toehold on the Cape York and we’ll not have fun getting them out again. There’s more men in the Jap army than there are in the whole of Australia.”

  “What about the Yanks, boss?”

  “Why should they fight for Australia? They want to kick the Japs back and pay them out for Pearl Harbour. Do you reckon they’d lend us an army of a million men so we could get Australia back?”

  “But they are coming this way, ain’t they, boss?”

  “So they reckon. I’ll be glad to see them, but. I still reckon we need to show willing first. I don’t reckon to be a bludger, if for no better reason than that they won’t go much on it.”

  They grunted and nodded and discussed his words among themselves and decided he made sense.

  “Can we drop these poor sods a few tins of bully, boss?”

  “Too right we do. I’ll talk to ‘em as well. Tell them that we’ll be cutting a foot track though with a bridge or two they can use to get down Sogeri way. We’ll be hiring carriers from the men and paying them with money and bully and rice and tobacco and lap-laps and bush knives.”

  They agreed that made sense – let the local people know they could earn, that they would do better that way than by fighting or stealing.

  “Are they goin’ to believe us, boss?”

  “Probably not. As soon as we’ve surveyed our track I’ll get the kiap to come up and talk to all the villages in the area. They’ll know him, and trust him not to lie to them. Trouble is, the kiaps have got too much to do. The bloke who’s got this area probably can’t get up here once every couple of years for needing to cover too much land. Be useful if he could come with us, but he’s got too much on to manage that. Not enough police to get a station up here, either.”

  “There’s one of them showing now, boss.”

  They shouted and waved to a distant figure, half hidden at the edge of a garden and George yelled in Police Motu and Pidgin and persuaded him to come within ordinary speaking distance. Five minutes and George gave up and sent him back to the village with a can of bully in his hand.

  “Crafty sods. They sent the village idiot first. If we was feeling bad-tempered and chopped him, then it was no loss to them. Heard of them doing that up on the Gazelle when me old man was new there, back in the last war. Can’t afford to lose useful men, so they reckon. Shows the different way of looking at things, don’t it, Blue? We make our half-wits into generals.”

  “And staff officers, boss! They give ‘em double-barrelled names so that ordinary blokes know what they are.”

  George wondered if he might not have made his opinion of Carter and Arkenshawe-Mathers just a little too obvious. Then he decided he was not a soldier anyway and wasn’t looking for promotion.

  Two more village men walked down through the gardens and came up to him; they spoke Police Motu, though not with exactly the same accent and vocabulary as George, quietly smiling at his clumsiness as he greeted them.

  Ten minutes sufficed to give them the message – there would be soldiers, King Georgy’s and maybe some other sorts called Yank who did not have a king. The soldiers would pay them to work, to carry boxes and bags. There would be a made track, leading back to a road with lorries on it.

  They accepted all of this and thought it a good idea. Then one asked if the track would continue to the north.

  That it seemed was not such a good thing. The track would enable enemies to come upon them, especially the very wicked men from the Orokaiva clans, who ate people. George said that the soldiers would protect them, but they countered that the Orokaiva would eat the soldiers. It was a known fact that the wild clans of the north used magic and that it worked on the whiteskins too; they had eaten missionaries in recent years, and a kiap who had gone among them.

  George explained at length that they knew of the Orokaiva and had taken measures to deal with them.

  “Oi! Corporal Killigrew! Come over here with a Lewis.”

  Killigrew ambled across, a massive man with the Lewis dwarfed in his hands.

  “Fire a full pan into the bush, mate. Well clear of the gardens and the village.”

  Killigrew obliged, firing into a cane thicket at shoulder height and scything the stems down. The local clansmen had seen rifles before but had never conceived of a machine gun, were deeply impressed. That would deal with the stroppiest of the Orokaiva, they were convinced.

  George then asked them about the planes they must have seen lately and whether they had been attacked by them, explaining that the soldiers were here because of them.

  “No, master. And please bugger off quick from our village so they don’t attack us by mistake.”

  “You speak English?”

  “You spoke Police Motu to us.”

  “Sorry. We are at war with Japan – they have the planes with the red ball showing. They have taken almost all of the New Guinea Side and are trying to come this way on land as well as in the air and on the sea. The Yanks are helping us, because the Japanese attacked them first, without saying they were at war.”

  “Ah! The Yanks are angry with them. They will be coming here?”

  “We believe so.”

  “Are they as rich as Australians?”

  “Richer.”

  “Oh good!”

  “We are trying to make a track to cross the mountains and reach the shores of the Bismarck sea. If the Orokaiva misbehave, we shall teach them the proper ways of doing things. We shall probably pass the lands of the Kukukuku clan as well.”

  “Jesus, boss! You can keep those short-arsed bastards well away!”

  The Kukukuku stood no more than five feet tall, commonly six inches less, and were believed to be especially bad-tempered as a result.

  “We shall; there are only a few of them. Where did you learn English?”

  “Down in Moresby, ten years ago, about. I went with the Fathers to learn to be a priest, but I found that I prefer
red to keep my backside for my own use only, so I ran away from the seminary and found a job on a coastal ship. Five years, boss, working all round the Islands as far as Honiara and Kavieng and down to Thursday Island as well. Then I took my money and came back here and was given a wife, without having to pay, for being a big man now.”

  “I thought this was a London Mission area.”

  “Back to Sogeri it is, boss, but this is new land and is open to both, but the Fathers went away soon after they took me from the village, for being shot at with arrows because they would not leave the boys alone. The London Mission tried to come here two years ago, but we wanted none of them. We do without them. We have Jack Tar Man to look after us now.”

  The English speaker pointed to a small hut, just visible, led them proudly to it and pointed out the fetishes that, he said, had brought them some prosperity in recent years.

  There was a carefully carved model of a steamship and a recognisable biplane on the roof and a pair of wooden lorries, a yard high at the door.

  Blue nodded respectfully.

  “Cargo cult. Saw it down Kiriwina way a few years back, George. It’s as good a religion as any other and don’t generally lead to trouble.”

  George had heard of cargo cults. The missionaries had fits whenever they were mentioned, and that seemed an argument in their favour.

  “Jack Tar Man? New to me. What does the kiap say?”

  “He don’t like it, boss, but he said we could keep him.”

  “All good for me, mate.”

  “Jack Tar Man will bring us much when there is a road up from Moresby. We will help your soldiers.”

  Successive villages showed much the same reaction; if the soldiers came they would help them. They wanted more contact with the wealth that the whiteskins had brought with them.

  Corporal Killigrew had listened interestedly, spoke up as they sat down round the stew pots for their evening meal.

  “Oi, George! What was that about ‘cookers’ or something?”

  “Kukukuku? Pigmy tribe, not much more than four foot tall. Got little man’s problem. Try to kill anyone and everyone bigger than them. Bad buggers!”