by Tim Flannery
Tree-kangaroos are among the most extraordinary animals ever to have evolved. They are distant relatives of Australia's rock-wallabies but, because of their specialised life in the tree-tops, some have come more to resemble koalas and pandas than kangaroos. Australia has two rather primitive species living in the rainforests of north-east Queensland, but at least a dozen different kinds had been recorded in New Guinea. These are found throughout the mountainous portions of the island, but are elusive and difficult to study.
The evolutionary pathway that led tree-kangaroos into the rainforest canopy is still far from clear. It seems likely, however, that their ground-dwelling ancestors found little to eat on the dark forest floor. Those able to climb into the trees to obtain food were advantaged. Even today, however, tree-kangaroos can look rather clumsy in the tree-tops.
My chances of doing useful work in New Guinea on these shy animals seemed remote, but halfway through my studies I could bear no more. I had to return.
My supervisor, Professor Michael Archer, must have sensed my restlessness. I will always be grateful to him. He was willing to tolerate yet another interruption to my degree that I might roam the Melanesian jungles.
Michael obtained funds from the National Geographic Society to send me back to New Guinea. And so, by January 1984, I was ready to venture into the field once more. This time, my destination was very different, for I had decided to work in the remote Yapsiei and Telefomin areas of Sandaun Province, in far western Papua New Guinea.
By the time the Australian colonial administration of the territories of Papua and New Guinea ended in 1975, most of the country had been brought under government control. Only a few areas were enticingly marked on the map as ‘uncontrolled territory’. Access to them was strictly limited before independence, and even by 1984 there was little government influence over the lives of the people inhabiting these last wild areas.
I chose Yapsiei as my study site because it was at the heart of one of the largest pieces of uncontrolled territory marked on the map. It had changed little during the nine years following independence. In 1981 I had seen something of Papua New Guinea as it was in the taim bilong masta. I chose Yapsiei now because I wished to experience New Guinea as it was taim bipo, that is, before European colonisation had irrevocably altered the ecology of the Melanesian lands and people. Through my studies I hoped to understand that timeless synergy which exists between a highly co-evolved forest people and their environment. Through this study I hoped to perceive the pressures that have shaped an ecosystem as well as a culture.
On this first trip to Yapsiei I was fortunately accompanied by anthropologist Dr Don Gardner of the Australian National University. He had worked with the West Miyanmin since 1975 and is the only outsider I know to have mastered the highly complex Miyanmin language. I owe everything I know of these ‘last people’ to him and the entrée he gave me into Miyanmin society.
Because we anticipated a long stay at Yapsiei, we had accumulated a vast pile of equipment. This rapidly turned into a major headache for, due to a shortage of aircraft in Port Moresby, we found it impossible to get our equipment on a scheduled air service. The only option was to charter an aircraft. None of the larger airlines had one to spare, but a small, now defunct company called AvDev had a Cessna which could do the job.
The morning of our charter flight saw us cramming every available space aboard the aircraft with equipment and people. Finally it was filled to bursting with our voluminous drums, liquid nitrogen flasks, packs and food. As we sped down the runway at Jackson Airport, our little aircraft strained to take to the air.
Forty minutes into the flight, the Gulf of Papua stretched from horizon to horizon below us. I was casually wondering about the number of crocodiles and sharks inhabiting the murky water when the aircraft yawed violently. I looked out of the window. A stream of oil was issuing from the left-hand engine.
The propeller slowed. The oil turned to smoke—and flickering flame!
The pilot was looking unnaturally pale and shaking as he reached for the button to activate the fire extinguisher. Then he bent down and grabbed a large map, which he spread out right across the windscreen.
He seemed to study the detail of the Gulf area minutely.
I had always been somewhat resigned about the possibility of perishing in an air disaster. In the unlikely event of it happening, I believed that at least everything would be over quickly. As I contemplated the pilot and his map I began to feel that I was very much mistaken in this. I leaned forward and asked him what was wrong.
‘Can't maintain altitude on one engine. We have to find an airstrip.’
For forty minutes we gazed at the waters of the Gulf as they loomed ever closer. Forty minutes is a long time to contemplate death by impact, drowning or shark attack.
At last the sight of land below us brought hope. Although the fire was out, the left wing was by this stage streaked black with oil and we were still descending. Nevertheless, it now seemed as if we might make it back to Port Moresby.
This incident remained with me for many years. I have since had countless flights in other small aircraft, a few almost as bad. Somehow the experience seems to have helped me handle them better. But very occasionally (sometimes when travelling on the safest of flights) I panic. I think I can smell noxious fumes in the cabin, or hear that the engines are not running smoothly. The plane seems to skew in the air. It is then that I must use my most potent weapon against panic—one I learned that day over the Gulf of Papua. I close my eyes and sleep.
That day I roused myself just before we landed. I stepped out of the plane quite a different person from the one who had stepped in. My youthful sense of immortality was gone. I now saw the risk in many of the things I did.
We all gathered round as the engineer inspected the damage. The cause was immediately obvious—a tappet cover with a push-rod protruding through it, both drenched with oil. A small piece of the aluminium cover had been dislodged and was lying in a pool of oil. I took this tiny thing and put it in my wallet.
In later years, when I have been in difficult circumstances in aircraft, I have felt for it, drawing comfort from the thought that one can walk away from such crises.
In a few days the engine was repaired and we squeezed back into the aircraft for another attempt. This time, all went well, and after several hours in the air we arrived at Tabubil, then flew on to Telefomin. After a brief stop there, we headed off on the last leg of our aerial journey.
The Telefomin Valley lies nestled in mountains close to the geographic heart of the island of New Guinea. Yapsiei, a lonely government station, lies some eighty kilometres west-north-west, where the August or Yapsiei River leaves the mountains and enters the vast Sepik floodplain. To reach Yapsiei you must take a light aircraft from Telefomin. You soon leave this last frontier settlement behind as the plane tracks along the awesome Sepik Gorge. To the right, the three distinctive peaks of the Drei Zinnen Range tower above the tiny Cessna, while the abrupt, almost vertical face of the Sepik Gorge shuts out all sights to the left. Below surges the mighty Sepik River itself, confined in a narrow cleft cut into limestone. The river appears white with the swirl of rapids. In that watery chaos, entire trees can be seen moving along, tumbled end over end by the furious torrent.
Where the Sepik disgorges onto its floodplain, the aircraft banks sharply right, crosses a ridge clothed in primaeval forest and flies into the valley of the August River. Near where the August begins to thread its way over the floodplain, a small, primitive airstrip has been cut out of the forest. It is the first break in the canopy since Telefomin, many kilometres away.
The Yapsiei airstrip is poorly positioned, for its approach end is constantly being eroded away by the August River, which twists and turns restlessly in its bed. With each advance of the river, the shortened strip becomes more dangerous to land on. As a result, the strip (which is also poorly drained) is under constant threat of closure. Staying at Yapsiei, I always dreaded that the strip
would be declared closed, leaving me with no way out.
At the top end of the airstrip lie the few buildings that constitute the government station. Yapsiei was established in 1973. It had attracted the Sepik peoples from downstream and the West Miyanmin from the upper reaches of the August River. By 1984 it already had a distinctly derelict look. Grass grew rank along the paths, and mould covered the painted walls of the fibro-cement buildings.
As I stepped out of the plane onto that airstrip for the first time, a blast of hot, suffocatingly humid air enveloped me. I looked at the people crowding around. Most of the men were wearing nothing but a tiny penis gourd, the women a short grass skirt. A few were dressed in the dirty, tattered remnants of western clothes. Almost all were disfigured by disease. Men with swollen scrotums and gross, disfigured legs jostled against me. A disgusting, sweet smell filled the air. I wondered what kind of place I had come to. Did I really intend to spend three months of my life here?
And indeed Yapsiei, I found, was a hell on earth in more ways than one.
Although about 200 kilometres inland, Yapsiei Station stands barely 100 metres above the level of the sea. The days are often made intolerably hot and humid by the baking air which rises off the Sepik floodplain and banks up against the abruptly rising mountains. By afternoon, a rush of cooler air descends the mountains, often bringing with it thunderstorms of titanic proportions. Occasionally these storms are so ferocious that they sound like the approach of jet aircraft screaming down the valley. When such storms hit, the place becomes chaos. Trees writhe in the first gusts of wind. Then, within seconds, nothing can be seen through the pelting rain—not even a hand held in front of your face. The thunder is so loud and continuous that it blocks out all other sound, and it soon seems that the world has become strangely silent. The true silence that develops an hour or two later, as the storm makes its way downriver, is all the more eerie for this effect.
By 1984, problems were beginning to develop at Yapsiei. The station was built primarily to attract and control the West Miyanmin. They originally came from the mountains and have little resistance to malaria, filariasis (elephantiasis) and the many skin diseases that thrive in the lowlands. As a newly contacted people, they have also had to contend with introduced diseases such as influenza, against which they have little immunity.
A generation previously, the Miyanmin had lived in small, fortified villages on the rugged spurs surrounding the upper August River, which they know as the Yapsiei. There, at about 600-1,000 metres elevation, the air is cool and disease had not been such a problem. But both water and gardening land had lain far distant.
When the Australian administration brought a respite from the incessant warfare which existed with neighbouring groups, most West Miyanmin had moved downslope onto the fertile river flats. There they remained scattered and isolated, which at least gave some protection from contagion. But with the founding of Yapsiei station in 1973 they congregated in an environment truly conducive to the transmission of disease. They were also close to sources of contagion such as visiting Europeans and the Sepik people who lived adjacent to and in the station.
In 1984 the mortality rate in the Yapsiei area was truly horrific. In some Miyanmin villages, infant mortality reached 100 per cent. Bloated stomachs, denoting malnutrition and chronic swelling of the spleen due to malaria, were almost universal in the few surviving children, as well as many of the adults. Grile, a form of ringworm which makes the skin flake in great concentric circles, was also ubiquitous. It can disfigure every inch of skin on one's body. It was the odour of grile which had first greeted me when stepping off the plane at Yapsiei, and I can still recall the sweet, sickly smell today. Throughout my stay at Yapsiei during 1984, the stench was inescapable.
The most disfiguring affliction suffered by the Miyanmin was doubtless filariasis. Many Miyanmin women had one breast grossly swollen, while the majority of the men suffered from swelling of the scrotum (many to enormous size), and swelling and disfigurement of the lower limbs. Kebuge, a West Miyanmin man of about my age who was to become one of my close friends, was already infected when I first met him in 1984. Over the years of visiting, I watched helplessly as his scrotum and left leg swelled, until finally his left foot was nothing but a mass of wart-like growths, his scrotum a bloated mass the size and shape of a football.
SEVEN
The last people
Our arrival at Yapsiei station did not mark the end of our journey. The terrible suffering which disease had brought to the Miyanmin had encouraged many of them to move back upriver, into the small villages which they had so recently left. After some discussion, we decided to base ourselves at Betavip, a village located at the confluence of the Skgonga and Usake Rivers, one and a half day's walk northwest of Yapsiei.
The walk to Betavip was flat, but nonetheless the heat and humidity, muddy track and numerous leeches and mosquitoes made it challenging. I was actually rather pleased about the leeches, for where there are lots of leeches there must also be many mammals for them to live off. This augured well for my work.
We had employed about forty Miyanmin to convey our equipment to Betavip. They straggled out over a distance of several kilometres, meeting only for smoko and lunch. At lunch on the first day we stopped at a little settlement—just a few huts—perched on a high bank of the August River. A man was sitting on the step outside his hut, holding newborn twin boys.
At first the scene seemed delightful. But then I noticed the vacant look on the man's face. One of our carriers whispered that the man's wife had died in childbirth the previous night. With a leaden feeling in my throat, I asked if there was a wet-nurse nearby who could suckle the babies.
An empty gesture was the only response.
Sick at heart, I gave the man our supply of powdered milk—knowing that the milk would be mixed in unmeasured proportions with unboiled water in dirty cups. There was little hope that it would give the babies even the slightest chance of survival. They had looked so untouched by the filthy world they had been born into. They had looked so healthy.
By that afternoon the imposing peak of Mt Boobiari appeared almost straight ahead. The second day's walk took us around its base, then on to Betavip. I was surprised when we entered Betavip on the afternoon of the following day. The village turned out to be a small, pleasant collection of huts inhabited by about eighty people. The square houses were made of poles, neatly thatched over with folded pandanus leaves. All were raised a metre or two off the ground and planted round with brightly coloured shrubs and fruit trees. A vast tract of primary forest, where we would work, lay nearby.
Entering the village, we were surrounded by its inhabitants. After a while, they showed us a hut where we could stay. But we did not have a good introduction to Betavip.
Tired from the walk, we removed our boots and socks, and hung them in the sun to dry. A few hours later one team member went to retrieve his new woollen socks, only to find them well and truly fly-blown.
The first few days of our stay at Betavip were all but unbearable, not because of any physical discomfort, but because of the undying curiosity of the people. Each hour of the day our hut was filled with bodies. When they first arrived, people would stay respectfully near the door, but as the crowd swelled they would edge inside. Finally, a child with a long, green gobbet of snot dangling from its nose would be peering over my notebook, threatening to add to the chaotic marks I was inscribing there. Beside me someone else, with a huge open sore on his leg, would be rubbing up against me. The hot breath and the general stuffiness of the hut would lead me towards a slow implosion. It was all I could do to stifle a scream.
Dinnertime was, if possible, even worse. Then the same crowd, all of whom were hungry, would watch solemnly every mouthful we ate. The air was thick with the smell of grile.
At first I simply could not eat under these circumstances. Instead I would hand my dinner to a child in the crowd. But soon, plain, undisguised hunger did away with my scruples, and I ate oblivi
ous to my surroundings.
Worst of all was going to the toilet. The decrepit village pit toilet was something to be avoided at all cost. Indeed, on my one and only visit I got the distinct impression that it was not built to hold the weight of a European. To avoid being plunged headlong into shit, I took to wandering a long way into the bush to relieve myself. During such expeditions, I would invariably be followed by a cloud of small children, eager to see what wonders I might perform in the forest. Louring looks, shouted obscenities and vigorous arm-waving were of no use. It was only when I began to take down my trousers that, my mission becoming obvious, the numbers seemed to diminish at all. Even then I sometimes felt the glare of myriad tiny eyes fixed on me from among the foliage.
This lack of privacy was particularly unfortunate in view of Miyanmin sensibilities regarding waste elimination. I soon learned that the very worst breach of Miyanmin etiquette is to break wind in public. So great is their abhorrence of such a breach that the only equivalent taboo I can think of in our society is masturbating in public. One evening Don, who had been suffering a stomach complaint, did let one fly. Our Miyanmin hosts hung their heads in shame and covered their eyes with their hands. Finally, our translator Kegesep saved the day.
‘Well,’ he said in Miyanmin, breaking the tension, ‘everybody does have an arsehole, after all.’
The curiosity of the Miyanmin did abate somewhat after several weeks, and the moment came when I found myself alone in the hut. After a few minutes of relief though, the silence felt ominous—and I wandered perversely out onto the porch in the hope of engaging someone in conversation!
Our initial stay at Betavip was a formative experience. It was there that I became a competent speaker of Pidgin and made my first close Melanesian friends. It was also there that I gained my first real insights into a Melanesian culture.