by Tim Flannery
This was a deception, for that night as the Amungme slept their hosts turned upon the refugees, killing many. The Amungme believed that this happened because the Ok Sibil people were being paid a bounty of 50,000 rupiah (then about thirty-five Australian dollars) for each border-crosser whose head was presented at the local military post.
The Amungme are a tough people and a few days later they regrouped and raided Ok Sibil. They killed several people and forcibly abducted a number of young women. At the time that I interviewed the refugees, they were keeping these women as their wives. Neither could speak the first language of the other, so doubtless the relationships were not altogether happy ones.
The refugees crowded close around me. They had heard that I had a shotgun. Could they borrow it, they asked, so that they could return to Indonesia and ‘pay back’ for the injuries they had suffered?
Horrified at the thought of being at the centre of an international incident, I ensured that the gun did not leave my side until I saw it safely on board the Cessna which would take me to Port Moresby.
PART III
TELEFOMIN
THIRTEEN
Exit by airbed
I first went to Telefomin in 1984. My arrival was a disaster which began during the last few days I spent at Yapsiei. Don Gardner and the rest of our party had decided to travel from Betavip to Yapsiei on rafts. I had never done this before. So it was an exciting prospect which I looked forward to mightily.
The morning of our departure was glorious, still and warm, and the river was flowing smoothly, reflecting the surrounding forest on its surface. It appeared to be a perfect day for travel by water. No more painful footslogging through swamps for us, I thought gleefully!
The raft I was travelling on was crowded and the constant babbling of my companions soon became an annoyance, as the noise was scaring off any wildlife well before we got close enough to view it. It was also a frustration to have to float past so many things I wished to get a closer look at, simply because the raft was not manoeuvrable enough. Finding these lost opportunities intolerable, I decided to inflate my airbed and float alongside. That way I could act a little independently, and get a close look at anything I particularly wanted to.
The head of a Soft-shelled Tortoise broke the smooth surface of the river not far from the raft. I set out to glide close to it. I soon became totally absorbed by the creature, which I had never previously observed in the wild.
The tortoise dived. Then I spotted a Brahminy Kite perched on a branch overhanging the river. The stately brown and white raptor just stood there as I approached it—a regal sight. Somehow, the creatures of the river did not view me as a threat as I glided past on my airbed. Perhaps they thought I was dead, or just another floating log.
Alone on the river, the raft out of sight, I seemed to have found paradise. Now that the noisy human caravan had passed by, the sounds of riverbank life were extraordinary. Birds and other animals seemed to emerge from nowhere.
All day I floated alone down that enchanted river, observing at close quarters wildlife which I had never encountered before. In the afternoon I passed a great circular eddy which must have been at least fifty metres across. I swirled slowly around in company with the great logs and other debris held in its grip. Lying face up, I watched the crowns of enormous trees outlined against the sky as they seemed to rotate around my head. It was one of the most magical days of my life.
In one place a great log jam all but blocked the river. Travelling ahead of me, a member of our expedition had been surprised to find the remains of a wallaby, half-rotten, lodged in it. He had clambered from the raft over the slippery logs and gingerly retrieved the skull for the museum collection. Months later, when our specimens were being cleaned and prepared at the museum, my attention would be drawn to some curious holes in the skull of this wallaby. It slowly dawned on me that they were puncture holes made by a crocodile bite. The wallaby had not drowned as I had assumed. It had been killed and stowed in the log jam by a crocodile when the water level was higher, probably just a few days before we had floated past.
Meanwhile, I drifted blissfully alone and unaware, down the river.
But by late afternoon I realised that I had no idea how far I was from Yapsiei station. It even seemed possible that I had passed it without realising—and was now headed for the mighty Sepik.
If I had missed the station I was in severe trouble, for there was no human habitation before me for many, many kilometres.
Alarmed at my disorientation, I now paddled on with purpose, looking for some sign of human settlement. As the last rays of the sun streaked across the sky I began to panic. Then I spotted the Papua New Guinea flag atop a pole high above the riverbank.
It was the flagpole at Yapsiei station.
As I clambered up the bank, I was met by Deyfu, who had arrived by raft an hour or so before. He looked at me sternly and led me towards the edge of the forest. There, on a pole, sat one of the largest crocodile skulls I have ever seen. Pointing to it, he said that the creature had been killed a few weeks before in the river, just by the station. I felt incredibly stupid.
The worst, however, was yet to come.
The night I arrived at Yapsiei, I awoke in the small hours of the morning gripped with the most terrible stomach cramps. A visit to the toilet was clearly imperative, yet I dreaded it. The dunny outside our fibro cottage was of the pit variety with a dirty wooden seat: a far less salubrious option than squatting in the bush. Worse, at least to me, was the fact that it provided an ideal habitat for a considerable population of large, hairy spiders. I left my roll of toilet paper there between visits and next time found a particularly ugly specimen secreted in the cardboard tube. By day most of them hid in nooks and crannies, but by night they were everywhere.
Large, hairy spiders, I am ashamed to admit, are the one thing I fear above all else. That night, I had to face my fear countless times as the pains became worse and worse.
By morning I was nauseous and began vomiting. I no longer had the strength to crawl to the toilet, and lay instead inside the crude, metal shower cubicle in the fibro house. Each time something emerged from either end of me, I turned on the cold shower and was cleansed under its cool flow. This unfortunate condition persisted for several days, during which time I ate nothing. By the time the little Cessna arrived to take us to Telefomin, I felt weak, but had recovered enough to carry on with my research.
FOURTEEN
The navel of the universe
While staying at Yapsiei in 1984 I heard much about Telefomin. Some Miyanmin represented the place to me much as some Australians still regard London: a remote, yet central, ancestral homeland.
Before I climbed aboard the Cessna at Yapsiei airstrip I asked Anaru what he knew of the Telefol. ‘Their language sounds like the croaking of frogs,’ he said. He told me that all of the Mountain Ok, the Miyanmin included, had originally come from Telefomin. He mentioned an old Telefol man called Femsep, who had the power to blight the taro of the Miyanmin. He spoke with great respect of this powerful sorcerer. I got the feeling from Anaru that I should watch out for this old fellow and his magic.
And Don Gardner had told me a little of the history of European contact at Telefomin. It was unique, he said, in being the only place in the Australian colonial territories where an organised insurrection against the administration had taken place.
In 1953 the Telefol cut off and murdered two young Australian kiaps and four Papuan police. Telefol warriors then massed at the station and attempted to kill the remaining Australians. Among them was Norm Draper, a quick-witted Baptist missionary. Draper grabbed Femsep's son, who was playing near the radio shack, and held him hostage until relief arrived.
The Telefol cut logs to roll onto the airstrip in order to prevent other Australians landing. But Draper radioed for help before they could be deployed. The uprising was over almost before it began. The principal rebels were sentenced to death, along with a number of other Telefol men, but th
e sentences were later commuted to terms of imprisonment.
Telefomin truly is remote from the other major centres of human population in New Guinea. The densely populated central highlands of Papua New Guinea lie hundreds of kilometres to the east, while Irian Jaya's Baliem Valley lies even further to the west. As a result of this isolation, Telefomin is a bit of a backwater, albeit with a very distinctive culture.
Sweet potato (introduced to New Guinea about 400 years ago) is the backbone of agriculture in most other areas, but at Telefomin it plays a very minor role. There, taro (a much older indigenous crop) still reigns supreme. Curiously, the Pacific Rat (Rattus exulans), which was introduced to New Guinea about 3,000 years ago and is a great pest in houses and gardens throughout most of the country, is absent from Telefomin. Again, this probably reflects the region's remoteness.
The material culture of the Telefol is also distinctive. The Mountain Ok (all of whom trace descent from Telefomin) are the only mountain people in New Guinea with an elaborate carving tradition. Their shields and house-boards (boards with a small oval opening which acts as a door) are beautifully carved in abstract designs which are often coloured in ochre, black and white.
The dress of the Mountain Ok also differs from that found in most parts of Papua New Guinea, but is similar to that worn by many mountain tribes in Irian Jaya. Women wear a skirt made of grass and are rarely seen without a laden bilum slung from their foreheads. These beautifully looped string bags are made from the bark of a particular tree. When new they are snowy white and soft, but incredibly durable and elastic. They are used to carry taro, other food, firewood and even children. It was a bilum which had saved Oblankep's life. Telefol bilums are renowned throughout Papua New Guinea for their strength, durability and artistry.
The dress of the men is rather elaborate. It consists of a long gourd which is worn over the penis and tied at its base to the scrotum. A few loops of cane are worn around the waist, and a bone or boar's tusk through the pierced septum of the nose. The heads of rhinoceros beetles are worn through holes at the nose tip, and the stiff, cylindrical spine-like feathers from cassowary wings go through holes at the sides of the nose. These cross above the nose, imparting a boar-like fierceness to the face. The bilums of men are often elaborately decorated with feathers or other objects. In times past, an intricate head-dress of cane and ochre was also worn. The nature of both head-dress and bilum denoted the stage of initiation that a man had reached.
For a while, traditional dress mixed rather oddly with new influences in the Telefomin area. One man was famous for wearing the pink, pudgy leg of a plastic doll in place of the yellow gourd usually affixed to the penis. The pink plastic baby flesh and cute baby foot looked somehow obscene in its new role. Another was known for wearing a cigar case.
By the time of my first visit to Telefomin in 1984 there were still a few old men who wore the penis gourd and cane bands, but by 1990 even they were gone. By then, almost everyone was clothed in dirty European cast-offs. These clothes are donated by Australians to the Baptist mission, which ships them to Papua New Guinea to sell to the Telefol.
On this first visit to Telefomin I flew from Yapsiei via the Sepik Gorge. Approaching the valley on this route, one sees that its entrance is marked by a precipice of titanic proportions. This cliff of white limestone, perhaps 1,500 metres high, stands guard on its southern side. On the very lip of the cliff is a tiny village. It looks like the work of ants in proportion to the scale of the massive white scarp below.
The small government station and mission post at Telefomin are nestled in the base of the steep but flat-bottomed valley. The Sepik River flows near its southern margin, but at a level several hundred metres below the main valley floor. My best guess as to how the valley formed is that long ago a landslide blocked the Sepik River, damming its waters to form a lake which filled the entire Telefomin Valley. Perhaps the towering white cliff is the scar left by this huge prehistoric landslide. Whatever the case, sediment must have been deposited in the ancient lake for a long time, finally building up to a thickness of several hundred metres.
When the dam wall broke, the lake drained and the river began to cut down through the sediment accumulated in the lake. Today the river has cut so far that it runs well below the level of the old lake bed.
In 1987, when a road was being constructed in the valley near Telefomin, workers unearthed fascinating evidence of the ancient life that once lived around the old lake system. The bulldozer cutting the track came across a layer of fossilised leaves and stems preserved in a bluish clay. Near them was most of the skeleton of an extinct marsupial. The animal, a distant relative of the wombat, was like a panda in size and shape. It must have inhabited the forest surrounding the lake. The fossil plants remain unstudied, but when they are examined they should give an intriguing glimpse of what those forests were like aeons ago.
The old lake surface is now all grassland, having being cleared in prehistoric times, but small remnants of forest have survived in gullies. The southern wall of the valley is also grassland. There, the mountain wall rises abruptly to over 2,500 metres elevation. It is so steep that fires lit at its base during dry periods carry right to the top, killing the forest as they go.
When I first saw the Telefomin Valley it seemed to be a dull, forbidding place. Cloud closed it off like a blanket over a basin. Below, through the constant drizzle, a maze of muddy tracks skirted swamps and led to sombre-looking buildings. Moss and lichen growing on every exposed fence-post and dead tree testified that rain and cloud were life's constants here.
Dan Jorgensen, a Canadian anthropologist who had already spent several years with the Telefol, was then living in a village called Telefolip. Telefolip lay about forty minutes’ walk south of the airstrip along a slippery, muddy path which wound its way through grassland. I was anxious to meet Dan, for my experience with Don Gardner had shown me just how valuable contacts provided by anthropologists can be.
A small cluster of huts lies near the place where the turn-off to Telefolip leaves the main track. I inquired after Dan at one of these, and an old man led me down the side path through long kunai grass. Soon, we dropped off the plateau into a steep gully, and the environment suddenly changed. We were walking through a grove of magnificent Araucaria trees. Around the edge of the grove they were saplings but, further in, the pines were soaring giants, mist swirling through their crowns. Their straight, clean boles carried patches of bright green moss, which contrasted with their walnut-coloured bark. At one point the path dipped under the trunk of a fallen giant, giving me a chance to measure myself against the diameter of one of these magnificent trees. It was about a metre thick.
The most striking thing about the grove was the quality of the sound. It seemed as if, in an instant, we had left the noisy, muddy world of drizzle and people and entered a large, open-air cathedral. The villages with their slippery paths and clamour of pigs and children were left behind. Even the sound of the rain had vanished—high above the drizzle was caught in the canopy. One could not feel or hear it below. The path itself had also become more pleasant, for it now passed over a soft carpet of leaves and moss, muffling our footfalls.
Suddenly, a bird flitted between the lower branches of one of the Araucarias. I held my breath as I recognised it as a male Splendid Astrapia (Astrapia splendidissima). With their long tails and curved beaks, these magnificent birds of paradise are imposing creatures. From a distance they appear to be all black, but when viewed more closely you can see the iridescent patches on their chest and head, which are beautiful beyond description. Their glorious tail plumes are highly valued everywhere. As a result, they are avidly hunted and are usually shy. I looked at my companion for signs of interest in the bird. I was astounded that he took almost no notice of it as it flitted about in the branches just above his head. He simply trudged by, head down, along the path.
Too soon light showed through the trees ahead of us, signalling the end of the Araucaria grove. We came to a fence
, and before us stood the wall of a building the likes of which I had never seen before in New Guinea. It was a barn-like structure about as tall as a two-storey house, and as we walked around to the front of it I could see that the only egress lay via a tiny oval door halfway up its front wall.
Stretched out before this remarkable structure lay the village of Telefolip. It consisted of a dozen or so houses, arranged in two rows facing a path leading to the barn-like building. The houses all stood on pedestals of soil about a metre high. The pedestals had been created, apparently, by the soil between and around them being worn away by countless generations of feet. This never happens in most of New Guinea because the village site changes regularly.
What struck me most about Telefolip was that everything was traditional. Not a nail or iron tool, not a plastic bag or piece of nylon rope gave any hint that this village belonged to the end of the twentieth century.
Dan Jorgensen was sitting in one of the huts, surrounded by senior Telefol men. He was in deep discussion with them, but he welcomed me warmly. I was breathless with the excitement of seeing a bird of paradise at such close range, and blurted out my tale of the sighting.
But that particular bird, it seemed, had been displaying for several weeks now in the sacred grove.
The grove of Araucaria trees, Dan explained, belongs to Afek, the ancestress of the Telefol. The large building at the end of the sacred grove was her cult house, where young Telefol men are taken so that the secrets of the ancestress can be passed on to them. No woman is ever allowed to enter it. Indeed, no woman is allowed even to enter the sacred grove of Araucaria trees through which I had just passed. Instead, they had to take a steep, muddy path that passed into the village via another route.