by Tim Flannery
Although these were spectacular fungi indeed, the most remarkable glow came from a bank of senescent grass growing by a garden. The fallen stems spilled down the bank for about five metres, and every one of them was infected with a species which gave off a silvery, sparkling luminescence. By night, this transformed the mundane bank into a shining, frozen waterfall.
On the whole, the mammal fauna of the Sol region contained few surprises. Cuscusses were the most common species caught, and our hunters must have brought in over a hundred of them during the time I worked there. We kept only a few for the museum, for the vast majority belonged to just one species, the Silky Cuscus (Phalanger sericeus). Then, towards the end of an expedition in 1986, a hunter brought in a young cuscus which looked different from all the others. When I returned to Australia I found that it resembled an adult which I had captured a year before on the Nong River to the south of Telefomin. At the time, I assumed that this animal was a hybrid.
With two specimens I began to rethink my ideas. Then Lester Seri showed me a female he had caught near Tifalmin years before. Here was a third. Biochemical and morphological studies subsequently made it clear that these specimens represented a distinct, very rare and primitive kind of cuscus which was found only in the Telefomin area. I named it Phalanger matanim, the last name being that which the Telefol know it by. Even today, this curious creature is known from only six specimens.
As I continued work on the Sol, I learned a little about what it means to be Telefol. At the centre of the Telefol world-view is the story of Afek—Afek of the Araucaria grove—the ancestress of all the Mountain Ok. There are many versions of her story and doubtless the one told to me is not precisely the same as that told to others. Indeed, because of my interest in animals, I probably learned more of the parts of the story relating to wildlife than of other aspects. Despite the difficulty of learning the whole tale, one needs to know the story of Afek in order to appreciate the Telefol world-view.
According to the Telefol, Afek was the first person to exist. She lived in the cult house at Telefolip with her children. At least one of her children was a man, while the others included the Long-beaked Echidna (which Telefol know as Egil), the rat (Senok) and the Ground Cuscus (Quoyam). For a long time, they all lived happily together in the house with their mother.
Egil was the first of Afek's children to leave home. He complained to his mother that the smoke from the cooking fire hurt his small and weak eyes. Afek said it was best that he go and live in the high, mossy forest surrounding the Telefomin valley. She told her human son that Egil was his brother, on no account to be harmed in any way.
Because of this injunction, Telefol never until recently hunted this rarest of New Guinea animals. In the 1950s echidnas were so common at Telefomin they could be met with even in the immediate vicinity of Telefolip. This taboo against hunting Long-beaked Echidnas was unique in all of New Guinea, making Telefomin at that time the last stronghold of this now endangered species.
So powerful was the taboo against harming Egil that Telefol believed that to walk into Telefolip with echidna blood on one's hands would be to bring disaster upon all Mountain Ok people. Even today, when all Telefol are nominally Christian, many older men refuse to touch, eat, or even look upon a dead Egil. Despite this, the Long-beaked Echidna is no longer seen in the Telefomin area. Younger men, who have been Christian since adolescence, capture the animals and sell them alive for fabulous prices to non-Telefol living at Telefomin, or carry them for sale to neighbouring tribes.
It is with a heavy heart that I must relate that in all my time at Telefomin (1984–92) I never saw a living Long-beaked Echidna.
The story of Afek continues in this way. Senok, the rat, was the child who never left home. Instead it stayed in Afek's house and became a pest to humans. The rat which infests Telefol houses is the Small Spiny Rat (Rattus steini). Despite its name, this is a sizeable and smelly rodent, which does considerable damage to crops. In traditional times, the species did have a use; before store-bought food became widely available, Senok was a major protein source for Telefol women.
The story of Quoyam (the Ground Cuscus) is perhaps the strangest of all those told about Afek's children. The Ground Cuscus is a large and powerful animal which is respected by many Mountain Ok groups. This is doubtless because it is a child of Afek, and indeed is regarded as a most human-like animal. Telefol say that Quoyam steals food from their gardens. It places taro pieces in its pouch just as a human thief would hide stolen taro in his bilum. Even the story of how Quoyam came to leave his ancestral home has distinctly human overtones.
Quoyam lived happily with his mother until he reached adolescence, when he became interested in the opposite sex and curious about female anatomy. One day, driven by carnal curiosity, he inserted one of his digits into his mother's vagina. Angered, she chopped off the offending digit with a stone axe. As a result, Telefol believe to this day that Quoyam has but four digits on its forepaw.
Biologists have a problem with this story, for we know that, like all species of cuscus, Quoyam has five digits on each forepaw. When I first drew this anomaly to the attention of a Telefol youth who had caught a specimen, he looked uncomprehendingly at the paw with its five robust digits. Shaking his head, he said that it must have four fingers and that, despite its appearance, the animal he had caught was perhaps not Quoyam at all!
How to account for the persistence of this Telefol belief in the face of such glaring contradictory evidence? The answer may lie in the fact that Ground Cuscusses are pugnacious creatures. Old males can be terribly scarred, with eyes torn through, ears missing, and claws and digits bitten off. Perhaps a sufficient number of large males have sacrificed a digit on the field of battle to keep the myth alive in the minds of the Telefol.
To return to the central theme of the Afek story, Telefol believe that, because of the association of the ancestress with Telefolip, the village has a special place in the Mountain Ok cosmology. They believe, indeed, that they occupy a physically and spiritually central position in the region. As a result, the rituals they conduct at Telefolip are thought to have repercussions throughout the Mountain Ok world.
This special sense of responsibility has perhaps led to the rather stolid and serious demeanour of Telefol. They are sometimes slow to laugh, and the Telefol ideal is to appear to disdain frivolity. Indeed, Telefol characterise themselves as sober, responsible people, qualities they find lacking in their neighbours. The Miyanmin, they say, are fiery and violent and—like children—prone to temper tantrums. The Atbalmin, they suggest, are also like children, without a real sense of responsibility or a worry about the future.
It is this sense of social gravity, perhaps, which accounts for the survival of the Telefolip cult house when so many lesser cult houses in the region have been abandoned. Since European contact, Telefol culture has been under immense pressure, both deliberate and inadvertent.
Perhaps the most mortifying discovery the Europeans brought the Telefol was that the world is a much larger place than they suspected, and that its centre does not necessarily lie at Telefolip.
Christianity came to Telefomin after the Second World War, and a Baptist mission has been established just a few kilometres from Telefolip since the early 1950s. Young Telefol have discovered that there are other ways to gain status than their tradition offers. By becoming pastors, or gaining power and influence in some other way within the church, they have learned to circumvent the social control of clan elders, and to bring traditional authority structures into question. It is all too easy for these aspiring young leaders to label ancient rituals as the work of the devil in an attempt to discredit the old power structure. This has led to the decline of many traditional beliefs.
As a result of these influences, the most important initiations occur today not at Telefolip, but at other cult houses in areas to the south which are peopled by the Wopkaimin and which are under Roman Catholic influence.
Some of the young Telefol men who be
came pastors have moved to other Mountain Ok communities to spread the good word. In 1986, I met one such man at the Atbalmin settlement of Munbil, some fifty kilometres west of Telefomin.
The Munbil airstrip had been opened just three weeks before my visit, and was still being lengthened and smoothed out as our Cessna came to a screeching halt metres from the jungle at the end of the clearing.
The Atbalmin working on the strip appeared to have had little contact with the outside world, for they were dressed in grass skirts or penis gourds, and most spoke little if any Pidgin. Moses, the Telefol pastor, introduced himself to us, and invited us to stay in the newly completed medical clinic by the strip. He told us that after he had heard the gospel message as a youth at Telefomin twenty years previously, he had decided to live among the Atbalmin at Munbil as a missionary.
Moses had long promised the Atbalmin that, if they prayed earnestly and followed gospel teachings, the day would come when Europeans would arrive and bring wonderful things with them. Our visit, he said, was the fulfilment of a dream which had been twenty years in the making. He begged us to buy the tomatoes and carrots which the village women grew. He explained that the Atbalmin would not yet eat such strange food and were growing them only for sale to the expected influx of tourists. If they saw us eat them, he reasoned, they might be encouraged to consume them themselves, or at least grow more for trade.
Despite his high expectations of us, we got on quite well with Moses—until one morning when our small group (myself and four members of the Australian Museum Society) went down to the river to bathe.
The river ran at the base of a steep cliff about fifty metres below the village. We all (including two women) stripped to our briefs and enjoyed a thorough wash. I was aware that all the while we were being observed from the cliff top by Moses and about two hundred Atbalmin.
When we climbed back to the village, Moses was almost in tears.
‘For twenty years,’ he lamented, ‘I have tried to teach these women to hide their breasts modestly, as the Bible says we should. Now you come and display yourselves shamelessly in front of my whole congregation. What will they think of me?’
I have often wondered how I should judge Moses. He had devoted his life to doing good as he saw it. Yet what had he achieved? He might, perhaps, have introduced a more varied diet and thus improved nutrition among the Atbalmin. But would this be counterbalanced by the diseases introduced as people started to wear dirty European cast-offs? Perhaps it is true that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
The Baptist missionaries at Telefomin have worked hard to wean the Telefol from what they see as their pagan ways. More than once I was told they had offered to purchase timber cut from Afek's sacred grove at Telefolip. They had also apparently discouraged people from participating in the renewal of the cult house itself, a job which must be undertaken every twenty years or so, as the construction materials used deteriorate rapidly.
During the latter part of the 1980s it was sad to see clear signs that the old Telefol culture was falling away. The last people to dress traditionally were rapidly fading. Telefolip was falling into disrepair, and even the sacred grove of Araucaria trees was no longer sacrosanct. I remember walking through the grove in 1984 in the company of a young Telefol man, when he saw that a branch had fallen from one of the larger trees. He was greatly alarmed by this, and looked intensely at the fallen limb as if trying to extract meaning from it.
When I last visited the grove in 1992, a great Araucaria lay by the path—its trunk hewn into segments with a chainsaw. Had the tree fallen before it was cut up? Yet a decade before, the cutting of even a fallen tree would have been unthinkable.
Although the Telefol experienced dramatic social change between about 1950 (when government influence began to be felt) and 1990, they had yet to suffer the breakdown in law and order which so often accompanies such changes in Papua New Guinea. Robberies were all but unknown at Telefomin while I was there, and the tight-knit and isolated community seemed to retain relatively powerful control over the worst excesses of its young men. Telefol do not easily give themselves over to lawlessness. They are too responsible for that.
Nevertheless, by May 1992 the houses of Telefolip had a neglected look and were clearly no longer inhabited. Weeds grew up around them, and creepers twined around door-covers which would, perhaps, never again be opened. The cult house itself was entirely dilapidated. Great holes in the roof had allowed the rain in, and precious Telefol shields (worth thousands of dollars on the international art market) and bilums full of ancestral bones were mouldering away on the floor. It seemed as if the modern world had finally won. Telefomin was no longer the centre of the universe. It had been converted into just another remote, grey, government station.
SEVENTEEN
Femsep—a Telefol big man
The arrival of the Europeans at Telefomin has left many people confused, groping for explanations of the phenomena which have so transformed their lives. This change has indeed been so rapid, yet so uneven, that extraordinary misunderstandings are inevitable.
I was intrigued to find Tinamnok show enormous interest in a candle, having never seen one before—yet battery operated torches were passé for him. Likewise, light aircraft are completely accepted at Telefomin as everyday means of transport, yet how would its people respond to a bicycle?
The coming of western technology is a favourite theme of Telefol stories. Several times I was told the story of the first torch to arrive in the valley. It had been brought by a young man who had visited a trade store. Everyone considered it a wonder—too valuable indeed to remain the property of such a young, irresponsible fellow. His aged and respected uncle, therefore, took possession of it. One night the uncle set out hunting. Using the torch, he was so successful that he became mightily burdened under the mountain of possums he had killed.
He had wandered far from home and in the middle of the night it began to rain. Unconcerned, the old man stopped under a tree and gathered some kindling. He applied the torch closely to the twigs, looking for the expected flame. After some time, his fire remained unlit and frustration was rising in the old fellow, who was by now wet and freezing. Finally he was roused to a fury and threw the torch to the ground. It broke and he spent the night in darkness, huddled under his pile of possums. When he returned to the village in the morning he threw the torch at the feet of his nephew, cursing the useless item along with the lad who had acquired it.
One can sympathise with the sense of disorientation at the intrusion of the modern world which is felt so keenly by Telefol. The effect of intrusions on their isolation became apparent to me during a visit in 1986. I was staying on the Sol River when several people arrived in a state of high excitement, saying that the Third World War had begun. They claimed to have heard on the radio that the Americans had attacked the Russians and that many cities were already destroyed. Some reports were quite precise, stating the number of MiGs and other aircraft lost on both sides.
As it was the Reagan era and the Cold War was still alive and well, this terrifying news had an aura of plausibility about it. I spent several days in a highly anxious state, questioning people closely about where they had got their information, and exactly what they had heard. They were so consistent and adamant in their stories that I really did come to believe them. The thought then occurred to me that perhaps all that remained of the world was this tiny valley high in the mountains of central New Guinea.
Returning to Telefolip several days later, I found that everyone there laboured under the same apprehensions. No-one knew where the news had come from, but it did seem as if America and Russia were at war, and that terrible destruction had been occasioned by nuclear weapons.
It was only when I got to Port Moresby some weeks later that I learned the full truth. The nuclear reactor at Chernobyl had blown up. Chinese whispers had transformed this event into a world war by the time word reached Telefomin.
Often on the Sol, I would be approached by
a Telefol elder in the dead of night. He would whisper to me: ‘This evening I told you everything of the secrets of Afek. Now tell me, friend, where does money come from?’
At first I did not understand the nature of these questions, and would respond by saying that money represents accumulated wealth and that my ancestors had worked and saved hard. They had invested their money in banks or companies, creating even more wealth.
On hearing this my listener would typically become irritable and say, ‘Money does not come from work. You come here and pay us to work for you. We carry your equipment and feed you. You do not work, yet it is you who have the money. Now tell me really, as a friend who will keep your secret, where does money come from?’
What the Telefol wanted to hear was the magic formula whereby money could be literally made.
One night I was asked, in a similar vein, how aircraft were created. Many Telefol had by this time visited the newly opened Ok Tedi mine, so I decided to begin by explaining the basics of where raw materials such as metals came from. I said that aeroplanes were made of metal, much like the copper and gold being dug up at Ok Tedi. This was taken to a factory, where a great number of people with different skills fashioned it into an aeroplane. I added that probably no one person knew how to make an aeroplane, but that it was a joint effort which took many people.
Again, my Telefol friends listened with patience, but finally, and rather plaintively asked, ‘Just tell me how to make them.’ It was as if I knew the secret of magically creating aeroplanes, but refused through selfishness to share it with him.