by Tim Flannery
Before I left Telefomin in the 1985 field season, I decided that I should try to meet Femsep, a man of whom I had heard much. He had lived through all the changes I have described and had played a vital role in some of them. As a result of what Anaru and Don Gardner had told me, and an article I had read by Tom Gilliard of the American Museum of Natural History, I felt that I already knew quite a lot about this most famous of all Telefol, and that my meeting would bring few surprises. How wrong I was.
Tom Gilliard was an ornithologist who worked with Femsep in the 1950s. Ironically, Gilliard arrived in Port Moresby from New York on the very day that the two Australian kiaps and four native police were dying at the hands of enraged Telefol and Elip warriors. Gilliard had planned to work at Telefomin, but because of the massacre his plans had to be delayed. By the time he finally did reach Telefomin over a year later, Femsep had been arrested for his leading role in the murders, tried, and sentenced to death. His sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment, but he had been released from jail in Wewak and returned to Telefomin when his death through sickness seemed imminent.
As Gilliard records it, he found Femsep ‘sitting in the round entrance to his dwelling. He was a tiny man, emaciated by dysentery and fever...totally naked and the holes in his nose lacked the slender decorative cassowary quills other men wore. His hair was shorn in a prison cut—the strands that had once intertwined in a great horn of carefully wrapped cane shafts were gone ...’*
As he questioned this rather pathetic figure, Gilliard discovered that Femsep had travelled throughout most of the territory of the Mountain Ok, and that he knew more about wildlife than any Telefol living.
This same impression was conveyed to me whenever I asked about a particularly obscure animal, or piece of traditional knowledge. The answer was always ‘Femsep i save‘ (Femsep would know).
On that morning in 1985 when I set out to meet Femsep, I walked along the track leading to Telefolip. I had armed myself with a few cans of tinned fish and sticks of Paradise Twist tobacco by way of a gift, such things being de rigueur on meeting such an eminent person. As I went I saw an old man walking in front of me. I soon caught up with him and greeted him in Pidgin, ‘Apinun wanpela, Femsep i stap we?‘ (Good afternoon sir, do you know where Femsep is?) To my amazement he replied that he himself was Femsep. My surprise came in part from his physical appearance which, despite Gilliard's description, did not match my mental image of the great man. Femsep was tiny. In height he reached somewhere near my middle. Furthermore, dressed in the ubiquitous European cast-offs, he was quite unexceptional looking.
Somewhat embarrassed by the unexpected meeting, I explained that I hoped to talk a little about his life. I handed the tins and tobacco over. Femsep stopped and after looking slyly around to make sure that there was no-one watching, hid them in the long grass beside the airstrip. He said that if he took them home they would only be eaten by his family. Better to hide them where he could return and enjoy them himself.
As we walked along, I felt that I should let Femsep know that I was not a complete tenderfoot, but had worked for some time in the Telefomin area studying mammals. By way of introducing myself I said that I had worked with Amunsep and his family. On hearing this, Femsep pulled a mournful face and said, ‘Amunsep i dai pinis!‘ (Amunsep is dead.) I was deeply shocked, for I had met Amunsep just the day before, and had enjoyed a cup of tea with him. When he had enjoyed my discomfort for a few moments Femsep burst forth with peals of laughter, clearly delighted that he had tricked me so thoroughly.
After some more preliminary banter I questioned Femsep a little concerning his role in the uprising of 1953, but he claimed to have little knowledge of it, and denied emphatically that he had played a leading role in the massacre. This denial, I knew from contemporary accounts, was entirely untrue.
When we reached his destination, I parted from the strange old fellow with a renewed respect for his cunning. To the end of his life he remained adventurous and ever game to try new experiences, and I heard that a few days after we met he had flown by helicopter to Green River to visit his son, who was working there.
Two years later Femsep died. Telefol envisage the death of a big man as being like the fall of a great Araucaria tree. ‘The drii has fallen,’ they would say when speaking of such a death. Femsep must have been well into his eighties when he died. So highly regarded was he that the local community obtained some bags of cement and built a monument to him. It is, as far as I know, the first and only such monument ever built by Telefol to honour a Telefol.
But did Femsep end up buried beneath the concrete monument, or was it only a splendid ruse to trick the tablasep (white people) once again? Secretly I hoped that, in the best Telefol tradition, Femsep's body was exposed in a secret place in the forest, and his bones collected for display in a bilum in the Telefolip cult house. Exposed burials are now illegal in Papua New Guinea, yet it would not be the first time that Femsep had stood against the rest of the world and won. The Baptist missionaries and public health officers at Telefomin would be appalled.
Much later, in 1995, during one of my visits to the mining town of Tabubil, I ran into my old Telefol friend Trondesep. We spent a morning gossiping and talking about friends and places we knew. I heard, to my great sorrow, of the death of Amunsep about 1993 as well as that of Tinamnok a year later. This last was truly shocking news, for Tinamnok was by no means old or infirm and had always enjoyed good health. Apparently a lung infection, either influenza or pneumonia, killed him. Perhaps a handful of antibiotics could have saved him.
I learned that Willok had married and his wife had already given birth to their first child. Then Trondesep told me something which seemed difficult to believe. The Telefolip cult house had been rebuilt, and some young initiates had begun the six stages of ritual instruction that would carry them through to manhood. This was heartening news, but even now I am not sure whether it is true, or whether Trondesep was simply telling me something he thought might cheer me up.
At lunchtime I took Trondesep to the Cloudlands Hotel where he had a T-bone steak. He fumbled with the knife and fork until finally, in frustration, he grabbed the steak with both hands and began to chomp away happily on it. A group of mining people, both black and white, sent louring looks our way as Trondesep enjoyed his meal. I had quite forgotten that Trondesep was a short, barefoot Telefol with a pierced nasal septum, who was dressed in dirty clothes. I had thought of him as a tribal leader, a man of knowledge whose dignity and generosity of spirit should be obvious to everyone. How, I wondered, could people be made to see beyond the external, and into the greatness of character that can grace a person, regardless of appearance, language or culture?
And meanwhile, the drii are falling everywhere. In their place are coming men who have not needed traditional skills and knowledge to become big men. Instead, they have cast their lot with religion or western learning. The land, and the balance between it and its people, will be irrevocably changed by this.
I am glad I have met great traditional leaders like Femsep, but their passing fills me with apprehension for the future.
* Alan Ternes, Ants, Indians & Little Dinosaurs, Scribner, New York, 1975, p. 102.
PART IV
OK TEDI AND BEYOND
EIGHTEEN
Bat from the ice age
If social disruption had come rapidly to the Telefol, the pace of change they experienced was snail-like in comparison with that forced upon the Wopkaimin, another Mountain Ok group who live on the southern slopes of the Star Mountains.
The Wopkaimin live in some of the most difficult terrain in New Guinea. Rainfall is over nine metres per year at the village of Bultem (their main settlement), and is only slightly less elsewhere in their territory. A sunny day is a rarity, and a week without rain is virtually unknown. To make matters worse, the topography of the area is breath takingly vertical. Relatively flat spots suitable for agriculture and village sites are almost as rare as sunny days, and where they do
occur are usually small. Such places are known as bil to the Mountain Ok, explaining the number of airstrips which bear the term as a suffix (Tabubil, Tumolbil, Defakbil, etc.).
These factors have dictated that the Wopkaimin live in tiny, scattered family groups in a few favourable localities in their vast territory. Until the 1970s they spent their lives isolated not only from the outside world, but also isolated, most of the time, from their neighbours. They remained in this state, and virtually uncontacted by the colonial administration, until exploration for the Ok Tedi copper mine commenced. Then, within a few years of the discovery of commercially exploitable deposits of copper and gold, the outside world arrived en masse in their little villages and forests. The impact was as enormous as its results were unexpected.
My association with the Wopkaimin people has largely come about because of a very unusual bat. In 1975, Jim Menzies, a biology professor at the University of Papua New Guinea, described an extraordinary, newly discovered species of bat. The description was based on some bones found in cave deposits in Chimbu Province, some 400 kilometres east of the Wopkaimin. The bones dated to the end of the ice age, some 12,000 years ago. Similar caves in the area had produced the remains of Tasmanian Tigers, giant wombat-like creatures and large extinct wallabies. The bat bones themselves seemed to belong to a big, cave-dwelling species which was unique in the bat world in entirely lacking foreteeth (incisors).
The creature, it seemed, was now extinct.
So unusual was the find, though, that it created international interest (and much later still was reported on briefly by Michael Crichton in his novel Jurassic Park). Menzies named his new bat Aproteles bulmerae. The first name means ‘incomplete at the front’, the second is in recognition of Susan Bulmer, the archaeologist who recovered the remains. The new species soon became known to biologists (and indeed the wider public) as Bulmer's Fruit-bat.
Just two years after its discovery the anthropologist David Hyndman, who was living with the Wopkaimin, accompanied some friends on a bat hunt. The cash economy and western goods had just arrived in the area, due to employment opportunities with exploration teams working for Ok Tedi. As a result, Wopkaimin hunters possessed, for the first time ever, a shotgun and some nylon rope.
The hunters walked to a cave called Luplupwintem, a name which means ‘gathering place cave’, in reference to the enormous number of bats which used to congregate there. This cave is so huge, and its entrance so formidable, that it had been inaccessible for millennia. The shaft is a vertical doline at least 300 metres deep, which opens below into a cavern the size of a cathedral. Even if people could have got in, the vast chamber the bats roost in is so high that mere arrows could not reach the bats clinging to its roof.
The bats themselves added to the majesty of the place. The Wopkaimin say that when the bats ventured forth each evening in their tens of thousands the ground shook with the thunder of their wingbeats. Men had to cover their ears to avoid being deafened by the sound.
Whatever the case, one particularly brave man climbed down the rope into the massive doline, and expended five whole boxes of shotgun cartridges shooting bats. Thousands of bats were obtained and that night there was a grand feast. Hyndman saved a skull and a couple of jaw-bones, as well as a skin which he stuffed, to allow him to identify the unusual bats which had been served up to him at dinner.
To Hyndman's chagrin, however, village dogs ate the stuffed bat skin before it could be taken to Port Moresby for identification. The skull and jaw-bones, though, did arrive safely at the Zoology Department of the University of Papua New Guinea.
Imagine Jim Menzies’ surprise when he opened the package and saw a complete skull and jaw-bones of a bat which lacked incisor teeth, and which just a few weeks before had been someone's dinner. At that moment he knew Bulmer's Fruit-bat was not extinct, but had somehow survived near the Ok Tedi mine in far western Papua New Guinea.
The two scientists returned to Luplupwintem as soon as they could, but found to their dismay that the great colony had vanished. During the intervening period, other groups of hunters had visited the roost (the Wopkaimin say they were from Tifalmin), and they utterly devastated the colony. The scientists saw only two bats circling the roost, and subsequent visits revealed none at all. It seemed as if Bulmer's Fruit-bat had become extinct again—virtually at the moment of its rediscovery, without so much as a skin surviving so that researchers could know what it looked like. Indeed, it remained almost as mysterious as when it was known only from ancient fossils.
Not surprisingly, the people of Bultem (the village closest to the cave) regard Luplupwintem as a sacred place, and normally will not harm any bats which roost there. The story of the cave and its special significance was told to me by Noken, village leader in the late 1980s. He was old then and ill with what appeared to be tuberculosis. He whispered the tale to me in jumbled Pidgin, after first making sure that no-one was eavesdropping.
I was sworn to secrecy by Noken, who said that the story was known only to fully initiated Bultem men and were it to become known to the enemies of the Bultem people, it could be used against them. Consequently, I cannot repeat it here. Suffice to say that the villagers believe that any injury visited upon the bats will be inflicted upon them in turn.
In the explosion of change which contact with the outside world brought in the late 1970s, these beliefs were temporarily disregarded by some. Indeed it seems possible that people from other villages (who do not hold such beliefs) had been drawn to Bultem by news of the exploration teams, and had done most of the killing in 1977, while the Bultem people merely looked on.
Because of my work at nearby Telefomin I had become fascinated by Bulmer's Fruit-bat. During a survey of the mammals of the Telefomin area which Lester Seri and I conducted over the eight years from 1984 to 1992, we searched every cave in the region without finding a trace of the species. Our search was made difficult, to say the least, because we had no idea of what the bat looked like. Indeed, all we knew of it was that it was large, lived in caves, and had no foreteeth.
A few of the caves we investigated were exciting places. I am somewhat claustrophobic and Lester has a morbid fear of snakes (which are common inhabitants of caves in New Guinea), so we were hardly the most suitable pair to carry out cave exploration work. Despite these shortcomings we crawled, slithered and clambered into just about every cave and crevice we could manage around Telefomin, in the process recording the occurrence of dozens of species of bats, frogs, enormous spider-like pseudo-scorpions—and snakes.
There is one cave I shall never forget. Located on the Nong River, it lies one and a half days’ walk south of Telefomin near the Hindenburg Wall, an extraordinary cliff-face I had heard much about. The river itself flows through a beautifully forested valley almost entirely undisturbed by human activity. The cave lies in the valley bottom, far from help were any needed. Its entrance is a narrow slit. After a crawl of a few metres, it opens into a cathedral-sized chamber which is lit through a hole in the roof. A few insectivorous bats roost in the twilight near the entrance, but I saw little else of interest in this first great chamber.
Because of the lack of bats, I began to investigate some water-filled pot-holes in the floor of the cave. The water was so still and clear it was impossible to judge its depth, or even to see it in some instances. There were beautiful, rounded stones in the bottom of some pools, while in others lay bones. Looking closely, I saw that they were human, and not very old bones at that. I hid this discovery from our Mountain Ok companions, for they are nervous of the spirits which are thought to inhabit caves, and they seemed to be more on edge than usual.
As Lester and I walked deeper into the darkness, we left the Mountain Ok near the entrance. They seemed unwilling to go further, and kept talking of the masalai that inhabited the cavern.
After going some distance I became aware of a low, rumbling sound. At first it seemed to be so bass that I felt rather than heard it. At the same time, the atmosphere was rapidly bec
oming opaque, thickened by a strange mist. This was quite unnerving, for the cave was so large that one could easily be standing in the middle of it and see nothing but white-out in all directions.
Rounding a corner, I lost sight of Lester's torch-beam.
I moved forward slowly, hardly able to see the cave floor, feeling instead for a wall to guide myself by. The rumbling became a deafening roar, which seemed to shake the very sides of the chamber.
With relief, I finally made contact with the wall. Feeling upwards, I detected a large, wooden object in front of me. It was an enormous tree-trunk, jammed high up in the cave.
Abruptly, I understood the nature of the place. The sound and mist were coming from a subterranean waterfall of immense proportions. Its reverberations filled the chamber and shook the floor. When the volume of water going over the fall increased, the chamber in which I stood was flooded. Trees carried by the floodwaters were lodged in the walls and roof.
The bodies of people, it seemed, were also carried in. They decomposed and their bones settled in the still pools of water near the cave mouth.
Suddenly I felt disoriented. How did I know that I was crawling away from, rather than towards, the waterfall? The mist was now so dense I could hardly see my hand in front of my face. Suppressing my growing panic and flattening myself against the cave wall, I kept moving slowly on.
Gradually the mist began to clear and the rumbling sound receded. In my confusion I had begun to retrace my steps. I walked past the bones in the pot-hole with a feeling of terror not unlike, I imagine, the feelings that this cave aroused in my Mountain Ok companions.
As a result of this investigation and many others like it, Lester and I became confident that there was no major roost site occupied by Bulmer's Fruit-bat in the area. Had there been, the chances are we would have found it.