by Tim Flannery
At present things are not entirely hopeless. I have met a few Javanese (usually the better educated) who understand and truly like the Dani, and who do not wish to change them. Likewise, I have met some Irianese (particularly coastal people) who feel some allegiance to Indonesia. These rare exceptions, however, are frail beginnings upon which to build a nation.
For many years the Indonesian military has been trying to get the Dani to replace their traditional dress with western-style clothes. During the 1970s this ‘persuasion’ took the form of an official policy called ‘Operation Koteka’. The coercion used was often brutal, and many Dani who came under its influence still complain of their ill-treatment. It is, I suspect, no coincidence that many of the Dani living at Wamena, which is the centre of Javanese influence in the mountains, have most strongly resisted the pressure to don trousers. It was they who suffered most intensely in the past and, in a typically Melanesian way, they have refused resolutely to be bowed.
Everything is cheap in Wamena. The military flies food into the isolated town gratis, so that rice can be purchased there for little more than one pays for it in the streets of Jakarta. Clothing is ridiculously cheap by Papua New Guinea standards, as are all of the other little luxuries of life. This, I suppose, is some small recompense for the outsiders (many from Java) who are sent to work in this remote and sometimes hostile outpost of empire. The Melanesians, however, who have no experience of any other economy (and whose cash reserves are minuscule), complain of the prices and strongly suspect that they are being exploited by the shopkeepers and the Government.
Despite my interest in the dynamic social mix at Wamena, I was anxious to leave the town and visit a truly Melanesian part of Irian Jaya. So it was a relief when, after a day-long wait at the police station to obtain permission to travel to Kwiyawagi, we finally held in our hands the last, necessary, profusely stamped piece of paper. Our flight (which we had to arrange months in advance) would be waiting for us in just a day or two's time.
The flight from Wamena to Kwiyawagi is unforgettable. As the aircraft climbs slowly to the west, mountains rise sharply from the valleys, their upper slopes clothed in beech forest of the darkest green, while their summits stand out above the vegetation as pointy limestone peaks and spires. Below, the Baliem River rushes through yellow grassland, past hundreds of settlements and gardens. There is something very ‘Irian’ about the view with its round houses and limestone topography. I could never mistake it for somewhere in Papua New Guinea.
Soon the aircraft enters a narrow valley where the river becomes a foaming torrent. At the head of the valley stands an abrupt limestone wall. It was astonishing to see that the huge river we had been following was issuing from a fissure at the base of this cliff.
Our aircraft struggled to gain elevation to clear the 3,000 metre-high limestone crest above the fissure. It did so with the barest of margins, and we swooped over tree-tops and spires of jagged, grey limestone karst which seemed to be just a few metres below us.
The conical limestone towers and dark trees soon dropped away abruptly at yet another steep cliff-face. Beyond it lay a glorious, undulating valley, stretching away to the east and west. This great, isolated valley is a gentle and fertile land dotted with hamlets. Two vast rivers cut their way through it. Even though the rivers are at nearly 3,000 metres elevation, they are lazy, meandering and muddy, resembling the type more often seen at sea-level than at such altitudes.
These are the East and West Baliem rivers. They converge just a few kilometres from the base of the cliff we had just passed. Looking back, I saw one of the most extraordinary natural features ever encountered in a lifetime of travel—the Baliem swallet—a vast hole in the earth which lies at the cliff's base. Into it disappears the entire combined flow of the East and West Baliem rivers. To see such an enormous volume of water disappear from the face of the earth, as if it was entering some great plug-hole, is awesome. The water swirls furiously, sending up great spurts of spray as the river and all it carries enter an underground cavern. It exits on the other side of the range, at the great spring we had flown over.
The swallet is made all the more striking by evidence that this sink-hole occasionally clogs up. Around it, in ever wider concentric rings, are ridges which mark the shorelines of old lakes. These form whenever debris, such as trees, boulders and mud, temporarily clogs the entrance. The water forms ponds until the blockage is breached. Then the lake is emptied by a vast, sucking whirlpool in what must surely be one of nature's great spectacles.
The limestone range at the swallet cuts the valley off entirely from the outside world. The basin is completely enclosed, and the only access into it by foot is by scaling one of the rugged ranges which surround it. I was to discover that this topography had protected the region, almost miraculously, from major incursions by the outside world. In a sense it is a little Melanesian Switzerland, peopled by patriots as fiercely jealous of their independence and security as any Swiss, and equally well fortified by nature.
This world enclosed by the limestone ranges is remarkable for its gentleness and beauty. Warm air rising from the valley prevents the formation of cloud, so there is often a clear blue sky overhead. The temperature is pleasantly warm by day, reaching the low 20s, but the nights are cool, and in May to July frosts are not uncommon.
The East and West Baliem rivers meander through this valley in great, easy loops. They flow through a rustic landscape of gardens and grasslands studded with tall, palm-like mountain pandanus. These striking trees, with their heads of radiating, strap-shaped leaves towering up to thirty metres above the valley floor, are supported on stilt roots, giving them a rather bizarre appearance. They are remnants left when the forest was cleared, and many are clearly ancient. The football-sized clusters of nuts they produce are by far the most highly esteemed plant crop the mountain people know. Smoked, they can keep for weeks or months. When the pandanus season comes, the Dani develop a single-minded obsession to gorge on the oily nuts. This has been referred to as ‘pandanus madness’ by some visitors.
The backdrop to this scene is one of forested hills, behind which, to the south, rises the awesome barrier of the Prinz Willem V Range. This is the highest point on this part of the range, and the grey-white limestone summit gives an illusion of snow-capped mountains, although snow is usually absent.
The Cessna began to descend into this dream-like valley, towards an airstrip perched on a rise beside the West Baliem River. Between it and the river, a small collection of tin-roofed shacks, interspersed with huts roofed with original thatch, marked the settlement of Kwiyawagi.
This settlement, and indeed the entire valley, is inhabited by the Lani, a large tribal group who are closely related to the Dani of the Baliem Valley.
On landing we were immediately surrounded by a small crowd of Lani youths, which quickly swelled as we unloaded our cargo. Almost all of them were dressed traditionally, wearing short, very broad penis gourds, and hair-nets.
By this time I was intrigued by the variety in shape and size of penis gourds in New Guinea. Many older Lani men wear extraordinarily long ones, which are in some cases so extreme that they threaten to poke the wearer in the eye. Youths, on the other hand, prefer the short, broad gourd I came to think of as the ‘sporting model’.
There is a functional reason for these preferences. The gourd worn by the young men serves as a pouch. They remove the plug of fur or cloth at its end, and retrieve from it tobacco, matches or other small knick-knacks. Being broad, it has considerable capacity. Being short, it does not get entangled during a dash through the forest in pursuit of a possum. Such an accident, by the way, could be rather painful, considering the string that ties the gourd at its base to one testicle.
Older men, of course, have different needs. Their hunting days are over, and politics and diplomacy are their business. Here, the truly long gourd comes into its own. Few mannerisms command as much attention as majestically waving an elongated codpiece away from the face as on
e prepares to speak.
Later I showed some Lani men and women photographs of Miyanmin dressed in their tiny, pendulous gourds. The women were immediately thrown into gales of hysterics, which erupted over and over each time my photographs were borrowed and handed around the room. The men, on the whole, looked a little embarrassed, but nonetheless often joined in the laughter.
Standing among the youth in their ‘sporty’ gourds who met us on that first day was one older Lani man dressed in shorts and a shirt. His European clothes set him apart, and he introduced himself as Manas, pastor to the community.
Manas led us to a surprisingly western-style house, complete with guttering, water-tank and chimney, which lay a few hundred metres from the strip. It contained, amazingly, a fine cast-iron stove, a shower and even a flush toilet! These unexpected luxuries had been imported, and the house itself built, by Pastor Doug Hayward of the Unevangelized Fields Mission (UFM).
The UFM is an American organisation which specialises in bringing the word of God, as it is understood in North America, to the few remaining ‘unevangelised’ tribal groups still inhabiting the planet. The organisation is clearly not short of cash, and does not believe that its missionaries need to suffer as they bring light to the heathens. Despite its luxurious accoutrements, the house was not Hayward's main base, but was used only occasionally during his brief visits to the area. Hayward had left Irian Jaya some years before, and now the community at Kwiyawagi made a little cash by renting his abode out to visitors.
It was soon clear that in travelling from Wamena to Kwiyawagi we had crossed some sort of invisible frontier. Wamena is an Indonesian town, complete with its mosque, army and police. Kwiyawagi, however, is completely Melanesian in character. In 1990 there was almost no sign of government control or influence. There were no outsiders at all living in the valley, and there was no government hospital, police post, or even school. All of these services were instead provided by the Lani people for themselves. It was as if Kwiyawagi was a small, independent nation-community, which somehow survived despite being surrounded by a vast, powerful and potentially hostile state.
These impressions were reinforced by seeing more of how the people of Kwiyawagi organised their lives. Although their needs were few, they still had to find the cash to purchase basic medical supplies, materials for the school, and to pay a few wages. In addition, the licence fee for their radio, an essential piece of equipment, cost the community an incredible three-quarters of a million rupiah (five hundred Australian dollars) per year. Unless this inordinate sum could be met, there would be no radio schedule, and therefore no aircraft landings, no access to emergency medical care, no export of produce, and no news of the outside world through the mission network. The mission radio network, incidentally, is carefully monitored by ABRI, the Indonesian armed forces, so news is hardly uncensored.
The necessity of raising cash for these purposes has engendered innovation and a strong sense of cohesion among the Kwiyawagi Lani. Manas seemed to be a responsible man who handled the community finances capably and fairly. One of his innovations was a project to grow garlic, a light, relatively high-priced product, for export. The community finds it economic to charter an aircraft and fly the garlic to Jayapura. There, a villager sells it head by head on the street. This project, plus rent from the Hayward house, were the principal sources of community income at the time of my visits.
It was soon made clear why the Kwiyawagi Lani guarded their independence so jealously. They remembered the last time ‘Indonesians’, as they referred to the army, had come to their land. That was in 1978, when, they said, troops made an incursion as far as the headwaters of the West Baliem River. The Lani told me that ‘hundreds’ of people had been slaughtered, many houses burned and pigs shot. Casualties on the other side were limited to two Indonesian soldiers who drowned while crossing the West Baliem River. The young men of Kwiyawagi assured me that, were the army ever to return, they would not escape so lightly again.
Our stay at the mission house was among the most pleasant I have ever spent in Melanesia. While there, we were cared for by a delightful, impish man named Jot Murip. He lit our fires and maintained a semblance of order in the kitchen. Each afternoon Lani women, dressed in their traditional grass skirts, would arrive carrying nokens (string bags) full of European potatoes, carrots, cabbages, beans, garlic and onions to sell to us. Each morning they would return with baskets filled to the brim with live yabbies, individually wrapped in grass, which had just been fished from the West Baliem River. Fresh yabbies in garlic, accompanied by potatoes and carrots, soon became an absolute culinary favourite.
By day, a sprinkling of Lani would remain in the house, but each evening it overflowed with visitors. At times it became so crowded that we could hardly move. Noses and eyes crowded at every window and door, while even cracks in the walls were not despised as vantage points by latecomers.
In these conditions I would often trip over children who were crouched under my chair munching on yabbie heads, or spill coffee over a dark arm that I had failed to perceive beside me in the dim light of our kerosene lamp. Occasionally, I would even accidentally sit on someone who had taken occupation of my chair. Still, my bedroom was a sacrosanct refuge, and because of it I rarely felt driven to desperation by the crowds as I had in Betavip.
After spending a few days getting to know the people and exploring the layout of the valley, Geoff, Bren and I explained to Manas that we wished to visit the cave where Pastor Hayward had found the fossils. Manas promised to organise some guides for us, and we prepared to set out the next morning.
The cave, known locally as Kelangurr, lies about half a day's walk north-west of Kwiyawagi. The track is initially good, but soon degenerates. We started by crossing a sturdy wood and steel cable bridge spanning the lazy, brown West Baliem River. Beyond that, a well-formed path led through an expanse of sweet potato gardens.
Lani gardens are quite the largest agricultural enterprises that I have ever encountered in Melanesia. At Kwiyawagi, entire hillsides were occupied by one vast garden. Their roughly rectangular area was bordered by fences and subdivided by shallow drains into smaller rectangles. Each of these smaller patches was the property of one woman. As we trudged the paths which bisected these great gardens, the women appeared as ant-sized figures in the distance. Each was bent over, digging stick in hand and noken slung from her forehead, intent on weeding, planting or harvesting.
Every few kilometres we came across a small Lani hamlet. The huts are of the round ‘bee-hive’ type, and are exceptionally well constructed and warm. The floor is sunk below ground level and there is a fireplace in the middle. This space is shared by the women, children and pigs. An internal platform provides an upper level on which the men sleep (now that men's houses have been abandoned through Christian missionary influence).
As we passed by, people would come out to greet us. On one occasion, a veritable Methuselah, dressed in dirty jumper and long penis gourd, was led to us with a request that we photograph him. By the time I returned to Kwiyawagi in 1994 the old man had passed away. I gave the photographs to his family, who were delighted to have them to remember him by.
Although Lani huts appear basic from the outside, they are built of a double-wall of split palings, with an insulating layer of dry moss packed between. The roofs are thickly thatched, and as there is no chimney the smoke can escape only by seeping through the thatch. I often woke to look across a misty valley in the early morning and watch the plumes of blue smoke as they trickled from the hut roofs on a hillside.
The arrangement, however, is not entirely safe. We were provided with spectacular proof of this as we passed through the last of the gardens on our walk and approached a small hamlet nestled against a hill which carried remnants of forest. The thatch of one of the houses was smoking rather more than usual. Within seconds, billows of smoke were rising above it, followed shortly by licking flames. People seemed to rush from everywhere, and soon several men were atop the hu
t, grabbing desperately at the flaming thatch and throwing it to the ground. Minutes later the fire had been extinguished. By evening, a new roof would doubtless be assembled and the occupants would once again be snug inside their renovated home.
After leaving the gardens, the track took us through swampy forest, where we struggled knee-deep in mud for several hours. The Podocarpus (Plum Pine) trees were fruiting, and under each lay masses of purple-black, plum-like fruit. The fruit of these curious pine trees comes in two parts. The seed is ovoid and about the size of a marble. Above it is a fleshy drupe the size and colour of a large muscatel grape. This is formed from the much-inflated stalk of the fruit itself. Birds had been busy eating the drupes, and many either had the seed detached, or had been damaged, spreading a purplish stain everywhere.
We finally emerged in a clearing in the forest. A boggy creek meandered through it and a hut, which acted as a kind of halfway house on the track, stood in the middle. It was of typical construction except that it lacked the internal ‘mezzanine’ level. From here it was only a twenty-minute walk to the cave.
Kelangurr Cave is not easy of access. The entrance through a tall, narrow fissure is about seven metres up a sheer limestone rock-face. At first I thought this would thwart us at the very last in our attempt to visit the cave, but a Lani youth felled a sapling against the rocks. By climbing it we were soon at the entrance.
The mouth of the cave forms a small antechamber, where we rested in the twilight before venturing further. Beyond it, the cave narrows to a crooked slit, wide enough to admit a Lani boy, perhaps—but far too thin, I feared, for me. As I sat in the antechamber pondering my next move, I noticed thousands of tiny bones scattered about on the cave walls and floor. They seemed to be weathering out of the limestone rock-face. Among them were the remains of rats, bandicoots and a pygmy species of ringtail possum. Many were black and heavily mineralised, and were clearly very old.