by Tim Flannery
The news was almost as bad for tree-kangaroos and echidnas. The hunters said that no tree-kangaroo had been caught near Billingeek for more than a generation, while the last echidna caught in the area was obtained more than a decade previously. What could have caused these dramatic changes to the mammal fauna living around Billingeek? Clearly, the larger, slower species had suffered most. The pademelons (of which there were two species) had disappeared prehistorically, while the echidnas and tree-kangaroos had suffered local extinction much more recently. And how was one to account for the curious recent increase in ringtail possums?
As I pieced the evidence together many months later, it became clear that the pademelons had probably disappeared from Irian Jaya about 2,000 years ago (the time that dogs had been introduced). Hunting alpine pademelons with dogs is a ruthlessly efficient method. The tree-kangaroos and echidnas had apparently followed the pademelons into extinction much later, when the frequency of hunting visits to Billingeek increased. This had occurred only over the past forty years, perhaps the result of changes brought about since European contact.
It is possible that the possums extended their distribution because of the increase in ‘empty niche space’ these extinctions created. I was saddened by this evidence of extinction in what had appeared at first to be such a pristine environment. Added to the extinction at a much earlier date of the marsupial giants Maokopia and Protemnodon, it meant that Irian's alpine regions had lost almost all of their larger mammals.
One afternoon at Billingeek, the hunters returned bearing the gunny sack I had given them to carry live animals in. It looked to be very full, and I was abuzz with anticipation at what they might have found. They set the sack down before me, clearly expecting me to look inside. Peering in, I found to my horror that it was full of bones: hundreds of bleached human bones.
Aghast at the thought that they might have ransacked an ancestral cemetery in order to obtain this bounty, I voiced my disapproval, explaining as clearly as I could that I was interested only in animal bones, not human ones. One man told me not to worry, for there was indeed one animal bone in the bag. He emptied the sack in front of me, and a cascade of human bones spilled onto the ground. After fishing through the pile for some minutes, he came up with a solitary tree-kangaroo jaw-bone.
This jaw-bone, as insignificant as it then seemed, was to prove crucial to my future researches in Irian Jaya.
My immediate concern at the time, however, was to return the human remains to their original resting place. I explained this to the Lani, but they did not seem at all interested. They told me that the bones had come from a cleft in the rock some hours’ walk away, and that it was just too much effort to carry them back! I was more than a little dismayed at having my camp turned into an instant ossuary. Despite my protestations, the bones were casually kicked about until they were scattered throughout the rockshelter.
On our last morning at Billingeek we decided to walk to the very summit of the Prinz Willem V Range. My altitude sickness had subsided and, although it was a misty morning, I was delighted at the prospect. We set out across the alpine tundra, which became increasingly bare of vegetation as we approached the 4,000-metre-high summit of the range. At one point our path crossed a vast pavement of limestone which had been scraped almost completely smooth by glacial action. Deep grooves had been cut in the otherwise smooth pavement by boulders as they were dragged along by the ice. Some grooves looked as fresh as if they had been gouged out yesterday, rather than 15,000 years ago. Indeed, in a few cases, the stone which gouged the track was still lying at the end of the groove, just where the glacier had left it 15,000 years before. As I gazed at this evidence of ice, the bitterly cold wind bit into me, and I could well believe that the glacier still lingered somewhere nearby.
Some remarkable and truly enormous boulders had been left behind by the glaciers on the sides of the valleys. One of these was as large as a suburban house, and sat perched precariously on a ledge high above the valley floor. We followed the valley as it rose gently towards the crest of the range until we saw, looming through the mist before us, another huge boulder, at least ten metres in diameter. Behind it was empty space, for it was perched on the very summit of the range. We had finally reached our high point.
By holding onto some bushes, it was possible to climb the great erratic block. From there, I beheld a most spectacular view—the southern side of the range as it dropped away almost vertically for hundreds of metres. Through the swirling mist I could make out, way below, the trees of the upper montane forest of the southern slopes of the range. Below them lay a steep jumble of ridges and valleys. Beyond that everything was obscured by cloud, yet I knew that just a little further to the south lay the lowlands of the Marind and Asmat peoples. And beyond that, four vertical kilometres below us, was the sea.
I raised my camera to capture the scene on celluloid, but was dismayed to find that all I could see was a blur. The auto-focus mechanism of this expensive new high-tech camera had jammed on a focal distance of about one metre when I had used it to photograph some minute alpine flowers a few moments before.
So I simply sat, enchanted by this scene, and thought about the ice age which left this great boulder in its wake, and the marvellous bushwalk that could have been made long ago when ice gripped the planet. So much water was locked up at the poles then that the level of the sea had dropped dramatically, exposing the continental shelf. A person could have walked from the glaciers of Tasmania to the point I was sitting on. Meganesia, that vast landmass, was then a single entity, inhabited entirely by Aboriginal and Melanesian people.
It was only when my gaze dropped from the majestic view that I found evidence I was not the first person to sit meditatively on this spot. For there, on a small clear space atop the boulder, a fire had been made. Beside it, on a shelf at my feet, lay the carefully arranged skulls of four Pygmy Ringtail possums (Pseudochirulus mayeri). They had been picked clean and lined up after a leisurely and perhaps solitary meal. I wondered at the thoughts which preoccupied that hunter as he enjoyed his meal in the sun. Had he been here days, months, or even years ago, and did he leave the spot feeling as refreshed in spirit as I did?
When the morning of our departure from Billingeek came, I found it difficult to leave its glorious, bitterly cold mountains. As I walked down the track towards the valley of gardens, I vowed to return.
TWENTY-FIVE
Arfak, Fak Fak
Four years passed before I could revisit the Maokop.
Between 1990 and 1994 much of my time was taken up by two research projects. The first, an ecological history of Australasia, became a book, The Future Eaters. The second, far more demanding in terms of time and resources, was a faunal survey of the mammals of the south-west Pacific and Moluccan islands. In order to complete this second task I needed to assemble and arrange funding for a research team which would survey every major island group in this vast archipelago, and find time myself to visit most of the island groups.
The substantial funding necessary to carry out this work was made available from a bequest from the estate of Winifred Violet Scott. Miss Scott bequeathed her fortune to a trust which sponsors endangered species research. Posthumously, she has achieved more for endangered species than most researchers achieve in a lifetime. Several species have been rescued from extinction, largely as a result of her will.
There were five researchers, all with considerable field experience in tropical regions. To each I assigned a section of the south-west Pacific region. I myself surveyed New Caledonia, the north and central Moluccas, and the islands lying off Irian Jaya and Papua New Guinea. I also visited several of the other survey sites, to gain an idea of the nature of each island group and to assess the difficulties which the other researchers encountered.
So I did not go back to the mountains of the Maokop for four years. When I did return, however, I was much better equipped, for during my island work in the Moluccas I developed fluency in Bahasa Indonesia. This pro
ved to be an invaluable asset in highest Irian.
I did, however, make one visit to the Irian Jaya mainland during the period of my island survey. This was in 1992 when my itinerary took me through the town of Manokwari on the Vogelkop or Bird's Head Peninsula. I had been surveying the islands of Geelvinck Bay with Boeadi, a senior Indonesian researcher from the Bogor Museum, and Alexandra Szalay, a member of the research team.
The team we formed was particularly well suited for work in Irian Jaya. Boeadi is one of Indonesia's most respected and senior biologists. He has worked at the Zoology Museum, Bogor, for much of the post-colonial period, undertaking research in virtually every province of Indonesia. He served as a zoologist on the Indonesian military expedition which climbed Mt Jaya in 1963 and has worked on many other major projects involving animals as diverse as Sumatran rhinos, tigers and bats. He has trained generations of forestry and wildlife workers, and his contacts within the Indonesian bureaucracy are extraordinary. Indeed, many senior forestry officials almost bowed down before him when we visited their offices.
Boeadi is also an excellent camp cook who can turn the toughest dunghill croaker into delicious ayam goreng in an instant. As well, he is a shameless bargainer who is not averse to beating the most impecunious-looking grandmother down a few rupiah in price, and rarely comes off the worse in such dealings (an exception being a long-remembered paraplegic rooster which somehow slipped past his guard on Halmahera). In contrast, I have probably purchased every wormy durian and rotten egg on offer between Java and Jayapura. In frustration at my ineptitude in this area, Boeadi finally banned me from attending markets and bazaars, and always kept himself between me and street vendors.
Alexandra is an anthropologist with wide experience in Melanesia. Her insights into local culture are invaluable in interpreting the information I collect about mammals. She always seems to ask the crucial question at the right moment. In contrast to Boeadi and me, she also has a memory like a steel trap and, where Boeadi and I tend to spread chaos in equipment, Alex restores order.
From our dingy hotel rooms in Manokwari we could see the majestic Arfak Mountains rising a short distance behind the town. We were going to have to spend a few days there anyway waiting for aircraft connections. Soon, we decided to make a brief visit.
The Arfak Mountains hold a special place in the annals of New Guinea zoology. For it was there, on 6 September 1872, that the Italian explorer and zoologist Luigi Maria D'Albertis first penetrated the mountainous interior of New Guinea and encountered and collected its unique mountain fauna. In his splendid account of his travels in New Guinea, What I Did and What I Saw, he records living off a diet of rice and birds of paradise during the three weeks he stayed there. Every shot seemed to bring down a species new to science. D'Albertis walked from Manokwari to a village called Hatam, and there, in addition to his birds and insects, he made a modest but important collection of mammals. Nearly all of the high elevation species were new. Since that time, very few additions have been made to our knowledge of the mammals of the Arfaks, and some of the species collected by D'Albertis have not been recorded since. In fact it is fair to say that the mountains have remained, almost to this day, a virtual terra incognita as far as mammals are concerned.
One of the frustrations of working in Irian Jaya is the impossibility of obtaining accurate maps, for the Indonesian Government is so security-conscious that it refuses to make available even those few maps which have been recently drawn. This forces one into reliance on archaic sources of information (often dating to before 1941 when the Japanese invaded)—and can lead to disaster.
We decided to follow Luigi's example and walk from the coastal plain into a conveniently located village in the mountains. The village I had settled on for the work was called Hing, and my Dutch map, printed in the 1930s, showed it to be at most a day's walk from the coast. It looked to be more conveniently located than Hatam, and from a scientific point of view it was preferable to sample another locality instead of returning to D'Albertis's old hunting ground.
I sent out word in Manokwari that I wished to employ some youths to carry our equipment and to act as guides on our trek to Hing. After several days there assembled, on my verandah, a rather motley-looking crew, whose main accreditation for the job was that they all claimed to have been born in Hing, and thus knew the village and the track which led there. Our main helper was a young man named Agus who, it turned out, came from Fak Fak, a town on New Guinea's south coast. Little did I know how many times during our trek I was to take the name of his birthplace in vain!
We set out very early one morning with sufficient food for just one day, as our carriers advised that we would reach Hing late that afternoon. The walk was not steep, but the track rose continuously, passing through the magnificent hill forest which still clothes part of the lower slopes.
We lunched under a break in the canopy of an extraordinarily diverse forest. All about us lay fallen fruit of types I had never seen before. Particularly conspicuous were the pale silvery-blue, ovoid, double fruits of a large tree. The seeds were about five centimetres long and, as one was always slightly larger than the other, they resembled nothing more closely than a pair of testicles. I was delighted by this evidence of an unusual forest full of endemic trees which were fruiting. Endemic plants (those unique to an area) often support endemic mammals. The fact that they were fruiting suggested mammal activity should be at a peak.
By late afternoon we had left the lowlands behind and were entering a forest of Araucaria trees. This suggested that we had gained about 1,000 metres in altitude, as Araucarias occur no lower in New Guinea.
When we had not reached the village by late afternoon, I decided to look for a convenient spot to camp. We entered a small patch of open ground just before dusk. Below us lay Manokwari on its arc-shaped bay, its lights twinkling against the glow of a tropical sunset. Later that night a crescent moon, reflected brilliantly on the water, transformed the entire scene with silver.
Our carriers had brought neither warm clothes nor shelter, yet they seemed not at all perturbed at the idea of spending a night in the forest in such diminished circumstances. They quickly erected a hut from bush materials, and soon had a roaring fire going. They sat around happily scoffing the little food we had carried with us. Alex, Boeadi and I set up our rather cheerless tents, shared our remaining meagre supplies, and fell into an exhausted sleep.
At dawn next morning the grass was damp with dew and it was with some difficulty that I unbent my stiff limbs and began to collect firewood. Boeadi (who was then sixty and perhaps should have been enjoying a cosy retirement instead of traipsing around New Guinea) had even greater difficulty in warming up. A steaming mug of kopi bubuk (a coarse but aromatic Indonesian coffee) improved everyone's outlook, and we were soon packed and set out, expecting to arrive at Hing within the hour.
My concern turned to deep worry when, by mid-afternoon, it became clear that there was still no village nearby. We continued to climb all day and were by then entering a forest of Antarctic beech. This tree typically grows at about 2,000 metres elevation. This was getting to be too high for a village in the Arfaks, and the forest we were now passing through was in that virginal state which one only encounters far from humanity. Despite these signs, our carriers continued to insist that Hing was only a few hours away at most.
Concerned at the toll the walk was taking on Boeadi (who later referred to the expedition as the journey which half-killed him) we broke our march early that day. We spent the last hours of daylight setting rat-traps and mist-nets in the forest in the hope of catching something to feed our by now famished carriers and ourselves.
As we explored the adjacent forest, Boeadi made one of those discoveries that allows even such a dismal trek to seem worthwhile. While setting traps he found what he first took to be a miniature hut built by human hands. It was an exquisite structure, rather like the top of a Dani hut in shape—but its round thatched roof reached all the way to the ground. It was abo
ut a metre high, and the roof of twigs had been built around a central pole. There was a low, door-like entrance, and in front of that, a carefully manicured lawn on which lay a variety of brightly coloured fruits and flowers. Most remarkable of all, just inside the door, on an immaculate lawn of moss, lay a ball-point pen.
This extraordinary structure, we realised, was the work of the Vogelkop Bower-bird (Amblyornis inornatus)—the burung tahu or ‘knowing bird’ of the mountain people. Male birds (of which there are over eighteen species) build a variety of structures called bowers in which they woo their females. That of the Vogelkop Bower-bird is by far the most complex, and this was a splendid example. The pen, the sole man-made item present, was clearly the bird's prized possession. Some fellow traveller (perhaps a researcher from the World Wide Fund for Nature, who some years before had assisted in the establishment of reserves in the area) must have dropped it.
That evening as I sat in my tent pondering our predicament, there was an inexplicable noise. At first faint and apparently distant, it sounded for all the world like the kind of noise a flying saucer is supposed to make in a B-grade sci-fi movie. Alarmingly, this strange sound grew louder and louder. An approaching jet from the Indonesian armed forces? But soon the noise became so urgent that I rushed out of the tent and looked up into the canopy, half-expecting to see a silver disc floating above the trees.
The sound suddenly faded, then ceased. It was only then that I discovered the culprit: a great cicada which flew off a branch next to my tent and into the mist-net. It was a ‘six o'clock cicada’, so called because it emits its remarkable call for just a few minutes each day, at about six in the morning and evening. I had heard them before, but never a species with such a quality of sound as this one. In the high Arfak forests, it seemed, you could set your clock by them.