by Tim Flannery
That evening I went to bed without eating, yet satisfied. The night was clear and bitterly cold, and it was only after some time that I drifted into a fitful sleep.
In the wee hours of the morning a low, humming sound woke me. At first, through the veil of sleep, the sound seemed an echo of the six o'clocks, but then it swelled and began to assemble itself into tune. Our carriers were singing—in four-part harmony. The hauntingly beautiful melody went on for hours, rising and falling through the night. I must have drifted off again, for I awoke at dawn cold and hungry.
In the morning the carriers said that they had sung in order to keep themselves warm and to stop thinking of food. Although the tune was clearly Melanesian, missionary-inspired words had surprisingly been put to it. What they were singing over and over again was this: ’Don't drink spirits, don't smoke cigarettes, and don't trust Chinese...’
Thankfully the traps had secured a cornucopia of about ten Moss-forest Rats overnight. I measured and skinned these and gave them to our carriers to roast over a fire. After getting about half a rat each, we felt somewhat strengthened and set off yet again, this time with assurances that Hing was really, absolutely, only an hour or two away.
By midday we reached the podocarp forest which grows only on the highest peaks of the Arfak Mountains—here approaching 3,000 metres elevation. We stopped, and found to our horror that Boeadi was no longer with us. We raced back down the track.
He had taken a wrong turning and, by the time we found him, had been wandering, lost and alone, in the forest for some time. He was exhausted and it was clear that he could not go on.
Angered by the constant misinformation I was getting, I sat the carriers down in the misty, cold forest, and sternly asked our guides if any of them had ever been to Hing! Finally, one ventured that he had seen the place as a small boy—and was sure that it was at least one or two days’ walk further on!
The others scowled at his perfidy, although Agus, the Fak Fak man, seemed to be genuinely shocked at the revelation. Their deceit had been based on the theory that it was better to be paid for a five-day walk to nowhere, rather than reveal that they knew nothing about Hing, and not get the job at all.
Disgusted, I ordered a retreat. Boeadi was clearly too ill to continue with the expedition, so I suggested that he return directly downhill to Manokwari with part of the carrier line. Alex and I determined to take a path which led down an adjacent ridge, at the base of which I had seen disturbed forest that resembled an old garden. From there we might locate a village where we could obtain supplies and begin our work.
The Arfaks are one of the most rugged mountain ranges in New Guinea, so it was not surprising to find that this alternative path plunged abruptly over a near-vertical 1,500-metre drop. The cliff was formed of crumbling sandstone which gave little reliable support.
We set off gingerly down the slope, but after a few steps Alex lost her footing and began a fatal-looking tumble downslope. At the last possible instant she grasped a bush which broke her fall. Trembling now, we continued even more cautiously.
Descending such a slope is far more painful and difficult than scrambling up it. Your knees ache, shake, then turn to jelly. There is nowhere to sit and rest, and every step is an effort to resist the fatal attraction of gravity. Carrying a pack adds immeasurably to the difficulty.
After about four hours of tortured descent, we reached a more gentle slope and found that we were indeed in an area of old garden land. We followed a path through the undergrowth and soon came upon a village which appeared to be deserted. We flopped onto the springy grass on the edge of the compound.
As I lay exhausted by a hut, a woman and her daughter, who were returning from their garden, walked into the village square, unsuspecting of any visitors. But on catching sight of us they took fright. It was only quick action by our carriers that prevented them from rushing off, screaming, into the forest.
We made the nature of our unexpected visit clear to the fast-assembling villagers. All except one were women and children. The able-bodied men, it seemed, had all gone off to attend an important meeting in the lowlands. The sole remaining male inhabitant was an old man whose crippled legs were permanently folded under him, and who got about by walking on his hands. He introduced himself as Benjamin, and invited us to sleep in a vacant hut.
We elected to spend a day or two in this village (called Je'ute) to recover from our walk. Alas, the hut was full of fleas, and the nights we spent there were even more uncomfortable and sleepless than those in the forest. We cooked, ate, scratched and rested, and in between I talked to Benjamin about the mammals of the Arfaks. He explained that before he became crippled he was a hunter of renown who knew where to find every beast that lived in the mountains. For hours we sat together, my book Mammals of New Guinea open before us, discussing the photographs. Pointing to a tree-mouse, Benjamin would say Choy-woi-be-a with the beautiful sing-song inflection so characteristic of the Arfak languages. I would attempt to pronounce the name. When I had performed this to his satisfaction, he would tell me all that he knew of the animal, then go on to the next species. Within a day I had a workable list of Hatam mammal names, as well as a great deal of local knowledge about their natural history.
After a couple of days we left Je'ute and walked to Mokwam, a larger village. Mokwam has an airstrip and a trade post, as well as a population of hunters. Now we were able to settle in to a week's highly productive work. By an irony it turned out that Mokwam is only about six kilometres from Hatam, where Luigi Maria D'Albertis had done his work 120 years before. Hing, on the other hand, was now located on the far side of the mountains. Its inhabitants had pulled up stakes and moved, people thought, at about the time of the Second World War.
At Mokwam we stayed with the kepala desa (head-man) and his family. They graciously gave us a room in their humble house, in which we erected tents to give a semblance of privacy. Unfortunately, the place was infested with a healthy population of the Himalayan Rat (Rattus nitidus), which had somehow reached this remote place so far from its original home. The Himalayan Rat is a robust, noisy animal with little respect for sleeping humans. It soon developed the sides of my tent as a murine ski-slope and resort.
If we were discomfited by the non-human inhabitants of the kepala desa's house, I'm afraid that the human inhabitants were even more dismayed by us. After we requested specimens from the local hunters, animals both dead and alive arrived at every hour of the day and night, much to the distaste of the kepala desa's wife. She (in common with other women of the area) had a particular loathing of young marsupials. She could doubtless stare down with equanimity the fearsome Himalayan Rat, but show her a young possum, fresh from the pouch of its mother, and she would recoil with one hand over her mouth, the other pushing in the direction of the tiny marsupial. Once I learned of this phobia I was discreet in my handling of these creatures, for I'm sure we were on the point of being ejected from the house when the first one was given to me.
Despite these difficulties, the work in the Arfaks paid off. We documented the existence of about five species of mammals which had never been recorded from the mountains before, and also resolved a long-standing taxonomic mystery. This concerned the D'Albertis Ringtail (first collected by Luigi Maria himself at Hatam in 1872). The species seemed to come in two sizes, and these had been given different scientific names earlier this century, only to be lumped together again in the 1940s. After examining the large series of trophy jaws retained by hunters (which we collected), as well as a couple of whole specimens, we discovered that there were indeed two species. We christened the new one the Reclusive Ringtail (Pseudochirops coronatus) to commemorate its having remained undetected by western science for so long.
Among the species from the Arfaks never previously recorded was a giant rat, resembling De Vis's Woolly-rat (Mallomys aroaensis), but whose exact identity I am still uncertain of, and the Western White-eared Giant Rat (Hyomys dammermani)—which made a wonderful consommé. The remarkabl
e Long-fingered Triok (Dactylopsila palpator) was also present. This black and white possum smells like a skunk and has the fourth finger of each hand elongated into a great, slender probe which it uses to hook insect larvae from their hiding places.
Our impromptu trip had made a contribution to the zoology of the region after all. When we met up with Boeadi (who had by now recovered) in Manokwari, he was also delighted with the result.
Looking back now, I can see that Mokwam was one of the more successfully Indonesian-influenced mountain villages in Irian Jaya. After 1969, the Arfak Mountains were the focus for a vigorous resistance movement. This had died down, however, and while I was there, I heard nothing of the Irianese resistance, the OPM (Operasi Merdeka Papua—Free Papua Movement). The OPM remains strong (and is growing) elsewhere in the province. But at Mokwam I saw little resentment of Indonesians from outside the province. The people of the village and the surrounding mountain areas had all been given land in a large transmigration settlement in the lowlands near Manokwari. There, they would plant and harvest dryland rice, then return to the mountains when they wished to resume their traditional life.
PART VII
SNOW MOUNTAINS
TWENTY-SIX
The discovery of Dingiso
One day in late 1993, at about the time that work on the Pacific islands faunal survey was winding down, I received a telephone call from an employee of a mining company called PT Freeport Indonesia. Freeport is one of the largest mining companies in the world. Based in New Orleans, it runs the world's most profitable gold and copper mine, which is located in Irian Jaya.
The distant voice at the end of the crackly line informed me that the call was coming from Tembagapura, Freeport's town, in the heart of Irian Jaya. The man explained that he thought he had discovered a very rare kind of possum known as the Great-tailed Triok (Dactylopsila megalura). This remarkable possum resembles the Long-fingered Triok, except that its bushy black and silver tail is so enormous that it appears to be larger than the rest of the animal combined. The man had read my book on New Guinea mammals; he was wondering if I would be free to come to Tembagapura to confirm his identification, and to talk to the local community about wildlife.
The Tembagapura area is one of the least explored regions in Irian Jaya, at least as far as mammals go. It was somewhere I had always wished to visit, but had hardly dared hope to be able to do so, for Tembagapura is not the kind of place one visits without an invitation.
Tembagapura lies just 120 kilometres west of Kwiyawagi and is adjacent to Mt Carstensz, the very highest point on the Maokop range. Atop Mt Carstensz is a glacier. This remnant of the ice age is one of only a handful of equatorial glaciers on the planet, and due to global warming it is shrinking rapidly. Indeed, at its present rate of decline, it will probably die before I do.
Another factor which influenced my desire to visit Tembagapura was the tree-kangaroo jaw-bone which I had picked from among the pile of human remains at Billingeek. It still eluded identification. A piece of tree-kangaroo fur I purchased at Kwiyawagi, which had originally been fashioned into a war bonnet, remained similarly mysterious. It was unique among all the tree-kangaroo fur I had seen in being black with a flash of white on the chest.
To top it all off, since leaving Kwiyawagi I had received photographs of a tree-kangaroo joey which had been taken near Tembagapura. They showed a very young animal that was boldly patterned in black and white. It seemed now that yet another undescribed species of tree-kangaroo was waiting to be discovered in New Guinea's mountains. Perhaps this visit to Tembagapura would provide the opportunity to gather more evidence.
By mid-1994 I had convinced the Freeport management that I should incorporate a faunal survey into my visit. I was also able to gain permission for Boeadi and Alexandra Szalay to accompany me, and together we hoped to continue our work successfully. Alex and I flew to Cairns, then boarded a charter aircraft flying directly to Timika in the southern lowlands of Irian Jaya. On arrival, we were met by our Freeport hosts and whisked into a Land-cruiser for the two-hour drive from Timika to Tembagapura. Boeadi was to join us a few days later.
The road linking the towns of Timika and Tembagapura is one of the engineering marvels of the world, for it traverses about 100 kilometres of some of the most difficult terrain on the planet. In 1910 the English explorer A. F. R. Wollaston took eighteen months trying to struggle over the route. He spent nights in camp flooded up to his neck in water and weary weeks stumbling through the relentless swamp and jungle. He lost many of his companions to beri-beri, malaria and drowning on the way. After all this, he reached a maximum elevation of only 1,400 metres. In just thirty minutes, now, a traveller on the road reaches the point where Wollaston was forced to turn back.
The construction of this fabulous road took several years, many millions of dollars, and a number of lives. Its design is highly innovative. Part of the section traversing the lowland swamps is built on old tyres so that it floats atop the vast morass. It passes through extraordinary, primaeval-looking swamp forest. Enormous numbers of birds, insects, orchids and ferns give the scene a sense of superfecundity. Bright orange fungi ornament stumps and stilt roots projecting from the morass. Wispy moss, which covers every branch, is eloquent of decay.
After passing through this amazing forest, the road ascends a rise, then continues its way atop a flat, forested terrace which lies about 600 metres above sea-level. To a biologist this is a fascinating place, for it bears greater affinity with the high-elevation forests than the lowlands. The last time I had seen some of the species here was above 3,000 metres elevation at Kwiyawagi, almost five years earlier. This forest grows on infertile, poorly drained peat and experiences almost perpetual cloud and exceedingly high rainfall—eleven metres per year.
Beyond the terrace, the mountains rise abruptly, and from this point the road winds its way up what appears to be an impossibly steep, knife-edged ridge. Miniature bulldozers about the size of ride-on lawnmowers were used to scrape the top off the ridge, allowing larger ones to follow in their wake. More and more of the ridge was removed until the flat space on top was wide enough to function as a road. It is the steepest road I have ever seen. I stopped at one point to take a photograph, only to find that I couldn't keep my balance.
As one follows the road upward the temperature drops and mists close in. The trees have smaller leaves and are more stunted. The hornbills and cockatoos of the lowlands are left behind and new sounds are heard, including the mechanical-sounding calls of the mountain-dwelling birds of paradise.
At one point the road enters a tunnel a kilometre or more long which bores through the heart of a mountain. Water drops from the roof in a subterranean cascade. The tunnel exits beside a precipice, and the road continues under towering vertical walls, until it reaches 3,000 metres in elevation. Here, one often encounters freezing rain and dense fogs. It is a terrifying experience at this point to meet a massive mine truck looming out of the almost impenetrable fog just a few metres ahead.
The road then begins its descent into the little mountain valley which shelters the town of Tembagapura. Tembagapura was built in the 1970s to house the staff of the PT Freeport Indonesia Mining Company. It has expanded enormously over time, and now even has its own dormitory suburb, Hidden Valley, which is perched on the range above it. It is prettier than your average mining town, largely due to its incomparable location, but also because of its compactness and good planning.
Life in Tembagapura is luxurious by Melanesian standards. With its population of more than 10,000 people, it has most of the facilities available in a small rural centre in the USA. There is a bank, supermarket and specialist shops, sports facilities, a club with restaurant and bar, and first-rate accommodation for workers and visitors. This is a very different environment from those I found when working elsewhere in Irian Jaya.
To my dismay, the Amungme people, traditional landowners of the area, were, at the time of my visit, largely kept outside the town by a vigorous secu
rity force. Even the jungle was kept at bay, for the rainforest had been cleared from the site, and someone had planted Monterey Pines (Pinus radiata) in its place. Most of these, doubtless imported at great expense, were dead by the time I visited again six months later.
The difficulty in contacting local people was a great impediment, for I needed to work with them as they hunted. This problem was overcome, however, when I met John Cutts.
John is perhaps the greatest asset that Freeport has in its effort to develop a strong relationship with the dispossessed landowners of its mining lease. American by birth, he was adopted when four years of age by a missionary couple who worked among the Moni people of what was then Netherlands New Guinea. Raised both by his Moni neighbours and his foster parents, John came to know Moni language and traditions intimately. In many ways he is as much Moni as he is American. The Moni have their territories just west of the mine and many of them live in the villages around Tembagapura, so this connection is highly useful to the company.
John was then community-liaison officer at Tembagapura, and it was through him that I was introduced to some local men, foremost among whom was Vedelis Zonggonau, a well-educated Moni man in his thirties.
I took out the fieldcopy of Mammals of New Guinea and opened it at Doria's Tree-kangaroo.
’Ndomea,’ Zonggonau said, giving its Moni name.
’Naki,’ the Amungme hunters said.
Next I showed them the photograph I had been sent, of the black and white joey.
‘Dingiso,’ Zonggonau said.
‘Nemenaki,’ the Amungme chorused.
After some discussion we formed a plan to explore the high forest above the town, in search of these species.