by Tim Flannery
The problem is, the Carstensz Meadow no longer exists. It has been used as a dump site for mine tailings. Only a few hundred metres of the meadow at the very back—hard against the mountain wall—were yet to be filled. The tailings have impeded drainage and the tiny remnant of the once beautiful herbfield has become a morass. One day, I was assured by a mining engineer, the meadow will be buried hundreds of metres deep in mine waste. Then, perhaps, one will be able to step directly from the waste pile into the Meren Valley. The cave where the children suffered will be buried and forgotten.
I was told that by dumping the waste in the valley (rather than moving it further away), the company saved about as much money as its operation makes in five days.
It was already raining hard by the time Alex, Boeadi, our helpers and the children reached the morass. They ferried the equipment across, but first had to find a path through the bog. The carriers placed Arianus, who was by then coughing and shivering with cold, on the far edge of the morass. All they had to protect him from the rain was a towel, which they placed over his head.
As Vedelis and Marsellius (one of our hunters) crossed, carrying Arianus shoulder high, they sank chest deep into the freezing water of the drowned Carstensz Meadow. Two mine workers laughed at their predicament. Even as they approached the pile of mining waste which the post was built on, the workers did not lend a helping hand or throw down some planks which were lying about.
The security post was deserted. Vedelis hailed a bus on its way to pick up workers, which took our group to the Ertzberg first-aid post. A Lani head-man who worked for the mine met them there. He talked to Arianus, holding his knee to comfort him. Arianus answered quietly between coughs. Arianus was then placed on a drip. The girl was whisked away by the Lani head-man, who, before he left, held Alex's hands in his own, thanking her gravely for rescuing the pair. The departing girl nodded to Alex, and that was the last time any of us ever saw the children.
By the time Alex and Boeadi arrived back at the security post to await my arrival, a Biak guard was in occupation. Boeadi took over the tiny guard house with its heater and commenced to skin the rats we had caught earlier. The guard was forced to stand in the rain. By the time Yonas and I arrived at about 4.00 p.m., Vedelis had a bonfire going despite the downpour. We then arranged for transport to the aerial tram, and were soon back in Tembagapura.
Upon arriving, I immediately called the hospital to check on Arianus's condition. I was able to confirm that he had been admitted, but the Indonesian nurse I spoke to would tell me no more, except that his condition was serious. Then I rang the American doctor on staff, in order to inform him of Arianus's history, and to ask for a report on the boy's health. To my astonishment, he said, in a formal voice, that he was not allowed to interfere with the ‘Indonesian cases’ and could not help me.
I called the hospital several times that evening, but always received the same response. Arianus's doctor, I was told, was unavailable to speak to me.
By morning I was sufficiently worried to call the hospital to arrange a visit. The voice at the end of the line told me not to bother, for Arianus was dead.
This news was devastating. Arianus had walked part of the way from the cave to the security post. He was a fit young boy who had smiled and chatted to me twenty-four hours earlier. His most serious injury, I learned, was a punctured lung. How could he have died so suddenly?
On several occasions since, I have described Arianus's injuries to medical professionals in Australia. They have been unanimous in their opinion that he was unlikely to have died had he been treated in an Australian hospital and that his sudden death from such injuries, given his condition and his survival for several days after they were inflicted, is indeed puzzling.
Sick at heart, Alex and I went to Banti village, where Arianus's sister was hidden away. The community was seething with rage. Arianus's relatives, including a number of senior men, had tried to go to the hospital to collect his body. The security guards at the town perimeter had refused them permission. When they were finally allowed in, there was a skirmish outside the hospital.
The following day, when I felt more composed, I related the entire incident to a senior manager in Tembagapura. He is a gentle and concerned American. He was distressed by my story, and gave me an assurance that, in future, medical checks would be carried out on anyone assisted to return home from the Tembagapura area.
I felt outraged. I wanted someone to take responsibility. I wanted a court case and, ultimately, jail for Arianus's assailants. Perhaps, in my heart, I wanted blood.
The truth of the matter, it seems, is that the Freeport management at Tembagapura have little control over Freeport security. Although paid for by the company, Freeport security seems to receive orders directly from ABRI, the Indonesian military.
That evening I sat in my room in Tembagapura, boiling with anger and frustration. There seemed to be absolutely nothing I could do to obtain justice for Arianus.
Desperate for a diversion, I remembered the rats I had collected in the Meren Valley. They were stored in the freezer. I got them out, and once again tried to identify the short-tailed, pinched-faced species which had defied classification. Then it struck me. It may well be new to science. If so, it was to be Arianus's Rat.
Months later, I found that the species was in fact named in the 1970s by a Belgian biologist. Rattus omlichodes—the fogbound rat—he called it. Due to a changing taxonomy and a new common name I formulated for it, it is now Stenomys omlichodes—Arianus's Rat.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Kwiyawagi revisited
Arianus's death upset me so much that I left Tembagapura with relief.
I returned to Kwiyawagi, to continue the work I began four years earlier. Due to the strong anti-Indonesian feeling expressed by people there, I felt it best for Boeadi to stay in the lowlands near Timika, collecting bats and reptiles. Alex travelled with me, as she was interested in looking at Kwiyawagi to assess its suitability as a potential field site where she could undertake her doctoral studies in anthropology.
It was a delight to see my old friends Pastor Manas and Jot Murip again. The pleasure was doubled by the improvement in my Bahasa Indonesia—I could now communicate far more effectively than on my first visit.
My plan was to visit as many caves as possible in the area, and to carry out a full survey of the mammals of the valley. Once people understood what was intended, I received enormous help from local hunters. People brought in bandicoots, possums and other mammals which they had collected in their traps or found in tree-hollows, and allowed me to weigh, measure and skin them before they cooked them for dinner. Various people volunteered to guide me to caves around the valley and, although none could compare with Kelangurr, I did find some interesting specimens.
Among the modern mammals, the most fascinating were the bats. One day a young boy brought me a tiny brown bat which he had found roosting in a hollow in a pandanus tree trunk. I recognised it as a Mountain Pipistrelle (Pipistrellus collinus). Its impressive penis (it looked to be a quarter the length of the animal's body) indicated that it was an adult male.
Over the following week, another five Mountain Pipistrelles were brought in by young boys. All were found roosting alone in hollows in pandanus trees, and all were male. My curiosity as to where the females might be was finally satisfied one morning when a young lad brought a bag stuffed full of tiny bats which he had found roosting together in yet another pandanus hollow. Examining them, I found that there were eleven females (which are larger than males and orange in colour) and a single male, whose impressive testes indicated he was in peak breeding condition.
This was a winged sultan and his harem.
The private lives of most species of bats are obscure, and it is only through chance encounters such as this that we gain insights into them. Had I arrived at Kwiyawagi a few weeks later, the harems might have dispersed; a few weeks earlier and they might not yet have formed. This was indeed a fortuitous discovery.
I was particularly interested in obtaining a specimen of the Alpine Woolly Rat (Mallomys gunung), which I had never seen except as a museum skin, and also to determine if Dingiso still inhabited the area. So I dispatched a party of young hunters to walk into the high mountains. Unfortunately, they had not returned to the settlement by the time we left.
Our visit to Kwiyawagi was poorly timed in one sense, for an epidemic of dysentery was then ravaging the valley. During the first week of our stay, eight infants and older children succumbed to it. The disease killed with terrifying rapidity. Babies who one day looked happy and healthy were dead a day or two later. We had virtually no medication to offer and, in the absence of a diagnosis, did not even know whether the epidemic was amoebic or bacterial in nature. Without such information, it was almost impossible to guess at which medicines might help such young children.
But I would learn, in a rather peculiar way, that the epidemic had indeed been amoebic. During the writing of this book I suffered high fever and crippling stomach pain. I was hospitalised and diagnosed as suffering from a large abscess on the liver, full of Entamoeba hystolitica, the causative agent of amoebic dysentery. The disease, apparently, can migrate from the lining of the bowel to the liver if left untreated. I had probably been infected at Kwiyawagi in 1994.
The best we could do during the epidemic was to try to keep the children from dehydrating. Tragically, we had very little sugar and there was none available in the settlement. The only rehydrating fluid I had was a large bottle of Gatorade. We could not treat more than one or two children and, because Jot Murip shared our house, his baby received the lion's share. Thankfully, his adorable little girl survived the epidemic.
The deaths of infants, while a cause of deep sorrow to their parents, were not as traumatic to the community as those of older children. When a twelve-year-old boy succumbed in the village just a few hundred metres from our house, the entire community was inconsolable. Old men and women sat outside the victim's house for days, tears running down their cheeks. Other people gathered wood for a funeral pyre, and in the afternoon the corpse was placed on top of it and set alight. The following day, walking past the place, I noticed a circle of turf on the spot where the pyre had been lit. Into it was neatly cut the name of the young boy. Each day, as I walked from village to village, I saw the smoke of similar pyres, or people gathering in preparation for a cremation.
Although the epidemic rolled on virtually unchecked while we were at Kwiyawagi, I did manage before leaving to organise a drop of medical supplies into the area, which I hoped would put an end to it. The medicines were paid for by Freeport. John Cutts arranged for them to arrive with the helicopter which took us out. Unloading them from the helicopter, I thought that they looked awfully high-tech to be useful in such a remote area. I just hoped that the mantri (who is rather like a barefoot doctor) could make effective use of them.
Despite my manifest failure to stem the epidemic, my attempts to treat children gained me something of a reputation as a medical practitioner, and people would come daily for treatment. The saddest and most perplexing case concerned a man who should have been in his prime. Two years before, he had enjoyed a reputation as the finest hunter in the valley. His skill at catching wild pigs was particularly admired. But, when I saw him, he was a thin, twisted relic. His head was permanently turned to one side and his arms and legs were painfully contorted. He could speak, but do little else.
He explained that one day, while he was out hunting, he had sat down before his fire. A forest spirit had seized him and twisted his head round and round on top of his body. Ever since then, he had been disabled and had suffered fits. He was now near death.
At first I was puzzled about the nature of his affliction. Then I remembered pig tapeworm. Pig tapeworm invaded Irian Jaya from western Indonesia in the 1960s. It was first noticed when outpost doctors reported a higher than normal incidence of burns among mountain people. The people, it seemed, were fitting in their sleep and rolling onto fires.
The worm is transmitted through consumption of poorly cooked pig flesh. Unfortunately, pig meat is often consumed in a half-cooked state in Melanesia, and the disease has spread quickly in Irian Jaya. In humans, the worms can settle in various parts of the body. The greatest damage is done when they invade the brain. There, they form cysts which eventually cause severe fits and other symptoms. Our hunter probably had more access to pig meat than many others in the valley, and had suffered first.
During this second stay among them, my relationship with the Lani warmed considerably. Each day, friends from four years earlier would come to see me, and would often ask the most extraordinary questions.
One of our most frequent visitors was an old man named Tegiorak. He was, perhaps, the patriarch of the valley. He had converted to Christianity some years before, but was clearly worried about the effect of his pagan youth on his soul. One morning he came to me and with disarming simplicity explained that he already felt half-dead, and was sure that the end was not far off. He then asked, ‘When I die, will I wake up in heaven?’
I hold no religious beliefs whatever, and was somewhat taken aback by this, yet I felt compelled to reply. After some thought, I said (with as much conviction as I could muster) that I was sure that when he woke up on the other side he would already be in heaven. A truly beatific look of relief came over his face.
This experience left me feeling rather uncomfortable. Simply because I had white skin, people assumed that I had expertise in this and so many other areas. Were I to stay any length of time at Kwiyawagi, I began to feel, I would severely disappoint their high expectations of me.
Not all of my relations with the Lani were so cordial, however. Like virtually all mountain people, they can view Europeans simply as a boundless source of wealth, and fail to accord them the common courtesy they would extend to anyone else. Some people demanded ridiculous prices for items such as vegetables, and then became angered when I refused to accede to their demands. Many, I am sure, thought that I acted out of pure selfishness by refusing to share my wealth.
On the morning of our departure we packed early, and by 8 a.m. were waiting on the airstrip for the helicopter from Tembagapura, which was to pick us up. But the weather conditions were appalling—dense mist filled the valley, and it soon became clear that our departure would be delayed.
As we waited glumly on the strip, the Lani arranged themselves into two teams (the Telenggens and the Murips, which appear to be the main clan names in the region), and began to play soccer on the airstrip with a tennis ball (sometimes two). Both males and females joined in, and there seemed to be no limit to the number of players allowed on each side. The men occupied the centre of the field and would call out to each other ‘Telenggen!’ or ‘Murip!’ in the hope that the ball would be passed to them. As these names rang out on each side (and as each member of a team bore the same clan name) I wondered how anyone could decide who to pass the ball to.
While the men were thus occupied, the women formed themselves into teams of goal-keepers. They stood three deep, each one crouched over holding a towel between outspread arms. Their role, it seemed, was to catch the ball as it was kicked towards goal.
In the midst of this spectacle I could sometimes catch sight of an umpire. As the game became more heated, however, he often joined one of the teams and the play became ever more chaotic. Finally, with shouting and screaming at fever pitch, the ball sped towards goal. At the last moment, one of the female goal-keepers scooped it up in her towel and raced from the field, squealing with delight. The rest of the players set off in hot pursuit. She was eventually caught and, after several playful thwacks on the head, was induced to release the ball, and play recommenced.
This riotous
game was interrupted by the distant sound of a helicopter. Unnoticed by us all, the mist had cleared somewhat. As the helicopter landed I said my sorrowful farewells to my Lani friends. Within a couple of hours we were back in Tembagapura.
The following morning John Cutts came to us with amazing news. He had heard over the radio that the hunters I had sent out from Kwiyawagi in search of Alpine Woolly Rats had returned only a few hours after we left, with two specimens—as well as a Dingiso. It seemed that the chances of obtaining these specimens were about zero, but when I told Terry Owen (a senior administrator in Tembagapura, who was then looking after us) about them, he arranged for a helicopter to take me back to Kwiyawagi.
Those specimens must be about the most expensive which the Australian Museum has ever received, as they cost over a thousand dollars each in helicopter time alone. I paid Manas for them, then gave him a twenty-kilogram bag of rice—my contribution to the Kwiyawagi Christmas celebrations. This meant more to Manas, I think, than anything else.
At last this trip to Irian had come to an end. It was an expedition of the highest highs and lowest lows. My fragile illusion that Irian Jaya was somehow a better place than Papua New Guinea because it was less troubled by lawlessness, and goods were cheaper there, had been traumatically shattered. I had discovered Dingiso and climbed to a tropical glacier.
I should have been ecstatic, but I kept worrying about the cost. Could I have prevented Arianus's death?
TWENTY-NINE
A living Dingiso
In mid-October 1994, as I sat in my office at the Australian Museum, I received an unexpected telephone call from Terry Owen, who was by now a close friend.
‘We have one of your tree-kangaroos,’ he said. ‘A live one. You'd better get up here in a hurry!’