Life

by Tim Flannery

  Torricelli Mountains

  1999

  BACK IN JULY 1985, after a stint at Telefomin, I decided to travel to the Torricelli Mountains to assess their suitability as a site for a faunal survey. The Torricellis form part of the eastern end of Papua New Guinea’s North Coast Ranges. They run roughly parallel to the north coast between the Irian Jaya border and Wewak, a distance of about 200 kilometres. Only a narrow coastal plain separates the mountains from the sea, while the vast floodplain of the Sepik separates them from the taller central ranges. Long ago the Sepik floodplain was occupied by the sea, and the North Coast Ranges would have formed islands lying many kilometres off the coast.

  The Torricellis are a low mountain range, reaching only 1500 metres in elevation. They had been largely ignored by previous researchers. My interest in them was piqued by a scientific article, published a few years earlier, describing a new species of large gliding possum, which was apparently unique to the Torricellis. Given the long isolation of the ranges, it seemed possible that the gliding possum was not the only mammal unique to the region. A whole undescribed fauna might be awaiting the patient researcher.

  The easiest access to the Torricellis is via Lumi, a small settlement lying at about 500 metres elevation on the southern slopes of the mountains. By 1985 a road led from Lumi most of the way to Fatima Mission at the foot of the highest peaks. Over years researching in the Torricellis, I have watched this road progress ever deeper into the mountains. By 1992 it was possible to drive a truck into virgin bush on the upper slopes of Mt Somoro itself (the highest peak in the range). This road, I fear, heralds the end of Somoro’s forest.

  It is always slightly unnerving arriving at a new location in Papua New Guinea. You have no idea what the locals will be like or how you will be received. Stepping out of the Cessna at Lumi that first time I would have been met by a small, wizened fellow known to one and all as Lumi Man. Lumi Man looks official. He wears a clean white shirt and blue shorts. Sometimes he carries a clipboard and pen. Lumi Man greets each stranger as they step from their aircraft with a long, detailed harangue. This harangue can be disconcerting, for Lumi Man delivers it in a language that no one else can understand.

  On subsequent visits to Lumi I have seen Europeans stand puzzled and embarrassed for long minutes as they strain to understand Lumi Man and his function. Meanwhile, everyone else in Lumi enjoys the joke enormously. The best response, apparently, is to shake Lumi Man’s hand rather formally, an honour that he delightedly returns with a crisp salute.

  My first reaction to Lumi Man must have been the same sort of embarrassed immobility I have witnessed so often in others—but I have no memory of it, or indeed anything else much about Lumi in 1985. As for the rest of the expedition, my recollections of it are few and dreamlike.

  On that first exploratory trip I decided to stay in the village of Wigotei, about half a day’s walk from the Catholic mission centre at Fatima. I was feeling slightly unwell when I arrived. This, I thought, probably heralded an incipient bout of malaria. Malaria is the constant companion of mammalogists working in lowland New Guinea, for our work leaves us very vulnerable to infection with the malarial parasite.

  Most New Guinea mammals are nocturnal. To observe them, one must be in the forest at night, which is when the Anopheles mosquitoes are active. Mammalogists are often occupied for hours at a time at a mist-net, attempting to disentangle bats without hurting them. All the while you are surrounded by a buzzing cloud of mosquitoes. Because both hands are fully occupied coping with live bats, you cannot even wave them away. No matter how well protected you are by clothing and insecticide, there always seems to be a dozen proboscises inserted into your bloodstream at once.

  Anti-malarial drugs offer only partial protection. Malaria, it seems, mutates so rapidly that it becomes resistant to each new drug soon after it is developed.

  As a result of these problems, I have learned to live with vivax malaria (the most common and least dangerous strain) while in New Guinea. Indeed, malaria often seems to cause my worst troubles in Australia. One attack in Woolloomooloo was particularly dangerous. I was enjoying a pub lunch with some friends when the first symptoms came on. The attack developed rapidly and my friends went off to find a cab to take me to a doctor. I began to feel cold and decided to take a stroll in the weak winter sun.

  As I paced up and down the street, a police car cruised by. The police seemed to take a great deal more interest in me than they usually do. My first impulse was to stop and ask them for help, but something in their expressions made me stop. Then I realised how I must look: pale and sweating, shaking violently, with my arms clasped around my chest. And I was walking along a street notorious as a shooting gallery for heroin users.

  I could just see myself in King’s Cross police station, trying to explain that I was not a junkie, but was in fact suffering from malaria. The enlarged liver and spleen that develop with malaria are exquisitely vulnerable to physical damage. A vision floated before me of my untimely demise from a ruptured spleen inflicted by a constable’s boot, its owner having decided I was an obnoxious, smart-arse junkie. With these thoughts swirling around my head, I rushed into the pub and hid in the toilet, to await escape, some minutes later, in the cab.

  I have had to take a philosophical view of this inevitable infection with malaria because I simply could not do my field work otherwise. The 1985 expedition was so expensive, time-consuming and difficult to organise that to pull out just after arriving in this remote and fascinating region was not something which, in all conscience, I could do.

  So—just a few days’ work, I told myself now, would repay all the trouble. I swallowed a couple of quinine tablets (still the most effective if oldest anti-malarial) and resolved to stick things out at Wigotei.

  The next afternoon I went out to set up a mist-net. On the way back to the village I was struck down with a ferocious bout of fever. It was as if someone had delivered a blow to the base of my skull with an axe. I had a blinding headache and could not walk nor focus my eyes properly. With the help of some villagers, I struggled back to my hut and took more quinine, certain that I was suffering the mother of all malarial attacks.

  From what I can remember, time passed strangely at Wigotei. Nights were an absolute torture, for sleep was banished and I lay soaked in sweat in a fevered state. The seconds ticked by through the hours of darkness as I longed for a sip of water and the balm of sleep. In place of sheep, I counted the pandanus leaves that made up the roof. I never got to the end of a row, for my disordered brain lost track, even among the neatly arranged fronds.

  The days were little better. I lay in the insufferably hot hut, parched and aching for water. A stream of people passed by, each one sticking their head in the door as they muttered ‘tarangu’ (a term of sympathy in Pidgin, roughly translating as ‘commiserations’). Somehow, I failed in my efforts to communicate to them my need for water. Thankfully, every now and then a kind woman would come by with a bamboo cane full of the precious stuff and I would drink it and down a few more quinine tablets.

  My thinking was not clear enough to ask the people of the village to carry me to the mission hospital and they did not take the initiative themselves. Perhaps they were waiting for my European bulk to reduce itself before they were willing to shoulder me for hours over the rough terrain. I continued to take quinine. Worse, I became confused as to how many tablets I had taken. This is highly dangerous, as quinine is not a drug to fool with.

  Death from quinine overdose is horrible. It is impossible to reverse the effects of the drug, so death is inevitable. As time went by, what began as a slight ringing in my ears increased in volume until it resembled church bells. Soon, the bells turned to cannons. This is a common side-effect of quinine and it finally alerted me to the fact that I had probably already taken far too much.

  I sometimes seemed to have a lucid period around midday, which lasted about twenty minutes. During one of these intervals I arranged to be carried by stretcher to
the mission clinic. I remember very little of the journey, but do recollect a series of semi-hallucinatory visions, including one which featured an extraordinarily large snail sitting on the trunk of a tree. From my unusual orientation, I also recall being intrigued by a black claw that one of my bearers was wearing on a string around his neck. When we arrived at the mission, I somehow managed to buy the necklace from him.

  This, it eventuated, was the most important specimen I acquired during the short expedition.

  At the mission hospital, the Catholic nursing sister in charge took one look at me and said, ‘You have the worst case of malaria I have seen for some time. Have some quinine.’

  I was beyond debating the point with her, indeed almost beyond caring, and swallowed the bitter pills once more.

  That evening, lying in a mission hospital cot, an extraordinary sense of calm came over me. The torture of the thirst and fever, the terrible tension that pain creates, all left me. I was at peace, simply lying there in utter tranquility, experiencing a level of relaxation deeper than I had ever felt before.

  At one stage I was aware of a nun coming in and undressing me. Her hands and eyes searched every part of my body. I grew up a Catholic and spent my primary school years being taught by nuns. It did not occur to me to wonder why she was touching me like this. Normally, I would have been embarrassed beyond words by such intimate contact, but that night I merely lay there, blissfully peaceful. It was as if it were all happening to someone else.

  I don’t remember anything at all of the following few days. My next memory is of lying in a bed in Boram Hospital in the coastal town of Wewak. The ward was full of dying people. It was primitive and dirty. A large and menacing male nurse, ears and nose pierced in traditional fashion, advanced towards me bearing a hypodermic syringe. I swear that he wiped it on his grubby shirt sleeve before jabbing it into my arm, saying, ‘I’m sure you have the worst case of malaria…’

  After he had taken the blood sample, I crawled out of bed and kept moving until I saw a friendly face. It was the hospital dentist. He took me home with him, where I stayed until I was fit enough to travel back to Australia.

  I had been suffering from scrub typhus. Victims of this disease who go untreated for six or more days have a frighteningly high fatality rate. Years later, when I again met the nun who first treated me, she told me that she thought I had only another twelve hours to live if I did not receive treatment.

  Her search of my body, she later told me, had yielded the bite mark of a scrub typhus tick. This tick is not stupid. It tries to bite on the genitals, knowing that this part of one’s anatomy is likely to come in contact with another animal, which may harbour a partner for it too.

  Fortunately, the nun had a supply of the appropriate drugs on hand and after administering them she evacuated me to Wewak. I owe her my life.

  It took me a long time to recover. For several months I did not experience an uninterrupted night’s sleep. My short-term memory was devastated. It was impossible to remember a new face or name, or use a telephone, simply because I could not retain a string of digits for long enough in my mind to dial the number. Eventually I found a way around this particular difficulty—by writing the number I wished to dial on a piece of paper and sticking it to the telephone. Other problems persisted, however, and my inability to remember faces and names provoked a million embarrassments and inconveniences.

  Eventually I was able to examine the small collection of mammals I had made at Wigotei. Of all the specimens I had gathered, it was the claw I purchased from my stretcher-bearer that proved most difficult to identify. I felt it must be from a tree kangaroo—yet it differed in detail from anything I knew about. The fur at its base was black and it was larger than any tree-kangaroo claw I had ever seen.

  Only one species, the grizzled tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus inustus), had previously been reported from the Torricelli Mountains, but this was not its claw. It seemed that at least one other species of tree kangaroo was present in the mountains, but what was it?

  The Discovery of Dingiso

  1999

  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 that influenced my desire to visit Tembagapura was the tree-kangaroo jawbone that 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 that 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 Landcruiser 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 1400 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, primeval-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 project 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 that 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 3000 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 that 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 3000 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.