Life

by Tim Flannery

  The road then begins its descent into the little mountain valley that 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 security 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 Dutch 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.

  We decided to work in the forest along the road at between 2500 and 3000 metres elevation. There was good beech forest growing at this elevation and it looked like prime habitat for tree-kangaroos. We chose a campsite on a spur that was covered with heath, thus giving us a little sun. This was an important consideration, for the forests around Tembagapura are among the wettest on Earth, and life can become unbearable unless you have a chance to dry out.

  It was a beautiful place, and one that our hunters assured us had been used in times past by the OPM. It commanded a view over the Singa Valley to the east, encompassing a vast sweep of primary rainforest. The various shades of green in the canopy below suggested enormous botanical diversity, while a variety of bird calls rang out from the forest all day long.

  The small patch of heath we camped in was very mossy, with orchids and rhododendrons making up most of the ground cover. One particularly spectacular orchid had a white flower that it produced in abundance. Its spent petals, scattered on the mossy ground, looked like a fall of new snow.

  Over the first few days we camped in the heath we were puzzled by a strange and whimsical call, resembling, I felt, the sound that a slightly tipsy maiden aunt might make were she pinched on the bottom by a favourite uncle at a family party. ‘Oooh,’ it went, at erratic intervals. The mystery caller was found on our first sunny day, when Alex spotted a tiny pink and black frog crawling over the sphagnum moss. It was no larger than the nail on my little finger, and was—needless to say—completely unknown to science.

  We sent our hunters out each day with dogs in order to locate tree-kangaroos, and soon had our first specimen. I was disappointed to discover that it was not the black and white animal I hoped to secure, but belonged to a subspecies of Doria’s Tree-kangaroo that I had originally described from specimens collected in the Star Mountains in 1987. I was nonetheless intrigued to discover this species living so far west of its known range. Over the next week we located several other Doria’s Tree-kangaroos, but the black and white animal remained elusive.

  Frustrated, I decided to try again at higher elevation. By following the road, which rises towards the mine site from Tembagapura, then turning into the bush, we reached an area with steep slopes rising to 3700 metres elevation. There, scrubby plants grew in dense clusters among the rocks. I was deeply sceptical about the possibility of finding tree-kangaroos in this area, for there were not even any trees of a reasonable size for them to climb in. Our hunters, however, insisted that they could be had there, so I deferred to their plan to base ourselves at this bleak spot.

  My worst suspicions seemed confirmed when, after three days’ hunting, we had failed to locate any sign of tree-kangaroos at all.

  Then, early one morning, a dog emerged from the mist and approached our camp. It was followed by another, then two men and two women. I introduced myself to the taller of the men. He said that his name was Yonas Tinal, and that he was a Lani man from Haga. He owned the two dogs and the women were his wives. The other man he introduced as his friend. He had come to this high forest, he told me, to hunt tree-kangaroos.

  Despite my increasing misgivings, he seemed confident of success. His dog, named Dingo, was, he told me, a four-million rupiah hunter: it was so good at finding game that Yonas valued each of its canine teeth at a cool million rupiah (about seven hundred Australian dollars) apiece. Dingo’s companion, Photocopy, was a less able animal and, as his name suggests, resembled a hunting dog more in appearance than action.

  Yonas and I hit it off immediately. He is a big, open-hearted and generous man with a delightful sense of humour. He has a typically large Lani nose, the septum of which has been wonderfully perforated. He offered on several occasions to perforate my own nasal septum, claiming that the mountains were an ideal place to operate, as the cold air would make it a relatively painless ordeal.

  Yonas liked Australians. At one time he worked for an Australian engineer engaged in road construction near the mine. The pair had become firm friends and still occasionally wrote to each other. Yonas had named the renowned hunting dog Dingo in honour of his Australian friend.

  Yonas explained that until recently he had four wives, but because one fought with the others he reluctantly returned her to her parents. Polygamy clearly suited him, however, for he had plans to enlarge his little family. A fondness for the policeman’s daughter at Nabire had blossomed into romance, and Yonas was now saving for the brideprice.

  Yonas is almost unique among the more traditional younger New Guineans I have known in that he displays open, physical affection to his wives. He could often be seen nestled among them, holding the hand of one and smiling at another. For their part, they seemed happy and contented in his company.

  After I’d explained to Yonas my desire to obtain a specimen of the black and white tree-kangaroo, he continued on his way even higher up the mountain, promising to return with one in a few days.

  I would have loved to follow Yonas to his camp, but our nets and traps were already set out and our hunters were scouring the bush at this lower location. It would take at least a day to reorganise ourselves, and Yonas could not wait.

  Our hunters found nothing and I was losing hope.

  But at last one morning I saw Dingo emerge from the forest. A smiling Yonas, holding up two fing
ers, followed behind. As he opened his noken, I divined from this gesture that he had captured two tree-kangaroos.

  As the contents of the noken were revealed, I was all but overcome by near-simultaneous sensations of exhilaration and despair. Yonas had captured two tree-kangaroos—but they had been eaten. All that he had brought were pieces of skin and bones!

  Nonetheless, the remains were sufficient to confirm that the black and white tree-kangaroo was a very curious and hitherto unknown animal. The skins were incomplete and miserably torn, but it was clear from them that the new species was a largish creature (we learned later that females, which are smaller than males, weigh nine to ten kilograms). The back was indeed black, the belly white, and the tail patterned variously in black and white, but usually with a white tip. The face was very unusual, for a band of white fur surrounded the base of the muzzle, and a white star stood in the centre of the forehead. These features were not evident in the photographs of the joey, and nothing like this pattern is seen in any other marsupial.

  The distinctiveness of this strange creature was also apparent from the bones. The skull showed some similarities to that of Doria’s Tree-kangaroo, but was more gracefully shaped and differed in details of its teeth and foramina (holes in the skull). The limb bones were also dramatically different from those of any other tree-kangaroo I had examined. The major limb bones of tree-kangaroos are exceptionally thick and robust. They need to be, for many species leap as much as twenty metres downward from the rainforest canopy. The limb bones of the new species were, in contrast, gracile, and similar in proportion to ground-dwelling kangaroos. Clearly, this animal could not make such great downward leaps.

  I would discover eventually that this new species was unique among tree-kangaroos in that it spent much of its time on the ground, among the stunted shrubs and bushes of the alpine region.

  Meanwhile, our largely unsuccessful hunters had gone off up into the higher country with their dogs once more, while we proceeded at a more leisurely pace behind them, collecting frogs, examining plants and looking for traces of smaller animals.

  In this venture, Yonas and I formed a team of sorts that specialised in searching under fallen timber for frogs and invertebrates. We worked rather like Jack Sprat and his wife, for Yonas had an unholy terror of all things amphibian, while I recoil at large, hairy spiders. Whenever a frog was exposed under a log, it was I who leaped on it, while Yonas had no compunction about casually stooping down to pick up the most terrible-looking spiders.

  I did not realise the depth of Yonas’ revulsion of frogs until we watched a video together in our quarters in Tembagapura. A few days earlier I had taped Yonas and our other helpers while they worked. Now they were crowded around the television excitedly talking about themselves as movie stars—when the scene cut suddenly to a close-up of a toad. Yonas leaped vertically into the air and landed on top of a couch. From there, he attempted to scramble out of our third-storey window! When he had calmed down, he explained to me that while the look of such an enlarged frog was terrible enough, to hear its croak amplified was almost unthinkable.

  Sadly, it was not Yonas, but another Lani hunter called Obert who brought in our long-desired specimen.

  On this particular day Yonas and I were doing quite well at our double act when our hunters appeared through the mist, led by Obert—who was triumphantly carrying a tree-kangaroo on his shoulders. It was, he said, only recently dead. As Obert carried the creature towards me seated upright on his shoulders, it looked more like a bear or koala than a kangaroo. It seemed such an adorable, gentle creature. Later, when I encountered a living animal, I would learn that its temperament is indeed mild. Lani have often told me that, when hunters find it, they offer it some choice leaves, and it approaches them—then they simply slip a noose over its head and lead it away.

  This extraordinary animal is well known to hunters living high on the Maokop. The Moni people, who inhabit the western edge of the range, know it as Dingiso, a name that we eventually bestowed upon it as its English common name. We did this because we were tired of the clumsy, double-barrelled English names (such as Goodfellow’s Tree-kangaroo) given to other species of New Guinea mammal. We wanted to bestow a native name, such as the Aboriginal koala or wombat, which would, in time, become familiar to Western ears.

  We also gave the scientific name Dendrolagus mbaiso to the creature. Mbaiso means ‘the forbidden animal’ in Moni, and we used this name as a tribute to the traditional Moni conservation practices that have been crucial in allowing it to survive to the present.

  Dingiso remains common in Moni territory. Many clans revere it as an ancestor and refuse to hunt it. When they meet it in the forest, they say, it throws up its arms and whistles, which they take as an indication that it recognises its shared ancestry with the Moni. Even their dogs, Moni say, recognise the sacred nature of this creature, and when they see one will slink away on their bellies. Biologists, who are a more prosaic bunch than the Moni, view Dingiso’s behaviour differently, descrying in it a typical tree-kangaroo threat display. They have no explanation, however, for the behaviour of Moni dogs.

  The Western Dani know the creature as Wanun. In their territories, which lie to the east of the Moni, it is not protected by traditional beliefs and is, as a consequence, extremely rare. It has already been exterminated within a few days’ walk of most Dani settlements.

  Now I had sufficient evidence to describe the species. With the discovery of Dingiso I felt that I had hit the high point in my career as a biologist. During the decade or so I had been investigating the mammals of Melanesia, I had discovered sixteen other species that were unknown to science, as well as fourteen new subspecies. Among these were bats, possums, bandicoots, wallabies and giant rats, as well as three other kinds of tree kangaroos. None, however, was as unusual as Dingiso, and none had such an interesting evolutionary and cultural story to tell.

  Prior to my departure to Australia I spent several days in the lowlands around Timika. The management of PT Freeport Indonesia were so pleased with the results of our survey that they put us all up at the newly opened Timika Sheraton Hotel. It is an extraordinary place to find in the middle of the Irian jungle, for the facilities boast the last word in luxury and one can hear and see (if one is lucky) from almost every room in the place several of the half dozen species of birds of paradise that inhabit the surrounding jungle.

  The construction cost of the hotel was apparently stupendous. I heard rumours that 80 million dollars went into building the forty-seven room facility. Still, one has to have adequate accommodation for visiting dignitaries and heads of state. Other rumours suggested that among the hotel’s customers were some Indonesian politicians seeking a quiet place for a weekend with their mistresses.

  The grounds surrounding the hotel are exquisite. Trails have been cut through the forest, and myriad insects, birds and other wildlife can be seen in the regrowth along the paths. Brilliant butterflies of many kinds hover around flowers on creepers and vines, and skinks with brilliant blue tails dash from every log.

  One does not have to travel far from the Sheraton, though, to be thrown into the reality of present-day Irian Jaya. The village of Kwamki Lama was created for displaced Amungme, who originally lived in the Tembagapura–Singa area. It lies barely a kilometre from the hotel. In 1995, nearly a hundred of the Amungme living there died of cholera. They are a mountain people and they fare just as poorly, healthwise, in the lowlands as do Europeans.

  The Kamoro are the original inhabitants of the lowland swamps. Prior to the coming of the mine they were semi-nomadic, and some continue in a remarkably traditional lifestyle today. Despite the enormous disruption to their lives caused by the mine, they manage to take advantage of the situation in unexpected ways.

  One day I was taken out to see the tailings levee. This is a large, dam-like structure that has been built to the north-east of Timika to contain the mine tailings that are dumped into the headwaters of the Aikwa River. The tailings consist alm
ost entirely of crushed rock as, thankfully, no chemicals are used in the mineral extraction process. Nonetheless, the sheer volume of sediment being discharged is causing some environmental concern.

  Where the sediment builds up it smothers the roots of nearby trees, causing vast tracts of forest to die. The area around the tailings levee looks awful. On its southern side, thousands of hectares of forest lie dead or dying. To the north lies original swamp forest, inhabited, I discovered, by a considerable population of Kamoro. Why had they come to live adjacent to this devastation?

  The answer was provided by a couple of women who were returning to camp as I arrived. Strung from their heads were huge net bags full of freshwater prawns. These jumbo-sized crustaceans are delicious and nutritious. They are normally not common and I wondered how the women had managed to collect so many. The answer, it seemed, lay in the devastated forest.

  The water under the dead and dying trees abounds in prawns. This is because the sediment that smothers the trees forms a highly fertile bed for the growth of algae and bacteria. This is prawn food par excellence. With the leaf fall and the sunlight reaching the forest floor, an incredibly fertile environment has been created in which the prawns and other aquatic life flourish. The women harvest the prawns by removing plugs set in the levee wall and placing their nets over the hole. Within minutes they are full.

  The Kamoro are not the only ones attracted to the bounty. Fat crocodiles abound, while wild pigs and forest wallabies, attracted to the regrowth occurring under the trees, are seen in large numbers. All of these animals provide further food for the Kamoro who, while political stability lasted, were selling smoked meat at some profit in the Timika market. I have never seen a lowland people as sleek and healthy as the Kamoro living on that levee.

  It is just as well that the tailings area has provided an alternative source of food for the Kamoro, for their traditional fare including the fish and mudcrabs that once abounded in the river estuaries, are now sadly depleted. Tailings have smothered many, while Buginese fishermen compete for those that remain. These aggressive people have recently discovered the near-virgin fisheries of southern Irian Jaya. With a ready market in Timika and Tembagapura, they have ransacked the region. In a few years’ time, the gigantic barramundi and abundant mudcrabs still seen in the markets will be a thing of the past.