Life

by Tim Flannery

  The next morning I had an appointment to meet the curator of mammals at the famed Humboldt University Museum of Natural History, which was in the east. The train to Friedrichstrasse Station would have been most convenient, but with the communist regime like a dead man walking, I felt that I’d never get another chance to experience a cold-war border crossing, so I decided to pass through Checkpoint Charlie. It was almost more than my hungover stomach and head could take. Designed to be terrifying and disorientating, I seemed to be its only customer, which made the featureless, claustrophobic corridors, with their abrupt turns, around which stood stern-faced guards, all the more intimidating. Suddenly they gave way to an inspection point, where a dour female guard minutely inspected the contents of my bag. Although I had nothing to hide, I felt it a distinct possibility that she had the power to make me disappear—perhaps forever. Then in an instant I was out on the street. After the buzzing west, the silence was eerie, until a Trabbie roared by. But as I walked through grey streets, the most striking thing by far was the lack of advertising.

  The Humboldt is one of the world’s great natural history museums, but the war and forty-five years behind the Iron Curtain had done it no favours. The grand entry hall, with its articulated skeletons of dinosaurs—including the world’s largest—recalls a glorious colonial age, for all were recovered from German East Africa. The excavation took years and cost hundreds of lives, but at the end the Humboldt had what was in the 1930s, arguably, the finest natural history exhibition on Earth. As the curator of mammals, Renate Angermann, ushered me towards her office we passed other displays, including a hunk of ground-sloth skin larger than myself. It had been dug up by German palaeontologists in Ultima Esperanza (last hope) cave in Terra Del Fuego and was one of the institution’s glories.

  Behind the public areas, the sense of dilapidation only increased. Through a grimy window I glimpsed an entire, four-storey wing of the building that had been gutted by bombs in the dying days of World War II, and through whose ruinous arches grew fifty-year-old linden trees. My destination lay in a wing that miraculously had survived the war, and which housed the mammal collection. Tall glass cases stood in serried ranks, and in them hung, as if on meat-hooks, the skins of mammals from all over the world. I spent the morning taking notes. The marsupials were housed together, and as I searched for specimens from the Spice Islands I noticed the skin of a wallaby from New Guinea. It was completely charred, and bore a label, in German, that explained its condition: ‘This specimen was damaged by a grenade during hand-to-hand combat in the museum on May 1, 1945.’

  Instantly I was there—in that very hall just forty-five years earlier, with desperate boy-soldiers hiding among the preserved skins, sniping at the advancing Russian army at it pushed into the heart of the city.

  In the afternoon Renate took me into a basement wing where the skulls and skeletons were kept. As I entered the dimly lit hall I struggled to understand what I was seeing. Row upon row, and stack upon stack, were thousands of skulls of the largest, most endangered creatures on Earth. Elephant, rhino, giraffe, hippo, Cape buffalo. All had come from German East Africa during the colonial era. It was a wonder anything was left alive on the savannah. Past them, in a corner of the vast hall, lay the cabinet I had come for. It was crammed with the remains of smaller, but not less important, creatures from Australasia. Here I would find the skulls of specimens whose skins I had seen earlier, along with the stuffed skins of small creatures such as bats.

  Although I was used to working in museums and the idiosyncrasies that involved, Renate said something that worried me. ‘You must come to my office at 4.50 pm at the latest. Otherwise you will meet the hounds.’

  Just what the hounds were I did not think to ask. Perhaps it was a slang term for the museum guards. But I did make a mental note to keep track of the time. The trouble was that the cabinet was chock-a-block with the most extraordinary biological treasures.

  The Germans are great scientists and patriots, and wherever they went they sent specimens back to the Fatherland. From German traders and administrators in the Pacific Islands to farmer-settlers in South Australia and Argentina, they had all made their contributions to a collection that documented the way things were in the natural world nearly 150 years earlier. Through their efforts was built one of the most fabulous natural history collections on Earth.

  A bat, bearing a label stating that it had been collected on the island of Ternate, had a face as strikingly striped as a badger’s. I had never seen anything like it. Dozens of cuscus skins, mounted for display, exhibited a bewildering array of colours and shapes. Almost all were labelled as coming from ‘The Spice Islands’ or ‘Ternate’, which may simply have been the point of shipping. Either the cuscus of the Spice Islands was an exceptionally variable species, or several species were lumped together under one name. If this were the case, then perhaps some species were yet to be named and described. My mouth watered at the thought. Alongside the cuscus lay a perfectly ordinary-looking sugar glider—the type I was used to seeing near my home in Sydney—labelled as coming from the island of Bacan in the Spice Islands. As I studied the collection of antique specimens, every specimen presented a puzzle.

  With measuring calipers, notebook and camera I set about documenting the collection, and was totally absorbed when I heard, in the distance, a deep, unearthly baying. Hounds, I subconsciously registered. Hounds? Hounds! My God, it was already 4.50 pm and I hadn’t even begun to pack up. I hastily grabbed my equipment and made my way through the darkening corridors towards Renate’s office. ‘What did you mean by hounds?’ I asked when I got there. ‘They are released to wander the collections by night. To deter thieves,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to meet them.’

  On subsequent days, the large steel door behind which the hounds were kept was pointed out to me, and as I worked away, measuring and documenting, I made sure to leave plenty of time to make good my getaway.

  Unfortunately, my visit to the Humboldt came just too late to meet with one of its most famous scientists. Georg Stein had gone to New Guinea with his new bride in 1929, and together they had roamed the mountains of what was then Dutch New Guinea, making extraordinary collections, including some of creatures that nobody had seen since. The Steins were among the bravest and most competent of mammalogists, but the war and its aftermath had served them poorly. Georg hated both the Nazis and the Communists, and he was never allowed to travel again after 1939. A colleague of mine had met him in the 1980s, and as he had walked towards his office he’d said loudly at one door, ‘He vas a Nazi during the war’, and at the next, ‘She is a communist.’ When he sat at his desk he took up a postage stamp and said, ‘It’s a good they put Honecker on the stamp, because I spit on him!’

  On my last day at the Museum, I decided to take everyone who had helped me at the museum to dinner. There were six of us, and the three-course meal, which I was assured was one of the best obtainable in the east, cost the equivalent of one German west mark. The mood around the table was a far cry from that in the west. My colleagues were all worried about what must have seemed a very uncertain future, yet they seemed reluctant to speak about it. As the dinner broke up, one young man suggested that we visit the zoo in the morning. East Berlin’s Tiergaten is famous, and I eagerly accepted the offer.

  We met at the gate and headed directly to the Indian rhino, which I had expressed interest in seeing. Then we went to the carnivore house. It consisted of a long barn with full-length glass panels the only thing separating the visitors from the big cats. The lions and tigers seemed to be looking right at us in the most terrifyingly ravenous manner. My colleague turned, and I saw that behind us was a great, glass-fronted refrigerator, in which the cats could see their daily meal. ‘Many of the museum staff are party members,’ my colleague said. ‘They have no idea whether they’ll keep their jobs, let alone their flats and other perquisites, if the government falls.’

  I decided to take the train back across the rapidly disintegrating bord
er. The West German Government had announced that it would give 100 Marks to each East German who fronted up at a bank, and the carriages were filled with people of all ages—many wearing outdated flared jeans and seventies shirts—going to receive their Marks. I watched their faces as they walked into the street. Many stopped dead in their tracks, their mouths agape, at their first sight of the West. Postcards of naked men with enormous penises hung on every rack. Topless girls stood in windows and doorways. It was Berlin’s infamous red light district, and I could only imagine what the East Berliners made of it. But there was little time to wonder. Tomorrow I would be on my way to the Spice Islands!

  Reconciliation, Kwaio Style

  2019

  ON OCTOBER 17, 1927, HMAS Adelaide slipped into Sinalanggu Harbour on the island of Malaita in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. Aboard the light cruiser was an extended crew of 470 sailors with extra arms and ammunition, primed to quell a ‘native uprising’. The vessel had been dispatched by the Australian government at the behest of the British.

  Several weeks earlier, a party of fifteen local policemen had accompanied Australian-born District Officer William Bell and his assistant Kenneth Lillies to a village on the harbour shore to collect a tax. The ‘head tax’ had been levied on every able-bodied Solomon Islands man to force them into labour—because the British needed workers on their plantations—but the Kwaio people of central Malaita, proud and independent, were determined to resist. Some had been blackbirded and forced to tend Queensland’s sugarcane fields, and were fighting against re-enslavement. The tax collectors were expecting trouble and came armed with the latest rifles. But the skilful Kwaio, despite being equipped largely with Stone Age weapons, attacked the party and managed to kill almost all of them, including Bell, while losing just one of their own.

  As the Adelaide anchored in the calm harbour the Kwaio leader, Basiana, who had planned and led the attack, was watching from a ridge 900 metres above. The sailors had also been joined by a ragtag civilian militia from the nearby British administrative capital of Tulagi, eager to join a suppression of the natives. Their lacklustre contribution to the arduous expeditions up the mountainside, in search of Basiana’s stronghold, earned them the sobriquet ‘the breathless army’ in the history books. But even the professionals were thwarted as the Kwaio melted into the jungle, and the Adelaide returned to Australia having failed to find their man. When they heard what had transpired, the British, infuriated at the impasse, decided to arm some north Malaitans who were then in conflict with the Kwaio, giving them carte blanche to kill. Not only did the north Malaitans murder dozens of men, women and children, they also desecrated the Kwaio’s ancestral shrines.

  Faced with a genocide, Basiana and his most loyal supporters made the ultimate sacrifice, walking to the coast and giving themselves up to be publicly hanged. Basiana’s body was never returned to his people: there was no closure for the Kwaio. Instead they became enmeshed in enmity with the north Malaitans and Australians, and a series of payback killings rolled on for ninety-one years. One of the last Australian victims, a sixty-year-old missionary, was beheaded in 2003.

  I first visited Kwaio country in 1987, at the invitation of Wailamo. His father, Folofou, had been a youth in 1927 and recalled vividly the events of that year. High in the mountains, the Kwaio were cut off from the world. Refusing Christianisation, and indeed most outside influences, they continued to live largely as their ancestors had done for thousands of years. The visit left a deep impression on me.

  In 2015, when the chance to fund a community conservation project in the Solomon Islands presented itself, I immediately thought of the Kwaio. Through public health researcher David MacLaren, I contacted Chief Esau Kekeubata, explaining that a European charitable foundation was willing to support his people to protect forests and manage their biodiversity by eliminating feral cats and monitoring endangered species. The timing was perfect: loggers were just moving into the last of the Kwaio forest. Despite the project’s great success, in February 2018 Esau explained that there was a problem: our researchers were not safe. A traditional reconciliation ceremony was needed to deal with the events triggered in 1927. Seeking acceptance of the ceremony by the Kwaio, Chief Esau and his son Tommy travelled for weeks between the scattered communities, eventually convincing 90 per cent of the Kwaio to agree to it.

  A reconciliation demands participation from both sides, and Esau had invited the Australian and British high commissioners, as well as myself (in my official capacity as 2007 Australian of the Year) to accept compensation for the European deaths. But when I arrived at the foot of the Kwaio mountains last July to begin my ascent to Basiana’s realm, I discovered that I was the only invitee who had accepted.

  Chief Esau is waiting for me in a typical ‘banana boat’—an open vessel with an outboard motor—at the ramshackle, mangrove-ridden shanty port of Atori. The bodies of William Bell and Kenneth Lillies lie buried a kilometre or so offshore, on the small island of Ngongosila. The island is not Kwaio country, and Esau has to request permission to visit the sombre granite headstones. We pay our respects and, in the failing light, set out again south-eastwards, into the teeth of a gale, a great, rolling swell tossing our boat like a dry leaf. As we approach a reef, the sound and spectacle of the swell bursting on jagged coral is awful. It is pitch dark by the time we reach a tiny islet called Gala, only a few metres off the mainland across a mangrove channel, where in a bush-materials guesthouse I meet David MacLaren and Esau’s son Tommy. Biologist Tyrone Lavery, cinematographer Ben Speare and David’s son Hamish make up the rest of the party.

  As we eat together—boiled sweet potato, roast taro and greens—Esau seems nervous. There are a few who can’t put their thirst for revenge aside, he says. Later that evening Esau tells me about himself. He was expelled from school in Grade Two and became a bank robber in Honiara. He had also stolen eighty-seven pigs. ‘When you reach 100, you have to kill a man,’ he says in pidgin English, in reference to the rules of the Ramo (a Kwaio strongman). Unwilling to kill, he decided to change his ways and is now an outstanding leader. But such was his reputation that in 2002 he was invited to hunt and kill Harold Keke, a notorious warlord on the island of Guadalcanal who was implicated in the murder of fifty people, including a cabinet minister and an Anglican priest. The prime minister had put up a reward—a bounty in the eyes of the Kwaio. Esau declined the mission, but the ten Kwaio who accepted were all killed by Keke’s henchmen.

  I haven’t slept well. We take the banana boat in heavy rain to a landing place where we are met by a ‘security’ contingent: sullen young men armed with bows and arrows, bush knives, axes and clubs. The rain is unrelenting, the river so furious I begin to wonder whether the ancestors want this reconciliation. We start walking and by midday I’m exhausted, but the track just keeps rising. After feeling our way across a submerged log bridge it’s just up, up and up, through mud covering irregular limestone. Steep. Constant slips and falls.

  The afternoon is well advanced when Esau announces that the reconciliation ceremony cannot happen today: we must spend the night in the village under guard, and without ritual protection.

  Just before dark we emerge out of the forest onto a ridge, where we ditch our sodden clothes and don traditional male Kwaio attire: a cane belt and leaf pubic cover. We walk into the village preceded by young men playing panpipes.

  Next morning, in pouring rain, a party of senior men escorts us to an ancestral shrine deep in the forest. There we will hold a sacred ceremony that cannot be filmed or recorded—this is the realm of the ancestors, an eternal and immediate reality for the Kwaio that is perhaps impossible for secular Westerners to comprehend. We enter a surreal region of abrupt sinkholes, limestone boulders and gnarled, moss-covered trees. I am led by Kwaio elder Waneagea. As we approach a cave entrance he wails, and tears fill his eyes. It is Basiana’s hiding place, never before revealed to outsiders. Emotions are breaking out everywhere on the usually stoic Kwaio faces.

 
; Several hundred metres upslope is a sinkhole where the bodies of murder victims and the bones of stolen pigs are disposed of. The horrible black void yawns just off the track. A few metres on I see three men standing in the pouring rain. It is ritual leader Diifaka with his brother and a son. The others fall behind me, leaving a long gap.

  Diifaka is a shortish, muscular man with a square face and the most startling eyes I’ve ever seen. He is wearing a necklace strung with human teeth, and his body is quivering with nervous tension. For six months he hasn’t slept with his wife, eaten food cooked by a woman or entered a house: he is tabu. He motions me to stand a few feet from him. Everyone else assembles a good distance behind me. Diifaka’s brother is holding a black piglet, barely a week old. It is lying in his hand, atop two heart-shaped leaves. The creature is silent but shivering violently in the cold. The brother hands the piglet to me and I clasp it to my chest. My heartbeat and warmth seem to calm it almost instantly.

  After a few moments Diifaka motions for the piglet. As I pass it over he lets out a deep wah!, and recites words I don’t understand, except for ‘Australia’, ‘England’ and ‘Kwaio’. He hands the pig to his son, who touches it on the head with a sop of leaves. The brother then brushes it with a whisk before handing it back to me. This is done ninety times, once for each victim of the conflict, with each name inserted into the chanted formula. As Diifaka recites one name, his face contorts with emotion and he bursts into tears. I hear sobs behind me as other names are called out. It dawns on me that the moment an ancestor’s name is called, descendants are grieving as if the atrocities were committed just yesterday. The momentous occasion of the reconciliation is hitting home. After nearly a century we stand together to resolve a situation—according to Kwaio custom—that many thought was impossible.