BEYOND THE CORAL SEA

Travels in the old Empires of the South-West Pacific

MICHAEL MORAN

Dedication

For my mother who saw this voyage begin but not end and the children of Papua New Guinea so full of energy and eternal delight

Epigraph

I have always thought the situation of a Traveller singularly hard. If he tells nothing that is uncommon he must be a stupid fellow to have gone so far, and brought home so little; and if he does, why – it is hum – aya – a tap of the Chin; – and – ‘He’s a Traveller.’

WILLIAM WALES

Astronomer and Meteorologist

Captain Cook’s Second Voyage in the Resolution

Journal 13 May, 1774

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Maps

Prologue

1 Forsaking Pudding Island

2 The Eye of the Eagle

3 ‘No More ’Um Kaiser, God Save ’Um King’

4 Death is Lighter than a Feather

5 Too Hard a Country for Soft Drinks

6 ‘Mr Hallows Plays No Cricket. He’s Leaving on the Next Boat.’

7 Constitutional Crisis in Makamaka

8 ‘O Maklai, O Maklai!’ or The Archipelago of Contented People

9 Kolonialpolitik Defeats the Man from the Moon

10 Minotaurs on Gilded Couches

11 Feverish Nightmares

12 Grand Opening – Tsoi Island General Store

13 An Account of the Criminal Excesses of Charles Bonaventure du Breil

14 ‘In Loveing Memory’

15 ‘The Sick Man Goes Down with the Plane’

16 ‘Rabaul i blow up!’

17 Queen Emma

18 A Moveable Feast

19 ‘No Trespassing Except By Request’

20 Auf Wiedersehn, Kannibalen

21 Under the Mosquito Net in Malinowski’s Tent

22 Farewell to That Strange and Fatal Glamour

Epilogue

Afterword

Brief Chronology of Significant Historical Events in Papua New Guinea

Bibliography of Principal Sources

Index

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Maps

Prologue

‘If you dress well, they won’t eat you!’ Wallace said.

He shuffled the cards with the stump of his right arm, beginning another interminable game of patience. The light was failing, the atmosphere oppressively hot and humid as the cards flapped on the bare table. Local boys glanced in darkly as they passed the flyblown screens covering the louvred windows. They were interested in the visitor and craned for a better view. A wretched poster of Bill Clinton greeting King Harald V of Norway hung at a crazy angle from the flaking wall.

‘We thought you were Gods.’

His rippling, grey hair caught the sun and he smiled, teeth showing the past ravages of chewing betel nut. Wallace Andrew was a distinguished personage with a heart of gold. This virtue had brought him many misfortunes in life. He began to hum the hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’.

‘Such a lovely tune, don’t you think? Young people today have abandoned proper hymns.’

The ceiling fan was motionless, the air thick and still. A pretty village woman with an ancient profile began to hurriedly set the table for dinner, laying out cutlery, bananas, pineapple and some lurid green cordial in a glass jug. She covered it with mesh. Malarial mosquitoes had already begun to ride the last shafts of sunlight in the dusk. ‘Napoleon will be here at seven. They will come directly from the chamber and then go out again,’ she said in excellent English, clearly for my benefit. They generally spoke the Suau language in the islands around Milne Bay in Eastern Papua New Guinea.

‘Fine men. Like my grandfather, a fine man,’ Wallace noted sadly, another fast game of patience in progress in the gloom. He adopted a consistently high moral tone in all his conversations and talked often of selfless Christians.

‘Charles Abel, one of the first English missionaries, always wore a bow tie, white shoes, starched shirt and trousers. He was never kai kai’d¹ because they respected him. His wife came from England too. She delivered a village baby after they landed and her white dress was soon covered in blood. They didn’t eat her. She helped them.’

Wallace was, after all, the grandson of a cannibal and an expert on matters of cannibal etiquette.

Two men carrying folders dragged open the grill on the front door and entered the main room. They glanced quickly and expectantly at the deserted bar but it had been some time since any festivities of an alcoholic or social kind had taken place there. They greeted Wallace. He stood up full of respect and pleasure that government ministers had chosen to be guests at his establishment.

‘We go up, then come down to eat, then go out.’

The brevity of their speech was almost aggressive as they noticed the white stranger in their midst. The assertive masculinity of Melanesian culture. Their dark features could scarcely be seen as they climbed the central flight of a once-grand staircase that branched into two wings of remarkable austerity and dilapidation. Their bare feet made only the slightest sound like large cats padding about. Floorboards creaked overhead and doors slammed. Silence apart from the worn cards softly slapping one over the other. Wallace scarcely glanced at the deck as he deftly adjusted his amputated arm, leaning slightly to one side, gathering them in.

‘You can walk around the whole island in the moonlight. It’s beautiful. Even if you are drunk nothing will happen to you here – not like the hell of Alotau!’

Wallace was full of trust in his fellow man yet he had suffered many betrayals. Tropical foliage spun by the moon appealed to my sense of romance, but this particular night was pitch black.

Fluorescent lights cruelly illuminated the dining room. The Kinanale Guesthouse was in desperate need of refurbishment. During colonial days it had been the single accommodation for white employees of the Steamships Trading Company.¹ Paintings of sailing ships and bush huts with strange watchtowers covered the larger cracks. A small lounge opened off the main room like a builder’s afterthought. Geckos darted in erratic motion across the stained walls. Dinah removed the mesh from the table. She laid out fish and taro on platters together with a jug of crystalclear iced water. A solitary bell sounded the hour over the football pitch, former cricket ground, former malarial swamp that lay before this once select building in the centre of the island. An air of abandonment and futility gave rise to a curious sense of threat and lethargy.

The government officials had changed into crisp shirts for the evening session and padded over to the table. Wallace, perhaps sensing their shyness, decided to introduce me.

‘This is Mr Michael from England. He is a famous man and wrote me a letter,’ searching the while in a battered briefcase. He produced the creased relic and began to read out loud, to my acute embarrassment. ‘Dear Mr Andrew, your name was given to me by Sir Kina Bona, the High Commissioner in London and I …’

Their fierce expressions changed at once to broad smiles of extreme friendliness. But the visitors must always make the first move.

‘Wallace has been telling me all about your important government work. What are you doing on the island?’ I was tactfully pouring a glass of the luminous cordial so as to avoid appearing overly inquisitive. Wallace beamed from his proprietor’s perch.

‘I’m Napoleon, Assembly Clerk for the Milne Bay Province and this is the Principal Adviser to the Provincial Government. He’s from Morobe Province. We are running a seminar for local councillors. Welcome to our difficult and beautiful country.’ The introductions seemed overly formal, even odd, in this place that had clearly seen better days.

I was on Samarai, a tiny island in China Strait that lies off the southeastern tip of Papua New Guinea, described before the Great War as ‘the jewel of the Pacific’. It was the original port of entry to British New Guinea and had been the provincial headquarters before Port Moresby. This gem lay on the sea route between China and Australia. The tropical enchantment cast by Samarai was loved by all who visited it. Destroyed by the Australian administration in anticipation of a Japanese invasion that never happened, it was now more like the discarded shell of the pink pearls still harvested nearby.

Having dinner with the descendant of a cannibal, a man who spoke reverentially and compulsively of the shedding of the blood of Christ whilst humming ‘All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small’, was just the beginning of a cultural adventure through the largely unknown islands of Eastern Papua New Guinea.

¹Pidgin for ‘food’ is kai kai. Here it is used as a passive verb – to be kai kai’d is to be eaten.

¹Steamships Group is one of the largest public companies in Papua New Guinea with many diverse business interests apart from shipping. The original Australian company was established in adverse circumstances in Port Moresby in 1924 by a retired sea captain, Algernon Sydney Fitch, the first branch opening on Samarai in 1926.

1. Forsaking Pudding Island

London

29 September 1999

It was raining heavily as I clambered out of the taxi in the Mall and ran up the grand flight of steps past the Duke of York column into Waterloo Place. The statues of the explorers Sir John Franklin and Captain Scott looked stern and Olympian. I was heading for the High Commission of Papua New Guinea through a forest of history and high culture, umbrella up, head down. The high classicism of Nash’s Via Triumphalis, former site of the Regent’s wanton and ruinous Carlton House, could not have contrasted more strongly with the musky odour in the corridor of pagan carvings that led to the High Commissioner’s office. Grimy windows overlooked Waterloo Place. The national flag wrapped around its pole badly needed cleaning. Papua New Guinea time and GMT were indicated by rough signs on mismatching clocks. This was clearly the lair of a culture unconcerned with cosmetic niceties. His Excellency Sir Kina Bona, the High Commissioner, was chewing gum and watching the Rugby World Cup as I wandered in. He had an instantly likeable face and seemed unaffected by his diplomatic status.

‘How do you do, sir?’ I held out my hand respectfully.

‘Much better if I could get out of here mate! Do you like rugby? What can I do you for?’

The gum thunked into the bin. Rugby was the furthest thing from my mind, but this was a promising beginning. He had a refined, educated air and wore fine-rimmed glasses. Underneath the banter I felt a moral outlook at odds with the modern political world.

We sat down and began to talk. An islander from Kwato in Milne Bay Province, he had attended the mission school as a child, secondary school in Sydney, studied Law at the University of Papua New Guinea and was Crown Prosecutor at the Public Prosecution Office until 1994 when he was subsequently appointed to the post of High Commissioner. Married to a ‘Lancashire lass’, he should have left London two years ago.

‘Britain has little interest in PNG but all the Commonwealth High Comms cooperate very well.’

Grotesque Sepik river masks grinned down like a nightmare from another world.

‘Where are you off to?’ he enquired vaguely, settling uncomfortably into a leather chair.

‘I’m planning a trip around the islands next year. I don’t intend to go to the Highlands at all. Far too violent. Just the islands.’

‘Yes – the violence. Moresby is pretty bad. The police are so under-funded that corruption is rife … the jungle hardly lends itself to strict policing. Not like Surrey!’

He laughed with a hint of derision at the ease of civilised life.

‘I used to live on Norfolk Island off the coast of Australia. Home to the descendants of the Bounty mutiny.’

I was fighting to establish a rapport with this fellow islander, some common ground. The masks seemed threatening in Waterloo Place. The contrast was suffocating.

‘Really? Islands are special places. I miss the sweet waves of Samarai and Kwato on moonlit nights. Cities, well …’

He drifted off into an unexpected romantic reverie. I explained myself.

‘I got bored with catching the seventy-three bus down Oxford Street to Victoria every morning. Threw it up in the end. The job I mean.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘Teaching languages.’

‘I had fine English teachers at the Mission. The very best.’ He paused. ‘Now we only bash the missionaries during election time!’ He grinned broadly.

After some desultory chat about the independence movement in East Timor and the excitement of family life in Hampstead Garden Suburb I rose to leave.

‘I’ll send you some family contacts and useful people to look up. They’ll look after you, or eat you!’ More good-natured laughter.

I signed the visitor’s book and left the office. I was heading for Berry Bros in St James’s to collect a good bottle of red Graves. A final farewell to civilisation. A feeling of exhilaration passed over me as I glanced back through rain-lashed Waterloo Place at the windows harbouring that alien world. For a moment I watched the beads of water running off the polished bonnet of his midnight-blue diplomatic Jaguar.

I was about to escape from Pudding Island.

The original idea of sailing a copra schooner called Barracuda around the islands of Eastern Papua New Guinea in the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson had faded, as do so many boyhood dreams. I. had always wanted to sail the old vessels of the past on those remarkable voyages of discovery. My friends at the Royal Papua Yacht Club laughed at the idea and told me that all the old ketches and schooners had rotted in the mud. The price of copra had collapsed and the corpse of the industry was barely twitching. No one would dream of wasting money building or even repairing an old copra schooner. There were no more sailing ships plying the islands. Traditional sailing canoes like the majestic lakatoi of Port Moresby with their towering crab-claw sails and multiple hulls had by now almost completely disappeared. Chartering a vessel as an individual was prohibitively expensive. Even if I had sailed my own yacht I could easily become a victim of unfavourable trade winds or worse, piracy. Unless I was prepared to wait for unreliable boats from Thursday Island in the far north of Australia, it was impossible legally to enter Papua New Guinea except by air through Port Moresby or Mount Hagen in the Highlands. I was disappointed but determined to sail at least part of the Australian coastline in the old style, completely dependent on the vagaries of wind and weather.

A rare opportunity arose to ‘take passage’ on the replica of Captain Cook’s ship Endeavour as a supernumerary member of the crew. That it was sailing in precisely the opposite direction to my intended destination did not disturb me. I would experience sailing a tall ship along the New South Wales coast for a week from Southport (near Brisbane) to Sydney. A suitably nautical frame of mind would then enable me to jet off to Port Moresby with equanimity.

Endeavour is a handsome vessel and a magnificent replica of the original ship. It was constructed as Australia’s flagship from 1988–94 in Fremantle in Western Australia. She is built of jarrah and has upper sides of varnished pine, finished in the Royal Navy colours of blue, red and yellow. I took Sir Joseph Banks’s cabin on the after fall deck – a small space that I later discovered was occupied not by Sir Joseph himself but by his dogs – a bitch spaniel called Lady used as gun dog, and a greyhound taken on board to run down game.

Joseph Banks was only twenty-five when word reached him on 15 August 1768 that Endeavour was ready to take him aboard on a great adventure to the South Seas. He was at the opera in London with Miss Harriet Blosset, a French ward to whom he was engaged and in love, but with whom he lamentably lacked the French language to communicate. Confessing himself to be of ‘too volatile a temperament to marry’, and unable to explain the meaning of his imminent departure, he drank heavily in a romantic funk the night before he left London for Plymouth. Poor weather delayed the sailing until 25 August.

Banks’s father was an MP and the family were wealthy and well-connected, living at Revesby Abbey in Lincolnshire. He had been to Eton (which trained him no doubt for the rigours of the voyage but not for the travails of love), spent seven years at Oxford studying botany, and worked at the British Museum in London. In February 1768, the Royal Society decided that observing ‘the passage of the Planet Venus over the Disc of the Sun … is a Phaenomenon that must … be accurately observed in proper places’. The Admiralty decided on Tahiti as a place of observation, and James Cook was appointed chief observer of the transit. He selected a Whitby ‘cat’¹ called the Earl of Pembroke as the most suitable vessel for such a voyage, refitted and renamed her the Endeavour.

As a Fellow of the Royal Society, Banks contributed ten thousand pounds to purchase a vast quantity of both practical and elegant equipment for the voyage, and transported a comprehensive library of some one hundred and fifty volumes. A party of nine made up his gentleman’s entourage, all trained in the techniques of collecting and preparing specimens. He became almost more famous than Cook himself, but remained dogged by the unfortunate repercussions of the ‘caddishly abandoned’ Miss Blosset (‘Miss Bl: swooned &c’, his journal coolly observes).

Cook had a complement of some ninety-four souls together with chickens, pigs, a cat and a milch goat that had already circumnavigated the globe. In a letter to Banks in February 1772, Dr Johnson included a Latin elegy for the celebrated animal, part of which runs:

In fame scarce second to the nurse of Jove,

This Goat, who twice the world had traversed round,

Deserving both her master’s care and love,

Ease and perpetual pasture now has found.

His adventurous friend James Boswell records that Johnson was sceptical of what a traveller might learn by taking long voyages, despite on one occasion when dining with the Reverend Alexander Grant at Inverness, divertingly ‘standing up to mimic the shape and motions of a kangaroo’ and making ‘two or three vigorous bounds across the room’.

By 16 August 1770, Cook had reached the Great Barrier Reef, courageously searching for the elusive passage between New Guinea and Australia. The passage had originally been discovered in 1606 by the great Spanish navigator Luis Vaes de Torres, but strategic secrecy was paramount for Spain and on many charts the two land masses appeared joined. Capricious winds drove Cook and his crew ineluctably towards disaster. ‘… a speedy death was all we had to hope for …,’ reiterated Banks. But by 21 August, the Endeavour had threaded its way around Cape York, the northern extremity of Australia, and passed through the Endeavour Straits or as it is now named, Torres Strait.

On 27 August they set sail for New Guinea. They voyaged past the south coast of the island, almost a year now after the visit to Tahiti where the officers had observed the transit of Venus and Mr Banks the slow and painful tattooing of a girl’s bottom. Two days later they came to a landfall fringed by dense vegetation and mangrove swamps. Banks wrote: ‘Distant as the land was a very Fragrant smell came off from it realy in the morn with the little breeze which blew right off shore …’ The water was warm, muddy and shallow, keeping them away from the coast until 3 September when they waded in to land. Banks collected a few specimens but remained curiously unimpressed. They found human footprints which caused them as much consternation as that felt by Robinson Crusoe. They proceeded with caution until they came to a hut in a grove of coconut palms. Three warriors suddenly rushed them from the jungle, throwing spears and incendiary devices, shouting hideously. A hundred naked Papuans appeared around a promontory. It was time to leave.

The following excerpts are taken from my voyage diary:

Endeavour, 7.30 p.m.

4 September 2000

Have come off Afternoon Watch and had dinner. A nerve-wracking and terrifying day. Rose early 6.00 a.m. Troubled sleep – excitement, nerves and information overload. Claustrophobia with the cabin door shut. Prolix talk of ‘bunts’, ‘clews’, ‘belaying lines’, ‘bracing the yards’ and generally hauling on any of the innumerable ropes in sight. Mind-snapping terms of the sea is assumed knowledge – understood absolutely nothing.

Time to ‘go aloft’. Terrified. My group designated Foremast Watch. Forced by bravado to climb the ‘ratlines’. Felt decidedly like a rat. The lines are angled up to a platform called the ‘tops’. Remainder of the thirty-three metre mast towers above. Palms sweating. Shuffling along the yard (to which sails are furled) on rope not much thicker than a garden hose. ‘Stepping on!’ is the brisk instruction. ‘Falling off!’ screamed as you crash to the deck. Managed that, then. Is this my future for the next seven days? Much preparation casting off.

Very calm day, brilliant sunshine with light NE wind.

‘Stand by for cannon!’ shouts the ship’s carpenter, a handsome, blond Cornishman, responsible for construction of the replica and loved by all the girls.

‘Fire in the hole!’ He lights the powder.

Boom! Replica four-pounder carriage gun recoils, acrid smoke rolls across the deck. A terrific report, too close to some nautical types sipping Pimms on the deck of their chromium cruiser. They fell backwards off their chairs as shredded paper and smoke engulfed them.

‘Haul on the halyards! Ease on the bunts and clews!’

Felt like easing myself but not permitted until further out. Hauled on lines until palms sore. Not seasick but a visit to the heads (mariners’ term for onboard toilet) could bring it on. Open grey valve, pump up water, do your business, keep your balance as you have a good look while you pump out, repeat three times, close grey valve under pain of castration. Voyage will be no picnic. Comforting smell of tar.

Came off Afternoon Watch at 4.00 p.m. and resume First Watch at 8.00 p.m. Ship glides slowly and is deeply restful. In perfect harmony with the sea. Progress about 3 knots – a stately speed which would have given Banks and his party ample time to draw, read, discuss and describe their collections. Sun setting through the stern sash windows of the Great Cabbin. Storm lanterns lit, secretive plashing of water at the stern and creaking of the ship. Absolutely magical and poetic.

Sailing at night on the Endeavour is like taking part in a Wagnerian opera, the Flying Dutchman, perhaps. On watch, time to gaze up at the moon through the swaying rigging, silhouetted against the myriad stars of southern latitudes. A shadowy helmsman guides us across the deep. Silence on deck. Ship groans quietly as it folds through the sea. Watching the phosphorescence at the bow I was suddenly transfixed by the appearance of silver tunnels and comet trails cut by porpoises as they dodged and played before the ship. Captain ordered us to ‘wear ship’ – rudely-broken reverie. Had to set the sails and belay lines (fasten the coils of rope around wooden pins) in the dark. After stress and furious activity, lying on my back in front of the helm watching the masts arch like giant pointers across the constellations. Dreamed of the discovery of New Guinea on a ship such as this.

Endeavour

6 September 2000

Morning Watch began at 4.00 a.m. Ungodly hour to be on deck. A still night with feathery winds and countless stars, the moon intensely bright. Silhouettes of the crew on watch float like wraiths. Dawn a glowing rind of orange before sun breaks the horizon. Red Ensign flies from the stern mast and stern lantern glints in the dawn.

Later in the morning a hump-backed whale breached – spectacular arch of patent-leather black and white. Barometer falling. ‘It’s coming all right,’ crackled Captain Blake ominously on the weather deck. During night watches he often comes on deck bare-chested in a maroon sarong. Seems to sense any unnatural movement of the ship through his sleep. Catapults from the companion to bark orders in eighteenth-century style.

Mainmast Watch took in sail at Trial Bay off coast of New South Wales. Landing from surf boats. Moving reconciliation ceremony with Aboriginal community. Exhausted from climbing and hauling – aching and stressed by vast quantity of strange sailing nomenclature.

Endeavour

7 September 2000

Oppressive lowering sky and ominous calm. Hardly slept for last three days. On watch and took the ‘brains’ side of the wheel.¹ Wind strength increased towards evening, gusting to 40 knots. Bow ploughed into the 1.5m swell but the ship felt strong. Sea a magnificent expanse of breaking waves, wind tearing the lashing foam. Shrieks rent the rigging. Wheel duty in this weather madly exhilarating. Maintaining course fraught with problems, arms aching, slow response to helm. Bow rises to frightening heights before ploughing back down into the troughs.

Lines lashed. Many seasick. Going aloft 25 metres in these conditions to take in t’gallant sails not for the fainthearted. Respect for the old mariners boundless – their achievement unimaginable until you sail a tall ship. Vessel utterly at the mercy of wind. So tired cannot sleep. Eating little.

Great Cabbin, Endeavour

8 September 2000

Physically impossible to write. Force 8 gales. Taking in all sail. On verge of throwing up. Gorge rising. Ship lurched and shuddered through night. Roped myself into the fixed cot.

Endeavour

9 September 2000

Wind sufficiently abated to write a journal entry. Warm sun as we sail along the coast of New South Wales and begin to set sails again after the storm. Activity everywhere.

‘Hauling on the halyards! Easing on the bunts and clews! Bracing the yards!’

‘Two, six … heave!’ we hauled on the lines.

‘Two, six … heave!’

‘Belay all lines.’ Signs of relief.

Leaned against the capstan and idly looked at a jetliner high above, slicing across the sky leaving a glittering trail of ice crystals; the eighteenth century contemplating the twenty-first century. The original exploration of the Black Islands of New Guinea was on ships such as this. My own journey to that fabled land would be on an aircraft such as that.

¹The English north-country vessel known as a ‘cat’ was a Whitby collier. This was the type of working vessel on which James Cook learnt his calling. In 1771 he wrote in admiration of her handling, ‘No sea can hurt her laying Too under a Main Sail or Mizon ballanc’d.’

¹Two seamen are normally at the wheel – the ‘muscles’ on the port side who only helps turn it, and the ‘brains’ on the starboard side who turns and maintains the course, calling out the setting and watching the instruments.

2. The Eye of the Eagle

Final approach to Port Moresby in the dry season is over arid, brown hills bereft of vegetation and a polished turquoise sea. The colonial terminal at Jacksons airport has faded lettering on the fibro huts, the modern terminal a bland feel, new paint already peeling in the heat. An Air Force Dakota without engines lies abandoned on one side of the runway, a reminder of the first commercial flights. The blast of desiccated air as you disembark is like a physical punch, gusts of the south-east trades dry the mouth. Certainly you are no longer referred to as masta as your bags are unloaded. Only one officer is on duty at passport control to process the entire jetload of passengers. Welcome to modern Papua New Guinea, ‘land of the unexpected’.

Captain John Moresby may have been the first white man the native people had ever seen when he sailed into the harbour aboard the HMS Basilisk in 1873. He spent some time trading with the villagers of the local Motu tribe. He wrote that civilisation seemed to have little to offer this culture. The London Missionary Society were settling in a year later and by 1883 there were five resident Europeans in Port Moresby including the Reverend James Chalmers, a gregarious character who was eventually murdered and eaten by cannibals on Goaribari Island in Western New Guinea. Despite its isolation and absence of road connections, Moresby has remained the capital.

The taxi driver informed me that the bullet hole in the corner of the cracked windscreen was from raskols – a misleadingly benign Pidgin word meaning ‘violent criminal’. They had attempted to hold him up on the way to ‘Town’, the centre of the city. He was a Highlander with an ambiguous smile somewhere between a welcome and a nasty threat. I began to glance anxiously at passing cars.

‘Wanpela sutim mi nogut tru lon hia. Olgeta bakarap.’¹

‘Were you hurt? Did they take your money?’

‘Took everything but I drive away quick. Back at work next day. Mosby em gutpela ples.’²

This made no logical sense at all to me so I fell silent until we reached the hotel. It was a dusty drive with colourful children and resentful adults crowding the roadsides. There had been a drought for the last seven months. The usual Western corporate signage had been bleached by the savage sun. A car had collided with a truck bearing the company name ‘Active Demolition’. I glimpsed the original Motuan stilt village of Hanuabada, fibro huts replacing the traditional bush materials. A few cargo ships lay becalmed in the port.

A midday stroll among the sterile office blocks, slavering guard dogs and confectioner’s nightmares thrown up by financial institutions did not appeal, so I headed south for Ela Beach, an inviting stretch of sand facing Walter Bay. Trucks cranked past with men crammed like sardines in the back and small PMV³ buses smoked happily by like toys. Seaweed, cans and other detritus marred the shore, but kiosks gaily painted in Jamaican style lifted the spirits. A rugby side were training on the sand, running forward through a line of plastic traffic cones and then suddenly reversing through them. Many who were overweight fell over during the difficult backward manoeuvre but there was no laughter, just embarrassment. Papua New Guinea is the only country in the world that has rugby as its national sport and every aspect of it is taken seriously. Training was interrupted by the capture of a turtle on the breakwater. A long time was spent inspecting and discussing the prize. Some of the boys scribbled graffiti on its shell in luminous paint and then released it back into the bay, fins flapping, neck craning. Training resumed.

Palm trees with slender trunks curved over the bay in front of international high-rise apartments. I walked past a group of suspicious-looking youths sitting under some trees outside a café and strolled out onto the disintegrating breakwater. A family were competing with each other, skimming pebbles across the surface of the water. The five children, father and mother were screaming with delight at this simple game that seemed to bond them so intimately.

Visitors are warned by expatriates not to approach, in fact to walk away from groups of youths but I decided to wander over to the cluster beneath the casuarina trees. They were chewing betel nut and spitting the blood-red juice in carefully-aimed jets. They were shocked when I greeted them, but smiled almost immediately. The smile on a Melanesian face is like the unexpected appearance of a new actor on the stage.

‘Monin tru, ol mangi. Yupela iorait?’¹

‘Orait tasol, bikman.² Where do you come from?’ They stood up, even respectfully I thought.

‘England. I live in London. My name’s Michael.’ I held out my hand which was shaken softly. They shuffled about looking at the ground, showing signs of amazement by spitting fast red gobbets in the dust.

‘And you’ve come here! Do you like our country?’

‘Everyone seems pretty friendly to me. What’s your name?’ I asked a boy with the most intense black skin I had ever seen – it was almost blue. He had dreadlocks, perfect white teeth and eyes like an eagle. He appeared highly intelligent, but melancholic shadows fleetingly crossed his features.

‘Gideon. I’m from Buka.’ His open face smiled engagingly.

‘Really! I hope to go there. I’m visiting the islands.’

‘It’s beautiful on Buka, but no work. The Bougainville war destroyed everything. I came to Moresby but can’t get a job. I’ve got my electrician’s certificate.’ The shadows were well established.

‘Mipela ino inap lon bikpela skul,’¹ said a fierce lad with broken, heavily-stained teeth. It looked as though a bomb had gone off in his mouth. He was angry.

‘I come from the Sepik. I have no parents and no money.’ He looked savagely at the ground and started violently peeling a new nut.

‘Are you all unemployed?’ I asked, already knowing the answer.

They nodded dreamily.

‘Don’t you miss your family?’

Silence.

‘I’ve heard that some boys break into houses and steal. Is that true?’ I was living dangerously, considering it was my first afternoon.

‘Yes, but they’re not bad boys, sir. We’re not raskols! We need the money to eat. We want to work but we can’t get a job.’

‘That’s not really a good reason to steal. You could go to prison. Ruin your life.’

‘Corrupt politicians have ruined our country. You don’t see them going to prison.’ Gideon offered this as a challenge for me to refute.

‘No one gives us a chance. We’re on the outside looking in.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘Chimbu.’ The older man seemed to stand apart from the rest and was more deeply resentful.

‘Where do you live in Moresby?’

‘Are you a priest?’ It was an aggressive answer. ‘Ragamuga. Six-Mile Dump. You’ll visit?’ He smirked and spat into the dust. I had only read about this desperate migrant settlement situated behind a large rubbish dump. No, I did not intend to go there.

‘But what about your future?’ I was moving into a dead-end.

‘So? No one gives a shit about us. Politicians just want money.’ Isaiah was from East New Britain and had parallel tattoos on his cheeks.

‘We’re bored and no future. That’s the problem.’

I realised with alarm that my group had grown into a small crowd that surrounded me. They pushed forward not to attack but desperate to explain, to justify themselves, expecting me to provide an explanation, an instant solution.

‘Everyone hates us. No tourists come because the newspapers report so much violence.’

I said nothing but the headline in the newspaper in my hotel screamed of the rape of three nurses at Mt Hagen Hospital and the theft of an ambulance. The thieves were demanding compensation for the return of the vehicle or they would torch it.

‘Violence is terrible in the Highlands. That’s why I chose the islands.’ I was out of my depth.

‘You’re lucky. You have money to travel,’ said a boy from Oro Province wearing a bedraggled feather in his hair.

Beavis and Butthead cartoons flickered on the screen behind the heavily-barred windows of the ‘Jamaica Bar’. Papuan reggae music was playing somewhere. I was a distraction but not a solution. Some drifted away and sat under the trees again. Large spots of rain from an afternoon storm kicked up the reddened dust.

‘Well, I’d better be going. Nice to have met you. Gideon, Isaiah …’ I shook their hands.

‘Tenk yu tru long toktok wantaim yu, bikman.¹ All the way from London! Enjoy our country.’

They remained standing and smiling as I headed back. This encounter with wasted potential, cynicism, and the crushed optimism of youth left me feeling depressed and impotent. The cultural diversity of the country meant that there was tension between youths from many regions thrown together by unemployment. In traditional villages in the past, fear of neighbouring peoples and respect for the authority of the elders would have limited the freedom of the young. The notion of respect had almost disappeared, but not only in Papua New Guinea. London and Sydney were similar, but this country was poor and the politicians corrupt.

Many observers blame the present law and order troubles on the premature commitment Australia made to the granting of independence in 1975. At the outset, an inappropriate West-minster-style two-party democracy was imposed on the country with legislative power vested in a national parliament. The national government devolved power through nineteen provincial governments. The country joined the Commonwealth with the Queen as Head of State, and a governor-general appointed as her representative. Papua New Guinea covers a vast area (it is the second largest island in the world) and possesses such extreme cultural diversity that the growth of a properly integrated strategy for development has remained a perennial challenge. The first Prime Minister, Sir Michael Somare, was an able and popular politician, but the many emergent parties have become increasingly unable to establish clear ideological principles. Political candidates pursue personal or regional goals at the expense of party policies.¹

Most Papua New Guineans still live a subsistence lifestyle in villages quite separate from the influence of the cash economy. The villagers have become convinced that, at both the provincial and national levels, politicians are self-serving and uninterested in their welfare. Traditional social arrangements had already begun to disintegrate under colonial rule. The adoption of an inappropriate Western legal system has only exacerbated the agony of cultural fragmentation. Tribal fighting has resumed in the Highland provinces, but under more murderous rules than in the past. As the traditional society in the village disintegrates, many young people flee to the urban ghettoes of Port Moresby and Lae to face almost certain unemployment followed by a descent into crime. The challenge remains to evolve a system that combines the strengths of traditional leadership with the ideals of modern government, giving due legal weight to the fraught claims of land ownership by the numerous clans.

On my return to the ‘executive floor’ of my hotel, I passed psychedelic kiosks and wrecked cars in the oppressive heat and scalding rain. Luxury expatriate enclaves seemed to be going up everywhere on higher ground. Segregation has made this a city divided against itself. The cool, spacious lobby transported me to a different planet to that inhabited by my ‘new friends’ on Ela Beach, and the grim reality of their settlement homes. This was the arena where exploitation and ‘aid’ were strategically planned by company generals. The sunset from the elevation of the executive floor was sublime; copper and tarnished brass shot through with blue. This luxurious scene was decidedly different from the wild 1920s when Tom McCrann’s hostelry in Moresby displayed a notice in the saloon:

Men are requested not to sleep on the billiard table with their spurs on.

At dinner there was an astounding mixture of guests. A tattooed Scot was having dinner with an Asian engineer.

‘Glad you’re on the fuckin’ project, Wang. You’ve got a degree.’

A German trio who had run out of time were attempting to negotiate a price for the ethnic decorations on the hotel walls. A heavily-tattooed Pacific islander in a black sleeveless singlet, chiselled black beard and jeans patched with grandmother’s chintz was eating soup and tugging at his pearl earring. A Belgian photographer with a ponytail was talking to a glamorous Parisian collector of artefacts from the Maprik region who had a gallery in Aix-en-Provence.

‘Every week I ’ave ze fever on ze exact same day!’ she exclaimed in desperation.

A newly-rich Highlander was eating a roast chicken, juggling greasy drumsticks in both hands and attempting to talk on a mobile phone. Pallid Englishmen and tanned Australians were earnestly discussing football and drink. They had the weak eyes and the furtive mouths of social casualties, bolstering their own false optimism or drowning betrayals in liquor.

‘The free drinks are from five thirty to six thirty. Don’t come after or we’ll have to pay.’

‘Right, mate!’

‘They’re tough men the South African rugby team!’

‘Blood oath! Fuckin’ tough!’

‘Hides like a rhinoceros!’

‘More like a fuckin’ elephant, mate!’

‘Fuckin’ tough.’

‘Yeah. Fuckin’ tough, real men.’

‘Fuckin’ tough!’

‘Yeah, fuckin’ …’ and so on, endlessly, whilst downing bottle after bottle of South Pacific lager.

A huge butterfly enamelled in iridescent blue battened against the glass door leading out to the swimming pool. A Chopin nocturne floated across the lounge from the Papua New Guinean pianist playing a grand piano. I wandered over at this unexpected appearance of European culture and spoke to him.

‘You’re playing Chopin,’ I rather pointlessly observed.

‘Yes. I studied classical music for many years. Do you have a request?’

‘Not classical. Jazz. Can you play “Misty”?’

‘Sure. If you like jazz you might like my novel. It’s on the music stand.’

A small pile of paperbacks entitled The Blue Logic: Something from the Dark Side of Port Moresby by Wiri Yakaipoko was stacked on one side above his fluent fingers.

‘What’s your novel about?’

‘It’s a crime novel about Moresby. Plenty of it around here to write about.’ I could hardly disagree.

Chopin, jazz and crime are an odd mixture. Unexpected conjunctions and unpredictable outcomes were to become a feature of all my travels in Papua New Guinea. I went to bed suffering from a blinding headache which seemed to come from the combination of the anti-malarial drug Lariam¹ and alcohol.

The next day the usual horrors were introduced quietly under the door of my room via the dailies.

A youth was chopped to death and two houses burnt down in the Kaugere suburb of Port Moresby over the weekend.

Under the banner headline ‘Patients Hungry’ we learn that patients’ food was stolen from Modilon Hospital in Madang.

A thirteen-year-old sex worker said, ‘My aunt kicked me out because she said I slept with her husband. Prostitution is fun and I get a lot of money.’ Tribal fighting now takes place with homemade guns, grenade launchers and Kalashnikovs rather than spears.

The city looks more attractive on my birthday. Red and mauve bougainvillea are flowering, Ela Beach looks inviting and the frangipani spiral down in pink and white. I decide to go for a walk. Outside the US Embassy I am almost arrested for writing down the sign NOKEN PARK LONG HIA meaning ‘No Parking’ in Tok Pisin (Pidgin).

The evolution of Melanesian Pidgin (or bêche-de-mer English, as it was popularly known in colonial days) was complex. There are many regional varieties of this colourful and witty language which originated on the Pacific plantations of Queensland, Samoa and New Caledonia in the early eighteenth century. It had emerged fully formed by about 1885 and is still evolving in rich referential complexity. Around eight hundred or one seventh of the world’s languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea. Some two hundred are Austronesian spoken in the coastal and island regions, and the remainder are Papuan spoken in the Highland areas. There are three lingua francas – English, Motu (spoken in Port Moresby) and Tok Pisin.

Outside the Westpac Bank a huge Alsatian and armed guard in a baseball cap stand in the centre of three signs warning ‘Beware of the Dog’. The brooding atmosphere of male unemployment hangs about like a miasma, and I have not seen a white face in three hours. Huge holes in the pavement and deep storm-water channels offer possibilities of serious injury. The light burst of a glowering Melanesian face suddenly smiling. At the Port Moresby Grammar School, children in pale uniforms are caged up in a security tunnel hung with plants waiting to go home. Fishing trawlers of unbelievable decrepitude are moored at the wharves. Thick, black smoke pours from their funnels, the idle crews lounging in the shade of tarpaulins or carrying huge tuna by the gills. One boy drops a plastic bag full of silver sprats that cascade over the wharf like pirate’s treasure. Six mothers breast-feeding babies inexplicably sit in the broiling sun on a concrete platform raised above a potholed road. I slip into the shade of the Port Moresby Public Library. An eerie silence reigns, but people greet my unexpected presence with smiles of surprise. Useful titles such as Australian Imperialism in the Pacific and Tuscan Cuisine grace the shelves.

A friend, John Kasaipwalova, had invited me for a birthday dinner. He is a prominent and controversial Papua New Guinean poet and writer and was a student rebel during the drive for Independence in the 1970s. He is also chief of the Kwenama clan on Kiriwina Island in the Trobriands, one of my destinations. I was collected in a Mitsubishi Pajero with gigantic bull-bars, a fantastically cracked windscreen and peeling sun filters. John has a round friendly face framed by a halo of tightly curled hair, his sensibility a rich repository of poetic image and symbolic knowledge. But entrepreneurial activities tend to preoccupy him these days, as he attempts to balance the claims of individual business and his responsibility to his own clan community. He was accompanied by Mary, his attractive Malaysian wife, and ‘Uncle Sam’, who drives the Pajero with fearsome spirit, thundering over unsealed roads past striped drums marking dark detours. While avoiding a cavernous pothole, he asked me to guess his nationality. His mother turned out to be from Sri Lanka and his father an unusual mixture of Dutch, Portuguese and Australian Aboriginal. ‘Dad’s family moved about quite a bit.’ Under an Australian bush hat he had the long grey beard of a swami and spoke with a slight Indian accent. It was a striking face, a colonial cocktail.

The shopping precinct that housed the Chinese restaurant was protected by a high security fence with bars two inches thick, armed guards, slavering dogs and a searchlight.

‘It’s a gourmet place!’ explained Sam as we parked among a crowd of children.

We were shown into a private room with intense fluorescent lighting. Geckos erupted into life on the walls like surrealistic wallpaper. Sam’s gold rings glinted on his slender fingers and the cutlery was reflected in his melancholic eyes.

Delicious coconut prawns, chilli crab and coral trout with tender asparagus appeared like magic. The conversation ranged lethargically over many topics, as if we were in an island village. They were shocked to learn of my walking alone in Moresby and even more surprised when I mentioned the young boys.

‘I’m hoping to go to the Trobriands quite soon, John.’ I briefly outlined my island itinerary.

‘You’ve made the best decision in choosing the islands. How come the Trobriands?’

‘Well, it’s a short story that’s taken a long time to complete. I bought a tabuya¹ or wave-splitter from Kiriwina in an artefact shop many years ago. It’s been in my music room in London for ages, and I’ve always wanted to visit where it was made.’

‘I can tell you that the tabuya has been watching you. The design symbolises bulibwali or the eye of the sea eagle [osprey]. You had to come. His eye never sleeps, you know. In an instant he decided on you as his particular fish. That’s why you came. It’s very simple.’

‘Do you really believe this?’

‘Of course. You’re a person who possesses concentration. You plan and attend to detail. Am I right?’

‘Actually, yes. I drive people mad with it.’

‘There you are!’ John reached for more coconut prawns in an ebullient mood. He continued his arcane explanations with some seaweed poised between chopsticks in midair. I wanted to hear an account of the famous kula trading ring from the chief of a clan. I was anxious to know if the classical descriptions were still accurate.

‘Tell me something about kula, John.’

‘Well, first you must understand the mystery of Monikiniki or the Five Disciplines of Excellence.’

‘Sounds a bit complicated.’

‘Never! It’s simple! The disciplines are symbolised in the five compartments of a Trobriand mollusc shell. Each compartment represents one of the senses and is represented by a bird, plant or even a grasshopper. The eye is represented by the bulibwali or the sea eagle.’

We had moved into the realm of myth and magic for which these islands are famous, rather daunting for a European unused to the sharing of mystical experience.

‘But what is kula exactly?’ I was impatient as usual.

‘That’s not easy to answer, but basically it’s an activity of giving and receiving between people that results in them growing spiritually.’

‘But doesn’t it involve trading valuable soulava or necklaces in a clockwise direction around certain islands and mwali or arm shells in a counter-clockwise direction?’

‘Of course, but they’re only the outward manifestation of the activity, in fact the consummation of it. The objects accumulate power as they pass from hand to hand over time. Some might even kill you. But it’s the quality of this experience that’s important.’

I began to be drawn irresistibly into the rich mythological world of the Trobriand Islands, so unlike the sterility of my own empirical society where success seemed the sole criterion. I began to look forward to my trip with keen anticipation. A couple of lines of a poetic song concerning the kula came to mind.

Scented petals and coconut oil anoint our bodies We’re ready to sail with the south-east wind

John fell silent and took some more chilli crab. The mood had become serious yet our state of mind was happy and free.

‘I’ve never been to the yam festival in the Trobes. Never managed to get there. God knows why.’ Sam trailed off and adjusted his hat to a more comfortable position. He reached for some more coral trout.

‘God’s saving you, Sam, from a long period of self-abuse,’ John observed. Everyone laughed heartily. The yam festival is famous for its ecstatic expression of sexual freedom in celebration of the harvest and the end of ten months hard gardening.

Myth and magic give life meaning in the islands. We discussed the weighty word kastom. It is an essential Pidgin concept that derives from the English word ‘custom’ but with a more complex Melanesian meaning and multifarious connotations. It is normally used in reference to traditional culture that has come under threat from aggressive European development. But kastom cannot be simply translated. There are many contradictions within this multilayered concept. The idea has led to a strong cultural revival as regional identities become increasingly diluted. People are always talking about the loss of it. Closeness to nature and the traditional sense of belonging to a community are being replaced by the desire for individual consumption. European technology dominates modern life in the cities, yet a profound need remains for the unseen worlds of magic and religion. A further complication is the extreme cultural diversity of the country. Many distinct cultures have been wilfully cobbled together into the artificial political entity known as Papua New Guinea. Cultural differences are ignored, or worse, attempts are made to diffuse them.

‘More chilli crab?’ Sam spun the lazy susan.

‘Do you know there is a ruined temple on the top of Egum Atoll?’ John said, secretively.

‘Yes, and flat stones with magical properties on Woodlark Island,’ his wife whispered.

It was getting late. We emerged from the restaurant into the glare of security searchlights. The massive gates swung open and we drove out of the compound. Uncle Sam began to sing the praises of Port Moresby as we drove back into town. Mansions surrounded by high fences topped with glistening razor wire, signs painted with cartoon-like dogs and guards posturing with guns, spun through the headlights. Dark hills sprinkled with twinkling lights reared on either side of the highway.

‘Nothing is as beautiful as this in the world!’ Sam suddenly exclaimed with great feeling.

I spent a restless night poring over maps, anxious to leave the place. Papua New Guinea can be broadly divided into the mountainous interior, the coastal regions, great rivers and the island provinces. My decision to explore the islands had come from their extreme isolation, their reputation for beauty, tranquillity and the preservation of their ancient cultures. Near Moresby, the start of the Kokoda trail had been closed by tribal fighting. There were reports of a white, female bushwalker who had been raped even though she was with a local guide. This constant threat of violence in the capital had begun to depress me. I was tired of being holed up for safety in a luxury hotel with paranoid expatriate businessmen planning the disintegration of a culture for profit. My jumping-off point for the islands would be Alotau, the capital of Milne Bay Province at the eastern extremity of the mainland. From there I could leap aboard a banana boat¹ to Samarai, the traditional gate to the old empires.

¹‘Somebody shot at me. Everything around here’s pretty bad. It’s completely buggered up!’

²‘Port Moresby’s a good place.’

³Public Motor Vehicle – these minibuses are considered to be dangerous for visitors, but in my experience they were a source of all my best conversations and friendships with local people.

¹‘Good morning, boys. How’re you?’

²‘Fine thanks, Sir.’

¹‘We can’t afford university.’

¹‘Thanks very much for talking to us, Sir.’

¹Sir Michael Somare was born in 1936 in Rabaul, East New Britain. He led the Pangu Pati (Party), the largest and most influential political party in the move towards independence in 1975. He became the first Prime Minister of independent Papua New Guinea from 1975–80 and again from 1982–5. His membership of the Pangu Pati ended in 1997 and he formed the National Alliance Party which won a comfortable majority in the violent 2002 elections. After seventeen years, Sir Michael Somare, ‘the father of the nation’, was elected Prime Minister for a remarkable third term.

¹Mefloquine or Lariam (the trade name) is the most powerful of the anti-malarial prophylactics. Unlike other drugs, it protects against the fatal strain of cerebral malaria. It can have disturbing psychological side-effects.

¹A tabuya is the prowboard of a Trobriand canoe.

¹The term ‘banana boat’ has nothing to do with bananas or their transport. It refers to the shape of the innumerable fibreglass dinghies fitted with forty-horsepower outboard motors that ply the islands and coast of PNG like noisy water insects. They have taken the place of the elegant sailing canoes of the past, which have almost completely disappeared. They sometimes carry suicidal numbers of passengers, often travel enormous distances across open ocean, and never take a single life jacket. Many simply disappear, the occupants lost to drowning or sharks.

3. ‘No More ’Um Kaiser, God Save ’Um King’

Australian Military Proclamation 1914

East of Java and West of Tahiti a bird of dazzling plumage stalks the Pacific over the Cape York Peninsula of Australia, her head almost touching the equator, tail looping above. In her wake she spills clusters of emeralds on the surface of the sea. These are the unknown paradise islands of the Coral, Solomon and Bismarck Seas, the islands lying off the east coast of Papua New Guinea.

As a child I had been captivated by the monolithic Moai statues of Easter Island. Painstakingly, I built a balsa replica of the Kon-Tiki raft on which Thor Heyerdahl tested his theories of the migration of the Incas and their sun-kings across the Pacific to Polynesia two thousand years ago. As I carved, lashed and rigged my diminutive vessel, I dreamed the boyhood dreams of distant voyages to the South Seas with only a green parrot for company. My seafaring uncle, Major Theodore Svensen,¹ a former naval draughtsman born in Heyerdahl’s own Norwegian coastal town of Larvik, was a veteran of the Boer War and the Gallipoli Campaign in 1915. He stoked my imagination with tales of the sea and foreign campaigns, his budgie chirruping on his shoulder, a large tropical butterfly tugging against the thread that tethered it to a palm trunk in his garden.

‘Useless to read books m’boy! Head for the front line! Go to the islands – that’s the last virgin land. Sail before it’s too late!’ he would thunder as he waxed his magnificent moustache, jabbing with a finger at yellowing maps. Many years were to pass before I could attempt such a voyage to Melanesia, and in many ways it turned out to be sadly too late.

The geographical term ‘Melanesia’ originates from the Greek melas meaning ‘black’ and nesos meaning ‘island’. The region was known up to the late nineteenth century as the ‘Black Islands’, a reference to the strikingly dark skin colour of the indigenous population and their former formidable reputation for cannibalism and savagery. Melanesia is situated in the South-West Pacific, south of Micronesia and west of Polynesia, occupying an area about the size of Europe and containing mainland Papua New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji and the innumerable intervening islands. The extreme cultural diversity of the region evades neat categorisation and facile generalisations remain suspect. It can be observed, however, that Melanesian society is more egalitarian and the qualities of leadership more achievement-oriented than in Polynesia and Micronesia, where power is largely based on inheritance.

Melanesian marsupials have been more deeply studied than the origins of ‘Melanesian Man’. The Australian Aborigines and the Negrito populations of South-East Asia are distant relatives from the Pleistocene era some 50,000 years ago. There were two main migratory waves, the ancient Papuan (from the Malay papuwah meaning ‘frizzy-haired’) extending over many thousands of years, and the more recent Austronesian.¹ The intervening millennia have witnessed enormous cultural intermixing. These movements have given rise to the two main cultural traditions in evidence in Melanesia today, the Papuans being the most numerous.

Geographically, New Guinea provided some of the greatest natural obstacles to exploration encountered in any country, with little prospect of gold or cargoes of spices as reward for the sacrifices of the voyage. Nature runs riot in the hot, humid and wet climate. Superlatives abound – over 700 species of birds, 800 distinct languages, the largest butterflies and beetles in the world, five times the species of fish in the Caribbean. Thomas Carlyle idly observed, ‘History, distillation of rumour.’ He could scarcely have known how appropriate his comment would be regarding expeditions to this fabled land.

The earliest surviving sketches of Pacific peoples were four rather crude drawings of warriors observed off the southern shores of New Guinea made in 1606 by the Spaniard Diego Prado de Touar. My destination, the coast and islands of what was to become German New Guinea, were mapped almost lethargically by a procession of European voyages of discovery. The Spanish and Portuguese were followed by the Dutch, who were succeeded by the English and the French. In 1700, that colourful buccaneer-explorer William Dampier aboard HMS Roebuck (a true exotic who mentions in his journal consuming ‘a dish of flamingoes tongues fit for a prince’s table’) found a strait between New Britain and New Guinea. He navigated the coasts of New Ireland and named the larger island Nova Britannia. He was the first European to be recorded as discovering and anchoring in the Bismarck Archipelago, formerly regarded as an integral part of New Guinea.

The French, too, have a distinguished history of New Guinea exploration. In 1768 the French Comte de Bougainville charted New Ireland, the Admiralty Islands, Buka and Bougainville. Louis XVI was an enthusiast for exploration and helped to plan and support the ill-fated expedition of Jean-François Galaup, Comte de Lapérouse. Although an aristocrat, the Comte had remained a darling of the revolution as he had married beneath him for love. For the time, this enlightened navigator held radical views on exploration. He observed in his journal:

What right have Europeans to lands their inhabitants have worked with the sweat of their brows and which for centuries have been the burial place of their ancestors? The real task of explorers was to complete the survey of the globe, not add to the possessions of their own rulers.

He disappeared in the Pacific after leaving Botany Bay in 1788. Louis despatched a search party under the command of Antoine Joseph Bruny d’Entrecasteaux. Part of this voyage of the Recherche and the Espérance in 1792 contributed to the accurate mapping of the Solomon Sea and the Trobriand Islands. This expedition remained the last significant exploration of the Bismarck Archipelago.

Captain John Moresby in HMS Basilisk discovered Port Moresby harbour in April 1873 naming it after his father, Sir Fairfax Moresby, Admiral of the Fleet. In a theatrical gesture he gave ‘some little éclat to the ceremony’ by using a capped coconut palm as a flagstaff to raise the Union Jack and claim possession. Lieutenant Francis Hayter wrote a rare account of this ceremony.

On John emerging from the Bush which he did in a way creditable to any Provincial Stage, we presented arms and the Bugler (who we had to conceal behind a bush as he was one of the digging party and all covered with mud) sounded the salute … spoiled by the Marines who, I believe, fired at the wrong time on purpose, because they didn’t like being put on the left of the line.

Moments of high comedy never failed to pepper this procession of explorations. On one occasion a Lieutenant Yule escaped murder by dancing along the beach nearly naked, dressed only in his shirt. The warriors were so convulsed with laughter at the sight, he managed to reach the safety of the ship’s boat.

The stimulus to explore remained strong among adventurers and geographers, naturalists and ethnologists, not neglecting the joyful and sometimes misguided missionaries who attempted to wrest the islands from the clutches of the Devil. Malaria, earthquakes and cannibalism took a fearful toll of their lives. In the north-west of the country, twenty-five years of evangelism had resulted in more missionary deaths than villagers baptised. The profiteers of the East India Company found little to attract their purses. Their settlement at Restoration Bay in 1793 was soon abandoned. The fabulous plumage of the birds of paradise, pearls and pearl shell, bêche-de-mer and sandalwood became the most important items of trade wherever a European settlement became successful. The British, the Dutch, the French and the Germans, a thousand Hungarians and even a Russian, perhaps the greatest scientific adventurer of them all, Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, attempted settlements with varying degrees of success.

Colonial flags rose over New Guinea like a flock of doves. The British Imperial Government proclaimed their Protectorate on 6 November 1884 by raising the Union Jack on HMS Nelson, one of five men-of-war present in the harbour at Port Moresby. The local people squatting on the deck heard in Motu the ambiguous words that were to cause much future suffering and discontent – ‘your lands will be secured to you’. German New Guinea had been annexed three days earlier on the island of Matupit in Neu Pommern (New Britain). On 4 November, Kapitan Schering, Kommandant of the Korvette Elizabeth, took possession of the Bismarck Archipelago by raising the German flag on the island of Mioko in Neu Lauenburg (the Duke of York Islands). Another fluttered in the fetid heat of Finschhafen on 12 November, claiming the north-east mainland of New Guinea (Kaiser Wilhelmsland).

Many eccentric and extraordinary individuals were attracted, and still are, to this destination of the imagination. The formidably inhospitable terrain was explored by a bizarre collection of colonial adventurers, a veritable New Guinean comédie humaine. Some exploits were not believed when first reported, but most turned out to be true despite their outrageous detail.

The melodramatic Italian explorer Count Luigi Maria D’Albertis was obsessed with the power of explosives, an authentic pyromaniac, and used every opportunity to set off landmines, petrol, fireworks, rockets with or without dynamite attachments, even Bengal lights which emitted a vivid blue radiance – all to intimidate the warriors in the most flamboyant style. Accordingly, on a May morning in 1876, this theatrical explorer assembled his crew – two Englishmen, two West Indian negroes, a Fijian named Bob, a Chinese cook, a Filipino, a resident of the Sandwich Islands, a New Caledonian, a head-hunter boasting thirty-five prizes to date, and his son acting as a navigator. To defend themselves and pacify the local people, they loaded nine shotguns, one rifle, four six-chambered revolvers, 2000 small shot cartridges and other ammunition, the usual dynamite, rockets and fireworks, a live sheep, a setter named Dash (later taken by a crocodile) and a seven-foot python to discourage pilfering from the luggage.

This extraordinary group entered the estuary of the Fly River in the Gulf of Papua on the south coast aboard the diminutive steam launch Neva, to sail into the interior of New Guinea for the first time. In order to divert himself from the difficulties he encountered, D’Albertis captured specimens of Paradisaea raggiana (Count Raggi’s Bird of Paradise) and examined phosphorescent centipedes. When under attack from villagers, he forced them into terrified submission by igniting cascades of fireworks and rockets. With enviable detachment he wrote in his book New Guinea: What I Did and What I Saw that he admired the beautiful reflections on the water the explosions made between the banks of dark forest. After some 580 miles from the mouth of the river he was forced to turn back, his legs paralysed by the onset of a mysterious illness. Nine war canoes of warriors blocked his path near Kiwai Island. He charged through them with the engine at full steam throttle, Bengal lights ascending into the sky, funnel pouring black smoke whilst he bellowed out an aria from Don Giovanni. He died in Rome of mouth cancer in 1901 after amusing himself in a hunting lodge of Papuan design built on stilts in the Pontine Marshes.

German traders had begun to move into the Pacific during the race for colonies and the first trading stations were set up in Apia in Samoa in 1856. The history of exploration in the Bismarck Archipelago, my destination, is less well known. By the 1870s, business was being done in ‘savage’ New Britain. The German hegemony over the Bismarck Archipelago and Kaiser Wilhelmsland lasted from 1884 to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. This was a classically ill-fated German colonial adventure, first under the disastrous and punitive Neu Guinea Compagnie and later ruled by the Imperial Government itself despite the fact that Prince Otto von Bismarck was not an enthusiast of colonial adventures.

German New Guinea also attracted its share of fearless explorers. The Austrian Wilhelm Dammköhler spent thirty years travelling through German, Dutch and British New Guinea. He worked on pearling luggers, prospected for gold, and explored the mainland. He was a man with a literary bent as well as a person of some sartorial distinction. In 1898 he had a close shave with a Tugeri head-hunting party. The ferocious Tugeri were among the most feared of all the tribes. They took heads to provide their children with names. They would cover themselves with chalk, set out in their canoes to attack a village and then after grabbing a victim would demand or cajole his name from him. They would then remove the screaming head with a bamboo beheading knife, memorise the name and bequeath it to their newly born.

On this occasion Wilhelm was collecting fresh water, having anchored his cutter, the Eden, at the mouth of the Morehead river. As he rowed upstream he carried, in addition to the water containers in the dinghy, a copy of Byron’s poetry, two silk shirts, a pair of Russian calf boots and a pair of white duck trousers. After some thirty miles he encountered the Tugeri. They calmed themselves when they mistook him for a missionary. Dammköhler played along with the deception:

On the following morning, the chief signed to me to read prayers, whereupon I opened my Byron and read some stanzas out of that … I remained with these friendly natives a fortnight, mixing freely with them, hunting with them etc.; and I kept up my missionary character all the time, reading to them out of my Byron morning and evening during my stay.

How Lord Byron would have loved such an incident. Poor Wilhelm finally bled to death after being attacked on a tributary of the Watut river near the present city of Lae. He was skewered like Saint Sebastian with a dozen fiendishly-barbed arrows in the arms, legs and chest. One severed an artery.

For those romantics and eccentrics, missionaries and mercenaries, desperate speculators, searchers after extremes, explorers, adventurers, swindlers, prospectors and a thousand other misfits who fled from so-called ‘civilisation’, the Black Islands had become a source of mystical and fictional descriptions, ultimately a magnet. New Guinea has always offered the possibility of self-transformation to depressed though imaginative underachievers and individualists. Outsiders unable to accept the prosaic nature of life in the bourgeois society of Europe have always been seduced by New Guinea and its promise of unspeakable adventures.

In the circulating libraries of the time, the public could read of a phantasmagorical world of fabulous creatures like Captain Lawson’s deer, endowed with long manes of silken hair, birds that sounded like locomotives, striped cats larger than the Indian tiger, mountains thousands of feet taller than Mount Everest. They read of men with vestigial tails who sat in their huts allowing the tails to protrude through special holes cut in the floor. There were reports of native cavalry that rode striped ponies and women who ate their children as a form of birth control. They read of the web-footed Agaiambu people, who lived in the marshes and swam through the reed beds, had flaring nostrils like a horse, small legs and buttocks, strange muscular protuberances on their scaly inner calves, walked with the ‘hoppity gait’ of a cockatoo on flaccid, straggling toes and whose feet bled when they walked on dry land. They kept pet crocodiles tethered with vines and raised pigs in slings. New Guinea was a domain of impenetrable tropical jungle and gothic phantasms that might well have been imagined by the French naive painter Le Douanier Rousseau on a particularly creative day.

The islands also attracted visitors of genius who had serious academic intentions. Perhaps the most famous of these was the Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski who, at the outbreak of the Great War, pioneered new methods of fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands. Melanesia subsequently became a cultural laboratory for European anthropologists and one of the most closely studied of the ‘unknown regions’ on earth.

In 1906 Australia took responsibility for British New Guinea and the British Protectorate ceased to exist. The new territory was now to be called Papua. The first Lieutenant-Governor of Papua, Sir Hubert Murray, was an empire builder of Olympian accomplishments. He was a character who seemed to have stepped straight out of Boy’s Own fiction. Born in Sydney in 1861, he stood six foot three, weighed fourteen stone and was amateur heavyweight boxing champion of Great Britain. A rowing blue at Magdalen College, Oxford, and possibly the finest swordsman in Australia, he had read Classics and achieved a double first.

A career as an Australian barrister beckoned but he abandoned the idea as ‘too tedious’. In 1904 the post of Chief Judiciary Officer became available in New Guinea. In need of diversion, he replied to a newspaper advertisement and was offered the post. He adopted a paternalistic style of governorship, promising the Papuans, ‘I will not leave you. I will die in Papua.’ At the time he was considered progressive but now is considered by indigenous historians as being regrettably colonial. He greatly admired men who exercised self-discipline and refused to open fire on the most threatening of warriors. While travelling the country on his circuit he carried a portable library. His nephew recalls seeing him reading a Greek text in rough weather, seated in a chair lashed to the deck of his small government vessel Laurabada, holding it above the waist-high foam to keep it dry.

He wrote a number of excellent books recalling his tours of duty, full of wry observation. He mounted expeditions into the interior and developed a degree of understanding of native customs and languages unusual in colonial administrators of the time. His laconic style keeps one turning the pages. He describes murder in his book Papua or British New Guinea published in 1912:

… murder to these outside tribes is not a crime at all; it is sometimes a duty, sometimes a necessary part of social etiquette, sometimes a relaxation, and always a passion. There is always a pig mixed up in it somewhere … Cherchez le porc.

He later refers to the reputation of ‘… the Rossel islanders who were quite oblivious to the most ordinary rules of hospitality’ and ate 326 Chinese who had been shipwrecked on the island. He informs us that in some villages ‘a thief is punished by killing the woman who cooks his food’ as this causes great inconvenience to the thief.

Both his wives Sybil and Mildred clearly lacked the sense of humour required to survive the colony, hated every minute of it and left him alone for long periods. Rumours of his mistresses were legion. Government House became the dwelling of a bachelor, full of books, manuscripts, saddles and muddy riding boots on the veranda. In February 1940 he suffered his final illness but refused to be carried off the Laurabada at Samarai hospital. ‘You can carry me when I’m dead, but not before.’ He was seventy-eight and had been in office for thirty-five years. On the forty-first day of mourning, thousands of Papuans came together at the stilt village of Hanuabada in Port Moresby for the funeral feast. There was total silence among the lighted fires and torches except for ‘the quiet tapping of a thousand native drums’.

At the outbreak of the Great War, the small Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force, derisively called the ‘Coconut Lancers’ by my uncle, the Gallipoli veteran, released the German Government from further responsibilities in a minor military engagement at Bitapaka near Rabaul. ‘No more ’um Kaiser, God Save ’um King’ read the Australian proclamation issued to the bemused villagers.

Much of the German administration was retained. Those Germans who took an oath of neutrality were allowed to return to their properties. There was an abortive move to rename the German colonies the Kitchener Archipelago or even Australnesia. The Australian military administration replaced the more enlightened, or as they saw it, ‘soft’ German bureaucracy, with a regime of questionable severity. Both Germans and local people were treated with arbitrary and undisciplined brutality. A number of Germans were photographed being flogged in public.

After the war, Sir Hubert Murray advocated measures that would create the combined state of ‘Papuasia’, comprising Australian-governed Papua and the former German New Guinea. His dream was for it to have an educated and affluent indigenous population. However, after protracted discussions throughout 1920 and threats by the then Australian Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, the League of Nations finally handed the entire former German possession to Australia in 1921, now to be known as the Mandated Territory of New Guinea. The capital would be Rabaul on the island of New Britain. Papua was to remain under a separate Australian administration with the headquarters in Port Moresby.

Great rivalry came to exist between these two Australian colonies. All German possessions in the Mandated Territory were expropriated – the magnificent German colonial buildings, the immaculate plantations, even wedding photographs. ‘More like looting,’ some residents thought. Many plantations were sold to Australian ex-servicemen who had little understanding of proper methods, more a romanticised vision of white verandas overlooking tropical lagoons, the plantation worked by armies of cheap labour. A fortune would be guaranteed. The young Errol Flynn ran such a plantation near Kavieng on New Ireland, deftly concealing behind that dazzling smile his complete ignorance of the copra industry. Particular bitterness resulted from the postwar inflation that made the German government’s compensation to German planters worthless when it finally arrived. The welfare of the indigenous population was of course ignored.

The influence of the previous military administration remained strong under the civilian mandate, many soldiers becoming government officers. Unfortunately, it signalled a return to some of the worst excesses of the Neu Guinea Compagnie. Punishment was often entirely at the whim of the District Officer or kiap (‘captain’ corrupted into Pidgin). There was little accountability and few criteria for the capricious penalties imposed by these men, referred to by some as ‘God’s shadow on earth’. Substantial authority was sometimes placed in the hands of inexperienced boys as young as twenty-one. They had come to New Guinea in search of ‘adventure’, and found themselves in control of enormous tracts of territory and large numbers of the indigenous population. Severe regulations were implemented such as the puritanical ‘White Women’s Protection Ordinance’ which meant that a Papua New Guinean male even smiling at a white woman was fraught with the danger of imprisonment. But scattered among the neurotic and unstable were many outstanding individuals who felt a strong sense of moral obligation to the colony and considered their service a true vocation. In time, university training and a career structure emerged, albeit military in flavour, and much was achieved in the fields of tropical medicine and construction work.

The Australian public were too preoccupied with the aftermath of the war and their own grim future during the Depression to take a close interest in faraway New Guinea affairs. The government of the day had a strategic interest in Papua and the Mandated Territory, ever hopeful of revenue from gold and petroleum. The colony was expected to pay for itself, many Australians feeling a degree of ambiguity about the whole notion of an ‘Australian’ colony. Local people suffered greatly under the rule of a nation that was struggling with an unclear view of its own national identity. Villagers scarcely understood the nature of the European wars that had carved up their land so barbarously and confused their allegiances. That there was not more violence speaks volumes for the adaptability of the Melanesians to the Australian mandate, those unpredictable successors to the severe certainties of German rule.

The Highlands up to this time had been considered uninhabited. In 1933 an Australian adventurer named Mick Leahy and his young brother Dan, together with the patrol officer, Jim Taylor, flew over the inaccessible Wahgi Valley for the first time in a Junkers aircraft and saw signs of intensive agricultural settlements. This valley was perhaps twenty miles wide and sixty miles long and contained a long meandering river. To discover if it contained gold they decided to explore on foot. The spectacularly-decorated local people wearing the brilliant plumes of Birds of Paradise had never seen white men and regarded them as their returned spirit ancestors descended from the skies. They in turn were impressed by the appreciation shown by the ‘wild men’ for Italian opera, played on a wind-up gramophone. The power of art effortlessly to cross cultural boundaries was commented upon until a little translating from the indigenous tongue revealed that the sounds emerging from the trumpet reminded the warriors of the screams of women selected for cannibal feast. Mick Leahy made further expeditions, but gold eluded him to the last. He gave an entertaining paper in 1935 in London at an evening meeting of the Royal Geographical Society where he described warriors with dried snakes and finger joints hanging from their ear-lobes.

A number of them have an eye shot out. We concluded that they were peeping round the shield at an inopportune moment …

Mick himself had peeped into skull racks shaped like dovecotes. The Fellows awarded Leahy the prestigious Murchison Grant for his explorations. He is remembered as a dashing, romantic explorer who took brilliant photographs and filmed some of the most astounding footage of Stone Age people encountering Europeans for the first time. New Guinea provided a rich vein for what might be termed ‘Macho Adventure Writing’. The American author Jack London sailed the Snark through Melanesia in 1908. In his strange story The Red One published in 1918, he is unashamedly excessive throughout, continuing the general fascination with ear-lobes:

… her sex was advertised by the one article of finery with which she was adorned, namely a pig’s tail, thrust through a hole in her left ear-lobe. So lately had the tail been severed, that its raw end still oozed blood that dried upon her shoulder like so much candle-droppings.

During the Second World War all the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago fell quickly to the Japanese. The arrival of the Americans with their enormous quantities of ‘cargo’ had a profound impact on the local population. Even more influential was the equality with which they saw ‘black’ American servicemen treated by their white comrades. The notion of colonialism became an anathema in the post-war world. Australia was influenced by a United Nations recommendation in 1962 to prepare the country for independence. Russia under Khrushchev derided colonialism on the international stage with cutting invective. To the villagers of Papua and New Guinea, all the foreign powers were equally heartless intruders.

Every white man the government send to us

Forces his veins out shouting

Nearly forces his excreta out of his bottom

Shouting you bush kanaka¹

KUMALAU TAWALI, from ‘Bush Kanaka Speaks’

Less abusively, but with a fiery idealism, my friend John Kasaipwalova, the poet and student radical, urged the destruction of the colonial yoke:

Reluctant flame open your volcano

Take your pulse and your fuel

Burn burn burn burn

Burn away my weighty ice

Burn into my heart a dancing flame.

JOHN KASAIPWALOVA, from ‘The Reluctant Flame’

In 1975 full independence from Australia was finally achieved. It was gained without bloodshed, revolution or violence. This in itself was a significant tribute to Melanesian tolerance.

In the decade following independence, economic and trade links with overseas countries were successfully established. Papua New Guinea has received over 10 billion dollars in development aid from Australia since independence was achieved in 1975. In recent years, however, the promising legacy of a Westminsterstyle government has degenerated through cultural hybridisation into a desert of self-interest, nepotism, corruption and violence. The development of wantokism,¹ which evolved quite understandably from traditional community and family ties, is deeply at variance with the notion of ‘fair’ individual enterprise and parliamentary democracy. An egalitarian culture of mutual support dedicated to subsistence survival has clashed with the European individualistic, dividend-driven market economy creating a climate of desperate contradictions. There are no beggars in Papua New Guinea and, unlike many nations, no one would ever starve. The land is rich and fertile, the clan loyalties strong. Yet traditional cultures can no longer supply solutions to the types of internal and external dilemmas posed by the modern world.

Admiral Sir William Goodenough, the chairman of the 1935 meeting of the Royal Geographical Society addressed by Mick Leahy, clearly had a premonition after the paper was read when he commented:

How far and in what direction is the march of man going to interfere with these people? Every possible care should be taken that the people of New Guinea and their country are not exploited in any way.

True values of independence and respect for kastom are struggling hard to survive in the hearts and minds of the new generation growing up in the Bismarck Archipelago.

¹My great-uncle, then Lieutenant N. T. Svensen, was an officer in the 15th Battalion (Queensland) 4th Infantry Brigade, Australian Imperial Force, that landed at Anzac Cove on the Gallipoli Peninsula on the evening of 25 April 1915. He made an entry at 6.47 p.m. in his meticulously-detailed diary, written by moonlight on a torpedo boat heading for the beach. ‘We are under shrapnel fire and two or three men have been hit already, one bullet within 18 inches of my foot.’ He distinguished himself in the campaign, was wounded and repatriated to Cairo.

¹The term ‘Austronesian’ refers to one of the two major language groups in Melanesia. The other, older and more complex group is known as Non-Austronesian or Papuan. Austronesian may have originated in South-East Asia and all of its languages have a family resemblance, unlike the enormous diversity of the Papuan languages. Austronesian languages are spoken in Indonesia, Polynesia, Micronesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam and Taiwan.

¹This historical word had a Hawaiian origin meaning ‘man’. A ‘bush kanaka’ was a Pacific Islander employed as an indentured labourer in Australia on the sugar plantations in Queensland. It came into more general colonial usage throughout Papua and New Guinea for any labourer. Initially a neutral word, it evolved into a rough form of colonial abuse, much resented by native labourers. It was also used in the islands as a term of what might be called ‘affectionate abuse’, so beloved of the Australian male when addressing each other or local ‘mates’, viz., ‘Come and have a beer you bloody kanaka!’

¹Literally ‘one talk’ in Pidgin. People who share the same language, loyalties and cultural heritage. They perform shared activities and support each other as they come from the ‘same place’, village or province. The preferential nature of so-called wantokism is a source of much dissatisfaction in modern PNG and the explanation for numerous misplaced criminal accusations of nepotism in both the private and public sectors.

4. Death is Lighter than a Feather

Across the sea,

Corpses in the water,

Across the mountains,

Corpses heaped up in the field,

I shall die only for the Emperor,

I shall never look back.

Japanese Second World War Poem

No roads link Alotau, the provincial capital of Milne Bay Province, with Port Moresby. Boats are infrequent and no longer run to schedule. Fortunately, this has insulated the province from raskol activity which blights life in the Highlands. The relative isolation of Alotau meant that flying from Port Moresby was the only feasible alternative.

The ‘Islander’ light aircraft climbed laboriously out of barren Jacksons airport over the forbidding green of the Owen Stanley Ranges. A gothic landscape unfolded below, the precipitous ranges and valleys resembling the spires and flying buttresses of monumental medieval cathedrals draped in cloaks of thick, tropical vegetation. The gloom and mystery brought to mind the inconceivable hardships endured by nineteenth-century explorers who attempted to probe the interior of New Guinea from Port Moresby. Precipitous paths needed to be cut through thick jungle slowing progress to a mile a day. Sir William MacGregor, first Lieutenant-Governor and intrepid explorer, wrote in his diary of the ‘deathlike stillness’ that prevailed in the dripping fog that swirled about the moss-covered trees as he climbed Mount Victoria. Gurney airport, which services Alotau, occupies the same position it did in 1942. Charles Gurney was one of the colourful band of aviators who opened up New Guinea in the 1930s and was a squadron leader in the RAAF (Royal Australian Air Force). Below the spinning hub of the propeller, endless plantations of oil-palm unrolled sporadically through breaks in the low cloud.

The terminal was the usual fibro affair with slowly circulating ceiling fans. My luggage was quickly unloaded and packed into a truck. The road into town was severely potholed, with river fords constructed of shattered blocks of concrete. Torrents rushed across them into Milne Bay, threatening to sweep us away. It was hot and uncomfortably humid. Luxuriant vegetation swathed in mist fell like velvet curtains from the ranges lowering into the Coral Sea. The province showed little sign of development.

This formidably rich cultural area is known by Europeans as the Massim. The inhabitants speak Austronesian languages, unlike the majority of Papua New Guineans, who speak one or other of the 300 Papuan languages. Much of the Milne Bay Province consists of islands and the finely-carved artefacts reflect this marine environment. Spectacular ornamented canoes, weapons of ebony and black palm, red spondylus shell necklaces and armshells of tangled beauty, clay pots of abstract shape, and noble war shields are the legacy of the past. Gifted master carvers worked along this coast in the nineteenth century, but the production of such masterpieces has tragically declined in modern times. The culture of the north supports large village communities, whereas in the south, clusters of tiny hamlets nestle along the shore. Their belief in sorcery and magic is strong. Compulsive sweeping keeps the villages free of any personal waste that a sorcerer might fix upon and use in casting an evil spell.

Massim communities are composed of clans ruled by symbolic totems representing an animal, bird, fish or plant. Children take the totem of their mother and it is forbidden for members of the same totem to marry or have sexual relations. In the past the punishment for illicit sex was death. In the almost complete absence of tourism, apart from hermetic groups of divers, the people subsist through fishing and agriculture. Crocodiles and turtles, pigs and megapodes (a small, dark-feathered scrub fowl), bananas and coconuts are being insidiously supplanted by modern supermarket foods, particularly cheap tinned meat like Spam that has scarcely altered since it sustained troops in the Second World War.

The Massim was one of the first areas of New Guinea evangelised by British missionaries in the late nineteenth century. The local people’s profound belief in the power of magic posed the greatest challenge to Christian conversion. The villagers continue to believe that supernatural spirits inhabit trees, streams, rocky places and swamps. Belief in Jesus has not removed the fear of sorcerers who kill by projecting fatal diseases and cannibalistic flying witches that become airborne after dark, snapping bones and tearing entrails. More seductively, erotic magic weaves love spells with flowers plucked in secret groves. More optimistically, a happy life after death is guaranteed by a magic that promises three states of Paradise and an afterlife where Hell is sensibly absent.

Alotau developed from the original Second World War American military base, but the capital was transferred officially from Samarai Island only in 1968. This islet, lying off the easternmost point of the mainland, had become inconvenient as it was only accessible by sea and overcrowded with residents. Alotau has the reputation of being the safest town in Papua New Guinea, a reputation jealously guarded by the inhabitants.

I had arrived in the sultriness of mid-afternoon. Hundreds of listless people were sitting under the rain trees in the shade cast by the awnings of prefabricated supermarkets. They were almost motionless in the oven-like conditions and appeared to be in shock, as if a terrorist bomb had recently exploded. Clumps of resentful youths were chewing buai,¹ smiling women in colourful cottons suffered tugging children, a covered market baked in the heat. Banana boats skittered across the glittering harbour and rusting Taiwanese trawlers disintegrated at their moorings.

A path crossed a stream, and I climbed some steep stairs through an avenue of trees past the tables of female sellers of buai. This green globular betel nut, which is the seed of the Areca palm, is laid out in carefully measured rows and beside each nut lies a small betel-pepper stick, the fruit of the pepper vine. The husk of the Areca seed is removed and the tip of the green pepper spike dipped in lime, now usually contained in an old plastic film container. The mixture is then enthusiastically chewed. In the past the powder was taken from an attractive gourd or the shell of the young coconut, often decorated with intricate burnt-in designs and fitted with a woven or wooden stopper. A beautifully carved ebony spatula with a pig or human carved on the handle would be used to remove the lime. Some spatulas were made from the bones of relatives. The family would then be able to suck the bone when taking lime as an intimate reminder of the departed. Lime powder is no longer made from crushed coral by women in secret locations. Spatulas are seldom used.

Gallons of saliva are generated from the chemical reaction and the resulting vermillion juice is spat in jets like an uncontrollable haemorrhage. The effect is horrifying to witness and mildly narcotic to experience. The villagers say it ‘makes them feel strong’, ‘makim head good fella’. Certainly it makes people more talkative, but excessive use creates a drugged daze in the chewer. Nuts are often presented to visitors. In the past, if the point of an offered nut faced away from the stranger, it was a secret signal to kill him.

I was overcome by nausea and an atrocious bitterness during my first attempt at ‘wearing New Guinea lipstick’ as it was popularly known. Gales of laughter accompanied my facial contortions and twitches but much friendliness followed. Captain Cayley-Webster, travelling through New Guinea in the late nineteenth century, referred to betel as ‘a veritable pâté du diable’. Chewing is paramount in social relations in Papua New Guinea, and the cosmetic clash this creates with modern sanitised life has become a symbolic focus of cultural freedom and kastom. Betel is chewed by men and women when working in the gardens, attending feasts and travelling by canoe, when making love and meeting friends. Television advertisements encourage people to stop chewing because of risks of mouth cancer and to present a ‘clean image’, but for most it is a universal refuge begun early in life, a balm to the rigours of existence in these islands.

I would be staying at Masurina¹ Lodge, run by Chris Abel, grandson of the missionary Charles Abel. I had never met him, but I had read a great deal about his unique regional business. In 1973 Alotau was a tiny place consisting of five trade stores and a post office. Chris established the Alotau Tea Shop with the help of Mila Walo (‘Aunty Mila’), one of the outstanding women who emerged from Charles Abel’s Kwato Mission. This tea shop was the forerunner of a large local public company called Masurina that Chris Abel established at Milne Bay, with interests ranging from accommodation to fisheries and construction. The local people of Milne Bay are major shareholders in what has become a symbol of the commercial way forward in modern PNG. I wanted to visit Samarai Island and the Kwato Mission and talk to Chris about his controversial forebear.

‘The Lodge’, as it is known locally, is situated high above the harbour and has the flavour of an early South Seas colonial resort with prefabricated units painted with large blue numbers. Reception and what might be termed a drinks veranda have a pleasant colonial atmosphere. A number of fans were ranged along the balustrade to keep the air moving and the mosquitoes at bay. My room overlooked the last thrust of the Owen Stanley Ranges, a line of jagged peaks heading down to the sea. Coconut palms crowned the hill above my writing table and from a garden below, a disembodied, unearthly monody sung by a child floated on the breeze. A dog barked in a distant valley. The weather felt unstable, the peaks shrouded in knotted clouds that were cut by the occasional flicker of lightning followed by sombre thunder.

A couple of attractive local girls with engaging smiles were looking after reception and talking quietly in the Tavara language. A figure sat at a table drinking beer and reading. He wore olive-green officer’s fatigues as part of his tropical kit, the crown of his Australian Akubra hat covered with a colourful woollen cap from the Highlands. A furled racing umbrella was propped against the arm of the chair. Some artefacts and a slim volume entitled Betel-Chewing Equipment of East New Guinea lay on the bamboo table. Clear, grey eyes and a welcoming face framed by a well-trimmed beard greeted me as he lowered his clip file.

‘Come and sit down. Get yourself a beer.’

It was a relief to relax near regular puffs of air from the fan. Carrying my luggage the short distance to my cabin had sent the sweat streaming down my face. Any movement in this sweltering heat apart from drinking seemed excessive. I bought an ice-cold beer and sat down in a cane armchair.

‘Who do you work for?’ he asked directly. The pressing need to speak to a European faintly betrayed itself.

‘No one actually. Just wandering the islands.’

‘Really? A wanderer is pretty unusual round here. I work for AusAID – Biomedical Engineer checking equipment – at the hospital.’ He would be the first of many aid workers I would meet on my journey.

‘So, what’s the state of the hospital equipment in PNG?’ I asked, unsure whether I wanted to hear the answer. Assembling my own travelling medical kit had taken weeks of thought and terror, as the list of possible ghastly diseases and the range of conflicting advice grew.

‘Dire, absolutely dire. The hospital in Alotau though is actually quite good with excellent staff.’ There was disappointment in his voice, overlaid with an almost convincing pragmatic realism.

‘What sort of problems do they have?’

‘Well, the main problem is lack of maintenance. The cultural mentality is so different. They think sterilising only requires the instruments to be washed in Omo.’

I felt that the constant struggle with cultural ‘otherness’ had made him almost unnaturally phlegmatic. He smiled wryly.

‘Is it the same all over the country?’

‘The Highlands are worse of course. I saw an ambulance in Mendi drenched in blood. I thought, “God, it’s bloody violent. Even the ambulances are blood-soaked!” Actually, it was betel juice from people spitting on it. Looked just like blood! But spitting on an ambulance?’

I smiled but my feigned bravado concerning health matters was ebbing away. We sat in silence, the fans whirring and the occasional tortured dog screaming in agony.

‘The tribes up there are spearing each other again. They love fighting and drinking. Some died recently after downing a hellish cocktail of coconut juice, methylated spirits and turpentine. It’s reverting to pre-colonial days.’

An unmistakable tone of angry disillusionment and ruined hopes marked his voice. So many aid workers begin with high ideals that fade in the face of indigenous resistance to change. The benefits of being rushed headlong into a technological paradise from the Stone Age are not immediately obvious to men still profoundly involved with their elemental natures.

‘Don’t you ever worry you might be targeted?’

‘Sometimes, but I am related to a Napoleonic general!’

Despite the off-hand smile, an expression of cultivated stoicism hardened in his eyes. An easy man to underestimate.

‘Is that so.’ I looked away.

I must admit to being sceptical of Napoleonic references in this part of the world. I had heard many such claims while travelling through Polynesia in my younger days. Ravings mostly. The South Pacific attracts extraordinary characters often beset by cosmic visions.

Heavy tropical rain had begun to fall on the iron roof and the storm channels were brimming with water. Night was quickly closing in as the fans hummed lazily. Village girls carried platters of food into the dining room. I rolled down my sleeves – a precaution at dusk in this malarial area. The female Anopheles emerges to strike at close of day. Small, silent and deadly.

‘But you’re not French are you?’

‘No, English, actually. Born in Surabaya in Java.’

‘So who was the French general?’

‘General Alexandre Mocquery. He attended the Military School at Fontainebleau. Around 1806, I think it was.’

He chuckled in the way that those moved by the memory of illustrious relatives often do – a mixture of respect combined with a feeling of comparative inadequacy. The silhouetted coconut palms began to dissolve in sheets of water.

‘How did he die?’

‘Fever in Algeria.’

We both fell silent and looked out into the opaque, watery atmosphere, listening to the muffled clatter of a tropical deluge on the broad leaves and thought of Europe. The ghosts of a hundred misguided adventurers and metaphysical questers seemed all around us.

‘Shall we go in for dinner?’ he said at last.

Sele and two other men were standing by the roadside as the Toyota Hilux four-wheel-drive whizzed past. They were bending over, staring up and listening to a rattle in the suspension of the truck.

‘It’s not serious,’ one said.

‘It’ll get us there,’ said the other with finality.

‘Do you really think so?’ I said.

The vehicle had turned around and was steaming back down the road toward us, sitting high on its suspension. Again they bent over with ears cocked.

‘The brakes were all right last week,’ Sele said.

‘I went down to East Cape last month in it,’ another said.

‘Oh, come on! Let’s go!’ I said. The Toyota roared past once again sounding pretty rough.

Sele, myself and two laughing island girls, Rachel and Marie, loaded up with provisions and plenty of chilled water. Our excursion to East Cape, the most easterly point of Papua New Guinea, would take most of the day. The atrocious road was full of the usual potholes requiring the skills of a rally driver to negotiate. We would need to cross some fifteen rivers and streams swollen by unseasonable rain. Some had warning signs of treacherously deep water: ‘Jesus Loves Careful Drivers – Take the Right Side’. Love messages with hearts and arrows had been picked out in white shells on the river beds.

The area toward East Cape is relatively unspoilt, and we passed the immaculate hamlets, villages and family communities of the Tavara people that have been erected at the very edge of the water. Clear, swept areas of sand have been carved from the dense tropical jungle to accommodate the thatched-roof huts erected on stilts with diapered walls of palm leaf. Smaller detached huts nearby serve as kitchens. Bedding of patterned sleeping mats and pillows was laid out in the sun to air. A Milne Bay woman stood at the window waving and smiling through the brightly coloured washing hanging on the line. Beautiful children squealed with intense pleasure as the family pig blundered about the yard accompanied by a wretched dog with its scrawny pups. The road caused us to be thrown about inside the cabin like rag dolls.

‘Where were you born, Sele?’ I asked. The girls craned forward, bumping my shoulder and listening intensely to my words, collapsing in fits of giggles if I caught their eye.

‘On Logea Island, near Samarai.’

‘Really? I hope to go there. I want to visit the Kwato Mission.’ Coincidentally, we were passing a church, one of many along this road. Pale blue walls with a simple black cross. As it was Sunday, a large congregation had filled the building. The huge windows were thrown open and hymns were being sung with a passionate enthusiasm that saturated the tropical groves.

‘They are good people!’

Sele had a stained ivory smile and seemed illuminated from within by his Christianity. A good man. The girls had never been to East Cape before and were in a state of high excitement, chattering and giggling interminably.

‘Are you still at school, Rachel?’ I glanced over my shoulder at the pair bouncing in the back.

‘No!’ they chorused, ‘Mipela iwok lon Lodge, insait lon kisen.’¹ Few children go on to secondary school. We bumped along, the springs often bottoming out in the potholes.

‘Is there much violence around Milne Bay, Sele?’

‘No. It’s peaceful here. A ship came in from Lae with many raskols last month. It was in the harbour. Many crimes happened but we got rid of it pretty quick. We don’t want such things here in Alotau.’

He seemed proud of taking the moral high ground and clearly wanted me to judge Milne Bay and the islands as far superior to the rest of the country.

Picturesque family groups were sitting on the beach in the shade of flowering pink and white frangipani trees, talking, laughing and looking out to sea. Many elegant canoes with outriggers were drawn up on the shore under rosewoods. The hulls had faded to a delicate pale blue or jade green. Groups of children happily played with models fitted with sails. These childish replicas were to be the only sails I saw whilst in Papua New Guinea.

The puncture we got from the brutal coral road was only to be expected. Sele showed not the slightest exasperation, treating it more as a slight inconvenience than a drama. The spare wheel was loosely chained to the vehicle and the change was accomplished in record time. The girls were extremely helpful, as I attempted to be, but the humidity and the searing sun made physical effort an exhausting task for a dimdim.¹

This road had been a quagmire in 1942 when the airbase at Gili Gili was being hewn out of the jungle to defend Milne Bay against a landing by Japanese Marines. The local people had watched spellbound as gelignite was placed in holes drilled in the base of coconut palms and the detonation propelled them vertically into the air. Our situation reminded me of photographs I had seen of bogged trucks and ruptured tanks that had skidded into ditches during the battle.

During the Second World War, Milne Bay possessed great strategic significance as it guarded the sea lanes to Australia and the eastern approaches to Port Moresby. By mid-1942, the area had become enormously important to General MacArthur in his campaign against the seemingly invincible Japanese. The Imperial Army had conquered the Bismarck Archipelago and was poised to strike at Australia. Pearl Harbor, Singapore, Malaya, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies had already been consumed by the forces of the Rising Sun. A remarkable victory was achieved here by the Australians and the Americans against malaria, typhus, bombs, scorpions, mosquitoes, rats, falling coconuts, crawling insects, green dye bleeding from their uniforms, disease, forbidding terrain, incessant rain, clinging mud and a fanatical enemy. This largely forgotten battle marked the extraordinary first defeat of the Japanese on land and halted any further advance in the Pacific, west or south.

The local villagers played a significant role in the victory and suffered terribly at the hands of the Japanese. Many village men were tied to coconut palms with signal wire and bayoneted in the chest or anus. A girl of fourteen was staked out, stripped naked, a bamboo stake driven through her chest, her breasts cut off and placed on the ground beside her. Poor food supplies meant the Japanese even turned to cannibalism. Australians took their own violent turn, and carried out summary executions of villagers they suspected of collaboration. For the local people it was a foreign war of which they understood nothing and cared less. Despite the atrocities, their loyal support of the Australians led to them being known as the ‘fuzzy wuzzy angels’.

The perpetration of unspeakable tortures by the Japanese has an explanation of sorts. The private in the Japanese army was treated as a cipher by his officers; animals and weapons were treated better. They became intoxicated in the heat of battle and disregarded discipline. Brutalised soldiers may have been effective against Russian, Chinese or Manchu troops, but permitting emotion to dominate proved fatal in the Pacific War. In the jungle they suffered from malaria, fatigue, poor food and heavy, outdated equipment. A private had no method of relieving the pressure of his pent-up fury. Japanese officers intended their men to hate them. The officer class was driven by elitism and a sense of fanatical loyalty to the Emperor and his Imperial Army. When unsheathing the sacred regimental sword, an officer would bind his mouth with cloth to avoid breathing upon it and as a war journal observes, ‘amorously caress the naked blade with white silk’.

‘On the way back I’ll show you where the Japanese landed,’ Sele said. ‘Local people told their spies the wrong place!’

The sudden silence that followed once the truck had stopped wrapped us in a cloak of birdsong, the laughter of children, tiny waves rapidly lapping on the shore and cicadas racketing in the tropical heat. War seemed a distant memory and little appeared to have changed for millennia. Milne Bay is one of the least disturbed areas in the whole country.

East Cape has glaring white coral beaches, a decaying schooner hauled up under the palms and a granite Methodist Mission Memorial baking in the sun. The small village of Bilubilu is nearby. Across the Goschen Strait the looming bulk of Normanby Island seemed to deserve its reputation for sorcery and cannibalism. Sele and the girls unpacked our lunch and I sat with my back against a gnarled tree at the edge of the turquoise sea and ate my sandwich, watched carefully by a group of shy children who put their fingers in their mouths and tugged at their clothes.

The cobalt waters that swirl up between the vastness of the Coral and Solomon Seas are diamond clear and support an unparalleled profusion of marine life. Many forms are still to be classified by biologists. The reef drop-off is perfect for snorkelling. More screams of laughter as I climbed into my diving gear – lycra suit, gloves, booties, fins, mask and snorkel. Coral cuts become infected in seconds in these warm waters, so rich are they in bacteria. There are the added attractions of fire coral that cause long blisters when touched, lionfish with beautiful but treacherous spines, cone shells that shoot poisonous darts, stinging hydroids, the occasional shark. I was taking no chances. Children swim constantly with no protection but I never saw an adult Melanesian swimming for pleasure.

As I slowly headed out to sea, superb tropical fish and a kaleidoscope of soft corals were laid out beneath me like a living carpet. Visibility in these glassy waters can be as much as fifty metres. Tiny electric-blue fish formed constellations around isolated outcrops of rock; rainbow fish swam lethargically away to shelter beneath the coral shelves; butterfly fish abstractly painted in swathes of luminous purple and chrome yellow shot into crevices; black and wild-green specimens with long, pointed mouths ignored me completely; gossamer-thin angel fish flowed in the crystal current like fabric; fantastic lacy scorpion fish mimicked plants and defied my most careful observation. The seabed as far as I could see was covered with ultramarine starfish, mauve-tipped clusters of beige coral and enormous brain corals. I remained among these enchanting coral gardens for more than an hour.

Sele seemed pleased that I had enjoyed my swim until I mentioned the skull cave I knew was nearby. In the Massim the dead were buried twice. In the second interment, bones were placed on rock shelves overlooking the ocean, or in dank underground holes near the shore. The cave was five minutes from the village, but no one would agree to show me the place. There remains a great fear of sorcery and witchcraft in Milne Bay. Strange apparitions still manifest themselves at sea in contradiction to mission teaching.

‘We don’t believe in such things anymore,’ Sele said not terribly convincingly.

‘Well, then, it doesn’t matter if you show me.’

He would not argue and shuffled about looking at the ground, occasionally spitting a jet of crimson, anxious to be off. The girls too had lapsed into silence.

‘The first mission school was called Under the Mango Tree. We were happy.’

As he crunched the Toyota into gear a couple of young boys chewing betel nut and dressed in sharp sports-shirts begged for a lift into Alotau. There is no bus service and hardly any transport this far along the Cape. Sele politely asked me if I minded, so naturally I agreed. They gratefully climbed into the tray behind the cab. As we jolted along I pointed to a pretty bush-material hut on stilts standing in the water and asked the girls what it was. Screams of laughter came from the back seat.

‘A toilet!’ they said after catching their breath.

Soon after leaving we were flagged down by some local Tavara villagers whose banana boat had run out of petrol during their Sunday outing. They also piled into the back. Sele ignored our precariously perched passengers despite the lurching of the vehicle, which threatened at any moment to catapult the whole laughing crew into the palms. Clearly they were accustomed to hanging on for grim death. We stopped at a small beach overhung with rosewood trees, a few rusty spikes poking up through the tide washing the sand.

‘This is Wahahuba where the Japanese landed. Wrong place! They came on a raining night and crawled under the huts. We thought they are dogs and pigs looking for dinner.’ Sele smiled with strange equanimity.

‘Were the people frightened?’ One inevitably asks trite questions concerning war.

‘Much shouting out. One meri¹ quickly grabbed up her covers thinking her baby is there, rushed away, but later she finds her bundle is empty. Terrible.’ Sele seemed almost tearful. ‘They bayonet people to keep them silent.’

On the showery night of 25 August 1942, a heavy naval bombardment preceded the attack of the Japanese Special Naval Landing Force. The Japanese began the engagement with only a vague idea of Allied strength. Neither side had been trained for living and fighting in the tropical jungle. Their equipment was inappropriate to combat the incessant rain and mud which destroyed their boots and rotted their feet. Some Australian troops who fought as part of Milne Force were young volunteers of the Militia, popularly known as chocos (chocolate soldiers) or koalas (not to be sent overseas or shot). They had trained sporadically at home during their free time. A great deal of ill-feeling, known as the ‘choco smear’, was expressed towards the Militia by the professional, battle-hardened troops of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) who had recently fought bravely in Tobruk in the Middle East. ‘Scum, scum, the Militia may kiss my bum,’ they would chant derisively.²

The Milne Bay Battle was problematical and confused. Troops had suffered from seasickness on the stinking hulks that brought them to New Guinea. The only food was Bully Beef and ‘Jungle Juice’ distilled from palms. Coconuts fall when the stem swells with moisture, and after rain these missiles killed and injured many men. The troops glowed a livid shade of green from skin treatments and dye bleeding from their wet tropical uniforms. There were no proper maps, only rough sketches of the terrain and their radios were useless. No mosquito nets had been provided. A malignant strain of tertian malaria laid low more than half the fighting force through ignorance of correct preventative measures. Equipment was inadequate. No one knew what was going on.

By dawn of 27 August the Japanese were pinned down by intense strafing by Kittyhawk fighter aircraft of the RAAF (Royal Australian Air Force), some flown by former Spitfire pilots. These ‘flying shithouses’ (as they were affectionately known) were polished with beeswax for speed, but the rain and ooze made flying conditions an indescribable nightmare. Fighters slid off the runway and collided with the bombers. One of the Japanese officers, Lieutenant Moji, became physically ill at the protracted onslaught and in his diary noted in his oddly mechanistic way that ‘the tone of our systems was feverish and abnormal’. However, moments of humour were ever present. Some Japanese soldiers attempted to confuse the Australians by shouting unlikely phrases in English.

‘Is that you, Mum?’ was rapidly answered by a burst of machine-gun fire.

Another four-wheel-drive had become stuck in the riverbed just in front of us. Sele contemplated the scene of impotent activity for a long time. He suddenly gunned across the torrent, all the while being egged on with shouts of excitement and delight from our precariously-positioned passengers. More picturesque tropical beaches were glimpsed through the palms until we encountered the final memorial which marked the western- and southernmost point of the Japanese advance. Some eighty-three unknown Japanese Marines, who made a suicidal charge against impossible odds, lie buried here. The Japanese military maxim, ‘Duty is weightier than a mountain while death is lighter than a feather’, seemed to possess an even deeper significance in this theatre of war. Soldiers would feign death, lying open-mouthed among the fallen, and then the ‘corpse’ would suddenly spring to life and shoot an Australian or American in the back. Numbers of dead are uncertain owing to the large quantity of body parts – legs, arms, hands and heads – that were left hanging sickeningly in the trees after the explosion of bombs and shells.

We arrived back at the lodge as dusk was falling. A late afternoon storm was gathering in the mountains. ‘General’ Mocquery was seated on the veranda in his customary position near the fans talking to a tall, fair-haired man whose complexion and features betrayed all the signs of having spent many years in a tropical climate. He was wearing shorts and his bare legs carried a number of small plasters covering insect bites. Slightly damp, thinning hair accentuated his faintly feverish appearance. Mocquery in full tropical fatigues gestured for me to come over.

‘… no dental treatment available at all,’ he concluded and glanced up.

‘Good trip to East Cape?’

‘Marvellous! Went swimming. The water’s so clear!’ I felt elated.

‘I’m Chris Abel.’ The fair-haired man smiled briefly.

‘Ah! I’ve been waiting to meet you.’

‘You must be the writer fellow.’ His voice betrayed unusual caution. An engaging yet slightly defensive attitude revealed itself in his English accent. We shook hands and I flowed into a bamboo chair.

We discussed his childhood on Kwato Island and his grandfather, Charles Abel, the famous and controversial missionary.

Chris had spent some twelve years in Popondetta as an Agricultural Extension and Development Bank Officer. During an election it was discovered that many of the villagers were unable to read the ballot papers, so he invented what they called ‘the whisper vote’. The locals would whisper their choice in his ear, and he would mark their ballot paper accordingly.

Large drops of rain began thudding onto the roof with increasing velocity. A mysterious figure carrying an ancient Gladstone bag wandered onto the veranda. He was wearing a beige linen suit, maroon-spotted cravat and heavy brogues. His engaging face and sculpted beard achieved a wan smile, but he was way overdressed for the tropics and sweating heavily.

‘A Victorian detective looking for the ghost of a missionary,’ Chris Abel commented wryly.

The BBC were making a programme about the Reverend James Chalmers, a famous nineteenth-century missionary eaten by cannibals on Goaribari Island in the Gulf of Papua. The next day I saw the optimistic film crew board a decrepit yellow coaster and dissolve offshore in a dark tropical storm. Abel suddenly turned to me.

‘And what exactly are you doing here?’ His eyes hardened and a measure of suspicion crept into his voice.

‘Just travelling around the islands and writing about the culture,’ I answered carefully.

‘A couple came here recently for a good reason.’ He emphasised the words meaningfully. ‘A lad came back with his father who had fought in the Battle of Milne Bay. He’s going to write a book about it.’

An atmosphere of unspoken confrontation entered the conversation. He seemed suspicious of writers. Russell Abel, his father, had written an excellent biography of Charles Abel in 1934 called Forty Years in Dark Papua. But the latest published biography of the missionary had made the whole family angry. One reviewer reported that the book contained errors, twisted facts and nasty allusions.

‘And we gave the writer access to all the private papers.’

Clearly I had uncovered a nest of scorpions. The downpour blotted out the light and almost stopped conversation. He was forced to shout over the noise. Water was swirling everywhere and the storm drains were overflowing. He raised his hands in a gesture of hopelessness at attempting to talk over the hammering rain. The fans rushed moist air over our faces.

‘I’ll dig out some books for you to look at. You can set the record straight!’

‘I’m going to Samarai and Kwato tomorrow in the Orsiri¹ dinghy.’

‘Have a good trip!’ he shouted as his slender figure disappeared into the murk.

‘What was all that about?’ commented Mocquery rhetorically.

‘I have absolutely no idea.’

¹Pidgin for ‘betel nut’.

¹‘Masurina’ means ‘the fruits of an abundant harvest’ in the local Suau language.

¹‘We work at the Lodge in the kitchen.’

¹Originally a Milne Bay word long used for white men, probably meaning ‘stranger from across the sea’.

¹Pidgin for Papua New Guinean woman.

²At the outbreak of the Second World War, Australia maintained three separate armies of volunteer personnel. The Militia were part-time, citizen-force volunteers ineligible for service outside Australia or its colonies. The Second Australian Imperial Force (AIF) was a highly-trained volunteer force eligible for service anywhere overseas. Finally, there was the permanent army made up of a relatively small force of trained volunteers. There was friction between these armies due to the differentiation of combat role and degree of professional training. Many Militia units subsequently distinguished themselves abroad when their theatre of operations was extended.

¹A local trading company based on Samarai Island in China Strait.

5. Too Hard a Country for Soft Drinks

The elderly ‘whiteskin’ standing on the wharf at the Alotau harbour side, casually dressed in check sports shirt and light trousers, was waiting for the St Joseph putt putt¹ to tie up. I was waiting for the Orsiri banana boat to finish loading and head off for Samarai. The fresh bread delivery was delayed so I hung about smoking a rough cigarette made from tobacco rolled in newspaper. An albino Melanesian ambled past squinting against the sun, his pink skin shockingly blotched, yellow hair dazzling against the palms. Decrepit trade boats were taking on crew who sat on the stern rails, ejecting jets of scarlet into the water and calling out to their friends in passing trucks. My nose was assaulted by a peculiar mixture of fish, yeast, distillate and copra. Banana boats packed with produce and drums of diesel skated across the harbour towards the islands like hunting water spiders. The sun beat down.

‘Good morning!’ I was the picture of bonhomie.

‘Good morning, my son. Are you visiting Alotau? We don’t get many of your sort, oh no.’

I thought this was an extraordinary way to greet a stranger. He had an Irish accent and mottled complexion. All ‘whiteskins’ who have lived in the tropics for years have this wan appearance. We stood side by side rocking on our heels in a foolish colonial manner, looking at the colourful activity, glancing from time to time at the oil slick and coconut husks floating in the water below the wharf.

‘I’m the Catholic priest in Alotau … oh yes … the Catholic priest.’ He volunteered in answer to my quizzical look.

‘Ah! How long have you been here, Father?’

‘Oh yes … must be getting on for thirty years now, thirty years since I left Ireland. I’ve stopped counting, I have that.’

‘I suppose there have been a lot of changes in your time.’

‘Oh yes … murders and break-ins are increasing all the time, they’re always about, they are that. That’s right. A boat from Lae brought in a whole criminal element, it did. It’s gone now, thank goodness, together with the murdering, thieving boyos we hope … oh yes … we do hope that.’

‘I heard about that boat.’

‘Did you now. You must have your ear to the ground. Oh yes … they know where you are all the time … they’re watching all the time … oh yes … now he locks his door … yes … now he’s gone out … yes … yes … now he’s come back. He’s gone inside and locked the door … He’s turning on his light. Now he’s having a shower. They know it all and see in the dark … oh yes … they see in the dark, they can do that.’

‘Has your health stood up over the years, Father?’

‘Well, to tell you God’s truth, I’ve had the fever recently … and it laid me desperate low but I seem to be all right now … oh yes. Age creeping on now.’

More shuffling and gazing.

‘I’ve read that sorcerers and magic are still about.’

‘Oh yes … the magic and the witchcraft are strong, strong. They might be Christian but that old black magic is still there in them … it’s a terrible ting, terrible ting, terrible, terrible … Propitiate the spirits of the departed now … it’s a dark existence out here to be sure. It certainly is that.’

The St Joseph, freshly painted in yellow ochre, finally tied up at the wharf. The priest waved to some village women dressed in Victorian cotton smocks.

‘That’s my lot there … oh yes … I’ll have to leave you now. God be with you on your travels … yes … God be with you,’ and he wandered over to his flock.

The bread had arrived while I was chatting and the banana boat prepared to leave. This powerful vessel had twin seventy-five horsepower outboard motors and two plastic garden chairs. We powered out of the harbour and the cool wind brushed our faces and lifted our spirits. The rusting Taiwanese trawlers were soon left far behind as we sped along the south coast of Milne Bay towards East Cape. A young village girl carrying some shopping sat in the seat beside me. She prattled on in Pidgin to the two boys piloting the boat but they said nothing at all to me. I put my feet up – one on a carton containing an electric lawn mower and the other on a carton of several hundred tins of baked beans. The dinghy began to buck as we headed towards the open ocean and I noticed there were no life jackets. Later I was to learn that this omission is quite normal practice. I would have felt decidedly wimpish to have mentioned this in such a ‘masculine’ society. Be a man and drown or laugh as you are taken by a shark. My panama began to whip around my legs as I held it down out of the wind.

We followed the coast east for only a short time, sailing parallel to the road I had travelled only a couple of days before. The sea became rougher as we turned south towards Samarai and the Coral Sea. I felt a tremendous sense of exhilaration, my face dashed with spray, slicing through the azure water, the dark-green jungle defending the mountainous interior coming up on the right. Coconut palms, transparent green water fringing crystalline beaches, a swirl of smoke from the occasional bush hut. Young, brown, white-breasted sea eagles soared on the up-draughts, their wingspans majestically spread against the vegetation. Fragile outrigger canoes weathering the sea swell were cheered on by the boys.

The currents in China Strait are treacherous. The pattern on the surface of the water changes from seahorses whipped by the wind to smooth powerful eddies of deep blue streaming up from the abyss. The pastel outlines of numerous small islands appeared, jagged peaks lifting from valleys shaped like cauldrons. The sun broke through gunmetal clouds and burnished the sea, biblical rays that appeared to be guiding us to salvation. I realised with surprise I was soaked to the skin.

Captain John Moresby landed on Samarai from HMS Basilisk in April 1873 hoping to evade the unwelcome attentions of his ‘savage friends’. He settled down to dinner with his officers but they were followed by a hundred fighting men, who squatted quietly on the beach beside the blue water and watched the proceedings with close interest. Moresby offered them a stew made of preserved soup and potatoes, salt pork, curlew and pigeon, which, not altogether surprisingly, disgusted the warriors. The sailors unsuccessfully tried paddling canoes which resulted in capsizals, hilarious moments for all concerned. The warriors opened the officers’ shirts and stroked the white skin of their chests in wonderment and appreciation. Captain Moresby wryly named the place Dinner Islet to mark this unusually human and peaceful encounter. The local name of Samarai soon replaced the cannibalistic associations of the former.

The island appeared a deserted ghost town at first sight. The former provincial headquarters, which is an older settlement than Port Moresby, had clearly seen better days. I climbed up onto the Orsiri trading wharf to take my bearings. Ruined warehouses lined the neglected International Wharves site, warehouses gaping like skulls set on a rack, the empty interiors propped up by partitions of broken bone. Planks and beams jutted out like shattered teeth. Clumps of resentful youths were loitering around the general store and glared at me without a smile, but the women and children greeted me with friendly waves.

‘Apinun!’¹

‘Apinun!’

The mown grass and coral streets (there is only one rarely used motor vehicle on Samarai) seemed like sections of an abandoned filmset. I walked between the abandoned shells of two buildings in which some boys were shouting and playing football. I hoped I was heading towards the Kinanale Guesthouse, run by Wallace Andrew, the grandson of a cannibal. Some attractive colonial houses were ranged around the perimeter of a waterlogged football field. In the sultry heat I leant exhausted against an electricity pole near a memorial obelisk before heading for a small beach in the distance. Rain trees and old flamboyants offered cooling shade.

‘Hello there!’ The voice came from a porch at the top of a flight of steps to my left. ‘Come up and have a drink!’

A tall, smiling ‘whiteskin’ wearing shorts, his legs covered in the ubiquitous small plasters, beckoned me in.

‘I’m looking for the guesthouse run by Wallace Andrew. Do you know where it is, by any chance?’

‘It’s just there!’ and he pointed to a large house partly covered in old wooden scaffolding. I had thought this structure was an abandoned building project.

‘Wallace is about somewhere, but come up for a minute.’ He disappeared inside.

I went into the sitting room and collapsed into a chair while he brought some iced water from the fridge. Furniture was clearly hard to come by on Samarai and the room had the feel of a temporary arrangement that had drifted out of control into permanence. For no good reason I imagined I could see mosquitoes everywhere. Probably the beginnings of tropical madness.

‘Hi, there. I’m Ian Poole, Manager of Orsiri Trading.’ I instinctively felt he was open and lacking in the customary consuming demons, a rare quality in the tropics, although it was a slightly mad challenge maintaining a business in this remote spot. Australians generally manage extremes with equanimity and dry humour.

‘I’m just travelling the islands. Chris Abel from Masurina told me to look you up. I’ve heard you have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the place.’

‘Well, it’s certainly interesting. Wallace knows a lot more about the local villagers and Kwato Mission, of course. He was born there.’

‘I’m surprised there are so many old buildings left. Didn’t the Australians carry out a scorched-earth policy to stop the Japanese?’

‘Yes. Unnecessary, though. The Japs buzzed the island a few times in flying boats and dropped a couple of bombs but that was it. The Aussie Administration Unit set fire to all the commercial and government places including the famous hotels. Tragic loss. You can still see the few survivors around the football pitch.’

Missionaries were the first Europeans to establish themselves in this part of Eastern Papua New Guinea. By 1878 the Reverend Samuel MacFarlane had made Samarai a head station for the London Missionary Society, but the LMS soon exchanged land on Samarai for the island of Kwato a short distance away. At the turn of the century Samarai had no wharf or jetty and goods were off-loaded from trading vessels into canoes. It was a government station, a port of entry and a ‘gazetted penal district’. Local labour was forcibly recruited here for the plantations. Copra and gold-mining dominated life, and this tropical paradise became a more important centre than Port Moresby. The town, if it could be described as such, consisted of ‘The Residency’ (a bungalow built on the only hill for the first Commissioner General, Sir Peter Scratchley, appointed by the Imperial Government in 1884 and dead from malaria within three months), the woven-grass Sub-collector’s House, the gaol (with the liquor bond store in the roof), the cemetery and Customs House, and two small stores plus a few sheds. There were no hotels or guesthouses in the early days of the 1880s, the traders living mainly on their vessels and the gold-diggers camped out in their tents.

The Europeans besieged Whitten Brothers’ premises since alcohol was dispensed from their store. The empties were hurled onto the sand from the roofed balcony. A village boy collected the bottles the next morning and counted them. Whitten then divided the number of bottles by the number of men drinking and so accounts were democratically settled. According to the entertaining reminiscences of Charles Monkton in his book Some Experiences of a New Guinea Magistrate published in 1921, men dressed mainly in striped ‘pyjamas’ or more festively in ‘turkeyred twill, worn petticoat fashion with a cotton vest’. He describes picturesque ruffians roaming the palm-fringed shore. One incorrigible known as ‘Nicholas the Greek’, after pursuing an absconder through impenetrable jungle, returned with only his head in a bag. When questioned about the missing body he laconically commented, ‘Here’s your man. I couldn’t bring the lot of him, so I’ll only take a hundred [pounds].’ Monckton also describes ‘O’Reagan the Rager’, who was ‘never sober, never washed, slept in his clothes, and at all times diffused an odour of stale drink and fermenting humanity’. The spectacular sunsets and moonlit tropical nights of Dinner Island had formed a cinematic backdrop to all types of mysterious schooners, yawls, ketches, cutters and luggers with eloquent names such as Mizpah, Ada, Hornet, Curlew and Pearl.

‘Life was pretty primitive here in those early days, I suppose.’ I wanted to draw Poole out. He obliged me at length.

‘Simple pleasures as now, I reckon. The malarial swamp was filled in by the prisoners to make a cricket field. Local people were forbidden to wear shirts in case they spread disease. They believed “the fever” came from the miasma that rose from the stagnant water. Mal aria means bad air, I think. Samarai was a deathtrap. The cemetery was always full. In fact, the fatal swamp occupied the football pitch right in front of your guesthouse. Sheep were imported from Australia and used to graze there until they were needed for meat. The residents, I think there were about a hundred and twenty in the early part of the century, played tennis, cricket and the children went swimming. Simple pleasures as I said.’

‘Sounds idyllic.’

‘There was always the demon drink. That’s a story in itself. The first hotel was called The Golden Fleece. One large room and a veranda. It was built of palm with a thatched roof. No doors or windows. Guests were expected to bring their own sheets, knives, forks and plates and sleep on the floor. Drunks would stumble in at night in hobnailed boots and fall over each other cursing and swearing.’

‘But I thought Samarai was famous for the glamour of its hotels!’

‘True, but that was later in the 1920s. There were a couple of better hotels – the largest one had two storeys and was called The Cosmopolitan. Another called The Samarai, was at one time run by a real merry widow named Flora Gofton. Missionaries had to drag the drunks into church. One called “Cheers!” during the consecration.’ I had to smile at this.

‘And the hospital?’

‘Oh, they built two hospitals and two schools – one each for Europeans and Papuans. Water was segregated as well. “Pride of race”, they called it. On moonlit nights people would go around the island by launch singing. Everybody loved the place, although it was pretty wild with drunken miners and labour recruiters.’

‘Women must’ve had a pretty rough time.’

‘Some sad stories there. Many just upped sticks and left. There was a Swede named Nielsen who worked his butt off and made a few quid. Then he married a pretty Australian girl who was a bit footloose, you know the sort. She finally pissed off and went south. Every three weeks he would paddle his dinghy out through the mangroves to meet the steamer. Dreamed she would be on it. He always dressed up to the nines to meet her, immaculate – tan boots, clean shirt, tie and white duck trousers. She always disappointed him and never arrived. He would return to Samarai cursing all women and get drunk as a sponge that night.’

‘What about married women?’

‘Spent all their time looking after ill children. Helluva life. I’ve got part of a letter here somewhere that will give you an idea.’ He fished around in a hefty file by his armchair and extracted a dog-eared photocopy. I noticed he kept scratching his legs and bare arms as did most expatriates I met in Papua New Guinea.

‘This one was written by Nell Turner, married to an officer of some sort. It’s from The Residency, used to be up on the hill, dated January 1909. She writes: “Alf is not at all well tho’ he is gaining weight this last month … Kate is a lot bigger than mother – gets bigger and fatter after each baby. Mollie had convulsions on New Year Eve and took over two hours to come out of it, was quite stupid for a couple of days after, she seems quite recovered now. Munrowd had a fit a week after Mollie, but is well again. Jean had a dose of fever but is on the mend.”’

‘Sounds drastic to me. Matter of fact my own wife is in Australia at the moment. It’s tough for women here.’ He carefully placed the letter back into his archive. ‘I hope to write a history of Samarai one day. No time of course.’

I suggested we find Wallace, so we went over to the guesthouse. I called out but there was no reply. The large room was sparsely furnished and seedy, like an old people’s home. A meal was laid out on a table under white gauze. It was dim despite the fierce sun blazing down outside.

‘Yu yah! kamap pinis!¹ I had gone down to the wharf to meet you!’

A voice came from the gloomy interior at the back of the house. A patriarchal Melanesian in an immaculate white shirt emerged from a corridor limping slightly. His grey hair was carefully groomed, teeth mauled by betel, warm eyes that expressed a mixture of love and disappointment. One of his hands had been amputated midway down the forearm.

‘Got your letter. I’m Wallace Andrew.’

Ian left us. Wallace immediately sat down at a bare table and began to play a game of patience with a limp deck of cards. It was as though he needed to erect a barrier to communication as a safeguard. Clearly he had spent years of his life playing this game in lonely isolation. The skill with which he shuffled the deck and deftly dealt and gathered the cards in with the stump of his arm fascinated me.

‘I’ve come to see Samarai and Kwato.’ I pulled up a worn chair.

‘Ah, it’s so beautiful there. We’ll go together, you and I, to Kwato. Many people used to come, but there are few visitors now.’ The cards flopped softly onto the table. He scarcely noticed if the game ‘came out’ and took even less interest. Time seemed to have come to a shuddering halt. I realized with alarm that nothing was actually going to happen in the next five minutes, the next hour, for the rest of the afternoon, for my entire life if I stayed on the island for long enough. My own arrival was the main event of the week. I needed to slow down to Melanesian time. It was quiet in that room and baking hot. The ceiling fan motors had probably burnt out long ago.

‘Dinah will show you up to your room. Then come down and have lunch,’ he suddenly said.

A petite village woman with a beautiful smile gestured for me to follow her up what was almost a grand staircase. The central carpet had long since disappeared, but the unpainted wooden strip in the centre was a ghostly reminder of some past attempt at luxury. We took the right flight of the staircase and passed through two bare rooms with flaking paint. Broken lampshades, mattresses and lumber lay abandoned on the floor in a corner. Her bare feet noiselessly brushed the cracked lino. A long veranda opened off a landing, but the bleached scaffolding hid any view. She pushed open the door to No. 8, a large room furnished with a double bed, a single bed, a dressing table, a wardrobe and a fan. It was clean and comfortable with screened windows against mosquitoes. French doors opened onto the veranda. I looked through the maze of planks over the former swamp to the few colonial buildings that had survived the destruction of the war.

‘You share the bathroom and toilet,’ she said in excellent English and showed me the most basic of conveniences. I noticed a sign in red letters under a sheet of discoloured plastic on the wall of the shower: ‘For hot water pull string.’

Dinah smiled again and disappeared. A corridor led out to what I thought was a rear entrance, but I found that the stairs had been removed and a twenty-foot drop into empty space yawned below. In a shed I could see a wrecked dinghy. I wandered back into the stifling room and sat on the bed. Glancing up I caught sight of my reflection in the glass. A crumpled traveller, sweating heavily, weighed down with notebooks and maps, wearing a sand-coloured colonial shirt, a planter panama and blue suede boots. Overdressed for the occasion I thought. I noticed there were no locks to the door of room No. 8 as I went down to lunch.

‘Where were you born, Wallace?’ I had poured myself some livid green cordial and was helping myself from a platter of reef fish and bananas.

‘On Logea Island, near Kwato.’

‘Really? Some people feel that Kwato was where the nation of Papua New Guinea began.’

‘Certainly it was.’

The legendary island mission station of Kwato gives rise to strong passions and controversial opinions. Many of the most distinguished people in public life in the national government attended this mission school. Wallace often lapsed in and out of pidgin which confused me on occasion. Fervent Christianity was obvious in every sentence.

‘The people of Milne Bay and the islands wantim Word of God, very much they wantim. Charles Abel tried to make a new Papuan society that was Christian and educated for working. He taught us boat-building and metalwork. Mainly discipline and concentration he knock it in their heads. Young people don’t want these things now.’ He dealt the cards to himself all the time he spoke, cultivating chance. Dinah was clearing away the remains of the lunch.

‘Respect for custom certainly seems to be passing away.’

‘Gone. Gone now. Young people are too lazy to keep kastom alive. Prayer is the answer to all problems, Michael. You must pray. Even when they stole my television and wrecked my boat I prayed.’ He began to hum a hymn tune I vaguely recognised.

‘Did you get it back?’

‘No. God didn’t want me to watch any more television. It was a sign. I read and write more now.’ His fatalism appeared to be the final tremors of a departing soul.

‘Is anyone else staying here, Wallace?’

‘Yes. Two government ministers. The Prime Minister has stayed here. The High Commissioner in London, Sir Kina Bona, he stayed here. They all know me. We had hundreds at a celebration not long ago. I built a dancing and picnic area beside the guesthouse. Did you see it? That was before the Englishman betrayed me.’ He had stopped the mindless card-dealing and actually looked at me, animated yet with traces of anger.

‘Who was that? What did he do?’

‘Not now. You go out and look at our beautiful island. We’ll talk tonight.’

‘Fine. I’ll have a look at your dancing area.’

‘Ah, yes. Do that. Not many come here now, but in the future we’ll once more have many people …’ His voice trailed away as if he had lost confidence in the remainder of the sentence.

‘I tried to have a shower but there was no water.’

‘No, that’s right. You must tell us first and then we will turn on the pump. Guests usually shower after meals.’

‘I see. Well, I’m going now. See you later on.’

‘All right. Will you come up to the hospital with me sometime? I need some more tablets. Arthritis they say it is.’ He drifted in and out of this world, bolstering himself with prayer and medicine. I dragged the heavy fly-door open and walked out into the fiery furnace of Samarai.

A coral path shaded by coconut palms and pines encircles the island. It is known as Campbell’s Walk after the Resident Magistrate who constructed it in the early 1900s using local labour from the prison. The transparency of the porcelain-blue water is transformed to a deeper cobalt as it reaches down China Strait and out towards the impenetrable mainland and pearly lips of Milne Bay. Small coves with upturned canoes invite fishermen to dream on the rocks. Fibro shacks nestle into the sides of slight hillocks waiting to be consumed by the exuberant palms, bananas, ferns, frangipani and hibiscus. The sound of an electric train instinctively caused me to search the horizon until common sense prevailed and I realised it was the sighing of the pines on the island of Sariba. Two women were cooking over open fires in a kitchen hut adjacent to a narrow beach where a gleaming new dinghy with outboard motor was knocking on the tide. The picturesque schooners and yawls, sails bellying in the wind, carving like swift blades through the currents, have long since disappeared.

I had been walking for only fifteen minutes and was already halfway around the island. One of the most distinguished visitors to Samarai was the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. He was delayed here in November 1917 while waiting for the cutter-rigged launch Ithaca, which would take him to the Trobriand Islands. His favourite occupation on this walk was to read Swinburne and write his private diary in Polish. It revealed him as a man who had embarked upon a profoundly personal quest.

Malinowski was born in Kraków, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia in partitioned Poland in 1884. The family would spend part of each year in the Tatra mountains in the Polish summer capital, Zakopane, a resort which became a haven for artists and intellectuals. Around 1904 he read Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, a vast collection of myths and magic from around the world, which inspired him to become an anthropologist and writer. Despite frail health he studied mathematics and physics, being awarded the highest academic honours in the Hapsburg Empire – sub auspiciis Imperatoris¹ – when he graduated in philosophy from the Jagiellonian University of Kraków in 1908. The deputy to Emperor Franz Josef personally presented him with a gold-and-diamond cluster ring at an opulent award ceremony in Kraków. In 1910 he moved to London where he began anthropological studies as a research student at the London School of Economics. He met and corresponded with eminent anthropologists at Cambridge, became a staunch Anglophile and is generally considered to have created the modern subject of British social anthropology.

By 1914 he was in Australia at the outbreak of the Great War. Although an Austrian subject and technically an ‘enemy’, he was given financial support to proceed with his work in New Guinea, first at Port Moresby and then on the island of Mailu. He also made two long trips to the Trobriand Islands from 1915 to 1918 where he followed the example set by the great Russian pioneering ‘ethnologist’, Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, and formally introduced the concept of extended contact and methodological fieldwork into anthropology. The complex rituals of yam cultivation, the kula trading ring and, most notoriously, the liberated sexual practices of the Trobriand islanders, gave rise to a series of remarkable publications. His works became seminal studies of their kind, controlled, objective, classical and charming accounts of remote peoples. But his private diaries, written mainly in Polish,¹ reveal a more complex figure, a man riven by doubt and boredom, a hypochondriac besieged by dreams and fantasies, a puritan wrestling lecherous demons nightly under the mosquito net. At a particularly low point he wrote, ‘On the whole my feelings towards the natives are decidedly leaning towards, “Exterminate the brutes.”’² They reveal a man who had embarked on a painful journey of self-revelation. This contradictory character read novels of contained passion such as Vilette, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, classical French works such as Phedre and the rhapsodic Lettres Persanes, even Thackeray’s Vanity Fair in the midst of a Trobriand pagan paradise. On bad days, unable to work, he would leaf through the naughty caricatures in old copies of the French magazine, La Vie Parisienne.

Constructively sublimating his eroticism was difficult. He became infatuated with the owner of The Samarai Hotel, the soon-to-be war widow Flora Gofton, and accused himself of libidinous thoughts:

… on the one hand I write sincere passionate letters to Rozia [his fiancée Elsie Masson], and at the same time am thinking of dirty things à la Casanova.

He felt he was betraying the ‘sacramental love’ of this nurse from Melbourne. In his mind he undressed and fondled the wife of the island doctor, calculating how long it would take him to persuade her into bed. He punished himself with work and exercise. Urging himself to ‘stop chasing skirts’, he cultivated a solitary passion for making tortoiseshell combs for Elsie, spending hours at this odd task, accusing himself at one point of ‘turtleshell mania’. His controversial and explicit work The Sexual Life of Savages in Northwestern Melanesia was published in 1929 with a preface by the sexologist Havelock Ellis. Not altogether surprisingly, it celebrates the magic of pagan love free of Christian guilt.

Despite his scientific training he had a creative temperament, beset by the demons of sensual temptation and metaphysical alienation:

… I have got the tendency to morbid exaggeration … There is a craving in me for the abnormal, the sensational, the queer …

In his diary he wrote descriptions of the Samarai landscape that possess the intensity and heightened feelings of German Expressionist painting:

The evening before: the poisonous verdigris of Sariba lies in the sea, the colours of blazing or phosphorescent magenta with here and there pools of cold blue reflecting pink clouds and the electric green or Saxe-blue sky … the hills shimmering with deep purples and intense cobalt of copper ore … clouds blazing with intense oranges, ochres and pinks.

He wrestled with language and culture like his compatriot and friend Joseph Conrad, a similarly-displaced Pole. Some commentators spoke of him, rather inaccurately, as the Conrad of anthropology. This he never was, possessing more of the Nabokovian ‘precision of poetry and intuition of science’, qualities the great enchanter impressed on his literature students at Cornell. But the prose of the diary, written partly in the Trobriand Islands, does share similar unsettling qualities to those we find in Conrad’s tale Heart of Darkness set in the Congo. Both writers pressure language to its limits. Malinowski was seeking a cultural truth, the resolution of an identity crisis.

‘Bronio’ felt that islands symbolised the imprisonment of existence, yet, ‘At Samarai I felt at home, en pays de connaissance [in the world of knowledge],’ he writes. His fastidious nature was repelled by what he considered the inhospitable, drunken and wretched representatives of European humanity he found on Samarai, how they contrasted so depressingly with the natural beauty surrounding him. The ‘part-civilised’ local villagers he found there offended him equally. He would compulsively circle the island on this path like a caged panther. He sometimes felt he was merely exchanging the prison of self for the prison of cultural research. Yet Malinowski redefined the role of the ethnologist, his work expressing a romantic love for non-European cultures. Here was a man driven to seek his own philosophical nirvana. He subjected his own psyche to as close an objective scrutiny as the Trobriand villagers he studied. One of the great journeys of the modern European mind began on this tiny island of Samarai in 1914.

Campbell’s Walk continued along the tropic shore, past rocks defaced by graffiti at the most easterly point but giving way to views of enigmatic Logea island shaped like an oriental hat, and chains of islets married to the sea by golden rings of sand. Clumps of hibiscus with miniature flowers suspended like drops of blood grew abundantly. Arching over the water, a strangely-shaped frangipani tree emerged from a wall, branches loaded with yellow and cream blossom, a canoe silently passing beneath. Almost hidden among the palms were the police station and the modest hospital, a moloch for patients in the early colonial days.

The heat was monstrous. I envied the village boys swimming among the tropical fish in the crystal water. I leant on a broken rail at the end of the wharf.

‘Those two are my sons,’ a voice behind me said.

I turned to see a tall, elderly ‘whiteskin’ in a baseball cap. The ubiquitous shorts and plasters decorated his legs, flip-flops on leathery feet, but it was the fathomless melancholy in his eyes that struck me. They were the bloodshot eyes of a hounded man given over to alcohol and grief. The lower lids drooped to catch his many tears.

‘Oh! They seem pretty happy. Wish I was a bit younger.’ I smiled pleasantly.

‘Well, I buried my wife a few days ago in the Trobriands. On Kitava. Died of cancer.’

‘I’m terribly sorry.’

‘We took her by boat. That’s mine over there. The Ladua. She was built on Rossel Island in the Louisiades.’ I glanced over at an attractive, wooden trade boat painted ochre and grey.

‘Why didn’t you bury her here on Samarai?’

‘I can see you haven’t been here long! Her soul must go to Tuma, the erotic paradise in the Trobriands where departed spirits dwell. It’s a pláce where you stay beautiful and there’s no old age. You might call it Heaven. You can hear the spirits crying there at night. It’s the mirror of the world.’ People so rarely speak in this way I lapsed into silence for a time, turning over these poetic images.

‘Is sorcery still strong?’

‘It absolutely rules the lives of everyone living on Samarai, particularly the women! Everything is explained by sorcery, particularly losses at sea – people taken by sharks or crocodiles. Dinghies often sink in the savage currents. We lost six drowned over there a few weeks ago, and four over here the other day. They try to take the boats as far as Port Moresby!’

I reflected grimly that all my travels through these infested waters would be without a life jacket or radio.

‘There’s a launch pad for yoyova just along the path. Did you see it?’

‘No. What are yoyova? Strange word.’

‘They’re the flying witches. They spread destruction and flame from their … well, you know! They can change shape into birds or flying-foxes, even appear like a falling star or fire-fly.’

‘But they aren’t real, surely. What’s this launch pad look like?’

‘A frangipani tree sticks out from the wall over the sea. It’s an odd shape. You can’t miss it.’

‘Yes! I did see it.’

‘They represent the malevolent magic of women, my boy. You must’ve experienced that. They’re real women all right. Some have sex with tauva’u, those malicious beings who bring epidemics.’

‘Yes, but what do they do exactly? How do they catch you?’

‘They pounce from a high place and rip out your entrails, eyes and tongue. They snap your bones then they devour the rest of your corpse.’

Those inflamed, leaden eyes might well have witnessed such ghoulish instincts in action.

‘When does this happen?’

‘Usually when there’s a storm. If you smell shit when you’re fishing out at sea, watch out! Then the flying witches will attack by the squadron! They stink!’ he laughed out loud, but without conviction.

‘They’re objects of real terror to these people. It’s no joke because their powers are inherited, carried in their belly. Sometimes the spirit leaves them when they’re asleep and goes marauding.’

I tried to imagine a world where such beings were an everyday part of consciousness. The books of J. R. R. Tolkien approached such a phantasmagoria, but his cruelty was of a different order.

‘Sorcerers don’t have the power they did in the old days!’ and he looked dreamily out to sea.

The boys had begun diving for pebbles and shells.

‘Have you lived here long?’

‘Only about sixty years. I came here when I was five.’

‘Sixty years on tiny Samarai! I think I would have gone mad.’

‘Well, I did. I live over there now. On Ebuma.’

He pointed to a perfect tropical islet surrounded by glittering sand lying a couple of miles offshore.

‘It belongs to the Prime Minister. I’m just the caretaker. My name’s Ernie, by the way.’

I introduced myself … ‘Ebuma looks like everybody’s dream island.’

‘Why don’t you come over for a few weeks? We could talk. I could show you the fishing rats. They come down to the shore at night and dangle their tails in the water as bait. Small crabs catch hold and they whip it quickly round to their mouth and fasten onto the crab. Munch, munch!’

‘You’re having me on, Ernie!’

‘There are strange things around here all right. If you see a swordfish leaping out of the water and going crazy, they have a borer in the brain.’

‘What the hell is that?’

‘A sort of parasite drills into the sword and works its way up the shaft into the brain. The fish goes mad.’

‘What a place! Look, Ernie, I’m going to Kwato tomorrow, so I might call in on the way back.’

‘It’s up to you.’

I could not quite leave this mine of information without a last question.

‘A lot of interesting people came through Samarai, didn’t they? Malinowski, for instance.’

‘Oh, him. You know he used to take opium while he was on the Trobriands? Probably did here too. Hancock, was it Hancock? Can’t remember. Anyway, old Hancock told me about it. He was a little boy when the great man came here. Malinowski criticised him as being a spoilt brat in the famous diary. Payback.’ He chuckled.

‘Come over and see me for a couple of months. We can just eat and drink there … on the beach. I’m working on another boat at the slipway just over there. You could help. Want to earn a few kina?’¹

A boy of about ten was running about behaving strangely, banging the walls of the warehouse with his head, laughing manically and fighting off a group of teenage tormentors. He seemed to have no control over his muscles and flopped about like a rag doll.

‘He’s a bit simple,’ Ernie answered my enquiring glance. Boys were leaping into the water in an endless circle.

‘May see you tomorrow then. Come over for a month.’ He wandered away towards the Ladua.

I was sitting on the edge of the wharf when suddenly I was struck from behind by the flailing fists of the disabled boy. He seemed to have gone completely mad and was making the constricted sounds many damaged people make. It became quite painful and I began to slip towards the water. Some of the local boys rescued me and used the incident to give him another beating. He disappeared round the corner of a shed squealing like an animal.

I crumpled in the shade against the gnarled bole of an ancient rosewood growing near a tiny beach. Fragile canoes with delicately lashed outriggers were drawn up amidst scattered coconuts stranded by the tide, the fibre of the husks trembling in the breeze. Women were leaving the market with bundles and launching their canoes to paddle to nearby hamlets. I drifted off to sleep under a blazing copper sky only to be woken by a lizard crawling down my neck. A mangy dog began timidly to sniff my boot as dusk softly enfolded the island in the wings of a giant moth.

The grass-paved street that led back to the guesthouse was dusted with pink and white frangipani rouged by the last light, the pink trunks of coconut palms leaning over a darkening sea. The lonely bell from the Anglican church marked the hour. Wallace was seated on his usual perch by the table playing patience.

‘So, you’re back. I thought you’d been eaten!’ and he laughed wickedly.

‘No, but I almost ended up under the wharf. That disabled boy tried to push me in.’

‘Oh, he’s harmless, a sweet child really. Tomorrow you go to Kwato. The pastor is coming in the morning to take you over.’

‘Great. Look, I’ve bought a few beers, Wallace. Let’s have one and you can tell me about that Englishman.’

‘Oh, him! Not much to tell.’ He grimaced as if I had prodded a painful injury.

‘He came to Samarai like they all do for a few days, but stayed on. He decided we could restore the guesthouse and went back to England to get the money. Work began and the scaffolding was put up. I built a dancing area in the traditional style.’

‘Yes, I saw it. Beautiful local carving on the posts and boards under the roof.’

‘Beautiful, yes. But I only used it once. He was an alcoholic and ran up debts everywhere.’

‘I had an Irish business partner like that. He drank all the profits.’

‘Well, then he left, disappeared into thin air taking what was left of the money with him. I had huge bills to pay. Electricity, workmen. It broke me.’ I began to understand why the whole building was surrounded by old, bleached scaffolding. Time had stopped for Wallace as it had for Mrs Havisham.

‘Did you tell the police?’ The moment I asked the question I realised it was ridiculous out here.

‘The police? They aren’t interested in things like that.’

‘Yes, but …’

‘He’s being sought in London. He’s thought to be in Thailand.’ The story had the faded, melancholic glamour of a sepia print.

‘He sounds a typical predator. Islands attract them.’

Dinah was preparing dinner and the table had been set with more bright green cordial and chicken, taro and pineapple. I poured a glass of pure, chilled rainwater.

‘Is there any local music?’ Mercifully, I had not heard any recorded music in the villages of East Cape, just distant garamut¹ drumming. The silence was inspiring.

‘Oh, yes! Music! That’s what I should be playing during the dinner.’

Depression had caused him to forget the past pleasures of hosting guests. Standards had slipped following the Englishman’s betrayal years ago.

‘My daughter is a singer. She’s made lots of tapes. I’ll get the recorder.’

He returned with an old recorder that had suffered the ravages of high humidity. The volume was either deafening or scarcely a whisper. Only one speaker was working. The songs were commercial and South Pacific in flavour, but professionally produced. The voice was very musical.

‘She calls herself “Salima”, which in Suau language means “canoe float”.’

‘Does she live on Samarai?’

‘No. She’s in Port Moresby now. All the young people leave the island to find work. My wife left too.’

Again he appeared to be wrestling with terrible dejection and unseen demons. The light went out of his eyes. He returned to playing patience. I battled with the volume control, not wishing to destroy the silence of the island night.

I had almost finished dinner when the two government officials returned from their seminar. They nodded towards me and padded upstairs. I had noticed with surprise their tiny travelling cases on the chairs of their open rooms. They rapidly caught up to my stage of dinner and introduced themselves as Napoleon and Noah. One was from the Sepik, the other from Morobe Province.

‘What’s the subject of your seminar to the councillors?’

‘Standing Orders. We need to explain the basis of the Westminster parliamentary procedure.’

‘My goodness, that must be quite a task.’

They glanced at each other suspiciously, sensing criticism.

‘They’re intelligent men. Serious men. The problem is just one of language. You know there are over eight hundred languages in our country. Explaining the concepts behind the English procedure is most difficult. Old English is a strange language for us. Standing Orders are supposed to make parliamentary business easier but in our culture … more difficult … some concepts mean nothing to these people even in Tok Pisin. Independence came before we understood how the system worked.’

They both looked dark and fierce with an almost excessive masculinity, as if it was my fault, then they smiled. Such extremes.

‘We’re having a party to celebrate the end of our mission tomorrow night at the Women’s House on the hill. You’re invited. And you, too, of course, Wallace!’

He was gathering in the flaccid cards as he thanked them, pleasure struggling up to the surface. The officials rose quite suddenly from the table and headed off to the evening session at the hall. Another hand of cards fluttered down. Wallace turned to me.

‘They always stay here, the ministers. Soon I will redecorate the entire hotel.’

He looked around the flyblown walls, the stump of his arm more than symbolic over the cards.

‘I plan a stylish refurbishment here. God will bring the cruise ships. Thousands of tourists will visit Samarai. You’re just the first of a great wave.’

I switched off his daughter’s music. Mass tourism on the scale of Fiji or Vanuatu is an impossible, even undesirable dream on Samarai. The situation seemed ineffably melancholic.

‘I’m sure you’re right. Well, I think I might go to bed, Wallace. Could you switch on the water pump?’

‘The pastor will be here in the morning. Everything will be fine.’ His voice trailed away as I climbed the bare stairs.

The air in the bedroom was hot and thick. Garish streetlamps lit the window covered by a thin curtain printed with a tropical landscape hung upside down. I switched on the fan and went for a shower. Huge cockroaches crawled up from the drain but fled as the water fell. I pulled the string that promised hot water but with no result. A blessed coolness bathed me, the effect remaining for a full two minutes. I was slightly worried about being unable to lock the door and decided to sleep with my passport and wallet under my pillow.

I had felt insecure about my personal safety and possessions ever since my arrival in Papua New Guinea. There is something in the air that combines with the menacing expression in the male Melanesian face that is unsettling to a European. The dark and brooding sensibility of the men in particular, creates an ever-present feeling of threat. I felt my presence was tolerated but deeply resented. Smiles shielded a deeper animosity; an ancient impenetrable psyche lay behind those dark eyes. I was not wanted here, the past was resented and there was jealousy of my imagined riches. Covetous glances settled on my belongings. Serious health risks could not be avoided. So came upon me the first temptation to abandon the whole enterprise and return to Sydney. This was to become a common feeling I was forced to fight. Only the idyllic beauty of the islands, the complex cultures and the occasional warm personality kept me travelling. Wallace was a truly good man, but what had it brought him? Theft, vandalism and betrayal. I lay on the bed and stared at the fly-spotted ceiling. The lonely Anglican bell marked the passage of European time. A solitary bird was singing, a species that sings after sunset for the entire night.

Whispers below my window woke me. I could see some youths had clustered around the marble obelisk and were looking up at my window and pointing. I remembered the Catholic priest at Alotau. ‘They know where you are, if you’re asleep, he hasn’t locked his door … oh yes.’ They wandered away at length and the memorial was bathed in moonlight.

The story of how this obelisk came to be erected is one of the legendary tales of this Province. It began with the cannibalistic murder in 1901 of one of the first missionaries to come to Eastern New Guinea, the Scotsman, the Reverend James Chalmers. He was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson who described him as ‘an heroic card … a big, stout, wildish-looking man as restless as a volcano and as subject to eruptions’. He was as much an explorer and adventurer as a missionary. The title of his book Work and Adventure in New Guinea (1885) describes his attitude to missionary activity succinctly. On one occasion tracing a journey on a map in a village hut, he noticed that drops of liquid had begun to fall from a bulky package lodged in the roof. Grandmother’s remains were being dried by her grandson. In many parts of the country the corpse was not buried immediately after death but retained by the family, placed on a platform outside the hut, perhaps smoked and stored or the remains given to the children to play with. In this way the relatives clung to the spirit of the dead for some time after the passing of the body. ‘It quite spoiled our dinner,’ Chalmers laconically commented later.

His book is full of bizarre cultural descriptions. One of the most celebrated is that of the ‘man-catcher’. This was a hoop of rattan cane attached to a bamboo pole that concealed a spike. The hoop was slipped over the head or body of the fleeing victim and then suddenly jerked tight. The spike would penetrate the base of the skull or spine, neatly severing the spinal cord. Ernie had told me during our talk on the wharf that Chalmers carried a Bible under one arm and a shotgun under the other as the instruments of conversion. Certainly not your average missionary, more an aggressive soldier of Christ unwittingly preparing the ground for the arrival of the colonial service.

The charismatic Chalmers was known as ‘Tamate’ by the people of Rarotonga. He was a fine figure of a Victorian gentleman and possessed a head as noble as that of the composer Brahms. Both his formidable wives succumbed to malaria. He writes of having to exhibit his chest to the warriors on numerous occasions each day. One friendly chief offered his wife a piece of human breast at a feast, declaring it a highly-prized delicacy. Chalmers wryly observed that this was the end of his chest exhibitions in that part of the country.

In 1901 the London Missionary Society schooner Niue set sail along the coast of the Gulf of Papua from Daru. It anchored off the ironically named Risk Point on Goaribari Island near the mouth of the River Omati. This area was well known as one of the most dangerous parts of New Guinea, an area of torrid mudflats and swamp crawling with tiny crabs and fierce cannibals. Early on the morning of 8 April some warriors with faces and shaven heads painted scarlet, their eyes ringed in black, paddled out to the vessel in a fleet of canoes and persuaded a landing party to come ashore. The unarmed Chalmers and his young and inexperienced assistant Oliver Tomkins, together with ten mission students from Kiwai Island and a tribal chief, landed from the whaleboat in a creek close to the village of Dopima. Chalmers had attempted to convince Tomkins to stay on board but the intrepid youth would have none of it. The warriors trembled and giggled with excitement, their cassowary plumes and long tails of grass swishing and shivering in anticipation. The Europeans entered the enormous dubu or men’s longhouse, all six hundred feet of it, and greeted the occupants. The air of the long, gloomy tube was thick with suffocating smoke and heavy with acrid odours. Rows of enemy skulls by the hundreds were arranged on shelves and racks, some fixed to macabre carved figures hanging from the roof.

The visitors were immediately struck from behind with stone clubs, and fell senseless to the floor. Tomkins managed to escape as far as the beach but was brought down with spears. This was the signal for a general massacre. Chalmers was stabbed with a cassowary dagger and his head was immediately cut off. Tomkins and the rest of the party of young mission boys suffered the same fate. The bodies were cut up and the pieces given to the women to cook. The flesh was mixed with sago to produce a monstrous stew and eaten the same day. The heads were divided among various individuals and quickly concealed from view. Ironically, the party who had expected to return to the schooner for breakfast had unexpectedly become breakfast. The Niue meanwhile had been boarded by a canoe raiding party and looted. The Captain managed to get under way and brought the grisly news of the slaughter to the wretched settlement of Daru.

After twenty-five years working among the ‘skull-hunters’, it is surprising that Chalmers allowed himself to be fooled. He was famous for possessing an infallible instinct for reading primitive moods and knowing when to leave. The precise reason for the butchery is unknown but there is speculation that he insisted on visiting in the middle of a ceremony that was forbidden to outsiders.

That this was an unprovoked cannibal murder rather than a revenge killing was clear. A punitive expedition was mounted three weeks later from Port Moresby. When the Government steam-yacht Merrie England (a most versatile vessel that reportedly could ‘go anywhere and do anything’) finally left Goaribari, some twenty-four warriors lay dead, many wounded and all the sacred men’s longhouses on fire. But the heads of Chalmers and Oliver had not yet been recovered.

A year or so later, a young lawyer, Christopher Robinson, was appointed Chief Justice and was acting as Governor of the Possession. He decided to go to Goaribari in one of the pretty gilded cabins of the steamer, retrieve the heads and capture the murderers for trial. He had learned that in the matter of identification of skulls, those that had artificial noses attached were from people who had died from natural causes; those skulls without noses had been killed, the noses bitten off by the killers. As fate had it, the party he assembled were chronically inexperienced in dealing with villagers or had only recently arrived in New Guinea.

In April 1903 the Merrie England once more anchored off the cannibal shores of Goaribari. Some of the highly excitable local people were enticed aboard from their canoes with trinkets and trade goods. The murderers were known to be among them. The ‘grand plan’ was that the constabulary would grab them upon a given signal. The plan went horribly wrong. Wild fights erupted all over the deck. The red-painted warriors remaining in the canoes attacked the ship with arrows which drew rifle fire from anyone on board who could lift a weapon. Nearly all lost control in the ensuing panic and blazed away at everything that moved on the water. One, a letter copyist, collapsed in a fit of shrieking hysterics at the sight of a man being shot. An unknown number of the inhabitants of Goaribari were killed.

The facts of the case were instantly sensationalised and exaggerated by an Australian press starved for scandal. The missionary from Kwato, Charles Abel, demanded a Royal Commission to investigate the circumstances of the reprisal raid. Robinson was vilified with sulphuric slander and offered up for immolation. The innocent steamer Merrie England was absurdly compared to the infamous Australian ‘black-birder’,¹ the slaving brig Karl, owned by the Irish physician, Dr James Murray. Robinson was summoned to Sydney and a junior magistrate appointed in his place as Governor. Like Timon of Athens he was now abandoned by all his false friends. He took the only course open to a gentleman of honour in those days. While the occupants of Government House in Port Moresby were peacefully sleeping, he wrote his account of the incident, accepting full responsibility for the actions at Goaribari. He then took his revolver, walked out to the base of the flagstaff in the moonlight and blew out his brains over the withered grass. He was thirty-two.

The marble obelisk, ghostly in the silver moonlight below my window at Samarai, commemorates this sad saga. Part of the inscription reads:

His aim was to make New Guinea a good country for white men. This stone was set up by the men of New Guinea in recognition of the services of a man, who was as well meaning as he was unfortunate, and as kindly as he was courageous.

The monument is now considered to be politically incorrect and the plan is to tear it down.

¹Pidgin for ‘launch’.

¹‘Good afternoon!’

¹‘There you are!’

¹This Latin phrase means ‘Under the Emperor’s Seal’. It was the highest academic honour in the Hapsburg Empire and only one or two were awarded in any one year. The recipient was given a jewelled gold ring carrying the Emperor’s seal which was conferred at a grand ceremony by a representative of the Emperor. Malinowski lost his ring.

¹On the inside front cover of the black notebook he inscribed in blue-grey ink: ‘A diary in the strict sense of the term,’ and immediately beneath: ‘Day by day without exception I shall record the events of my life in chronological order. Every day an account of the preceding: a mirror of the events, a moral evaluation, location of the mainsprings of my life, a plan for the next day.’ And beneath that: ‘The overall plan depends above all on my state of health. At present, if I am strong enough, I must devote myself to my work, to being faithful to my fiancée, and to the goal of adding depth to my life as well as to my work.’ The first entry, on page one, is ‘Samarai 10.11.17’ (quoted from Michael W. Young’s as yet unpublished biography of Malinowski).

²Italics written in English and taken from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

¹The currency in use in Papua New Guinea. At current rates (2002), 1 kina equals about 25 pence.

¹The garamut is a type of slit drum commonly used in the islands. The carrying power of this simple instrument is extraordinary in the still air of tropical nights.

¹A ‘black-birder’ was a slave ship or the captain of one that forcibly abducted men from island villages for labour on the Queensland or Melanesian plantations. Dr Murray and his brig, the Karl, were notorious in South Pacific waters for sensational cruelty and murder in their pursuit of profit through slavery.

6. ‘Mr Hallows Plays No Cricket. He’s Leaving on the Next Boat.’

CHARLES ABEL

Letter from Kwato Mission to

his sons studying at Cambridge

My early morning walk around Samarai unveiled the islands of China Strait floating on glass, filtered through magenta gauze. Perfect silence reigned apart from the occasional fish breaking through the mirrored surface of the sea. The air was still and almost cool, the grass streets lightly scented with frangipani blossom. Scavenging dogs held their tails between their legs and cringed away from a lone fisherman heading towards the beach. Local children were screaming with joy as they entered the school in a crocodile line. I watched until lessons began; their enthusiasm and sense of mischief was electric. Papua New Guinea is a republic of children.

Wallace did not look too happy at breakfast. ‘I don’t sleep well these days. And then there is my arthritis. You will come down to the hospital with me, won’t you?’

‘Of course, but aren’t we going to Kwato today?’

‘Yes. I asked the pastor to come before lunch. His assistant will get a dinghy for you. But I won’t be coming. I’ve got accounts and letters to settle.’

I concealed my disappointment.

‘I suppose you don’t want the flying witches to get you!’

He suddenly became grave and serious. ‘If you fear the witches they have power over you. If not, they can’t touch you. I don’t fear them, Mr Michael.’ His tone indicated I had overstepped an invisible line.

‘Strange lights appear above the water at night and witches can kaikai you. On moonlit nights on Kwato, the spirit of Charles Abel appears. Ask the pastor about it.’

I changed the subject slightly. ‘Did your grandfather ever meet the Reverend James Chalmers?’

‘I’m not sure, but I do know after Chalmers was killed and eaten they tried to cook his boots! Ha! Ha! What do you think of that? Yes, the cannibals thought they were part of his feet. They boiled them for days but never could get them tender enough!’

‘Then, he must’ve known Charles Abel.’

‘Yes, we knew all the Abels. I was born on Kwato remember. I knew his son Cecil Abel. He was a good man. At Wagawaga Charles would walk up and down the beach at night praying in the moonlight. He was in strong communion with God.’

The cards were produced and the flight from reality began again. The government ministers came down for breakfast, faces transformed by friendly smiles. They ate quickly and headed off for the final day of the seminar.

‘Don’t forget the party tonight, Michael.’

‘Certainly not.’

‘We’ll send a councillor down to guide you.’

I ate a few more slices of sweet pineapple and perfumed paw-paw. The sun was up and the room heating slowly. The torpor of the day had already begun to set in.

The early European settlement of New Guinea is the scarcely credible story of competing missionary teachers of various denominations carving up the country – Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Evangelicals of the London Missionary Society (LMS), Methodists, Barmen of the Rhenish Mission, Anglicans, Pietists, Baptists, Protestants and Seventh Day Adventists. On first contact the indigenous islanders were described by both colonisers and missionaries as indolent, mendacious, ‘intractable little cannibals’, loathsome and depraved, filthy, ‘truculent mannikins’, sensual, lazy, and, in summa, ‘hopeless little degenerates’ – to list some of the more insulting labels assembled by the Governor, Sir Hubert Murray, in his book Papua or British New Guinea. The primary objective of missionaries was to save the endangered souls of the ‘natives’ from perdition and render them European in the shortest possible time.

The first LMS station had been established in 1871 on islands in the Torres Strait by the Reverend Samuel MacFarlane. By 1877 two local missionaries from the Loyalty Islands had established a presence on Logea Island in China Strait close to Samarai. Here the vividly-painted inhabitants impaled skulls on spears at the prows of their outrigger canoes. This was a region of enthusiastic cannibals, and the missionaries commanded respect often by force of character alone. They were also respected for their powerful possessions, superior technology and items they wished to trade. The evolution of what could be called ‘Oceanic Christianity’ was a slow process.

The following year Samarai was ‘purchased’ by MacFarlane from the local people as the LMS head station for 3s 6d. Parts of the island were cleared, houses and vegetable gardens established. The LMS flag of the dove and olive branch now flew alongside the Union Jack. Mission stations inevitably became part of the colonial structure. Through education of the mind and spirit, missionaries innocently prepared local people to accept European values, oiling the wheels of understanding during the imposition of European colonial bureaucracies. But there was a terrible price to be paid in loss of life.

Cultural observations taxed the Victorian mind and weird snobberies were noted with horror by the missionaries. The cannibals in the Milne Bay region considered themselves above their neighbours in the nearby D’Entrecasteaux Group, deploring that on those islands they ate every part

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