Terra Cognita: Return to New Guinea

terra cognita: Return to New Guinea

by Chuck McAllister

Smashwords edition

Text and cover art copyright 2018 by Chuck McAllister

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License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Acknowledgments

Thanks, as always, to the people who read through early drafts of this and my other projects, most especially to John Kuzel, whose insights and suggestions have always given me a new way of looking at things. Sincere thanks also to the people of Papua New Guinea, who provided the impetus for this journey, and made it as much a reunion as an adventure.

Table of Contents

Preface

MAPS

The Southwest Pacific

Papua New Guinea

The Sepik River

1 Coming Home

2 Mendi

3 Kutubu

4 The Boatman’s House

5 Fiowaga

6 Parting Company

7 The Sepik Hustle

8 Kanduanum

9 Prophylaxis

10 Waitman

11 River Harpies

12 The Master Carver

13 Missionaries

14 Upriver

15 A Sepik Goodbye

16 Uncle Chahlee

17 Simbrangu

18 The Rita

19 Flying Foxes and Strangling Figs

20 The Sexy Boys

21 Peter and Rose

22 Ondino Primary School

23 The School in the Jungle

24 The Mummies of Aseki

25 Epilogue

About the author

More by Chuck McAllister

Also by Chuck McAllister

Paradise: Solo across New Guinea

Finding Home:

An American’s Journey of Life and Love in the West Indies

Preface

This is the third book I’ve written based on my travels, and chronologically it also belongs third in line, for the time being. The first of my memoirs to see the light of day, Paradise (an account of my first trip across Papua New Guinea), in fact covers a period in my life immediately following the narrative of Finding Home, which was the second book to reach publication. Finding Home is, for all intents and purposes, the opening chapter in the narrative of my life and travels—so far. In the best of all worlds, it may not matter in which order the stories are taken.

Having said that, I had nearly finished the first draft of this book before it occurred to me that I had been writing almost exclusively, though unwittingly, for an audience that had read, and remembered, the story told in Paradise. Spotting my error, I went back and added the sort of history, setting, and backstory that would render this book comprehensible on its own terms. For readers who have already availed themselves of Paradise, there may be a ring of familiarity here and there—I have tried to give it a fresh face, but a writer is seldom the best judge of his or her own work, so I am left to offer my gratitude that you have decided to take the chance, and a wish that you may enjoy the journey as much as I did in putting it down on paper.

CM, January 2018

The Southwest Pacific

Papua New Guinea

The Sepik River

1 Coming Home

No one go dat way anymore, the man was telling me, De road too bad.

I was, I admit, surprised to hear it. I had been this way ten years earlier, when the oil company had only just put this road through—150 km (93 miles) of it, from the mountain trading post of Mendi all the way down to the Chevron landing strip at the northwest end of Lake Kutubu. It was a dirt road back then too, but wide—wide enough for two huge excavation trucks to pass one another—and smoothly graded, well kept. Chevron needed the road to bring in equipment and workers, but it had also been a concession to the tribal landholders—they had demanded schools, clinics, and a road good enough to get them into town faster than the old three-days’ walk.

In case you don’t already know it, we’re talking about the South Pacific island-nation of Papua New Guinea, at a time when almost half the population was still living a subsistence lifestyle—farming their own crops with nothing but digging sticks, raising a few pigs, and hunting whatever provender they could garner from the forest with a bow and arrow. Few roads connected any place with anyplace else—travel was accomplished on foot, by canoe, or by small airplane. Most people lived in villages of bamboo or grass houses thatched with hay or palm leaves—no electricity, no running water, no modern media—and their greatest loyalty was not to the nation but to their own tightly-knit clan. There were more than 700 distinct languages spoken across the island—something like forty percent of the known languages on Earth—and intertribal aggression, or at least antipathy, was a constant theme in the development of their nascent national identity. Even though Christian missionaries had been giving it their best shot for almost a century, many villagers still attended church services bedecked in face paint, feathered headdresses, and beating tom-toms. A visitor like me—white, Western, and festooned with modern garb and gizmos—was about as familiar to the average village child as a man from Mars.

During my first visit in 1994, I had wondered how the local inhabitants would bear up under the influence of modern conveniences. After they had seen the big rigs, and the jet planes, and the helicopters; after they had ridden the van into town; after some of them had begun earning money digging ditches or ferrying workers across the lake in their company-granted motorboats. After their kids had gotten used to wearing hand-me-down T-shirts from Goodwill and swigging the occasional bottle of Coca Cola. I had come to New Guinea out of curiosity, to see these people and their way of life before the modern world overtook them. And in July of 1994 the modern world had only just knocked this road through the jungle and connected them with a trading post at one end and a multinational oil drilling operation at the other.

For the uninitiated, New Guinea is the very large tropical island just a few kilometers north of Australia, due east of Indonesia and a little southeast of the Philippines. Archaeological evidence suggests that humans have been living there for at least 40,000 years—a few millennia longer than Homo sapiens has been living in Europe, for example. The rising waters at the conclusion of the last Ice Age left them isolated for most of the past 15,000 years, and though they had somehow descended from Asian stock, their physical exterior—dark skin, broad noses, and black, tightly-curled hair—left them looking altogether more like West Africans than anyone else—the Portuguese named the island New Guinea precisely because of its tropical ambience and African-looking people.

These folk had never harnessed animals for agriculture, apart from keeping pigs for meat—so there were never horses to draw plows or cows or goats to give milk. They had never learned to smelt metal, and even pottery was a skill mastered by only a handful of tribes scattered across the island. The wheel was unknown, as was written language. Over the past five-hundred years there had been occasional visits by sailing ships and Asian traders in search of pearl shells or bird skins, but in all that time no foreign power had managed to establish a substantial foothold on the island—both the environment and the people were just too hostile. All of this remained true right up until the Second World War, when the Japanese invaded New Guinea in preparation for an all-out attack on Australia. Because of this, many New Guineans became acquainted with the wheel at the same time they learned about radio, airplanes, land mines, and nylon string. The war was a blur of weird introductions that ended as swiftly and inexplicably as it had begun. And then the Twentieth Century began trickling back in the late 1950s, when the Australian government starting thinking about getting the island ready for self-government and the inevitable intrusions of the modern world.

Looked at this way, it can be seen that, for the vast majority of the New Guinean population, Western civilization—white people, automobiles, electricity, and social cohesion—was a very recent introduction. I had New Guinean friends whose fathers were the first people in the village to come face to face with white men, while their grandfathers stood off in the distance, worried that the strangers might in fact be ancestors returned from the grave. Such stories sound like adventurers’ yarns, but they were the real thing. I met a few old-timers who could accurately and truthfully recount the experience of eating human flesh when they were children in the 1950s.

My first visit in 1994—travelling solo, taking my chances among people who had no more familiarity with the situation than I had—had been a life-altering experience. Two months of living alongside the people of New Guinea changed my perspective on the human condition in ways that have colored and informed my life ever since. And ten years later I decided to go back.

Ten Years Previous

Returning to old haunts is a risky business, if what you’re hoping to accomplish is to reconnect with the people and places that made you who you are. And New Guinea had been transformative for me in more ways than one. I had, on my first visit, a lot on my mind, not least of which was a marriage that had ended badly. The deterioration of my nuptial bond had been slow and quiet, but the final death throes were loud and humiliating, and by the time it was over I no longer knew who I was or what I was doing with my life. I had dreamt of a trip to New Guinea since high school; as my divorce became inevitable I escaped to New Guinea in an attempt to clear my head and divert my attention to more immediate concerns—such as where I would sleep each night, how I would feed myself, and to keep a watchful eye against malaria, hypothermia, and crocodiles. For a while, this diversion did the trick.

That first trip had been a solo effort, inasmuch as I knew no one upon my arrival, and had nothing apart from a rough itinerary and only the vaguest excuse for a timetable. There was only one New Guinea guidebook on the market, and I had used it to identify several points of interest, but it was a vast country (about 1,000 km, or 700 miles, east to west), and connecting the dots was up to me; there were no roads linking the capital (Port Moresby) to anywhere else on the island.

My first goals upon arrival were to obtain a series of detailed topographic maps, and to acquaint myself with the pilots back at the airfield. Many of them were missionaries, or flying for them, and a day or two spent in their company landed me my first hop into the mountains, to a faded gold-mining town called Wau. From there, the next two months took on a life of their own, through a combination of chance encounters and informed guesswork. Somehow, it all worked out.

Wau was the largest town in the mountains of Morobe Province, a region home to a tribe of fierce, formerly headhunting raiders known to their enemies as the Kukukuku. Among themselves they were the Anga, which meant ‘the people,’ and by the time I got there they had settled down to growing coffee, which was a lucrative crop sold mainly to Australia and Japan. The Anga were not artists or body-painters, and their homes did not have the noble grandeur of, say, the Tongkonan built by the tribes of Sulawesi, but they had the mummies of their war dead perched on limestone cliffs overlooking their settlements, and this was enough to attract my attention. I was also an entomologist (a bug scientist, to put it concisely, specializing in dragonflies), and there were sure to be undiscovered species lurking in New Guinea’s rainforests, so the combination of scientific discovery, anthropological nosiness, and a desire for escape became the foundation of my journey.

From Wau I hitched a lift with a mail plane to the Anga village of Aseki, and after visiting the mummies I took whatever ride I could find into the New Guinea Highlands, along what was, at the time, the only paved road worthy of the name ‘highway,’ through settlement after settlement—Kainantu, Goroka, Asaro, and Kundiawa. I made a detour to hike solo up Mount Wilhelm, Papua New Guinea’s highest mountain, with the hope of collecting undiscovered dragonflies in the Pindaunde Lakes, and nearly died of hypothermia during the ascent. I had, in climbing the mountain, made several rookie mistakes, and though I survived the experience, the consequences were dire and my health was never the same afterwards. I recuperated a few days in Mt. Hagen before pressing on to Lake Kutubu, with a stopover in Mendi, then on to Tari and Koroba. Along the way I met a few missionaries, of various persuasions and temperaments, and made some lasting friendships with New Guinean school teachers with whom I corresponded for years after I returned to the States.

From Tari I found a plane that took me via the Star Mountains to a mission station on the banks of the mighty Sepik River. I hired a local guide to take me upriver as far as a village called Swagup, where the religious cult centered on insect imagery, and from there spent the next two weeks travelling downriver through the villages of Ambunti, Korogo, Aibom, Chambri, Kaminabit, Mindimbit, Tambanum, and ending at the trading post of Angoram. The Sepik people are wood-carvers, renowned for their dance masks, war shields, ritual figures, and pottery. I became enchanted by their work, and during the visit loaded the boat with enough artifacts to warrant an additional airline ticket to get everything home.

The last thing I did on that first trip was to catch a flight back into the mountains, to attend the annual Highlands Cultural Festival, where tens of thousands of people from tribes all across the island gathered to dress in their traditional finery and dance their ritual dances before a panel of judges. It was a chance to get a taste of New Guinea’s cultural diversity in one three-day binge, and it was time well spent. A day or two later I was on a plane bound for Brisbane, and from there to Auckland, Los Angeles, and back to New York. And three days later I began my new life as a public school science teacher.

The journey had been an emotional one. My pending divorce was never far from my mind, and my journal-writing was peppered with rants against my former spouse, her expectations and recent behavior. In the end I probably enjoyed New Guinea about half as much as I might have, so whatever shortcomings I found in the country would have to take that into account. On the other hand, my anger and discontentment also made me reckless, and there is every possibility that I was daily taking chances that otherwise would have seemed unnecessary. I certainly wouldn’t have travelled, dined, or slept in the same manner if there had been even one American companion by my side—the journey I took would have been inconceivable with any of my friends or family in tow. Most people simply would not have done it the way I did and, all things considered, I am glad to have gone through the experience alone.

Ten Years On

Practically out of nowhere, in the fall of 2003 I began to hanker for a return visit. I can’t rightly say what prompted it. It was just a feeling that crept over me. Somewhere around my eighth or ninth year teaching, I decided that New Guinea deserved another go. And I began writing letters to the old schoolteacher friends, to let them know I was coming back. It was still, in those days, all done by post—email had not, within PNG, reached beyond one or two major towns. (Dear Charles, began one piece of return correspondence, I received your letter dated 3rd September 2003 on the 15th April 2004…) So began a series of six-month waits for written responses bearing Bird-of-Paradise postage stamps and hard-to-read handwriting, that eventually resulted in my reconvening in Port Moresby with one of my friends from the first trip, a native-born teacher named Ikewa.

I first met Ikewa when we were both staying in a guesthouse in the trading-post town of Mendi, in PNG’s Southern Highlands Province. At the time he was headmaster of a government school in a tiny mountain hamlet called Pimaga (near Orokana, which is easier to find on a map). Back then I gauged him to be about forty-two years old to my thirty-one, but in fact he was almost precisely my age—his middle-aged paunch and black wooly