Beyond the Coral Sea: Travels in the Old Empires of the South-West Pacific. Michael Moran
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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