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