Attack on the Black Cat Track. Max Carmichael
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company of a single guide.
A major problem for a viable Black Cat Track trekking industry was that the original track was too tough. The steepness of the mountain sides, the numerous landslides and dangerous river crossings severely limited the category of trekker able to negotiate the track to the younger, extremely fit trekker. In an effort to make the track accessible to a wider clientele base, most tour operators began to use an alternative route, known as Skin Diwai, or ‘War Track’. This route avoids some of the most geographically dangerous sections of the original Black Cat Track, and commences about an hour’s drive from Wau at a place known as Biaweng. From this start point the track initially pushes through forests of kunai grass, following an ever upward trajectory, before entering dense jungle. It then becomes a testing pathway, climbing through the jungle, crossing a clearing called Banis Donki, then re-entering the jungle and climbing to a final zenith of just over 2000 metres above sea level. Then it is down and on to the village of Skin Diwai, the total distance covered at this stage being approximately eighteen kilometres.
Most trekkers stay overnight at Skin Diwai, before travelling on down the mountain side a further fourteen kilometres to the village of Godogasul. After Godogasul the track crosses the valley floor to the next village, Mubo, a further five kilometres. Then it’s uphill again for six kilometres to New Camp. After climbing a lower mountain range of a mere 800 odd metres above sea level, the next stop is eight kilometres on, at the village of Komiatum. From here the track crosses the coastal plain, and after a further eight kilometres finally reaches its end at the village of Salamaua. On some treks this last stage is travelled by raft along the San Francisco River, allowing the trekker to arrive in style on the Salamaua beach.
This was, in fact, the plan for the September 2013 trek. However, regardless of the means of travel for the last leg, it will have taken the trekker five to six days to complete the whole journey. The stages of the track are manageable, but it is certainly a journey that is not for the faint hearted, nor the inexperienced bushwalker.
Aside from the natural beauty of the track and the World War II history, a major tourist attraction is the local people and their culture. While generally friendly, the people of the Black Cat Track are as raw and as tough as the place where they live. By any standard they are desperately poor. They follow a subsistence lifestyle, where the major daily activities are maintaining their village huts, hunting and fishing, tending native vegetable gardens and the care of livestock, particularly pigs. Many of them lack a basic education and their contact with the world beyond their traditional lands is limited. In many ways, life along the Black Cat Track resembles a lost Eden and visiting there is to travel back through the ages to another time. The people have a complex belief system, where the physical and the spiritual worlds are inexorably, often magically, intertwined. The health and wellbeing of the community is seen as dependent upon respect being paid to the spirits and totems of the land. This belief system has often led to complications in addressing seemingly trivial disputes, particularly if witchcraft is suspected to be at play — for an accused witch or sorcerer, the consequences may well be fatal.
Most resources held within the community are shared, with the main asset of prime cultural importance being the land. The traditional association of each tribe or clan to a particular area of the land is extremely complex and stretches back through millennia. Traditional ownership of that land extends to all that lives or grows upon the land — people, domestic and wild animals and birds, crops and natural flora are all subject to this proprietorship, and this association is jealously guarded.
At the Wau end of the track the land is owned by the Biangai people, while at the Salamaua end the land is owned by the Bong people. However, the largest tract of traditional lands crossed by the track is situated between the Biangai and Bong lands and is owned by the Iwal people. In this the Black Cat Track itself is a complicating factor, as various points of it crosses these traditional tribal lands. Visitors, including trekking parties moving along the track, are obliged to acknowledge the traditional owners, a process that generally includes payment for the right to cross their lands. Attempts to ignore this process do not go unchallenged.
To some outsiders the traditional communities along the track may appear to be wild and lawless. This is not the case. The people of the Black Cat Track are subject to the same laws and regulations as every other citizen of PNG. However, powerful local social mores are enforced by a system of traditional law that, so far as the local people are concerned, takes precedence over the modern laws and regulations of the PNG National Government and the local Morobe Province Council. The traditional law is harsh and often deadly, but it has maintained order of a kind that the local people see as appropriate. Based on ‘payback’ and revenge, traditional laws allow the wronged party to seek retribution through violence or payment of an appropriate kind. Nor is the perpetrator of a crime held to be the only person responsible or liable to compensate the victim. Close relatives and even friends of the perpetrator may also be held to account, often with tragic results. Sometimes retribution breeds further retaliation, and blood feuds lasting for decades have resulted from the application of the law of payback. To the traditional owners of these lands every person within their boundaries is subject to their law. This is not a stance with which PNG authorities or the tour operators concur. However, common sense would suggest that a visitor should observe local custom in an area where the nearest law enforcement agency is the traditional community.
It was this dangerous and exotic world that in 2013 eight middle-aged Australian men chose to visit. Pete Stevens, Glen Reiss, Jon Hill, Zoltan Maklary, Steven Ward, Rod Clarke, Gary Essex and Nick Bennett, each for his own particular reason, had committed to walk the Black Cat Track. As a technically difficult trek, the Black Cat Track presented these men with an additional physical trial, as their ages ranged from forty-six to sixty-seven, slightly older than the optimum age for tackling such a challenge.
Aside from the desire to trek the Black Cat Track, the group had much in common. Unlike the people of the culture they planned to visit, they were educated, had secure well-paid employment, and they enjoyed a relatively high standard of living. They also shared a keen interest in military history, particularly of the World War II campaigns in New Guinea. However, for all that, they were a diverse group. Two lived in north Queensland, the other six in Victoria. Five of the men had a background of military service, another in agriculture and farm management. One was an accountant and one a former policeman-turned-life-coach. Six of the group had some experience in trekking, but only one of these, Pete Stevens, had any first-hand knowledge of the Black Cat Track.
A nuggetty sixty-two-year-old with a no-nonsense attitude and a determination to get things done, Pete Stevens had been born in the UK but spent the first ten years of his life in Malaysia, where his father was serving as an Army officer. Later, the family migrated to Australia, living in the Adelaide suburb of Netherby. In 1970, after completing secondary school, he entered the Royal Military College Duntroon. During his RMC training in 1972, along with a number of his classmates, Pete walked the Black Cat Track as an adventurous training activity. He remembers the trek as ‘very wild, very adventurous, but probably not as dangerous as it is now’.
Graduating in 1973, Pete was allotted to the Royal Australian Infantry Corps. During a twenty-year career he served in a variety of regimental and staff appointments, including a period of study in the UK at the Royal Military College Shrivenham. In 1993, at the rank of Major, he accepted a voluntary redundancy package and for the next three years worked in a variety of civilian occupations.
Later, Pete secured a position as a Test Engineer at Australian Defence Industries in Bendigo, where he worked on the Bushmaster vehicles made famous during Australia’s commitment to Afghanistan. He then went on to work in various Melbourne-based companies in the research and development field, and as a project manager and consultant. During that time he met and worked with Jon Hill, Glen Reiss and Zoltan Maklary. At around the same time he met and befriended Rod Clarke, who was a member of the same swimming club as Pete’s wife, Dee. In 2010, along with Jon Hill, Pete had walked the Kokoda Track, an experience that had left him with a thirst for more:
Doing the Black Cat was another adventure, I suppose. I’d done Kokoda, a tick in the box, and the fact that Jon and I had done it reasonably, not easily mind, it’s an arduous walk, but we were looking for something a little bit more challenging, something a little bit more remote