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  Leaving the market that day, I joined an enormous crowd gathered around the entrance of a dingy Chinese trade store. Young and old alike were pressed together, their mouths forming solemn Os as they craned their necks upward. Their faces were filled with amazement. After fighting my way through the crowd I discovered what transfixed them—television had just come to Port Moresby.

  The twentieth century appeared to be catching up with New Guinea. But Port Moresby was a long way from Mt Albert Edward. This high, isolated mountain was the place where I hoped to encounter the timeless New Guinea of my dreams. I had not seen the mountain when I first arrived, for smoke from the innumerable dry-season fires had obscured it. It remained hidden until dawn on the very morning I was to fly to its base.

  TWO

  The fear of heaven

  Flatness trains the Australian eye not to stray far above the horizon, so while I stood in the dawn light at the airport, I missed the massif at first. The jagged, dark green peaks of the Owen Stanley Range receded away to the north, their summits becoming increasingly obscured in dawn-tinged cloud. Through a trick of the atmosphere, a pale blue band of sky appeared to rise over the mist. For some reason my eye made an effort to search above this point—and met with a seemingly impossible illusion. There, as if floating, detached above all, were two further peaks. Not dark green these, but golden and purple from the frigid grassland and jagged rock crowning their summit. I fancied that a lost ice age, a new world, beckoned to me from those two islands in the sky. The furthest, Mt Albert Edward, was my destination.

  My journey to Papua New Guinea had been made possible by Dr Geoffrey Hope, a palaeo-botanist. At that time he was almost like a god to me. He spoke Pidgin fluently, he had climbed to the Carstensz Glacier in Irian Jaya ten years previously, and knew more about New Guinea than anyone else I had met. A lecturer in geography at the Australian National University, Geoff is one of the most inspiring of all teachers. A real adventurer, he creates irresistible opportunities for students to travel with him to remote places.

  Geoff was mounting an expedition to Kosipe, below Mt Albert Edward, because some ancient stone axes had been unearthed there some years before. He thought that sediments in the region might hold fossil pollen which would give some idea of long-term climate and vegetation change there, as well as, perhaps, some idea of the early human impacts on the environment.

  On that first trip, Geoff was accompanied by his partner, Bren Wetherstone; their infant son, Julian; Geoff's mother, Penelope; and his father, Alec. I was also in awe of Geoff's father, better known as A. D. Hope. He wrote the finest modern poetry I had ever read. Strangely, I thought, this great man would actually talk to me, a mere student!

  Penelope Hope, Geoff's mother, had grown up in the Gulf of Papua, where her father was a trader. She knew the country well, and told me much of her experiences as a child. For her, this was to be a last trip of reminiscence.

  With infants and the elderly, however, it was hardly a party that satisfied my desire to undertake life-and-death adventure in a remote New Guinea jungle. The expedition, was, though, to give me experiences I could never repeat. For through it I saw a little of the taim bilong masta—the time when white men ruled New Guinea. I look back on it now as an invaluable peek at the way Papua New Guinea used to be.

  A. D. Hope seemed to be quite interested in our work, and was particularly fascinated with the small animals we caught.

  One day, I trapped a small carnivorous marsupial, a relative of the Australian Antechinus. A. D. Hope was ecstatic. He questioned me intensively about the beast and its sexual habits, before explaining that his most recent book of poems was called Antechinus. The work had the sex lives of these strange marsupials as a major theme. Their reproductive pattern is unusual in that males live only eleven months, while females can live years. The last month of the life of the males is spent in search of sexual fulfilment, an exercise so strenuous that it inevitably leads to their death. Later I received a copy of Antechinus, beautifully inscribed by Hope in celebration of our time spent peering at a tiny marsupial.

  Our plan was to fly Hopes junior, senior and middle-aged to Kosipe, a Catholic mission station at the base of the mountain. Ken Aplin (a fellow student) and I were to be dropped off at Woitape, some fifteen kilometres away, to walk the rest of the way in.

  Sometimes walking has advantages over flying, for it gives an entirely different feel for the context of the place you are visiting. The track from Woitape to Kosipe was a good one, used for tractor access. Following it, we wound our way for five hours through forest and regrowth. Someone accustomed to the open forests of Australia begins to feel hemmed in on such a track, for the vegetation is dense, blocking out vistas. But finally a splendid and entirely unexpected scene opened before us.

  The mission station at Kosipe lies in an exquisite mountain valley, behind which rises, in tier after tier, majestic Mt Albert Edward. On this clear afternoon its summit glowed purple against the sky. The valley floor was almost entirely taken up with a great swamp. This was what Geoff had come to take a core from, in order to examine vegetation changes through the ages. Around it was a grassland which rose and fell in little prominences and flats. The afternoon air was crisp and cool. There was something distinctly European about the scene. Dotted everywhere around the valley, but particularly on the higher ground, lay immaculate, steep-roofed, double-storey Swiss chalets, between which grazed cattle and horses. Further in the distance, hidden in clumps of trees, wisps of smoke betrayed the presence of the villages of the Goilala people.

  This beautiful place was the result of the synergy between two superficially different, yet fundamentally similar mountain cultures. The grasslands of the Kosipe Valley were created by the Goilala, the original inhabitants of the place. Before the establishment of the mission, they had lived down the valley. They had made this clearing in just the past forty years or so. Whenever conditions permitted they burned the forest, creating an ever-broadening expanse of grass.

  The chalets, cattle and horses, on the other hand, were the work of Father Alexandre Michaellod, one of the most remarkable people I have ever met.

  Father Michaellod had been unfortunate enough to be born the eleventh child of a humble Swiss Catholic dairy farmer. In the early twentieth century, there were virtually no prospects for such a child. The time-honoured—indeed only—option was to enter a monastery. Michaellod did this at the age of twelve. There he learned to make several varieties of cheese and, by his own admission, became bored nearly to death. Then the opportunity arose to become a missionary. After a brief period of training, Michaellod was sent off to New Guinea. Even on the ship, he was under the distinct impression that he was bound for somewhere in Africa.

  When Michaellod finally arrived at the Catholic mission station on the south coastal island of Yule, he was assigned the near suicidal task of proselytising in the then largely uncontacted Mendi area. According to one account (possibly apocryphal), when told of his task, Michaellod swore, spat on the ground three times, and stamped off to begin his journey.

  Despite the difficulty of his task, Michaellod was outstandingly successful in bringing the gospel to the Mendi—so successful indeed that he was sent next to establish a mission among the Goilala.

  The Goilala have a nasty reputation. One of the most infamous raskol gangs in Port Moresby is named ‘105’, a sort of mirror image of the first three letters of the word Goilala. The daring and brutality of the 105 gang is legendary. Just a year after we left Kosipe a Belgian doctor was murdered while climbing Mt Albert Edward. His Goilala guides, newly out of prison, drove an axe into the back of his head before robbing him. The first aircraft ever hijacked in Papua New Guinea (in September 1995) landed at Kosipe, its pilot making the difficult touchdown at the—by then—abandoned airstrip with a shotgun held to his head.

  A New Guinean friend once told me about his grandfather, a police sergeant who worked in the Goilala area in the 1930s. As a Papuan with rank, he could lead
a police team when tracking down wrongdoers without the supervision of a kiap (government official). His favourite tactic was to track the miscreants back to their village. There, in the early hours of the morning, he would torch the men's house, then stand at the door with rifle in hand. As the sleepy warriors emerged through the door trying to escape the conflagration, he would shoot them through the head.

  In his dotage, the old fellow found his many sins difficult to forgive. He would often ask his grandson about divine justice. Why, he asked, if God was just, would He let an old bastard such as himself live to such a ripe old age, yet see so many good men die young?

  Strangely though, when my friend visited the Goilala area he found that his grandfather's name was common among younger men. Despite his tactics, the hard old fellow had been admired by the Goilala. A generation of young namesakes was their tribute to him.

  This story threw some light on Michaellod. He seemed an extraordinary man just for staying so long at Kosipe. Yet I liked him for much more than that. He was a complex and intelligent person who had given his life in the service of a faith he never questioned. But sadly, by 1981, he was something of an anachronism—newer Roman Catholic missionaries tend to see themselves as facilitators who guide rather than rule. Father Michaellod, in his way, was of the older, more authoritarian school. Having spent much of his life in New Guinea highland societies, he had become profoundly affected by them. Many in his congregation expected their priest to act like a ‘big man’, and in the best traditions of New Guinea big men Michaellod was both feared and respected. This suited the older Goilala, for they were comfortable with such an old-style leader.

  Michaellod remembered clearly his first contact with the Goilala. How he had trekked through the dense jungle, alone and clad in black robes, and had terrified the ebullient mountaineers. They fled from their villages, leaving a few frail old women in occupation. Only after some days did the others dare to return. Michaellod, unable to speak the Goilala language, decided that contact with children was the best way to win the confidence of the adults. He would offer a child a boiled sweet, then take it by the hand and lead it into his hut to talk.

  Many years later Michaellod at last understood why the mothers had wailed in grief as he led their children away. When a Goilala takes someone by the hand and leads them off to a private place, it is an inevitable prelude to intercourse. For years the Goilala believed that the solemn man with no sexual interest in women was a pederast.

  His first attempts at proselytising were a dismal failure. The men refused to allow the women access to religious knowledge. When they finally consented, it was only under the condition that they be taught separately by Michaellod's catechist. This pious coastal man would not look upon the nakedness of Goilala women, and took to holding up drawings depicting Christian doctrine while positioned behind the trunk of a tree. These would then be discussed.

  Michaellod was horrified to find that his parishioners all preferred hell to heaven. It took him some time to find out why. On the mission picture card, hell was depicted as a place of eternal fire, peopled by dark-skinned beings with spear-like pitchforks. With these, they occasionally pricked a captive white man. In short, he discovered, the scene bore a close resemblance to the inside of an idealised Goilala hut. Heaven, on the other hand, was depicted as a place of cloud and mist, among which many white people stood, pale and menacing. So—to the Goilala—heaven was too much like the mountain summits, where swirling mists and storms often kill with cold. They feared it.

  Even worse in Father Michaellod's eyes, the Goilala persistently (perhaps perversely, he felt) misunderstood the nature of the Trinity. Not long before our arrival, he told us, a group of the most devout parishioners had come to him in a state of great excitement. They said that the Holy Spirit had appeared to them while they were working on the edge of the forest, and requested Father to speak with Him. Michaellod coolly jotted down a few words (in French!) on a scrap of paper, and handed his agitated parishioners the note. They returned some time later, highly pleased, saying that the Holy Spirit had hopped down off His perch, taken the note in His beak and carried it up to heaven!

  Michaellod was every bit as tough as his Goilala charges. He told me that a few months after he arrived he saw two Goilala men engage in a duel with axes. The naked men circled each other warily, like fighting cocks. Each held a long-handled axe upright before him, the blade standing in front of his face. Both looked for the moment's opportunity needed to drive the wedge of steel deep into his opponent's skull.

  Michaellod rushed forward and put out a hand to separate the combatants. In reflex, one brought his axe down on the unprotected hand, spilling blood onto the ground.

  Within weeks the offender was dead, believing that he had released the spirit of the great man along with his blood. The spirit, he believed, would not rest until it had claimed his life.

  Father Michaellod, meanwhile, had horrified the Papuannuns sent to care for him by propping a spare coffin up against the wall of his house, joking that he had bought it for himself ‘in advance’.

  This fondness for coffins had, incidentally, rubbed off on his sacristan, who must have been a rum old gent. The devout fellow had visited Port Moresby while his wife was taken ill. He returned home with a present for her—a shiny new coffin. Apparently she was delighted with the gift, and neither seemed to mind when she recovered from her illness and so had to defer its use!

  Michaellod's easy European acceptance of corpses was a great advantage to him. He would often take the battered mission jeep to a nearby village to pick up a corpse for Christian burial. On the return trip, he would simply tie it into the passenger seat. Inevitably, there would be a rush of potential passengers wishing to hitch a free ride to Kosipe. Their horror at the discovery of the corpse gave the old priest much mirth.

  While such events doubtless gave Michaellod something of a reputation as a black magician among his parishioners, his greatest triumph came when he brought cattle to Kosipe. It is hard for a Swiss dairyman to see a grassy, alpine valley devoid of cows. Father Michaellod had to have them, but in the early days the trek in from Ononge was difficult for cattle.

  Michaellod himself drove the beasts endlessly along narrow, mossy paths through dense rainforest, all the while dreading the last leg of the route in to Kosipe, for then it was just a winding track through the thickest scrub. But when he neared the mission he found that his parishioners had built a veritable bovine highway. The crooked path had been widened, straightened and paved with mats in order to make the progression of the ‘ancestor pigs’ (whose tusks grew impressively from the top of their heads) more comfortable.

  By 1981, though, those early days were well and truly past. A few old men in the village still respected the priest who possessed the ancestors of the pigs, and whose blood, when spilt, could kill a warrior in his prime. But the young now grew up in a different world. They knew of Port Moresby and were familiar with European ways. Many knew that the Europeans could be robbed as easily as anyone else. They opposed the old priest and, while they did not yet dare to do it openly, the day would soon come when they surely would.

  As Christmas vacation drew near, groups of people began arriving almost daily on the track from Woitape. They were returning from Port Moresby to celebrate Christmas and New Year with their relatives. Many were clearly hard-working government employees looking forward to a welcome break. Others, however, were arrogant-looking young men swaggering under great, apparently purloined bundles of western goods of diverse kinds. Radios, lamps and other electrical appliances seemed to predominate, despite the fact that the Goilala huts were without a power supply.

  On Christmas Day 1981 the sound of Father Michaellod's great alpenhorn rang out across the Kosipe Valley to call the faithful to Mass, just as it had done each holy day for the past thirty years. And for the first time in more than a decade, I was drawn to a church—apart from anything else, I wanted to hear the old man hold forth in Goilala.


  Much of the service was indeed given in the Goilala language, but the sermon contained a strange mixture of Pidgin and English. After sternly commanding lactating mothers to cease breast-feeding in future during the Consecration of the Eucharist, Michaellod set to work on the most ferocious hellfire and brimstone sermon I had ever heard in my short-lived though unforgettable career as a Roman Catholic.

  He began with the warning that this might be the last sermon they would ever hear from him, so they had better listen carefully. He was the only guide the Goilala possessed in following that narrow, winding road to eternal reward, yet he was klosap long bagarap pints (nearing death) and might not last another year. He knew of their slothful, forgetful and downright evil character. He had been there when their grandfathers were still killing and eating each other! Even the new generation was falling away from the faith and into dastardly ways. Left to their own devices the entire tribe would surely perish in eternal hellfire.

  The terrible tortures of hell were lovingly dwelt upon, and the multitudinous sins of the congregation spelt out in great detail. Strict, absolute adherence to Christian doctrine, Michaellod concluded, was the sole path to salvation.

  I reflected later on the fact that he had spoken partly in English—I was one of the few in the congregation who could have understood a word.

  As Mass concluded, even Father Michaellod's thundering words were gradually drowned out by a banshee-like wailing emanating from behind the church. When I asked him about this, Michaellod said that it was all the result of a terrible accident.

  The wailer was a poor widow whose only possessions were two dearly loved pigs. One morning Michaellod had woken to find these pigs rooting up his carefully tended vegetable garden. He had previously promised summary execution for any such errant swine, yet was sorely troubled at the thought of depriving the widow of her only possessions.