Papuan “Wonderland”

A SPLENDID sal© in the British Empire and the United States is reported con cerning Papuan Wonderland, the book written by Mr, Jack Hides at the end of last year and published in London by Blackie and Company. The book has been praised in lavish terms by reviewers all over the world, who agree that it is likely to become a classic of modern travel and exploration.

The following is the way in which the book was reviewed by “Touchstone” for the Melbourne Herald: As a record of courage and endurance in the face of almost insuperable diffi culties, both natural and human, this enthralling record of present-day adven ture challenges and sustains comparison with the exploit of the great explorers of the past. It is a record of which all Aus tralians should, and will, be justly proud.

Some 400 years ago, a Portuguese Don named de Menses was drifted, by storms and currents, on to the shores of a strange land. Because its inhabitants were adorned with heads of kinky hair, he called them Papuas, from a Malay word implying crinkled hair. De Menses had discovered New Guinea.

Later on other adventurers, Dampier among them, landed on its savage shores, but it was not until the end of the 19th century that the white invaders firmly established themselves.

Mr. Hides was born in Port Moresby, and he is both old, and young enough, to remember it in its infancy. He has watched it grow from what was little more than a native village to its present state.

In choosing him to lead the expedition, the

Administrator (Sir Hubert Murray) could not have made a better choice. Mr. Hides was not only fully conversant with the difficulties he had to overcome, but he had also an intimate knowledge of native life and habits which was ' later to stand him in good stead.

Assisting him in the difficult task to which he was assigned were Mr. Chris.

O’Malley, a young Irish-Australian, and a detachment of the Papuan Armed Con stabulary to whose loyalty the author pays the following tribute: “They were brown men of Papua, re cruited from all parts of Papua to serve Papua. Loyal and courageous always, they have built up a wonderful tradition. There is nothing they fear, no task which they will not tackle. They will die for their tradition. Savages in serge if you like; but they serve their country faithfully and well.”

It was in December, 1934, that Mr. Hides and his party set out to conquer the “ugly blank” in the map, an area of some 8000 square miles, Papua’s vast secret, along the borders of British New Guinea and the Mandated Territory. After leading his little party for hundreds of miles up the Fly and Strickland Rivers, Mr. Hides struck out into the unknown in a north erly direction towards the vast limestone barrier beyond which lay their objective, the headwaters of the Kikori upon which they hoped to float back to civilisation.

Their equipment and stores were care fully calculated for a three months’ jour ney, but they could not foresee the diffi culties they had to face. It was not until eight months later that they floated down

the Kikori River to the kindly hospitality of the Resident Magistrate at Ogomobu.

What Mr. Hides and his companions dis covered and endured during their voyage of discqvery affords material for a modern epic.

Even Sir Hubert Murray, who is not given to extravagant praise, feels it neces sary to remark that: “It is generally ad mitted that travel in these territories is as difficult as anywhere in the world, and the explorer, D’Albertis, has left on record his opinion that it is easier to cross the Alps than to ascend an ordinary hill in Papua ... the distance that can be cov ered in a day will sometimes hardly exceed a couple of miles.

“Your route may lie, for instance, due east, but nine times out of ten you will not be able to travel due east, for the nature of the country will drive you either north or south; and though, in inhabited districts, you will find tracks, still they

rarely lead in the direction in which you want to go. And in uninhabited country you are driven to the slow and maddening tedious process of cutting your way through jungle and forest. . . .

“It is necessary for the reader to realise all this if he would appreciate the task which this apparently insignificant body of white men, native police and car riers had undertaken, and which they so gallantly brought to a successful conclu sion.”

And he adds: “As to the white officers

themselves, one need not say more than that they fully sustained the reputation of the Papuan service for efficiency and resolution. Personal courage is, fortu nately, not a rare virtue, and both these men showed again what we knew already, that they possessed this virtue in a very marked degree.”

The first stages of the journey after leaving the Strickland River along a stream which Mr. Hides named the Ren toul, were comparatively easy. The sur rounding country, beautiful in its tropical

flowers and trees, was inhabited by a race of nomads with whom they vainly tried to come in contact. When their canoes would take them no further they aban doned them and set out on foot towards the limestone barrier that barred their path to the north.

Their first meeting with the natives of the region was not encouraging. The little party was ambushed, and arrows be gan to fly. There was nothing to do but beat their attackers off, which they did, at the loss of two lives. Mr. Hides sadly re cords: “In nine years of patrolling, and from most of the hostile corners of Papua, I had captured nearly 150 convicted mur derers; and this was the second man that I had shot. A rifle against a bow and arrow; it did not seem fair to me. Yet the position might have been reversed; it could easily have been me now lying on the ground with an arrow in my chest. I walked back dejectedly to camp to tell O’Malley of what had happened.”

Nothing daunted, they pushed ahead, meeting with no more opposition until they reached the dreaded limestone barrier, which the Papuans themselves call the “broken-bottle country.” In describing this stage of their journey, Mr. Hides says: “It was a frightful stretch of coun try—a desolate, silent land, where only bandicoots and pythons can find a home.

The rock is honeycombed and stands on end; it forms fissures and craters, large and small, and every step has to be watched, for the limestone edges are as sharp as broken glass. There are no running streams, no water, for the rain seeped immediately through the limestone.

The fissures and cylindrical stone pits of this country sometimes appear bottomless to the eye. A stunted and tangled growth covers it all.

“The days dragged on into weeks as we fought our way across this limestone; our tents were leaking and falling to pieces, and, with many of the police and carriers disabled by deep gashes, caused, by the limestone, our outlook was far from cheer ful. A perpetual blanket of fog covered the land, preventing us from seeing any thing of the country around us, and a cold, miserable rain made our existence wretched. . .

“In this country of limestone craters and the crevices with their jagged edges, with no level stretches at all, we even had diffi culty in finding a space to stretch our three tents. The reader has probably seen limestone caves somewhere, and if he can visualise a mountain barrier of such for mation rising in places to eight or nine thousand feet, and covered with a dense growth, he will arrive at some idea of what this terrible country is like. It tore our boots to pieces, and whenever we slipped, it did likewise with our bodies.

And the wounds that it left always fes tered from the poison in the rocks."

But the expedition had its reward when, after passing through this inferno, they looked down upon a wonderful valley of rolling timbered slopes and grasslands laid out in carefully cultivated squares, with little columns of smoke arising from the homes of the people of this new Eden. It was, as they shortly discovered, the land of the Tarifuroro, a light-skinned race who still lived in the Stone Age (they refused the author’s offer of steel tomahawks, pre ferring their own greenstone axes) but whose methods of agriculture and living generally were far in advance of tho coastal tribes.

In describing them, Mr. Hides says; “I was astounded at their appearance. They were all of short stature, they were , clean and light skinned, and they had girlish mops of brown hair, adorned with flowers.

Three or four had rosettes of bachelor

buttons; others had bands of eidelweiss across their foreheads; some had parrot feathers; while all of them had bone dag gers stuck in the cane girdles around their waists. A knitted sporan, tucked between the cane girdles, was all the covering they had.

“I was greatly interested in their Asiatic like features; their cheek bones were high, and their noses and lips were all finely moulded. I set to wondering about theso new people, their extraordinary methods of cultivation, arid this valley wonderland of yodelling natives who lived in farm houses. Whence had they come, and for how long had they lived in this forgotten world of theirs? Perhaps they had been here before Hannibal crossed the Alps? Or even before corn was discovered in Egypt?

For we are told that the migratory whirls that populated the Pacific date back many thousands of years.”

For day after day the party marched across the valley whose extreme fertility impressed even the native police. From the land of the Tarifuroro they passed to that of the Waga Furari —the black “Pharaohs” of Papua—bewigged, dark skinned men with deep, guttural voices, who also showed not the slightest sign of European influence and who also preferred their stone axes—with which they can fell large trees—to the author’s steel toma hawks.

They reckoned their wealth in pearl and cowrie shell and their disappointment was great when Mr. Hides explained that he had none. However, their quick searching eyes discovered the pearl buttons on his and his companions’ clothes, and before night fell they had no buttons left. For five days the expedition travelled through these friendly people, being everywhere hospitably received.

Date in the afternoon of the fifth day,

however, they entered a new section and here they met with a hostility that was to dog their steps for many weeks. All food, although they offered to pay for it, was refused them and every night their camping place was surrounded by hordes of sullen savages fingering their stone axes and bows and arrows. By this time the stores of the expedition were running low and every member of the party was suffering from hunger and the results of privation. To have attempted to take what they wanted from the fields around them would have been to invite disaster.

Husbanding their resources and their strength, they pushed slowly onward, ig noring the insults hurled at them by the arrogant natives.

It was then that Mr. Hides proved the quality of his leadership and the discip line of his constabulary. To the natives the guns of the party were nothing more than wooden clubs, but rather than turn them on his attackers, Mr. Hides endured their insults in silence.

Only when hundreds of them launched an assault were the party’s guns turned upon the people of the Wen. For three long hours the expedition beat off attack after attack until at nightfall their assail ants withdrew. Dismayed by a resistance they had not expected, the savages retired to a distance, but hung on the flanks of the expedition, trying to ambush them. Time after time disaster was only averted at the last minute and to add to their difficulties Mr. Hides was stricken with dysentery, and the police and the carriers were gaunt and hollow-eyed with the strain.

There was nothing to do but push on and on, with the limestone still to be re crossed. “I wonder if the reader knows what I mean?” asks Mr. Hides. “Can he picture a little band of men, their frames no more than skeletons, the bones of their

faces showing out and dull eyes sunk deep in the sockets; and can he picture them dragging their frames over limestone rocks, exerting those frames again and again with no promise of food, with nos trils filled with a mucus that strength is not there to clear away? I never want to see such tortured and pitiable humans again.”

At long last, however, the limestone was passed and the expedition made its way slowly towards the Kikori and, launching themselves on its broad surface, drifted safely home.

The book contains a number of exceed ingly interesting illustrations and a map.