Maprik—Pre-Mopping Up

By Judy Tudor

ffIEWS ITEMS: Australian troops in

the Aitape area of New Guinea have captured two villages north-east of Maprik. . . . Flying-Officer Tom

Ellis, Beaufighter pilot, stayed behind

to provide cover for the crew of a sister plane forced down off Amboina- Ceram. {See “Tropicalities” this issue.) THESE are two apparently unrelated pieces of headline news, yet in the mind of this scribe, Maprik and Ellis are almost synonymous.

It was there at Maprik that young (apparently to distinguish him from his father, of Rabaul) Tom Ellis was respon sible for providing me with the first—and last—oyster I have ever eaten. The oyster floated in half an inch of white soup, straight from the can.

I abominate oysters. But it was New Year’s Eve; I had been fortified by a cocktail consisting of wild lemon, much

whisky, a little less vermouth and appar ently a dash of prussic acid, manufac tured by the same versatile gentleman and I had been too long in the bush and had grown socially timid.

In the mid-thirties, the Sepik district was a vast area of mountain, jungle and grass-land, in which life went on in almost the same fashion as it had for unknown centuries. Here and there in the mountain streams that ran down into the Sepik, or, over the range, ran through gorge and cha§m to spill eventually into the sea, miners were located.

To a certain extent each miner influ enced the immediate area in which he toiled. Gravel and sand passing through his sluice boxes muddied the stream; tailing dumps, like giant white snakes, lined the banks; bordering trees and saplings came down when gold was gouged from their roots. And, at the same trnie, the local natives, suddenly awakening to the glories of civilisation in the way of red, white and blue beads,

cotton print, razor blades and whatnot, brought in native foodstuffs to trade.

But, taking it by and large, these civi lising influences were scattered and it was possible for a miner to walk for a day or more in any direction without encountering his next-door European neighbour. And soon, too, with the sud denness of the tropics, all workings were overgrown once more with a green mantle and the stream tinkled on over the brown boulders as it had from time immemorial.

IN this sort of set-up a visitor from But came to our camp one evening. “Ray Parer has brought his plane up from Salamaua,” he said. “He’s making a landing-field down in the kunai; near a place called Maprik, I believe.”

And soon, at irregular intervals, came the thrumming, drumming sound of an aero-engine, high above the rim of the valley, usually out of sight behind moun tain peak or cloud, but infrequently appearing as a dark, bird-creature dash ing across our small patch of sky to dis appear swiftly into a world we could not see.

The fame of the plane had preceded it.

None of the boys working on the claim had seen one. but they did not need to be told what it was. None tore into the jungle or died of fright—which would, of

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Standing on the edge of Imbia we could look out towards Maprik ’drome and the Sepik.

Australians are fighting in this country to-day.

course, make a better story—but they yelled with delight: “‘Balus’ e’ come!” and let it go at that.

IT was four months or more before any of us saw the “balus” in the flesh; and, by that time, a Guinea Airways plane was also running irregularly to connect with the six-weekly “Macdhui.”

We had spent the morning climbing the mud slide that passed for a track to the village “on top”—lmbia; 10 minutes to wonder on the further side of Imbia, gazing with unaccustomed eyes at the sweep of country unfolded before us— undulating foothills, and valleys, villages on the crests, with a smudge of plains beyond; and several hours of the after noon floundering down, then up, more slippery slides, across rivers and through villages. That road out was later short ened and when I did it for the last time before the war the whole process was accomplished in 3£ hours.

Maprik ’drome swam before us in a haze of heat, part-bordered by a semi circle of river. It was nothing more than a huge river flat from which the kunai grass had been cut by the natives, armed with lengths of hoop iron. Little had been done for its natural contours. Ray Parer could, and often did, land his plane where fancy dictated, and the natural undulations of Maprik he left severely alone, for the commercial pilots who came after to bewail.

Maprik remained nothing more than this rough landing strip until late in 1937.

Then it suddenly blossomed out as an Administrative sub-station, and all the natives who normally carried cargo for us, or who brought taros and bananas and sweet-potatoes to our doors, were “frozen” and diverted to the construction of the buildings thereof.

TOM ELLIS, appointed to the new sub station as a Medical Assistant, made our acquaintance pe.r medium of a medical patrol when he stuck hypodermic needles into the unenthusiastic arms of our labour line. He spoke diffidently of building a house for himself and a hos pital on the hill behind Maprik ’drome, and a house each for the Patrol Officer and the ADO on the river terrace below.

We had heard something of those houses. Men returning from the ’drome called in at the camp to exclaim: “My God—you should see the houses Tom Ellis is building. Got every kanaka for miles around working on them. They are two-storied, no less. And big—about an acre each. Believe he got the idea in Bougainville.”

We did not actually see the houses until the following Christmas, and then we sighted them afar off. Not even the mountains of New Guinea could dwarf those houses. Ellis’s residence stood on a cleared knoll overlooking the river below and flanked by a full-sized pre cipice. Down the slope sprawled the native hospital and on the wide river terrace, 200 feet above the ’drome, were the two other pagoda-like mammoths.

If one would have firmness and sta bility, then there is a limit to the size of the native building, which is all split palm-wood, bamboo and cane lashings.

The Maprik erections were impressive and, purely from the point of impressing the wily savage with the size of British might, they were a howling success. But the swaying limbohm floors bounced back at you and the partitions threatened to give if you were misguided enough to lean. And the white ants and borers came in their millions and bored and chewed until a fine rain of soft yellow wood-dust fell perpetually.

The upper stratum was reached by a ladder which bored up through a hole in the roof of storey one.

AT Christmas time, having completed this job of construction, young Ellis, and an even younger Patrol Officer, turned their thoughts to other things.

For weeks before the event, it was impossible to buy pigs or native food any where —all were being saved for a “big fella sing-sing.” And, at the end of the third week in December the bush tracks converging on the ’drome were thronged with more traffic than ever before in their history. In came the naked men, carrying their spears, and their pigs trussed up on poles; in came the women, in their minute grass sporrans or nothing at all, yams, taros, bananas, sago and fruit carried in tiers of string-bags on their backs; baby trussed up in the top most one, like a coccoon on a twig.

Toddlers came, and the children, and all the youth and beauty. And the dogs were brought, and the feather head dresses and masks and ceremonial attire of beads, and shells and dog’s teeth neck laces and girdles.

Their food was purchased by the two Administration officers and added to the growing store. By Christmas Day the ’drome was festooned from end to end with palm fronds, strings of yams, piles of bananas, decorated dishes of sago and pig—all splendid in the eyes of Brown Brother. rE Europeans had been called to gether, too. From far and wide they came; by plane from the coast and per boot from the interior; from the

Sepik. to the southward, and from But to the northward. Perhaps a hundred men and the district’s half-dozen women; even a sprinkling of white children. The three huge houses of Maprik accommo dated them.