Up Front

with the Editor

Part of the satisfaction of publishing PIM is being able to record from time to time facets of Pacific Islands history that nobody knew about, or that we knew about but didn’t expect to see recorded. Our letters columns sometimes provide excellent examples of the “didn’t expect to get” variety—as for instance when somebody who has made a little Islands history, as perhaps a notable adminis trator, writes to give his version of events he helped shape.

A good example of the “nobody knew about it” kind was our report last month (there are also some pic tures in this issue) of the details of the Akmana expedition into the New Guinea Highlands 40 years ago. That story came right out of the blue.

Nobody had suspected that the late Bill MacGregor’s Highlands wanderings of 1929/30 had gone as far as they did or that they had been undertaken as part of a well-organised gold prospecting expedition. And that three of the five Europeans in the party were still on deck to tell at first hand about their first contact with the wigmen.

Now that we do know about it, the historians—in this case from the University of Papua-New Guinea— have already gone to work to gather every scrap of information while it’s still to be got. (One wonders, incidentally, when we will be in a position to properly tap similar material from native sources).

Luckily the three European sur vivors are literate, intelligent men and this will make the historians’ job easier. Reg Beazley, one of the three, wrote some of his adventures in book form, as yet unpublished. Ernie Shepherd has a retentive memory, is a stickler for accuracy, and has an enthusiastic interest in getting the ex pedition’s work recorded now that he knows others are interested.

“Pontey” Seale, at 84 the eldest of the survivors, is a delightful old boy to whom we owe a debt for having kept in good condition these last 40 years the negatives of the many pic tures he took of those wigmen and

their mountains. “Pontey” also retained, right up to two years ago, a journal of the expedition showing dates, camps and heights (he was the mining engineer). He burned it when he and his wife were moving to a smaller home, because as he told me sadly, “I thought everybody else on that patrol was dead, and who else would want to read it?”

But we will get worthwhile infor mation on Akmana because, as I said, the survivors are the kind of people who are capable of giving us the facts coherently.

There is a widely held but erro neous belief that anybody who has had an adventurous life has a book in him, or at least a series of colour ful magazine articles. The fact is that the inveterate doers of this world are often unable to express themselves on paper, with or without assistance.

Perhaps many of them despise the pen as the tool of charlatans who prefer to scribble theories than meet life head-on.

The alternative to getting the doers to write their story is, of course, getting them to speak it, but this, too, is never as easy or rewarding as popular opinion believes.

“Put a bottle of rum and a tape recorder in front of Old Bill and you’ll get a valuable piece of living history before it’s too late,” is what I am frequently told on my travels.

Those with the patience to put it to the test will find when they commit the tape to paper that Old Bill seldom completes a thought, can’t remem ber dates, has scornful disregard for spellings of people and places.

and will remember best and at length those events of least impor tance to the proper assessment of history. (But it will be a relaxing, boozy evening in the company of a colourful, and probably irreverent, character and thus not entirely wasted.) Tommy Grahamslaw, former Chief Collector of Customs in New Guinea, whose account of the Aus tralian New Guinea Administrative Unit in wartime Papua has been running in PIM recently (the last of the three parts is in this issue), is one of those coherent people able to tell a good story straight—pro viding both colour and fact. Other people shared some of Tommy’s adventures, but it was Tommy who gave us the word picture and that is the vital difference.

Keith McCarthy is another doer also able to use words to good pur pose, as we saw in the story of his New Guinea years, Patrol Into Yesterday. Apsley Cherry-Garrard played a minor part in Scott’s last expedition, but his ability with words has, in his The Worst Journey in the World, kept ever green that moving episode of An tarctic history. There are never enough first-hand reporters of facts, in my view.

The most efficient method of tracking down unreported history is to deliberately go searching for it.

Bob Langdon, executive officer of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, attached to the Australian National University, Canberra, does this very successfully. The bureau was set up for just this purpose, but Bob has uncovered an extraordinary amount of material by painstakingly follow ing up all kinds of clues.

Gavin Souter followed the same path when writing New Guinea: The Last Unknown, the book which has become a basic text on the history of New Guinea exploration.

The reason that book contains such a wealth of new material is that whenever Gavin found in his read ing of published works a story that specially interested him he wrote to the man concerned, if he was still alive, or to any surviving relatives or friends he could trace. Relatives sometimes had letters or other material they were delighted to learn still held interest for someone.

The luck, of course, is to uncover the material before it gets burned like Pontey’s journal, “because everybody’s dead and who else cares?”

Stuart Inder