Book Review

By Nicolas Rothwell

And so at last, after many a false dawn, ‘gonzo’ journalism, that pecu liarly modern form of writing where the description is as important as the thing described, makes its brash entry into the Pacific.

Paul Toohey, a young Australian journalist of extraor dinary talents, has dedicated his first full-length narrative to a bracing tale of travel, set in that most seductive of literary destina tions -Irian Jaya, the Indonesian governed west half of the island of Papua New Guinea.

Toohey, the author of a volume of journalistic pieces titled “ God’s Little

Acre” , published last year, promises

much, and offers an intriguing theme as the peg for his account.

He aims to investigate, indeed retrace one of the most notorious of Pacific mysteries, the disappearance in 1961 of young Michael Rockefeller, scion of one of America’s great plutocratic fam ilies, deep in the wilds of Asmat country.

The story opens well, with Toohey, intrepidly self-aware, flying in over the Baliem Valley, a “sort of huge sunken lounge room” peopled by the Dani tribes men, a community of whom it could be said that “war was their art”.

Toohey’s own experiences are interwo ven, at first, with those of the hapless Rockefeller, a curious and idealistic figure who dedicated himself to collecting Asmat tribal sculpture and carvings, and both sponsored and participated in an anthropo logical expedition to the region.