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Books

Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press

Throwim Way Leg

Tree-Kangaroos, Possums, and Penis Gourds--On the Track of Unknown Mammals in Wildest New Guinea

by Tim Flannery


“[Throwim Way Leg] is an enthralling introduction to the mountain people of New Guinea–unimaginably remote, charming, cunning, cruel, subtle and appealing–and to their magnificent land. . . . [Flannery’s] evocations of the New Guinea landscape carry you away.” –D. J. R. Bruckner, The New York Times Book Review (front cover review)

  • Imprint Grove Paperback
  • Page Count 336
  • Publication Date February 18, 2000
  • ISBN-13 978-0-8021-3665-7
  • Dimensions 6" x 9"
  • US List Price $16.00

About The Book

Tim Flannery is a scientist of international standing, a world expert on the fauna of New Guinea with twenty new species and seven books to his credit. In Throwim Way Leg, he takes us into the field and on an unforgettable journey into the heart of this mysterious and uncharted country. The result is a book of wonder and excitement, brimming with marvelous stories.

Flannery’s scientific voyage leads him to places he never dreamed of: he camps among cannibals and befriends Femsep, a legendary warrior who led the slaughter of colonial whites decades before. He enters caves full of skeletons of long-extinct, giant marsupials, scales mountains previously untouched by Europeans, and is nearly killed when tribes people decide to take revenge for their prior mistreatment by his “clan” (wildlife scientists). And Flannery writes movingly of the fate of indigenous people in collision with the high-tech world of late-twentieth-century industry.

In New Guinea pidgin, throwim way leg means to thrust out your leg on the first step of a long journey. Full of adventure, wit, and natural wonders, Flannery’s narrative is just such a spectacular trip. Like Redmond O’Hanlon’s classics Into the Heart of Borneo and No Mercy, Throwim Way Leg is a tour de force” of travel, anthropology, and natural history.

Praise

‘readers of Throwim Way Leg, a gripping tale about the most remote areas of New Guinea, will be grateful they’re spared the discomforts and dangers the author describes in hair-raising detail. But they’ll be catapulted into exhilarating and adventures rarely chronicled in such vivid verbal pictures. . . . At the end of this wild adventurous literary ride, readers will feel blessed that a writer of such insight has recorded this remote environment of animal and human cultures on the verge of possible extinction.” –Marjorie D. Hamlin, The Christian Science Monitor

“[Throwim Way Leg] is an enthralling introduction to the mountain people of New Guinea–unimaginably remote, charming, cunning, cruel, subtle and appealing–and to their magnificent land. . . . [Flannery’s] evocations of the New Guinea landscape carry you away.” –D. J. R. Bruckner, The New York Times Book Review (front cover review)

“Throwim Way Leg tells the story, in a disarmingly wry and unpretentious way, of how Flannery made his great discoveries. . .

. All of this makes for great reading–the thrill of the unknown, rare enough these days, combined with a scientist’s true passion for his work and for the creatures he studies.” –The Washington Post

“Whether literally going out on a limb to capture an “extinct” bat, nearly getting killed when a hostile group identifies him as a member of the hated “wildlife” clan, or solving the mystery of a tree-kangaroo with a white man’s face, Flannery combines diligent science, heart-pounding adventure, and a respect for ancient cultures to create a compelling tale.” –Sierra, The Magazine of the Sierra Club

“Exciting, exotic book, one that introduces the reader to a world far more mysterious than we might have imagined.” –William R. Wineke, Wisconsin State Journal

‘reads like a collection of adventure stories.” –Lucille M. Boone, Library Journal

“[An] energetic fusion of natural science and anthropology . . . The title comes from New Guinea Pidgin; referring to a first step, it means “to go on a journey.” Readers would do well to follow Flannery on this one.” –Publishers Weekly

“This book combines an irresistible author with an irresistible subject: Tim Flannery, a great zoologist and writer about science, relating his explorations of New Guinea, a vivid tropical universe. . . . The result is a dangerous book that you pick up at your peril, because it is so hard to put down.” –Jared M. Diamond, professor of Physiology, UCLA, and author of Guns, Germs & Steel

“Australia has found its own Stephen Jay Gould.” –Matt Ridley, The Times Literary Supplement (London)

“One of the world’s greatest zoologists . . . who’s probably discovered more new species than Darwin. He’s a remarkable man.” –Redmond O’Hanlon

“Tim Flannery is in the league of the all-time great explorers like Dr. David Livingstone.” –Sir David Attenborough

“What an extraordinary book this is. . . . Flannery provides a magical polychrome of [New Guinea]. You can hear the cataclysmic thunderstorms, smell the hunting dogs, taste the roast possum. No one else could have written this book. . . . The themes he elucidates are the largest themes available to any writer: life and death; religion and questions of belief; greed and the havoc that the pursuit of money can wreak; the politics of colonialism and oppression; the cultural specificity of morality. . . . Flannery is a fiercely intelligent and perceptive guide. He is also courageous. This is a journey through and beyond fear. . . . Flannery’s book is as fertile and fascinating as New Guinea itself. It deserves to be read widely and often.” –Michael Winkler, Sunday Age

“As vivid and compelling as being landed in a helicopter in a high valley among the mountains of Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya, some of the wildest country left on earth.” –Geoffrey Dutton, The Bulletin

Excerpt

Introduction


Throwim way leg


In New Guinea Pidgin, throwim way leg means to go on a journey. It describes the action of thrusting out your leg to take the first step of what can be a long march.

For as long as I can remember I have been intrigued by New Guinea. Perhaps it was the stories my uncle `Gunner’ Keith told of fighting the Japs in Dutch New Guinea, of spiders the size of dinner plates, and of fuzzy wuzzy angels, the warriors who used their local knowledge to save the lives of many Australian soldiers during the Second World War. Maybe it was the visit to my school by a group of excruciatingly shy yet fascinating Papuan students. Whatever it was, it worked its magic while I was still a child.

I was twenty-six when I first travelled overseas. I went to Papua New Guinea. I can still feel the wonderment, tinged with excitement–even fear–which flared in my breast. The crisp, cool mountain air, the unfamiliar smells, sights and sounds all embedded themselves deep in my consciousness.

Everything was new and strange.


*


New Guinea sprawls like a vast prehistoric bird across the sea north of Australia. After Greenland it is the world’s largest island, and its size, shape and rugged mountains are all the result of its peculiar geological history, for New Guinea is Australia’s bow wave. As the continent of Australia has drifted northward it has accumulated islands and fragments of other continents along its leading edge. Like debris swept together by a broom, these have built up into a long, chaotic pile of landforms. This geology also explains why New Guinea’s flora and fauna resembles Australia’s. Although it is close to southeast Asia, New Guinea has no tigers, rhinos or elephants, but it does have kangaroos. New Guinea’s kangaroos, however, live in the trees.

Mi bai throwim way leg nau (I’m starting my journey now) still has literal meaning, for even today walking is the only means of travel in much of New Guinea. The island’s topography is so rugged that roads service only a tiny portion of it. There are no roads, for example, linking either Port Moresby (the capital of Papua New Guinea) or Jayapura (the capital of Irian Jaya) with the rest of the country. Furthermore, there are no pack animals in New Guinea and, until the arrival of aircraft, New Guineans living in adjacent valleys, or in the mountains and on the coast, were as isolated from each other as people living on different continents. This helps explain why New Guinea is home to about 1,000 languages–one sixth of the world total.

While New Guinea is still one of the world’s last frontiers, its human history is venerable. People have lived there for at least 45,000 years. They arrived by sea from Asia at a time when New Guinea and Australia were joined. As the sea rose and isolated the two landmasses, these immigrants were to diversify into the living Australian Aborigines and the tribesmen of New Guinea.

Nine thousand years ago, New Guineans living in high mountain valleys had already developed intensive agriculture. There they domesticated and harvested the world’s most important plant crop–sugar cane–along with taro (a large nutritious tuber), bananas, yams and winged beans. They had begun this process at a time when my European ancestors were still chasing woolly mammoths across the tundra.

Despite its isolation New Guinea has played an important role in world trade. By the sixteenth century, Sri Lankan princes were adorning themselves with hats made from New Guinea’s birds of paradise. Before that, it seems likely that Chinese were consuming New Guinean nutmeg, and Indonesians rubbing themselves with oil made from New Guinea’s Massoi tree. The ancient Romans flavoured their food with cloves, which are the flower buds of a lilly pilly which grows only on islands just to the west of New Guinea.

During the colonial period, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia all counted parts of New Guinea as their territory. Australia ended up administering the eastern half of the island, which became the independent nation of Papua New Guinea in 1975. The western half passed from Dutch to Indonesian hands, and is now a province of Indonesia.

This brief political history, however, says little of the lives of the village people themselves, for many were unaffected by much of it. Despite half a century of colonial rule, it was only in 1935 that Australian gold prospectors stumbled across the 750,000 people living in the central highlands of Papua New Guinea–by far the largest concentration of people on the island, some of whom live at the greatest rural population density on the planet.

Irian Jaya’s major population centre, the Baliem Valley, was discovered even later, in 1938, when the millionaire adventurer Richard Archbold saw what he described as a `shangri la’ from the air. This was the last time in the history of our planet that such a vast, previously unknown civilisation was to come into contact with the west, and it was not until over a decade later that substantial contact was made with this area.


*


Biologists have played a leading role in the exploration of New Guinea. Luigi Maria D’Albertis, a Genoese, was one of the first. On 6 September 1872, he had the privilege of being the first European to enter the island’s mountains. There he discovered a biological realm unknown to the outside world. He later explored the Fly River with the aeronautical pioneer Lawrence Hargrave, impressing the locals with dramatic displays of fireworks. Richard Archbold was leading just one of three major biological survey expeditions which he participated in when he discovered the Baliem Valley. The fund he established was eventually to sponsor seven major biological exploring expeditions to the island.

Even contemporary biologists have made significant contributions. In 1974 Jared Diamond explored the Foja Mountains of Irian Jaya. No European had previously set foot in this vast range, and no native people inhabit it. The animals were entirely tame, birds of paradise displaying to Diamond within metres of his face, while undescribed kinds of tree-kangaroos stared at him as he walked by.

I was already studying for my doctorate when I undertook my first expedition to New Guinea. I went there because New Guinea seemed to be the last great biological unknown, and I felt that it was on the island’s biological frontier that I could make my best contribution to mammalogy, my area of expertise.

As I studied in preparation for that first expedition, I read avidly about the island. I found that one had to ferret around in innumerable musty scientific papers to discover what had already been achieved in New Guinea mammalogy. There was no compendium, no single volume where I could go to learn what other researchers had already found. There were few photographs of the mammals, and everything then known about their ecology could have fitted comfortably onto this page. Here, I felt, was my chance to make a lasting contribution. I could write the first handbook of the mammals of this great island.

Fifteen expeditions, two trips to museums overseas, and countless hours in libraries later, I achieved my goal.

In my naivety, I imagined when I set out on this quest that the world was fully documented, and that the great age of exploration had ended in the nineteenth century. I was envious of explorers like D’Albertis, who walked through entire undiscovered mountain ranges, and who lived for months on end on a diet of rice and newly discovered birds of paradise. My role, I thought, was more humble: to bring together the knowledge previous researchers had gathered, add some photographs and ecological notes, and place it all between the covers of one book. If I was lucky, I might discover some obscure creature such as a rat which had escaped the searching eyes of earlier explorers. My greatest discovery in New Guinea, perhaps, was finding out just how wrong I was.

Little did I imagine then that I was to live among largely uncontacted peoples, to whom, just a few years before, cannibalism had been not a rumour but a way of life. Nor did I think I would climb mountains previously unscaled by Europeans, enter uncharted caves, or rediscover animals previously known only as ice-age fossils. Had someone intimated to me that I was to discover what is arguably the world’s largest rat, name four kinds of tree-kangaroos, or stumble on a cave full of the bones of long extinct and entirely unknown marsupial giants, I would have scoffed in disbelief. Yet I did.

I have always worried that my book Mammals of New Guinea would lead students into imagining that the age of exploration is finished in New Guinea. The book looks so glossy, so neat and so complete, but it is, in reality, just a beginning. New Guinea is as vast a field for adventure and discovery as it ever was, and even though the cultures of its people are changing rapidly they will offer a very different way of seeing the world for many years to come. I hope that the great island will continue to exert its magnetic attraction on young adventurers and researchers, and that they will continue where I have left off.


Chapter One


Buai impressionism


The aircraft circled slowly over a parched landscape. Below, the atmosphere was thick with smoke as the rank, brown savannah burned. In the wet-dry tropics, fire rends the landscape the way an archaeologist strips layers of sediment with a trowel. Here it had revealed a dozen old horseshoe-shaped redoubts (once used to shelter aircraft from bomb attacks) encircling the airstrip, vast piles of discarded fuel drums, and the skeletons of armoured vehicles and other such remanie of the Second World War.

This was Jackson Airport, gateway to Papua New Guinea, a nation which in December 1981 was less than six years old. It was definitely not the luxuriant, jungle-clad New Guinea landscape I had imagined countless times in my dreams.


*


My first memories of Port Moresby are still vivid. Dark-skinned women and children sitting on each street corner before piles of buai (betel nut) and daka (fruit of the pepper vine chewed with buai), or perhaps neat bundles of peanuts as I had never seen them before, tied together by their stalks.

At first I took the red stains lying on every footpath and wall to be blood. The result, perhaps, of violent assault and bloody riot. It was only later, after much private anguish, that I learned that the stains were buai. When the kernel of the small green nut is chewed with lime (made from crushing burned sea-shells) and daka, the mixture turns bright red. Chewing buai ends when a great red stream of liquid is ejected from the mouth, often with extraordinary force, accuracy and aplomb.

The first flush of innocent inquiry allows a person a kind of liberty which fuller knowledge denies them. Satisfied that the streets of Port Moresby were not steeped in blood, I felt free to roam where I would–even once as far as the front bar of the notorious Boroko Hotel.

That evening, after I’d drunk a beer or two in a hushed silence and surrounded by dark stares, a couple of young Hanuabada lads suggested that they would walk me back to Angau Lodge where I was staying. It was only as we neared home that, noticing the barbed-wire compounds and vicious dogs surrounding every house in Boroko, I realised they had certainly saved my money, and possibly my life.

I soon found that the best and cheapest places to eat in Moresby were the Chinese cafes. The Diamond Cafe in Boroko became my favourite. Its laminex table-tops and simple menu reminded me of the Chinese restaurants of my childhood, of my father bringing our own saucepans to be filled with fried rice and sweet-and-sour pork. One night, I noticed that a curious addition had been chalked on the menu board. Below the chow mein was written Papa Fell Over. Intrigued, and suspecting it to be some exceedingly alcoholic local brew, I ordered a small one with coffee.

Startlingly renamed in Melanesian Pidgin, and transmogrified in a Chinese kitchen, that distinctively Australian dessert pavlova never tasted so good.


*


Koki Market nestles by the sea near Ela Beach. This beautiful, exotic place drew me daily. A sea of constantly moving black bodies crowded the square, the musky animal smell of humanity blend with the distinctive spice of buai. Huge red splashes of the latter seemed to be concentrated around a sign proclaiming NO KEN KAIKAI BUAI HIA (BETEL NUT CHEWING PROHIBITED). Nearby, an old fellow sat each morning, dressed in a simple laplap, with just a few buai for sale in front of him, his grizzled head nodding. One afternoon there were only two fruit left as he made a painful effort to unbend his arthritic joints. A woman screamed out in Motuan, `Hey old man, you’ve left your balls behind!’ and the entire marketplace rang with peals of hysterical laughter.

Gargantuan piles of fruit and vegetables always covered every market bench. Above this cornucopia hung mysteriously shaped bags and bundles, suspended by wooden hooks from the rafters of the tin-roofed shelters. I could see, occasionally, a bewildered-looking cuscus (a kind of possum) peek from one of the string bags, but the contents of others remained obscure. I desperately wished to acquire some cuscusses for our museum collection. Before I realised that the bundles could contain anything from groceries to babies, I sometimes found myself bargaining, in this language I barely understood, for pikininis rather than possums.

Near the water one day, a mammoth hawksbill turtle lay on its back in the sun, gulping helplessly, its eyes streaming salty tears. This was the seafood section. Someone had already purchased a fore-flipper. Shocked by the cruelty, I abandoned thoughts of turtle soup and instead purchased two live kindam, beautiful painted crayfish, for less than a dollar each. Never did I imagine that my meagre field allowance would extend to such luxuries.

Just behind were the meat stalls. There, piled in their dozens, were the smoked bodies of wallabies. The smell of the smoky wood fire was dense, yet was insufficient to deter the clouds of flies which hovered about. I paid my five kina to an old man, blind in one eye and with his shotgun resting behind him, and at one stroke collected my first specimen in New Guinea and solved the riddle of what to curry for tomorrow’s dinner.

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.

Copyright ” 1998 by Tim Flannery. Reprinted with permission from Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.