A new life in Papua New Guinea

BY ANDREW LESLIE PHILLIPS

Andrew Leslie Phillips is now general manager at radio station KPFA-FM in the USA but as a young man he spent time in Papua New Guinea as patrol officer. Andrew has now written a memoir of those times. We’ll be publishing extracts in six parts....

IN AUSTRALIA I SICKENED OF THE URBAN LIFE, the crowded rush to work in the mornings, the tiresome after-work booze-ups at the pub and the predictability of my future. I’d spent five years in advertising. I was now an account executive doing the bidding of my corporate masters, selling the American dream that had become Australia’s.

My initial fascination had become a curse and no longer was I interested in the shallow search for unique selling points and catchy phrases, the pretty pictures and the jingles, selling capitalism to the masses.

As I observed the careers of my fellow workers grinding relentlessly toward retirement, I felt a dark cloud descending and as it thickened around me I struggled to find a way to escape.

I thought about inland Australia where mining companies paid well and life was rough in the desert. I considered joining the army, something to initiate and toughen me and help me escape the malaise I felt.

But the war in Vietnam was in the headlines every day and Australians were dying in a distant struggle that made no sense to me and I quickly dropped the idea. And then, one day, an old school friend suggested Papua New Guinea.

We were having lunch at a pub when he told me about patrol officers, young men employed by the Australian government taming the wilds of Papua New Guinea. Suddenly the cloud lifted as I realized that perhaps this was the answer, a way out; overseas travel and adventure, all paid for by the Australian government.

Immediately I began reading to learn as much as I could about this faraway place and applied to become a Cadet Patrol Officer with the Australian Department of External Affairs. It would take six long months before the invitation for an interview arrived.

Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad had nothing on James Sinclair and Jack Hides, Ivan Champion and the other great explorers who wrote of their adventures in Papua New Guinea; who’d disappeared behind the ranges and into the swamps and vast inland valleys deep in unexplored territories on the second largest island on Earth.

These books vibrated with authentic adventure and raw excitement that tantalized and fascinated me. The authors were ordinary Australians in an extraordinary country and I prayed that one day I would join their ranks and see this land and the people about which they wrote.

Their books described journeys into territory never seen by white men, cannibals and crocodiles, exploratory patrols that lasted months and yielded reports of sorcery and magic, unique characters and taim bilng tumbuna, the time in the past which still lived in the present in Papua New Guinea.

It has been called “the land that time forgot”, “the mysterious island”, “the most primitive place on Earth”, but these were European appellations and had no significance to a people who had evolved complex kinship systems and survival techniques of great diversity and complexity unmatched in my white washed culture.

I felt ready for a new life and my desire was strong. My will to make the cut filled my every day. But I was twenty-three years old, at the older end of the spectrum for applicants, and feared my dream might not materialize.

But then the invitation for an interview arrived. Four hundred young men had applied for forty new positions as cadet patrol officers in what appeared to be the last induction, as the colonial period slowly wound down in Papua New Guinea.

My interviewer was a big, bluff former senior patrol officer who spoke softly belying the image I had of hard-bitten veterans of New Guinea. He told of his love of the island and the people and a life very different to mine and I hung on his every word.

Some months later I learned I was accepted and would soon leave my home in Melbourne and drive the six hundred miles to Sydney to attend ASOPA – the Australian School of Pacific Administration - a tertiary institution established by the Australian Government to train administrators, patrol officers and school teachers to work in Papua New Guinea.

I had never been to university having left school and gone straight to work in advertising. Now I was absorbed in a very different world, studying anthropology, law, history, Pidgin English and geography and I exceled.

 I competed in athletic competitions and local track meets, something I had not done since leaving school five years earlier. And again I cleared the high jump bar at six feet six inches and my spirits soared as a new world opened to me.

I lived in a guesthouse in Mosman, not far from the Sydney Harbor Bridge near the magnificent harbor and eagerly awaited the time for departure. I enjoyed Sydney. It was warmer and more brash than the gray conservatism of Melbourne.

On weekends I crewed on ocean yachts that raced in Sydney harbor and at nights drove my old beaten-up Volkswagen over the bridge into the city to visit restaurants and bars. I knew soon this life would be over.

In November, 1968 forty excited neophyte cadet patrol officers fastened their seat belts and roared down the runway, lifted into the air, and looked down on Sydney’s harbor; the ferries ploughing white furrows in the blue sea, the white lines of breaking surf skirting the serpentine coastline, the endless blue Pacific ocean, flat and limitless, and then the Arafura Sea that separated Australia from its nearest northern neighbor.

Ahead lay a new life. A feeling of elation filled me as we droned towards the place I’d read so much about and soon would touch and taste in person. I felt reborn. It was only the second time I’d flown and the exhilaration I felt was palpable.

Suddenly my previous life seemed old and distant, as if a great lid was closing on the trunk of my childhood and a new portal opening to real adulthood. I don’t think I’d ever felt such relief and happiness. And then the intercom crackled and a voice told us that Papua was in sight and I looked out a porthole and saw the formidable coastline slowly materializing on the horizon.

The sea changed color turning from deepest blue to green as we approached. White horses whipped by the wind raced across its surface as we descended. Now I could see Port Moresby’s scatted bungalows and rusted tin roofs, a yellow, dry and desolate landscape caught in the rain shadow created by the Owen Stanley ranges.

It was unlike anything I’d ever seen. The mountains were steeply rising monoliths, great green giants looming ominously, rising endlessly into the clouds and the dark interior where the Kokoda Trail, the track renowned for viscous World War Two battles between Japanese and Australian forces in 1942, wound its way through some of the most impenetrable country in the world.

The Kokoda Trail was legendary in Australia, its history written in blood and courage, the final holdout where my countrymen had fought back against the Japanese invasion of Australia. Relatives of mine had fought and died in the war in Papua New Guinea and I was filled with awe and humility as I looked down and felt grateful for the opportunity of adventures I’d only dreamed about.

The first thing I felt as I stepped from the belly of the airplane was a solid wall of stifling heat sucking the breath from my lungs. It was a completely new feeling. I felt perspiration squirting out of me as I walked across the tarmac to the low-slung airport complex.

Soon we were on a bus, staring out the windows at the shacks and the natives on the roadside as we headed for Kwikila, fifty miles east of the capital, where we would spend a final month of on-ground training, sleeping under canvas on cots, attending lectures and demonstrations, as we were inducted into our new life.

We learned about primitive road and bridge construction, heard stories from our trainers, themselves seasoned patrol officers. We drank dark rum and water with our anti-malaria tablets and handled .38 Smith and Wesson side arms on the firing range.

As cadet patrol officers we would spend twenty-one months before graduating to full patrol officer status but already we were officially officers in the Royal Papua New Guinea constabulary. On distant patrol posts we were the law.

We’d learned about the inland highlands where more than a million people had been discovered only thirty years previously, where there were people who’d never seen a white man. The Highlands were cooler than the coast and considered desirable because there were still exploratory patrols and a taste of the old days of New Guinea. And then there were the less attractive humid low-lands.

I’d read Ivan Champion’s account of crossing Papua New Guinea from the southern seaboard to the northern coast. The great swamp lands in the south-west on what is now the Indonesian border, where six hundred miles upstream, the Fly River was still only sixty feet above sea level.

On the West Irian border, which used to be Dutch New Guinea, Indonesia had invaded sending the Dutch colonialists packing. Now there were border incursions by Indonesian soldiers and there was fear that Indonesia might make a grab for more territory in Australian Papua New Guinea.

When Indonesia gained its independence from the Netherlands in 1949, the Dutch government retained control over the territory of West New Guinea. From 1949 until 1961 the Indonesians sought to "recover" West New Guinea arguing that the territory, rightfully belonged with them.

In late 1961, Indonesia's President Sukarno declared a military mobilization and threatened to invade West New Guinea and annex it by force. I remember the fear in Australia that Indonesia may be our next enemy.

At school in Australia I’d been in the cadet core with the rank of sergeant major. I’d attended military training at Puckapunyal, the Australian Army's Combined Arms Training Centre.

Puckapunyal, or "Valley of the Winds", was named by the area's Aborigines. I remember those hot dry winds and the scrubby vegetation and the bivouacs at night where we’d learned to use a compass and read maps and fire Enfield .303 rifles on the firing range. Our instructors reminded us constantly that “Indos”, the Indonesians, were the enemy.

Now in Papua New Guinea, as I began my new career, there was unease when Indonesia took control of West New Guinea which it promptly renamed West Irian. A U.S. sponsored agreement through the United Nations, obligated Jakarta to conduct elections on self-determination, no later than 1969 soon after I’d arrived. But once in control, Indonesia quickly moved to repress political dissent by groups demanding outright independence.

It was here, near the Fly River, that Michael Rockefeller had disappeared in 1961. Rockefeller and a Dutch anthropologist René Wassing, were in a 40-foot dugout canoe about three miles from shore when they were swamped and over turned. Most believe that Rockefeller either drowned or was attacked by sharks or crocodiles. But because headhunting and cannibalism were still present in some areas of the Asmat region in 1961, there was speculation that Rockefeller was killed and eaten by the locals.

There was circumstantial evidence to support the idea. Several leaders of Otsjanep village, where Rockefeller likely would have landed had he made it to shore, were killed by a Dutch patrol in 1958. Thus the villages had some rationale for revenge against someone from the "white tribe." Neither cannibalism nor headhunting in Asmat were indiscriminate, but rather a part of a tit-for-tat pay back revenge cycle, and so it is possible that Rockefeller found himself the inadvertent victim of a pay back began by a Dutch patrol years before.

In 1979, Rockefeller's mother hired a private investigator to go to New Guinea to try to resolve the mystery of his disappearance. The investigator swapped a boat engine for the skulls of three Caucasians claimed to be the only white men ever killed in the area. When the investigator returned to New York, he handed the skulls to the Rockefeller family, convinced that one of them was the skull of Rockefeller.

Rockefeller's mother is said to have paid a $250,000 reward for final proof proving whether or not Michael Rockefeller was alive or dead. The legacy of his death can be found in the Asmat artifacts Rockefeller collected, on permanent display, in the Michael C. Rockefeller collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

In the north-west of New Guinea, paralleling the Indonesian border, is the mighty Sepik River, another of the great rivers systems of the world. It snakes sinuously towards the northern coastal town of Wewak, another site of ferocious fighting in the war.

Grass-thatched spirit houses called Haus Tambarans, line its banks and contain the bones and messages of the ancestors in primitive carvings, many of them stolen by shady characters and sold to fashionable New York galleries. Years later I would see Sepik carvings hanging behind the glass windows of fashionable art galleries on Madison Avenue in New York.

And then there were the islands where the palm trees swayed and the soundtrack from South Pacific played in your head. The Bismarck Archipelago, a crescent of volcanic islands that included tiny Manus Island, part of the Admiralty island chain in the north near the equator; New Ireland, a long spit of sand and surf that curved south to New Britain; the Trobriand Islands that Margaret Mead made famous when she described the promiscuity of the women.

And finally, the island of Bougainville. These were considered prime postings. All these islands had suffered during the Second World War as the Japanese advanced on Australia and the heroic Allied support of most islanders was legendary.

Our initial training ended in late 1969, we lined up in the hot sun and our names were called and matched to our postings. I was sent to Bougainville, Papua New Guinea’s most eastern district near the Solomon Islands, three hours flying time from the country’s capital, a sleepy island of 80,000 people, volcanic, wild and beautiful.

Bougainville was a backwater. It was 150 miles long with volcanoes, black sand beaches and limpid glass green seas. It was named after the French explorer, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, who’d fought against the British and the Indians in Canada and America in the seventeen hundreds.

In 1766 Bougainville had received permission from Louis XV to circumnavigate the globe. He would become the 14th navigator in western history, and the first Frenchman, to sail around the world. On his long voyage, Bougainville sailed to Tahiti and in his book “Voyage Autour du Mond”, wrote of an earthly paradise, describing noble savages who lived in happy innocence, away from the corruption of civilization.

From Tahiti he sailed westward to southern Samoa and the New Hebrides, then on sighting Espiritu Santo, turned west still looking for the rumored great Southern Continent. In 1776; the British explorer Captain James Cook, would discover and call it Australia. Bougainville almost discovered Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the largest such reef in the world, on the eastern seaboard, but sailed north through what is now known as the Solomon Islands chain. He named the most western of the Solomon Islands, Bougainville.

One hundred years later, missionaries, traders and men with guns and beards arrived in Bougainville. Germans, British, Japanese, and finally Australians, overran the island, and when I arrived in the late nineteen sixties I was to witness the most devastating invasion of them all. The world’s most powerful mining companies arrived to extract copper and gold that might make Papua New Guinea a wealthy nation but it precipitated a vicious ten year civil war that saw the deaths of twenty-thousand innocent Bougainvillians.

http://danielborgstrom.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/papua-new-guinea.html

Thanks to Bill Brown

Comments

[Peter Kranz]

"Among the Headhunters" was actually a pretty amazing film. Apart from a handful of references to "primitive stone age customs" etc. it is remarkably enlightened and non-patronising, expecially considering it was made in 1955 (and not once does it mention cannibalism).

It features some of the first colour footage ever taken of Sepik initiation rites, bush-materials bridge building across the Wahgi, Simbu tainim-kek/kukim-nus traditions, and even mumu cooking in a hollowed-out tree trunk, flute playing and dancing etc.

They seemed to spend quite a bit of time filming around Kudjip and Kundiawa.

It also met with approval from The Boss. Worth watching if you can dig up a copy.

[Ross Wilkinson]

Andy is a bit of a legend. I was on the same intake in that group of 40.

I was a couple of years younger than him but knew of him because of his athletic prowess. He was the Associated Grammar School's high jump champion and record holder. I was in a competing school as our miler and half miler and ran at Interclub level after leaving school.

At interclub level, he would have been competing against the likes of Olympians such as Tony Sneazwell and Laurie Peckham. Saturday competition at Olympic Park was a veritable who's who of the Australian Olympic team and Andy was right up there.

I didn't see him again after leaving Kwikila but the stories of Andy's feats (mainly social) left us in awe.
__________

The second part of the Phillips' memoirs will be published on Monday - KJ

[Colin Huggins]

Well Ludmilla, it might be a bit of a battle as to who from Europe was first to 'discover' Australia. See this from Wikipedia.

"The first documented and undisputed European sighting of and landing on Australia was in March 1606, by the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon aboard the Duyfken. It is possible that Luís Vaz de Torres, working for the Spanish Crown, sighted Australia when he sailed through the Torres Strait several months later, in October 1606.

Occasional claims have been made in support of earlier encounters, particularly for various Portuguese explorations. Evidence put forward in favour of this theory, particularly by Kenneth McIntyre, is primarily based on interpretation of features of the Dieppe Maps. However, this interpretation is not accepted by most historians."

So as you say, it sure wasn't "Jimmy" Cook.

[Ludmilla Isalonda]

A great read. Can't wait for the next instalment.

But on a point of historical fact, was it a Dutchman rather than the British man who was the first European to stumble across (discover?] Australia?

[Peter Kranz]

For a documentary view of western perceptions of PNG 50+ years ago, GEM TV is showing Armand and Michaela Denis' "Among the Headhunters" this morning.

Made in 1955 it provides an interesting glimpse of village life at the time, and despite the title is a rather earnest and undramatic documentary.

The Denis' were pioneers of natural history film making and many oldies like me may remember seeing them on TV in the '50s and '60s.