Beyond the Coral Sea: Travels in the Old Empires of the South-West Pacific

Chris had spent some twelve years in Popondetta as an Agricultural Extension and Development Bank Officer. During an election it was discovered that many of the villagers were unable to read the ballot papers, so he invented what they called ‘the whisper vote’. The locals would whisper their choice in his ear, and he would mark their ballot paper accordingly.

Large drops of rain began thudding onto the roof with increasing velocity. A mysterious figure carrying an ancient Gladstone bag wandered onto the veranda. He was wearing a beige linen suit, maroon-spotted cravat and heavy brogues. His engaging face and sculpted beard achieved a wan smile, but he was way overdressed for the tropics and sweating heavily.

‘A Victorian detective looking for the ghost of a missionary,’ Chris Abel commented wryly.

The BBC were making a programme about the Reverend James Chalmers, a famous nineteenth-century missionary eaten by cannibals on Goaribari Island in the Gulf of Papua. The next day I saw the optimistic film crew board a decrepit yellow coaster and dissolve offshore in a dark tropical storm. Abel suddenly turned to me.

‘And what exactly are you doing here?’ His eyes hardened and a measure of suspicion crept into his voice.

‘Just travelling around the islands and writing about the culture,’ I answered carefully.

‘A couple came here recently for a good reason.’ He emphasised the words meaningfully. ‘A lad came back with his father who had fought in the Battle of Milne Bay. He’s going to write a book about it.’

An atmosphere of unspoken confrontation entered the conversation. He seemed suspicious of writers. Russell Abel, his father, had written an excellent biography of Charles Abel in 1934 called Forty Years in Dark Papua. But the latest published biography of the missionary had made the whole family angry. One reviewer reported that the book contained errors, twisted facts and nasty allusions.

‘And we gave the writer access to all the private papers.’

Clearly I had uncovered a nest of scorpions. The downpour blotted out the light and almost stopped conversation. He was forced to shout over the noise. Water was swirling everywhere and the storm drains were overflowing. He raised his hands in a gesture of hopelessness at attempting to talk over the hammering rain. The fans rushed moist air over our faces.

‘I’ll dig out some books for you to look at. You can set the record straight!’

‘I’m going to Samarai and Kwato tomorrow in the Orsiri1 dinghy.’

‘Have a good trip!’ he shouted as his slender figure disappeared into the murk.

‘What was all that about?’ commented Mocquery rhetorically.

‘I have absolutely no idea.’

1Pidgin for ‘betel nut’.

1‘Masurina’ means ‘the fruits of an abundant harvest’ in the local Suau language.

1‘We work at the Lodge in the kitchen.’

1Originally a Milne Bay word long used for white men, probably meaning ‘stranger from across the sea’.

1Pidgin for Papua New Guinean woman.

2At the outbreak of the Second World War, Australia maintained three separate armies of volunteer personnel. The Militia were part-time, citizen-force volunteers ineligible for service outside Australia or its colonies. The Second Australian Imperial Force (AIF) was a highly-trained volunteer force eligible for service anywhere overseas. Finally, there was the permanent army made up of a relatively small force of trained volunteers. There was friction between these armies due to the differentiation of combat role and degree of professional training. Many Militia units subsequently distinguished themselves abroad when their theatre of operations was extended.

1A local trading company based on Samarai Island in China Strait.

5. Too Hard a Country for Soft Drinks

The elderly ‘whiteskin’ standing on the wharf at the Alotau harbour side, casually dressed in check sports shirt and light trousers, was waiting for the St Joseph putt putt1 to tie up. I was waiting for the Orsiri banana boat to finish loading and head off for Samarai. The fresh bread delivery was delayed so I hung about smoking a rough cigarette made from tobacco rolled in newspaper. An albino Melanesian ambled past squinting against the sun, his pink skin shockingly blotched, yellow hair dazzling against the palms. Decrepit trade boats were taking on crew who sat on the stern rails, ejecting jets of scarlet into the water and calling out to their friends in passing trucks. My nose was assaulted by a peculiar mixture of fish, yeast, distillate and copra. Banana boats packed with produce and drums of diesel skated across the harbour towards the islands like hunting water spiders. The sun beat down.

‘Good morning!’ I was the picture of bonhomie.

‘Good morning, my son. Are you visiting Alotau? We don’t get many of your sort, oh no.’

I thought this was an extraordinary way to greet a stranger. He had an Irish accent and mottled complexion. All ‘whiteskins’ who have lived in the tropics for years have this wan appearance. We stood side by side rocking on our heels in a foolish colonial manner, looking at the colourful activity, glancing from time to time at the oil slick and coconut husks floating in the water below the wharf.

‘I’m the Catholic priest in Alotau … oh yes … the Catholic priest.’ He volunteered in answer to my quizzical look.

‘Ah! How long have you been here, Father?’

‘Oh yes … must be getting on for thirty years now, thirty years since I left Ireland. I’ve stopped counting, I have that.’

‘I suppose there have been a lot of changes in your time.’

‘Oh yes … murders and break-ins are increasing all the time, they’re always about, they are that. That’s right. A boat from Lae brought in a whole criminal element, it did. It’s gone now, thank goodness, together with the murdering, thieving boyos we hope … oh yes … we do hope that.’

‘I heard about that boat.’

‘Did you now. You must have your ear to the ground. Oh yes … they know where you are all the time … they’re watching all the time … oh yes … now he locks his door … yes … now he’s gone out … yes … yes … now he’s come back. He’s gone inside and locked the door … He’s turning on his light. Now he’s having a shower. They know it all and see in the dark … oh yes … they see in the dark, they can do that.’

‘Has your health stood up over the years, Father?’

‘Well, to tell you God’s truth, I’ve had the fever recently … and it laid me desperate low but I seem to be all right now … oh yes. Age creeping on now.’

More shuffling and gazing.

‘I’ve read that sorcerers and magic are still about.’

‘Oh yes … the magic and the witchcraft are strong, strong. They might be Christian but that old black magic is still there in them … it’s a terrible ting, terrible ting, terrible, terrible … Propitiate the spirits of the departed now … it’s a dark existence out here to be sure. It certainly is that.’

The St Joseph, freshly painted in yellow ochre, finally tied up at the wharf. The priest waved to some village women dressed in Victorian cotton smocks.

‘That’s my lot there … oh yes … I’ll have to leave you now. God be with you on your travels … yes … God be with you,’ and he wandered over to his flock.

The bread had arrived while I was chatting and the banana boat prepared to leave. This powerful vessel had twin seventy-five horsepower outboard motors and two plastic garden chairs. We powered out of the harbour and the cool wind brushed our faces and lifted our spirits. The rusting Taiwanese trawlers were soon left far behind as we sped along the south coast of Milne Bay towards East Cape. A young village girl carrying some shopping sat in the seat beside me. She prattled on in Pidgin to the two boys piloting the boat but they said nothing at all to me. I put my feet up – one on a carton containing an electric lawn mower and the other on a carton of several hundred tins of baked beans. The dinghy began to buck as we headed towards the open ocean and I noticed there were no life jackets. Later I was to learn that this omission is quite normal practice. I would have felt decidedly wimpish to have mentioned this in such a ‘masculine’ society. Be a man and drown or laugh as you are taken by a shark. My panama began to whip around my legs as I held it down out of the wind.

We followed the coast east for only a short time, sailing parallel to the road I had travelled only a couple of days before. The sea became rougher as we turned south towards Samarai and the Coral Sea. I felt a tremendous sense of exhilaration, my face dashed with spray, slicing through the azure water, the dark-green jungle defending the mountainous interior coming up on the right. Coconut palms, transparent green water fringing crystalline beaches, a swirl of smoke from the occasional bush hut. Young, brown, white-breasted sea eagles soared on the up-draughts, their wingspans majestically spread against the vegetation. Fragile outrigger canoes weathering the sea swell were cheered on by the boys.

The currents in China Strait are treacherous. The pattern on the surface of the water changes from seahorses whipped by the wind to smooth powerful eddies of deep blue streaming up from the abyss. The pastel outlines of numerous small islands appeared, jagged peaks lifting from valleys shaped like cauldrons. The sun broke through gunmetal clouds and burnished the sea, biblical rays that appeared to be guiding us to salvation. I realised with surprise I was soaked to the skin.

Captain John Moresby landed on Samarai from HMS Basilisk in April 1873 hoping to evade the unwelcome attentions of his ‘savage friends’. He settled down to dinner with his officers but they were followed by a hundred fighting men, who squatted quietly on the beach beside the blue water and watched the proceedings with close interest. Moresby offered them a stew made of preserved soup and potatoes, salt pork, curlew and pigeon, which, not altogether surprisingly, disgusted the warriors. The sailors unsuccessfully tried paddling canoes which resulted in capsizals, hilarious moments for all concerned. The warriors opened the officers’ shirts and stroked the white skin of their chests in wonderment and appreciation. Captain Moresby wryly named the place Dinner Islet to mark this unusually human and peaceful encounter. The local name of Samarai soon replaced the cannibalistic associations of the former.

The island appeared a deserted ghost town at first sight. The former provincial headquarters, which is an older settlement than Port Moresby, had clearly seen better days. I climbed up onto the Orsiri trading wharf to take my bearings. Ruined warehouses lined the neglected International Wharves site, warehouses gaping like skulls set on a rack, the empty interiors propped up by partitions of broken bone. Planks and beams jutted out like shattered teeth. Clumps of resentful youths were loitering around the general store and glared at me without a smile, but the women and children greeted me with friendly waves.

‘Apinun!’1

‘Apinun!’

The mown grass and coral streets (there is only one rarely used motor vehicle on Samarai) seemed like sections of an abandoned filmset. I walked between the abandoned shells of two buildings in which some boys were shouting and playing football. I hoped I was heading towards the Kinanale Guesthouse, run by Wallace Andrew, the grandson of a cannibal. Some attractive colonial houses were ranged around the perimeter of a waterlogged football field. In the sultry heat I leant exhausted against an electricity pole near a memorial obelisk before heading for a small beach in the distance. Rain trees and old flamboyants offered cooling shade.

‘Hello there!’ The voice came from a porch at the top of a flight of steps to my left. ‘Come up and have a drink!’

A tall, smiling ‘whiteskin’ wearing shorts, his legs covered in the ubiquitous small plasters, beckoned me in.

‘I’m looking for the guesthouse run by Wallace Andrew. Do you know where it is, by any chance?’

‘It’s just there!’ and he pointed to a large house partly covered in old wooden scaffolding. I had thought this structure was an abandoned building project.

‘Wallace is about somewhere, but come up for a minute.’ He disappeared inside.

I went into the sitting room and collapsed into a chair while he brought some iced water from the fridge. Furniture was clearly hard to come by on Samarai and the room had the feel of a temporary arrangement that had drifted out of control into permanence. For no good reason I imagined I could see mosquitoes everywhere. Probably the beginnings of tropical madness.

‘Hi, there. I’m Ian Poole, Manager of Orsiri Trading.’ I instinctively felt he was open and lacking in the customary consuming demons, a rare quality in the tropics, although it was a slightly mad challenge maintaining a business in this remote spot. Australians generally manage extremes with equanimity and dry humour.

‘I’m just travelling the islands. Chris Abel from Masurina told me to look you up. I’ve heard you have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the place.’

‘Well, it’s certainly interesting. Wallace knows a lot more about the local villagers and Kwato Mission, of course. He was born there.’

‘I’m surprised there are so many old buildings left. Didn’t the Australians carry out a scorched-earth policy to stop the Japanese?’

‘Yes. Unnecessary, though. The Japs buzzed the island a few times in flying boats and dropped a couple of bombs but that was it. The Aussie Administration Unit set fire to all the commercial and government places including the famous hotels. Tragic loss. You can still see the few survivors around the football pitch.’

Missionaries were the first Europeans to establish themselves in this part of Eastern Papua New Guinea. By 1878 the Reverend Samuel MacFarlane had made Samarai a head station for the London Missionary Society, but the LMS soon exchanged land on Samarai for the island of Kwato a short distance away. At the turn of the century Samarai had no wharf or jetty and goods were off-loaded from trading vessels into canoes. It was a government station, a port of entry and a ‘gazetted penal district’. Local labour was forcibly recruited here for the plantations. Copra and gold-mining dominated life, and this tropical paradise became a more important centre than Port Moresby. The town, if it could be described as such, consisted of ‘The Residency’ (a bungalow built on the only hill for the first Commissioner General, Sir Peter Scratchley, appointed by the Imperial Government in 1884 and dead from malaria within three months), the woven-grass Sub-collector’s House, the gaol (with the liquor bond store in the roof), the cemetery and Customs House, and two small stores plus a few sheds. There were no hotels or guesthouses in the early days of the 1880s, the traders living mainly on their vessels and the gold-diggers camped out in their tents.

The Europeans besieged Whitten Brothers’ premises since alcohol was dispensed from their store. The empties were hurled onto the sand from the roofed balcony. A village boy collected the bottles the next morning and counted them. Whitten then divided the number of bottles by the number of men drinking and so accounts were democratically settled. According to the entertaining reminiscences of Charles Monkton in his book Some Experiences of a New Guinea Magistrate published in 1921, men dressed mainly in striped ‘pyjamas’ or more festively in ‘turkeyred twill, worn petticoat fashion with a cotton vest’. He describes picturesque ruffians roaming the palm-fringed shore. One incorrigible known as ‘Nicholas the Greek’, after pursuing an absconder through impenetrable jungle, returned with only his head in a bag. When questioned about the missing body he laconically commented, ‘Here’s your man. I couldn’t bring the lot of him, so I’ll only take a hundred [pounds].’ Monckton also describes ‘O’Reagan the Rager’, who was ‘never sober, never washed, slept in his clothes, and at all times diffused an odour of stale drink and fermenting humanity’. The spectacular sunsets and moonlit tropical nights of Dinner Island had formed a cinematic backdrop to all types of mysterious schooners, yawls, ketches, cutters and luggers with eloquent names such as Mizpah, Ada, Hornet, Curlew and Pearl.

‘Life was pretty primitive here in those early days, I suppose.’ I wanted to draw Poole out. He obliged me at length.

‘Simple pleasures as now, I reckon. The malarial swamp was filled in by the prisoners to make a cricket field. Local people were forbidden to wear shirts in case they spread disease. They believed “the fever” came from the miasma that rose from the stagnant water. Mal aria means bad air, I think. Samarai was a deathtrap. The cemetery was always full. In fact, the fatal swamp occupied the football pitch right in front of your guesthouse. Sheep were imported from Australia and used to graze there until they were needed for meat. The residents, I think there were about a hundred and twenty in the early part of the century, played tennis, cricket and the children went swimming. Simple pleasures as I said.’

‘Sounds idyllic.’

‘There was always the demon drink. That’s a story in itself. The first hotel was called The Golden Fleece. One large room and a veranda. It was built of palm with a thatched roof. No doors or windows. Guests were expected to bring their own sheets, knives, forks and plates and sleep on the floor. Drunks would stumble in at night in hobnailed boots and fall over each other cursing and swearing.’

‘But I thought Samarai was famous for the glamour of its hotels!’

‘True, but that was later in the 1920s. There were a couple of better hotels – the largest one had two storeys and was called The Cosmopolitan. Another called The Samarai, was at one time run by a real merry widow named Flora Gofton. Missionaries had to drag the drunks into church. One called “Cheers!” during the consecration.’ I had to smile at this.

‘And the hospital?’

‘Oh, they built two hospitals and two schools – one each for Europeans and Papuans. Water was segregated as well. “Pride of race”, they called it. On moonlit nights people would go around the island by launch singing. Everybody loved the place, although it was pretty wild with drunken miners and labour recruiters.’

‘Women must’ve had a pretty rough time.’

‘Some sad stories there. Many just upped sticks and left. There was a Swede named Nielsen who worked his butt off and made a few quid. Then he married a pretty Australian girl who was a bit footloose, you know the sort. She finally pissed off and went south. Every three weeks he would paddle his dinghy out through the mangroves to meet the steamer. Dreamed she would be on it. He always dressed up to the nines to meet her, immaculate – tan boots, clean shirt, tie and white duck trousers. She always disappointed him and never arrived. He would return to Samarai cursing all women and get drunk as a sponge that night.’

‘What about married women?’

‘Spent all their time looking after ill children. Helluva life. I’ve got part of a letter here somewhere that will give you an idea.’ He fished around in a hefty file by his armchair and extracted a dog-eared photocopy. I noticed he kept scratching his legs and bare arms as did most expatriates I met in Papua New Guinea.

‘This one was written by Nell Turner, married to an officer of some sort. It’s from The Residency, used to be up on the hill, dated January 1909. She writes: “Alf is not at all well tho’ he is gaining weight this last month … Kate is a lot bigger than mother – gets bigger and fatter after each baby. Mollie had convulsions on New Year Eve and took over two hours to come out of it, was quite stupid for a couple of days after, she seems quite recovered now. Munrowd had a fit a week after Mollie, but is well again. Jean had a dose of fever but is on the mend.”’

‘Sounds drastic to me. Matter of fact my own wife is in Australia at the moment. It’s tough for women here.’ He carefully placed the letter back into his archive. ‘I hope to write a history of Samarai one day. No time of course.’

I suggested we find Wallace, so we went over to the guesthouse. I called out but there was no reply. The large room was sparsely furnished and seedy, like an old people’s home. A meal was laid out on a table under white gauze. It was dim despite the fierce sun blazing down outside.

‘Yu yah! kamap pinis!1 I had gone down to the wharf to meet you!’

A voice came from the gloomy interior at the back of the house. A patriarchal Melanesian in an immaculate white shirt emerged from a corridor limping slightly. His grey hair was carefully groomed, teeth mauled by betel, warm eyes that expressed a mixture of love and disappointment. One of his hands had been amputated midway down the forearm.

‘Got your letter. I’m Wallace Andrew.’

Ian left us. Wallace immediately sat down at a bare table and began to play a game of patience with a limp deck of cards. It was as though he needed to erect a barrier to communication as a safeguard. Clearly he had spent years of his life playing this game in lonely isolation. The skill with which he shuffled the deck and deftly dealt and gathered the cards in with the stump of his arm fascinated me.

‘I’ve come to see Samarai and Kwato.’ I pulled up a worn chair.

‘Ah, it’s so beautiful there. We’ll go together, you and I, to Kwato. Many people used to come, but there are few visitors now.’ The cards flopped softly onto the table. He scarcely noticed if the game ‘came out’ and took even less interest. Time seemed to have come to a shuddering halt. I realized with alarm that nothing was actually going to happen in the next five minutes, the next hour, for the rest of the afternoon, for my entire life if I stayed on the island for long enough. My own arrival was the main event of the week. I needed to slow down to Melanesian time. It was quiet in that room and baking hot. The ceiling fan motors had probably burnt out long ago.

‘Dinah will show you up to your room. Then come down and have lunch,’ he suddenly said.

A petite village woman with a beautiful smile gestured for me to follow her up what was almost a grand staircase. The central carpet had long since disappeared, but the unpainted wooden strip in the centre was a ghostly reminder of some past attempt at luxury. We took the right flight of the staircase and passed through two bare rooms with flaking paint. Broken lampshades, mattresses and lumber lay abandoned on the floor in a corner. Her bare feet noiselessly brushed the cracked lino. A long veranda opened off a landing, but the bleached scaffolding hid any view. She pushed open the door to No. 8, a large room furnished with a double bed, a single bed, a dressing table, a wardrobe and a fan. It was clean and comfortable with screened windows against mosquitoes. French doors opened onto the veranda. I looked through the maze of planks over the former swamp to the few colonial buildings that had survived the destruction of the war.

‘You share the bathroom and toilet,’ she said in excellent English and showed me the most basic of conveniences. I noticed a sign in red letters under a sheet of discoloured plastic on the wall of the shower: ‘For hot water pull string.’

Dinah smiled again and disappeared. A corridor led out to what I thought was a rear entrance, but I found that the stairs had been removed and a twenty-foot drop into empty space yawned below. In a shed I could see a wrecked dinghy. I wandered back into the stifling room and sat on the bed. Glancing up I caught sight of my reflection in the glass. A crumpled traveller, sweating heavily, weighed down with notebooks and maps, wearing a sand-coloured colonial shirt, a planter panama and blue suede boots. Overdressed for the occasion I thought. I noticed there were no locks to the door of room No. 8 as I went down to lunch.

‘Where were you born, Wallace?’ I had poured myself some livid green cordial and was helping myself from a platter of reef fish and bananas.

‘On Logea Island, near Kwato.’