In New Guinea's Threatened Wilds

Author: By Carmel Schrire

Date: SUNDAY, January 24, 1999

Page: G3

Section: Books

New Guinea, the world's second-largest island, lies north of Australia and just south of the Equator. Its deep past is linked with that of its southerly neighbors, Australia and Tasmania, all of which calved off together 60 million years ago from their parent supercontinent, Gondwanaland, on a single continental plate known as Greater Australia.

They broke loose just as placental mammals were beginning to evolve, and subsequent isolation from evolution elsewhere saw the efflorescence of a distinctive flora and fauna here, including ancestral egg-laying monotremal mammals like the spiny anteater and the platypus, as well as pouched marsupials such as the koala and the kangaroo. Deep-sea barriers maintained isolation as they drifted toward Southeast Asia, only to be dramatically breached with the spread of humans from Asia into Greater Australia sometime between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago. Finally, the most recent sundering into three lands took place with the rise of the post-glacial sea, around 10,000 years ago.

The first human colonists in Greater Australia were hunter-forager descendants of earlier Old World humans, who floated across the sea (whether intentionally or by chance) on bamboo rafts. With them, at various times, came the use of fire, dogs, and -- where New Guinea is concerned -- a package of cultivation, pigs, and chickens. Despite repeated migration from Southeast Asia, Australia and Tasmania remained the province of aboriginal hunter-gatherers until widespread European colonization over the past 200 years.

New Guinea stayed inviolate for much longer, due largely to its vast central spine of impenetrable mountains, which were entered by Westerners only about 60 years ago and still remain largely unexplored by Western science. A land of subsistence hunter-farmers, it was initially governed by colonial Dutch, Germans, and Australians. Today, the eastern half is the independent nation of Papua New Guinea, and the west is a province of Indonesia.

Tim Flannery, an Australian research scientist and expert on marsupial mammals (currently visiting Harvard University as the chair of Australian studies), has worked in New Guinea since 1981, making innumerable journeys -- or, as the pidgin has it, ``throwim way leg'' -- to isolated regions in search of its mammalian fauna, including the tree-kangaroo and possum portion of the book's subtitle. The ``penis gourd'' mentioned there epitomizes the isolated nature of men who still wear a traditional ornament, and encompasses Flannery's wider, humanitarian concern for the people themselves.

``Throwim Way Leg'' is a chronicle of journeys into dangerous places, incorporating hunters and even cannibals as guides and helpers to map, catch, and study elusive specimens. Flannery is at his most lyrical describing the land. The Neon basin, where a former glacial lake once shone, is now covered with tussock grass, huge tree ferns festooned with brilliant orange orchids, all glowing bronze and orange in the afternoon light. A grove of sacred pines, ``soaring giants, mist swirling through their crowns,'' is carpeted with a thick mossy floor and roofed with an impenetrable canopy that renders it as silent as a cathedral. Floating on his airbed down a tributary of the Sepik River, the author becomes so entranced at the tops of enormous trees rotating above that he little realizes the dead animals trapped in the logjams below are the leavings of crocodiles.

Hunting and trapping present a less rhapsodic face. Many villagers festoon their houses with the jaws of prey, making it easy for him to identify species he needs. Valuable specimens come in mauled by dogs, and Flannery has to hurry when he samples the prey before it is cooked and eaten by his helpers. He finds and names new species of the reclusive tree-kangaroo, one from a tiny brown joey captured live in its dead mother's pouch; another with a pale face ``like a white man''; a third from a black claw that he recognized when he first saw it dangling from the neck of a bearer who carried him to a clinic when he was almost unconscious with scrub typhus; and -- best of all -- one from a black and white species found hiding in a disused shed at a mining town.

Likewise, his persistent hunt for the world's rarest bat -- Bulmer's Fruit-bat, thought to have become extinct at the end of the Ice Age -- leads him to a remote cave where vast flocks roosted, only to find it deserted when scientists returned for more. A mislabeled museum specimen led Flannery to a hunter who shot one in a fig tree in his back yard, and from there back to the original cave where a few still fluttered away.

Flannery copes with privations all the way -- hunger, fear, illness -- but always defers to the suffering of the people he meets. Some live in small, smoky villages perched atop narrow ridges, separated from their neighbors by a thousand mutually unintelligible languages that constitute a full one-sixth of the world total. Others endure the misery of relocation in hostile, unfamiliar places at the hands of political and developmental forces.

Many animals are in deep danger of extinction through human and canine predation, as well as the habitat depletion brought by mining and logging. Given how many new species manage to survive in isolated refuge areas, nonhuman mammalian prospects seem rosier that those of indigenous people. Widespread diseases have afflicted Miyanmin villagers since resettlement, so that their ringworm skin disorder produces a vile and characteristic stench of decay. Children visiting a mine are beaten by guards and left to die of exposure. As for people living in the far west under Indonesian rule, the advent of the giant New Orleans-based Freeport mine bent on eviscerating a mountain of copper and gold has brought a vicious Indonesian military presence into the area, birthing an indigenous resistance movement that promises further violence.

Ralph Bulmer, the late great anthropologist and expert on New Guinea birds, once said that extinctions there arise less from hunger or malice than from simple curiosity to see exactly what this last strange creature may be. Flannery's close association with hunters may help dampen some of this curiosity by educating people in the protection and conservation of rare species. He may well be more successful here than in his dealings with big business, for though he dedicates this book to one Jim-Bob Moffat, CEO of Freeport, in the hope that he will learn something about the ecosystem into which he and his company have blundered, the engines that drive multinational profiteering and Indonesian militarism might well outstrip those that guide and preserve New Guinea village life.