It is a long and remote river is the Sepik. It wanders some 700 miles or so through hostile country from the Victor Emmanuel Ranges in the Central Highlands of New Guinea to disgorge itself abruptly into the Bismarck Sea a few miles east of Wewak. Unlike the Fly river, its southern cousin which drains into the Gulf of Papua, it has no delta. There must be a reason for this. I never stopped to ask why.
I got to it only once and that was in 1968 when Papua New Guinea was administered by the Australians. The company I worked for had acquired a chain of travel agencies situated in the main towns in Papua New Guinea. The company bought it from a feisty lady who was keen to get away from a bad divorce and make a new life in Australia. It took me some time to realise that my employers had been too easily persuaded to make the purchase. A lack of due diligence may have been the cause, or I may have screwed the business up being too young and less than well at the time I took it over. You can take your pick should you be so inclined.
I had been sent from Fiji to manage the business and was just recovering from multiple injuries sustained in an accident. Most of the bones I had broken had mended. My left femur, however, had not. It was held together by a device invented by the German surgeon Gerhard Küntscher during WWII. It was a metal rod hammered down the cavity of the femur to hold the broken bits together whilst the bone healed. One of the problems with the device in those days was that it allowed the bone to rotate about the fracture, and my left foot began to point inwards. I found that alarming. Surgeons have recently cured this problem by drilling nails through the bone into the rod.
I was making a familiarisation trip to see for myself the potential tourist destinations around Papua New Guinea. That is why I was traveling up the Sepik river in a canoe hollowed from a huge cedar log. A crocodile head was carved on its sharp end for luck. I was sitting on a wooden kitchen chair behind the aforesaid feisty lady who was similarly seated. We were also accompanied by an Australian crocodile skin trader. The owner of the canoe, a small local man, sat at his outboard motor wearing an imitation pith helmet and smoking tobacco rolled in newspaper. The refreshment available was small tins of Craft cheese and a bottle of Cognac. This was supplemented after a while by the purchase of some fresh coconuts from one of the riverside villages.
The crocodile skin trader had a double purpose. He intended to make money as my tour guide and to purchase some skins recently pealed from crocodiles which he would sell via a local trade store to someone in Singapore whose name sounded like Arshak Gallstone. The said Mr Gallstone had a factory in Singapore where he cured the skins and made ladies handbags and other ‘accessories’ from them. My interest lay in the possibility that Japanese tourists might be persuaded to make a trip down the Sepik river to see where their fathers or grandfathers had fought in WWII.
The Japanese had occupied New Guinea during WWII. Between July and November 1942, they attempted to expand their Greater East Asian Coprosperity Sphere into Papua by forcing the Kakoda Track through the Owen Stanley mountains but were thwarted by the Australians who defended it heroically. The defence of the Kakoda Track is now a part of ANZAC history. Had the defence failed the Japanese would have had a foothold in Australian territory.
In 1968 there was still plenty of evidence in New Guinea of the strange brutality the Japanese had visited on the Australians they had captured. I was aware of the hostility Japanese visitors engendered, especially those who adopted military uniforms when they visited their ancestor’s graves. Even so we did a fair trade in Japanese ‘battlefield’ tours of Wewak, Madang, Lae and Rabaul. In Rabaul there were some old Australian WWII veterans who had been ‘Coast Watchers’. They had spent time alone and in great peril on remote islands reporting the movements of Japanese shipping by radio to the Australian navy. They were less than happy to welcome Japanese tourists.
We had set off upriver from Ambunti in the early morning and aimed to reach a village known to the crocodile skin trader before sunset. Here we would stay in the Haus Kiap, that is the house built and reserved for Australian District Officers and government officials. It was built on stilts to make it harder for ants to get into the house and to avoid inundating the residents when the Sepik river flooded the village. It had a somewhat flexible floor made of split cane. The floor’s flexibility was disconcerting.
On the way upriver, we had stopped at a village or two and traded for fresh skins. By the time we reached our destination we had consumed a good portion of the brandy and acquired several potential handbags. When the canoe stopped the mosquitoes attacked in the still air. I crushed a squadron of them feeding on my forearms. They were bloated with blood which burst out of their abdomens and smeared my skin red. The females of these voracious Anopheles mosquitoes were vectors of the Malaria parasite. I was not infected. Perhaps they did not like the brandy.
We reached the Haus Kiap village and sat for a while talking to a group of village men with aid of the official village ‘talking chief’ who spoke in a ‘Pidgin’. My broken leg was a source of embarrassment. In the New Guinea Pidgin, I was known as the ‘big fella ‘im leg ‘im bugger up’. To add to the effect this unfortunate title had on my self-esteem, ‘crippled limbs’ were thought by natives of the Sepik villages to contain evil. My ‘rotated’ left leg and my ungainly limp made me the object of some suspicion in the village.
We slept on bunks in the Haus Kiap from whence I could see the Sepik river gleaming in moonlight through the open door. I stumbled out of my bunk, through the open door and down the steps for a call of nature during the night. On the way back, the treacherous split cane floor attacked me. The cane was not distributed continuously across the floor and my injured leg pushed through a gap leaving me with one leg dangling through the floor and another at right angles to it on the surface. I manged to extract myself from this undignified position. The dangling leg had been scoured by the sharp ends of the split cane and needed first aid.
We made our way down stream the next morning. We passed a side channel at the entrance to which some men in a canoe made gestures in our direction. They clearly implied we were not welcome. The Australian guide told us this story.
Somewhere down the side channel was the ‘Village of Angry Men’. During the WWII some Australian prisoners of the Japanese had escaped and somehow reached the village. They were closely pursued by Japanese soldiers. The Australians dived into the thick bush and hid. The Japanese told the villagers they would kill some of their menfolk if the Australians did not give themselves up. Despite some frantic hollering from the villagers the Australians remained hidden. The Japanese shot some of the village men. The villagers, who were innocent spectators of the war, blamed the Australian fugitives – and by extension all white men – for the barbarous act. That is why the men in the canoe at the entrance to the side channel had made their anger clear as we passed.
DON'T KILL ME NOW 