It is scarcely imaginable, in this time of jumbo jets disgorging thousands on scheduled holidays. And so close to Australia. There was Andrew, teeth stained red with beetlenut dye. Andrew is the headman of a small village on the northern side of Milne Bay which lies at the tip of PNG’s tail. “”Village” is perhaps too grand a title. It is a collection of five or six grass huts. There is no road. The only access is by dug-out canoe. Unless you are (comparatively) very rich and white. And then you can arrive by a dive charter boat with a large motor. Andrew’s village is not completely Stone Age. It is not utterly National Geographic. It is too genuine for that. Andrew, for example wears a grey T-shirt advertising Kentucky whiskey. He has never been to Kentucky. Indeed, he had never been to Port Moresby. In fact, he has only once or twice been to Alotau, population 402, just 30kms away.
But Andrew has two assets in addition to the traditional subsistence garden that most villagers in PNG have. He has Deacon’s reef and a waterfall in the rainforest. He also has a skull cave, but that is not so much an asset as a necessity.
The waterfall is easy to describe. It is an ordinary waterfall. Crystal clear water cascades, bubbles, cliches its way through a narrow gap in the rock in the middle of the rainforest. Bright white, it is. And the pool beneath is gin clear and cool in the tropical heat. To get there you walk up the creek valley amid giant trees, stepping across grey stones, walking along huge logs that fell naturally in storms decades even centuries ago, until you arrive at the jewel pool below the waterfall.
Very ordinary. We have all seen waterfalls before. Compared to that Deacon’s reef is special. The mountain, clad in rainforest, drops vertical into the sea. The steep hill covered with hundreds of species of rainforest plant continues as a wall under the sea with even more species of coral and fish crowded in the first 20 metres where there are some ledges before the water turns darker and darker blue as it descends into the abyss of ocean thousands of metres deep. Hence good anchorages are rare. If you are close enough to shore for the anchor chain to reach the bottom, you are too close for the safety of the boat if the wind or current turn. Andrew has an anchorage off his “”village”.
We arrived in the Marlin II a dive charter run by Wayne Thompson and his wife Lee. Five of us — friends and family — chartered the boat. And there was John the PNG national deckhand who did everything – two from helping with dive gear to washing the dunny. One day he rather optimistically trailed a fishing line – just a very large hook and a shinny teaspoon rigged as a spinnaker. I scoffed at his optimism.
Though Andrew has been to the waterfall and the skull cave and has sat on the deck of dive boats many times, he has never seen the biological glory of Deacon’s reef close-up. PNG has both Pacific and Indian Ocean species Out of the wall project alien growths from a Blake’s Seven set: grey, purple, yellow, green in wild shapes like tube, barrel and tulip-shaped sponges. There are cabbage-leaf corals the size of a person. Sometimes hard coral; sometimes soft coral. Then tiny stick coral with fingernail size fish and huge fan coral that looks like a giant biologist’s slide or red coloured MRI scan. Dappled sunlight dangles and dances through the coral. Beyond a barracuda points into the current opportunistically waiting for some smaller fishes fatal inadvertence.
I have very clear pictures of this in my mind now because something went wrong with my underwater camera. So dear reader you will have to put up with verbal underwater descriptions – which does not do it justice. At dusk, a whole new set of species comes out for the night shift while the day shift tucks into the coral, some like parrotfish create a mucus web around themselves for protection. You sweep the torch through the black water. Stars of phosphorous shine in the water. The tiniest exquisite crabs come out at night — red and white and delicate like a Japanese ornament.
Next day Andrew takes us to his skull cave. We go through the forest and suddenly there is a helicopter just overhead – in fact a hornbill which makes an astonishing sound with its wings as it flies. The skulls of ancestors are collected in caves for worship. Missionaries have tried to stop the practice, but it continues. Villagers happily show visitors the skulls of their ancestors.
Kids have to canoe and walk two hours each way to school. In our seven day trip in and around Milne Bay whenever we anchored villagers came out on their dug-out outriggers to trade fresh fruit and vegetables for rice, tin food, fish hooks, empty bottles and clothing. They sit in the canoes for hours, some fish at night by the boat’s light.
The outriggers look flimsy, but are remarkably stable. Andrew let me have a go in his. The secret is to lean slightly towards the outrig and to turn slowly. They take several days to make and last several years before they become too waterlogged. Kids paddle them with their baby siblings. In a land often too steep and poor for road transport, the outrigger is ubiquitous.
It seems idyllic. No roads. Warm sea. Fertile gardens. But life is short. Andrew’s first wife died when she was in her 30s. How did she die, I asked.
“”She just died.”
When there are no doctors there is no diagnosis and no known cause of death.
And the wantok system makes it difficult for anyone to break out and get ahead. The wantok (one-talk) and the people who talk your language, your immediately kin. They demand their share of everything you have. So incentive is dashed. In return they will protect you, so the will to establish neutral law enforcement is lessened.
John, now on a wage, seems determined to break out, understating his wage to his wantoks.
You wonder about the chance of birth. John was on the boat the whole time. Running the dinghy, picking us up, filling tanks, attending the compressor. he would earn less in a year than one of us spent on the week’s charter, yet in PNG terms he was very fortunate, to have a job and a steady income. Andrew lives in a grass hut. No health care. Life expectancy of perhaps 35. But then in his canoe on the sea his mind is uncluttered by western learning and sophistication. Who knows what is best. Would you want to connect these villages by road to Port Moresby. That would bring rascals and take young men to the city.
Then again that is easily said from the comfort of a live-aboard diveboat with good food and interesting things to see and do.
Suddenly as I write this in my notebook my thoughts are interrupted by an urgent yell from John at the stern. “”Help, Crispin, help”. I race out of the cabin, expecting to see John in desperate trouble. Instead, he was straining at the fishing line. We haul in a Spanish mackerel. It is almost as big as him. What a triumph of ingenuity and resourcefulness.