Throwim Way Leg: Tree-Kangaroos, Possums, and Penis Gourds

by Tim Flannery

Overview

Flannery travels to the unexplored regions of New Guinea in search of species that science has yet to discover or classify. He finds many — from a community of giant cave bats that were supposedly extinct to the elusive black-and-white tree-kangaroo — and along the way has a wealth of unforgettable adventures. Flannery scales cliffs, descends into caverns, and cheats death, both from disease and at the hands of the local cannibals, who wish to take revenge on his "clan" of wildlife scientists. He eventually befriends the tribespeople, who become companions in his quest and whose contributions to his research prove invaluable. In New Guinea pidgin, throwim way leg means to take the first step of a long journey. The journey in this book is a wild ride full of natural wonders and Flannery's trademark wit, a tour de force of travelogue, anthropology, and natural history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802136657
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	01/06/2000
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Tim Flannery is director of the South Australian Museum. He was previously the principal research scientist at the Australian Museum in Sydney and has also been visiting professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of eight books, including his award-winning history of Australian ecology, The Future Eaters.

Read an Excerpt

Throwim Way Leg

Tree-Kangaroos, Possums, and Penis Gourds-On the Track of Unknown Mammals in Wildest New Guinea

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By Tim Flannery

Grove Atlantic, Inc.

Copyright © 1998 Tim Flannery
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8021-3665-6

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Chapter One

Buai impressionism

The aircraft circled slowly over a parched landscape. Below, the atmosphere was thick with smoke as the rank, brown savannah burned. In the wet-dry tropics, fire rends the landscape the way an archaeologist strips layers of sediment with a trowel. Here it had revealed a dozen old horseshoe-shaped redoubts (once used to shelter aircraft from bomb attacks) encircling the airstrip, vast piles of discarded fuel drums, and the skeletons of armoured vehicles and other such remanie of the Second World War.

This was Jackson Airport, gateway to Papua New Guinea, a nation which in December 1981 was less than six years old. It was definitely not the luxuriant, jungle-clad New Guinea landscape I had imagined countless times in my dreams.

* * *

My first memories of Port Moresby are still vivid. Dark-skinned women and children sitting on each street corner before piles of buai (betel nut) and daka (fruit of the pepper vine chewed with buai), or perhaps neat bundles of peanuts as I had never seen them before, tied together by their stalks.

At first I took the red stains lying on every footpathand wall to be blood. The result, perhaps, of violent assault and bloody riot. It was only later, after much private anguish, that I learned that the stains were buai. When the kernel of the small green nut is chewed with lime (made from crushing burned sea-shells) and daka, the mixture turns bright red. Chewing buai ends when a great red stream of liquid is ejected from the mouth, often with extraordinary force, accuracy and aplomb.

The first flush of innocent inquiry allows a person a kind of liberty which fuller knowledge denies them. Satisfied that the streets of Port Moresby were not steeped in blood, I felt free to roam where I would-even once as far as the front bar of the notorious Boroko Hotel.

That evening, after I'd drunk a beer or two in a hushed silence and surrounded by dark stares, a couple of young Hanuabada lads suggested that they would walk me back to Angau Lodge where I was staying. It was only as we neared home that, noticing the barbed-wire compounds and vicious dogs surrounding every house in Boroko, I realised they had certainly saved my money, and possibly my life.

I soon found that the best and cheapest places to eat in Moresby were the Chinese cafes. The Diamond Cafe in Boroko became my favourite. Its laminex table-tops and simple menu reminded me of the Chinese restaurants of my childhood, of my father bringing our own saucepans to be filled with fried rice and sweet-and-sour pork. One night, I noticed that a curious addition had been chalked on the menu board. Below the chow mein was written Papa Fell Over. Intrigued, and suspecting it to be some exceedingly alcoholic local brew, I ordered a small one with coffee.

Startlingly renamed in Melanesian Pidgin, and transmogrified in a Chinese kitchen, that distinctively Australian dessert pavlova never tasted so good.

* * *

Koki Market nestles by the sea near Ela Beach. This beautiful, exotic place drew me daily. A sea of constantly moving black bodies crowded the square, the musky animal smell of humanity blend with the distinctive spice of buai. Huge red splashes of the latter seemed to be concentrated around a sign proclaiming NO KEN KAIKAI BUAI HIA (BETEL NUT CHEWING PROHIBITED). Nearby, an old fellow sat each morning, dressed in a simple laplap, with just a few buai for sale in front of him, his grizzled head nodding. One afternoon there were only two fruit left as he made a painful effort to unbend his arthritic joints. A woman screamed out in Motuan, 'Hey old man, you've left your balls behind!' and the entire marketplace rang with peals of hysterical laughter.

Gargantuan piles of fruit and vegetables always covered every market bench. Above this cornucopia hung mysteriously shaped bags and bundles, suspended by wooden hooks from the rafters of the tin-roofed shelters. I could see, occasionally, a bewildered-looking cuscus (a kind of possum) peek from one of the string bags, but the contents of others remained obscure. I desperately wished to acquire some cuscusses for our museum collection. Before I realised that the bundles could contain anything from groceries to babies, I sometimes found myself bargaining, in this language I barely understood, for pikininis rather than possums.

Near the water one day, a mammoth hawksbill turtle lay on its back in the sun, gulping helplessly, its eyes streaming salty tears. This was the seafood section. Someone had already purchased a fore-flipper. Shocked by the cruelty, I abandoned thoughts of turtle soup and instead purchased two live kindam, beautiful painted crayfish, for less than a dollar each. Never did I imagine that my meagre field allowance would extend to such luxuries.

Just behind were the meat stalls. There, piled in their dozens, were the smoked bodies of wallabies. The smell of the smoky wood fire was dense, yet was insufficient to deter the clouds of flies which hovered about. I paid my five kina to an old man, blind in one eye and with his shotgun resting behind him, and at one stroke collected my first specimen in New Guinea and solved the riddle of what to curry for tomorrow's dinner.

Leaving the market that day, I joined an enormous crowd gathered around the entrance of a dingy Chinese trade store. Young and old alike were pressed together, their mouths forming solemn Os as they craned their necks upward. Their faces were filled with amazement. After fighting my way through the crowd I discovered what transfixed them-television had just come to Port Moresby.

The twentieth century appeared to be catching up with New Guinea. But Port Moresby was a long way from Mt Albert Edward. This high, isolated mountain was the place where I hoped to encounter the timeless New Guinea of my dreams. I had not seen the mountain when I first arrived, for smoke from the innumerable dry-season fires had obscured it. It remained hidden until dawn on the very morning I was to fly to its base.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Throwim Way Leg by Tim Flannery Copyright © 1998 by Tim Flannery . Excerpted by permission.
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