Environment
'And there the great island lies, with its archaic bird-reptile shape. The smoking mountains speak low thunder, the earth shakes lightly, the sun glares down on the impenetrable dark-green mantle of forest with its dark baroque folds, the cloud shadows pass over the green, a white cockatoo rises off the tree tops like a torn scrap of paper . . . like an unread message.'
James McAuley
'My New Guinea'
Quadrant, No 19, Winter, 1961
Warime journalist, Osmar White, author of 'Green Armour', returned to Papua New Guinea for many years after the war and was an uncanny observer of the country and its people. He recorded his observations in two outstanding books on PNG -'Parliament of a Thousand Tribes' and 'Time Now-Time Before'. The following description of the island was written in 1945:
'The main island, shaped like a rearing dragon and lying just under the equator, has a spine of mountains 1ooo miles long. At the western end, snowcapped peaks rise to more than 16,000 feet . At the western end, the tallest soar between 13,000 and 14,000 feet, and are clothed almost to their summits in dense oain forests. From this mighty backbone of ranges, row upon row of razorbacks extend like herringbone, with roaring torrents in every canyon between them and everlasting rainclouds on every crest.
'The drainage of the highlands flows through a multiplicity of streams into five major river systems - the Mamberano, the Digoel, the Fly, the Sepik and the Ramu.
'Even as the mountains are an almost insuperable barrier between north and south, the great rivers, their tributaries and scores of lesser but still considerable streams bar free movement between east and west.
'In any latitude a land so violently fashioned would resist settlement and civilization, but, in addition, all of New Guinea within 11 degrees of the equator. It is drenched with flooding rains the year round, except in the scattered 'dry belts' of the east. Its soil is fertile, and even the mountain precipices sprout forest. Wherever, by some caprice of nature, trees have not blanketed the face of the land, the grass grows ten feet high. In the kunai grass country of the Ramu and the Markham tivers, it is recorded that some American paratroopers who landed for the airborne attack on Lae in September 1943 collapsed within an hour from the effect of the tremendous heat and humidity.
'In New Guinea lowlands, men may rot with malaria, typhus, leprosy, hookworm, yaws, and skin diseases of unimaginable variety. There, night and day, the moisture in the air condenses on every surface and trickles back to earth.
''In the highlands, travellers may shiver in frost and hail or be drenched in downpours so violent that an inch of rain has been known to fall in five minutes. Teh only inhabitants are the small, dark, frizzy-haired peoples who still seek human heads for trophies and who live by privitive horticulture or by hunting the scarce game with blowpipes, darts and poisoned arrows.
'Even though the existence of such a country be known to white men for more than 400 years and its potential wealth in minerals, oil and forest rpoducts suspected for half a centurey, it is not surprising that tens of thousand of square miles should sitll be unexplored . With the single exception of the goldfields in the Bulolo valley, white colonization has been limited to coastal strips where the sea offers lanes of communication denied by the jungle-smothered mountains and ravines'
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Osmar White
Green Armour
1945