A Patrol led by Capt P. A. Stokes, PIR

By about May 1963 the extent and role of my patrol was determined. It was to be called the Star Mountains Patrol and involved a trek from Telefomin to Kiunga via a westerly route through the Australian side of the famous Star Mountains, most of which were on what was now the Indonesian side of the border. The Australian route had only been covered once before, partly by Charles Karius and Ivan Champion in the 1920s and partly by a recent patrol in 1962 by DNA into the Faiwore and Faiwolmin. From Kiunga I was to proceed down the Fly River calling in at Boset. The idea was to show the flag and get some information on likely border crossing points in the mountains. Subsequent activity revealed that not even the Indonesians would be silly enough to cross the border through the Star Mountains. The patrol was to be long in ultimate distance but less than four weeks in elapsed time. It also closed a loop in that Terry and Mick had done Ambunti / Hagen the year before from Wewak and Terry Gray and Jim Underwood were at this very time doing Mt Hagen / Telefomin from Wewak.

It was determined that I would take the band as the Pipe Major Jimmy Whitecross was going to be on leave and I was to have a week’s work up over the trail again beforehand. The Band was thrilled at the idea, but George Telek the Drum Major and Sgt Mae were to remain behind, leaving me with only one NCO, Cpl Peni. I didn’t mind, if they could blow a set of bagpipes or thump a bloody drum, they could climb mountains and they were all selected soldiers anyway; apart from Transport, it was the place to be for an aspiring PIR soldier.

I was also able to wangle myself an air reconnaissance of the route and the area between Telefomin and Kiunga. Added to that, it was about this time that I got promoted to Captain so I was able to go on my recce feeling as though the world had fallen into my lap all at once. I was given permission for a five-day reconnaissance. It need only have taken two days, but the weather was so unpredictable and where possible I was to use regular flights instead of charters, so a very complex route had to be worked out. Until three weeks before I left, the only way into Kiunga was by Catalina Flying boat to D’Albertis Junction down river by fifteen or twenty miles to where the Alice River (Ok Tedi) joined the Fly, or by Otter Seaplane to Kiunga itself. Both means were erratic and infrequent. Now however there was a new airstrip at Kiunga, and it was to be regularly serviced by a slightly deranged French Canadian de Montfort missionary pilot who had just earned his licence, flew in bare feet and was to write off two aircraft in the next twelve months. I was indeed fortunate that I didn’t have to fly with him and was flown to Kiunga by the MAF. (Mission Aviation Fellowship).

I got to Madang by fairly routine means via Lae and the milk run to Madang. I had to stay overnight in Madang at the only hotel. It was run by the son of a well-known identity, and we got on so well that in the pm we went boating out on the harbour in a good heavy swell. It was interesting to skip from wavetop to wavetop at speeds in excess of 30mph. He told me he went through about one hull per year. I was not surprised. Madang was very interesting as I had more time there this time than in the previous year; there was still significant evidence of wartime-more so than at Wewak, mainly because of the wrecked shipping.

Next day I skipped up to Wewak on the early milk run and got a charter flight flown by Fr Ivo Reuter the American SVD missionary who was one of the most experienced pilots in the territory. We couldn’t get into Telefomin straight away because of the weather so we called into Lake Kopiago, which had no lake that I could see, then over the Strickland Gorge and Oksapmin. It was the most spectacular country I had ever seen, and I was to get to know it pretty well in the years that followed. Telefomin had a Baptist Mission a Patrol Post and a liklik dokta; there was also an anthropologist somewhere around busily chewing buai and absorbing native culture.

Telefomin region was the location of the last concerted fatal attack on an admin post. A Patrol Officer, Gerry Szarka and a Cadet Patrol Officer, Geoff Harris were killed in a planned ambush at different ends of the Eliptamin valley in November 1953; two police constables were also killed before the little people tried to block the airstrip. They didn’t succeed and retribution was swift; over thirty were caught and sentenced to death but the Administration realized that such a course of action would have been meaningless, and they all had their sentences commuted. Civilisation had arrived several years before but now it was here to stay. There is a memorial to the party at the Telefomin strip. I remembered the incident well as a kid at school; one of the kiaps had been an old boy of CBC St Kilda and had been well known to John Healy.

When we went on recce, we weren’t paid any allowances, instead we were to take ration packs and put up hutchies wherever we went. That was the theory, and it just goes to show how appallingly out of touch our Movement Control and Staff were at Murray Barracks. I was able to persuade them that at least at Madang I would be arrested if I tried to erect my hutchy at the airport and start brewing up next to the waiting room. Not so at Telefomin or Kiunga, I was still supposed to camp next to the airstrip in both cases. Thank God for the Kiaps and their hospitality. It was for this reason that henceforth whenever I arrived at a Patrol Post over the next few years, I always took a slab of beer – at my expense I might add.

Terry Holland had been issued with a new set of maps of the tri-border, Papua, New Guinea, West Irian. We were both greatly amused; every now and again there was a wisp of a river or the name of a village, but for the most part the maps were totally blank with grid lines and topographical symbols but no topography! The late Ray Stuart referred to this in his book of Poetry High Mountainous Country – No Reliable Information. I would have been happy even with some unreliable information. There was none; certainly, none that JIB or the mapmakers were aware of, but the kiaps and pilots had a lot more information than ever filtered through to our Canberra bureaucrats. So, I was able to plan my route fairly well and rather than head south through the better known and marked route through the Victor Emmanuel Range, Bolivip and the Blucher Range to the headwaters of the Fly River, I needed to head west into the Star Mountains and south into the headwaters of the Ok Tedi which had been the objective after all.

So, after teeing up guides, policeman and carriers for four weeks hence with Frazer Esdaile the Kiap I flew over the route next day for several hours by MAF charter; but there was no hope of seeing the route by air any further west or south of the Atbalmin region and I could see nothing north of Rumginae on the Papuan side. We landed at Kiunga in the PM of the Saturday. Not a good day; there were four kiaps, and they were all having a day off. I joined them in their activities. I stayed the night with a CPO who lived a fairly primitive existence – I would have been better off with my ration pack, but the bed was good.

The next day I went up to the mission to mass. There were three priests and a bishop- all except one, French only speakers, but we made ourselves understood in school-boy French and English. They were gracious hosts insisting that I stay for the Sunday roast which of all things was a huge turkey!! These were the Canadian de Montforts and as missions go, not short of a quid, presumably because all the Iroquois were either converted or dead. There was a surfeit of red wine and lots of chatter. I gleaned that they had been in Kiunga less than a year and had already built a manse, a church, a school and a small hospital; all with permanent building materials, but they had a lot to learn. The meris were forbidden to come to mass bare breasted, in fact forbidden to be in the priests’ company bare breasted. They were obviously well supported and supplied but I think they were going to need to broaden their outlooks. Still, I was treated well, and the kiaps were amazed when I told them about my dinner; only one of them had ever been inside the place; that was Mike O’Connor who many years later was the foundation Director of the Australian Defence Association and a well-known right-wing Catholic. I did suggest that the others actually go and say hello but that may have been asking too much. Was there something going on? I never found out.

I can’t remember how I got back to Moresby, but the evidence suggests that I did so in one piece with my enthusiasm dampened not one wit. My next task was to get hold of the band and spend a few days up the Trail as a warm-up which I probably needed more they did. The patrol was to be a first in many ways. We (including the soldiers) were to try out a new type of canvas and rubber boot which I found to be a Godsend; we also had new lightweight woolen blankets, lightweight nylon blankets and mosquito nets, lightweight ponchos and mattresses, with blow-ups. This was to be an active user trial and I was the first to use any of these new things which were still in use until well after I had left the Army nearly twenty years later.

The new gear was great although the new-fangled webbing based upon the US pattern left a lot to be desired in carrying capacity. In the style of the yanks and our boffins they couldn’t seem to conceive that we’d need to carry more than one day’s supply of anything so there was no big pack. We also had dehydrated rations which meant all in all that we could be self-contained for well over a week – all things being equal, which they never were. Notwithstanding the new gear, we all took our stretcher tops and glad we were that we did. I didn’t have to take my own weight in shilling pieces this time as the currency for carriers and guides, when you could find them was salt, or coloured trade beads or tobacco which I purchased in bulk at Steamships Store.

We arrived in Telefomin by charter about three weeks later and after a day or so readying porters, guides, policeman and hangers-on we made a break for the hills. The head guide and interpreter was a little five-foot nothing chap called Sunei who had been with Gerry Szarka when he was killed nearly ten years earlier. He was a local Pidgin speaker from Tifalmin, a hamlet near the main Telefomin station. Our route was south to cross the west flowing Sepik and then West towards the Atbalmin, climbing all the while. The first two days were in beautiful weather and gave the lie to all the kiaps’ predictions. In fact, halfway through the second afternoon we could still see the smoke from Telefomin way down in the valley. This was a patrol with a difference; we not only had an interpreter and a guide and a policeman, but we also had scores of hangers-on, four or five carriers and two young men who seemed determined to stay with us no matter what, plus eight or ten along for the ride some perhaps peeling off hamlet after hamlet. The shouts and war whoops were part of the play. It must be a product of boredom or something, but it seemed odd to me that someone would go climbing into the mountains for several days with no guarantee of food, sleep on the ground without blankets, and still call it fun.

Telefomin valley is at 4000 ft altitude, and we were climbing I imagine up to about 10 or 11,000 ft to get over the saddle in the mountains. By the second afternoon I began to experience the breathlessness which comes from altitude so that one had to stop more frequently than once an hour, but one recovered quickly so we had two- or three-minute halts every ten minutes or so. The altitude was much higher than we were used to in the Owen Stanleys or the Bewanis, but the good thing was that the walk involved a steady upward climb and not the up and down ridge and valley trek over mile after mile. The other good thing was that we were in essentially savannah country, so it was very warm despite the increasing altitude. In the scheme of things an altitude of 4000 ft is nothing, in later years we lived in the Indian Nilgiris at 6500 ft for a year and regularly exercised up in Ooty at 7600 ft – Mexico City which we visited years later is also at 7500 ft.

By the late afternoon of day 2?3? the terrain changed, and the grassy slopes became stunted mossy growth, and that’s when the weather started to close in. A mist descended and all the next day we plodded on with almost zero visibility through lichen and moss forest expecting to be set upon at any moment by some denizen of a bygone age. It was weird and spooky to say the least. But spookier was to come. Sunei came to see me with Cpl Peni, and he was quite agitated; one of the oli who had turned back that afternoon had warned him to tell us to be very quiet while in the cloud line of the mountain otherwise we would offend the local deity and he or she would create a storm and send huge rains. I nodded wisely and we made camp. It was difficult to find any trees for our shelters, but we made do with tufts and tree ferns and for the first time our blow-up mattresses. We made the usual bivouac type noises and as it was quite cool, I encouraged the soldiers to help fossick for firewood to keep the carriers and hangers-on warm overnight. It was needed; by darkness we were attacked by a massive and frightening thunderstorm which seemed to last for hours; the lightning was terrifying, and we were unprotected. The oli huddled together near the fire more terrified than we were.

Eventually the storm subsided but the rain continued down in sheets all night, and the next day and the next and……. (Fortunately, we had reached the top of the Range so, from then on, we started our downward track.) As we continued the following day the track narrowed and became quite precarious in several places although thankfully, we were still in cloud so we couldn’t see more than a few feet below us. I began to worry about the flash flooding in the lower reaches of the mountains as the little steep rivulets we were crossing had in some cases become raging torrents. Things got worse before they got better. We reached a re-entrant where the track had been washed away by a small landslide and there was another raging torrent disappearing into the cloud below. I don’t do heights very well, but we had no option but to press on; even the soldiers were none too keen and became very subdued.

We had amongst our hangers on, a well-dressed young man whose clothing consisted of a short shoulder bilum inside of which was his pipe and the odd trinket, on his head on a top knot, he had a funny little straw hat which I have to this day, otherwise he was stark naked except for a phallocrypt the size of a plum protecting his manhood, or the end of it at least. He carried in one hand a smouldering ember on which he blew from time to time to ensure it was still alive; he had already carried one such piece each day for the four or five days since we left Telefomin. He proved to be our saviour. Nimble as a cat he picked his way across the gap and waved to us from the other side. I called him back and we tied our fifty-metre nylon rope to a substantial tree fern while he took the free end and carried it across the ravine in the pouring rain, keeping his ember alight and shouting encouragement to the rest of us. He tied off the running end against a stump and one by one hanging onto the rope for dear life we gingerly followed his path. It took us about two hours from the time we had arrived at the landslip. I forgot about the rope although I am sure our naked saviour would have happily gone back and brought the loose end over.

We had to continue for some hours before we eventually found a flattish patch of ground on which to camp. The rain continued and it could no longer be regarded as a joke because one either had to sleep in wet clothes or face the moment of truth next morning when getting into sopping wet gear, and tropics or not, the weather was quite cold. Next morning the path headed downwards and all day we descended quite sharply, the weather was warmer now and we got through the cloud-line, but the rain continued unabated. By late afternoon we came across a garden which was the first time we had seen any signs of life on the south side of the range and indeed since we had left the last Faiwolmin hamlet two or three days out of Telefomin. Sunei explained to me that we were now in the land of the Faiwore, a group related to the Faiwolmin but with significant linguistic differences and unlike the Faiwolmin not likely to have seen any white men before.

The hangers-on scattered and called the local oli but without result although we knew they were around. I was anxious to contact them and establish our bona fides before dark otherwise we could have felt quite vulnerable. We could hear a very large stream close by, so we pressed on and came upon a magnificent scene, the clouds cleared momentarily and before us was an incredibly powerful torrent smashing over the rocks with a huge mountainous cliff face as a back-drop and that was whence we had descended. I was told the river was the Ok Tedi discovered by Karius and Champion 30 years earlier and rarely visited. We moved back from the river some distance and set up camp.

Sunei and our naked saviour and the policeman went off calling again and this time had some success. They came back with a young man who greeted one or two of the carriers quite fondly, too fondly in fact, as their greeting consisted of gently rubbing each other’s scrotums (or is that scrota?) They were distant kinsmen although not strictly wantoks. Such was not an uncommon form of greeting I was told but the most common form was to crook the fore and middle finger and grasp the other person’s similarly crooked fingers in between them and pull, making a sound like a very loud slap. The inside of each finger was quite calloused from such greetings. The young man was given some tobacco and a few beads and came back in the late afternoon with four or five others including a lapun with an ancient Dutch axe who proceeded to talk to me vociferously. Our naked saviour explained to Sunei that he (the lapun) had missed me when I went through the last time, but he had traded some vegetables with my tumbuna many years earlier on the other side of the mountain when he was still a boy. Clearly, he didn’t think there were too many of us!! I could tell things were going to get complex as we were now translating through three different languages. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the Dutch on the other side of the mountain from whom presumably he had got his axe had just been unceremoniously kicked out.

Before evening there was a veritable invasion by people with all sorts of goodies to trade. We saw no women, but the men were plentiful although very few were armed. They gave us kaukau, taro, fish and native greens and I think they even had corn though lord knows where they got that from, probably down-river. We had to speak sternly to them eventually to tell them we wanted to be left alone for the night, but we agreed that two or three could stay unarmed for the night. One enterprising young man slept under my hutchie and every so often lifted my mosquito net just to look and check that I was real. They all thought our footwear was hilarious.

I decided to have a make and mend day, so we stayed put the next day while the soldiers and the locals traded. They were very friendly people indeed and I dwell on this because I almost weep when I think of the incredible injustice done to them subsequently by our rapacious miners. This area was to become ten years later the heart of the BHP Ok Tedi copper project. The countryside was laid waste, the river poisoned, the gardens slurry coated and unworkable and the people compensated pathetically in a currency they had no use for. Promises were made and broken, a livelihood disappeared, and a very fragile culture lost forever. Pictures and films I saw in 2001 and 2002 of the devastation would make good people cry to heaven for vengeance as I know many kiaps and missionaries did. Now there is an all-weather road from what is now called Tabubil to Kiunga which Google tells me is full of copper convoys and is 137 km long.

The patrol was in good shape. There were no injuries or illnesses despite what we had gone through to date. The bandsmen were good soldiers although Peni was a little weak. There were a couple of real wags, a Gasmata and a tall Manus lad both of whose names I forget. The radio operator was a huge legged Hagen lad called Raim who was actually a bn sig and was very competent with CW; he could even send it one handed while doing something else, generally eating. The medic was a Buka called Gani who was also a real RAP medic and knew how to dress wounds and give needles unlike Mirou on my previous stint. We had had no fevers that I can recall, and I was feeling very much fitter myself and easily able to match the lads with my appetite. The boots were a boon and had so far lasted better than the ABTS even on the limestone verges up in the mountains. The soldiers were thrilled with them.

Here too we dispensed with most of our porters and some of the oli hangers-on were getting homesick. So there were tearful farewells. The soldiers were very good to them all and they seemed to appreciate that. My two youths wouldn’t budge, they were coming to Kiunga come what may. I had by now ascertained their names as Tsaeni and Ugarrit? or some such. They were quick learners and had mastered a significant amount of Pidgin by the time we reached Kiunga.

Off we went on what was probably day 7 or 8 with a large number of replacement oli. We headed south in the pouring rain for a day or two before heading South East towards the headwaters of another river which joins the Fly around Ninggerim? Rumginae where there was a small UFM mission station. It was several days walk in pouring rain, streams were torrents and on one occasion we had to enlist half a dozen canoes to get us along a flooded track for about half a mile before crossing a raging river – the headwaters of the Fly River. Everyone except me thought it was a great joke. I sat rigid in the middle of this unstable narrow log with about three inches freeboard while I was paddled out into this fast-flowing current and manoeuvred ashore hundreds of yards downstream. Still the locals knew what they were capable of. The villages which began to be a little more numerous now were all built on stilts for obvious reasons as dry ground was becoming hard to find.

The times and locations of the next couple of weeks are a blur now. Names like the Ninggerim and Rumginae are familiar, but I did return there six years later so I may be confusing them. I remember that we twice had to use our blow-ups to make rafts to cross large sections of the submerged Government track including a two-hour wade on the last stretch into Kiunga.  Originally when I saw Kiunga six weeks earlier the station was built on a series of low hills perched about thirty feet above the river; it was now a number of islands almost inseparable from the river. And it continued to rain until the day we arrived in there.

We had parted company with Sunei and the remaining oli at Ningerrim and proceeded with only the policeman and one or two locals; together with our two determined Telefomin boys who had now been adopted by the soldiers and who would hear of nothing less than joining the PIR. When we reached Kiunga and at the risk of being accused of abduction, I revealed my plight by radio to BHQ. The reply was ‘Bring’em in!’ and a new era had begun. We picked up a week’s dumped rations at Kiunga and a day later, dead on time the admin launch from Daru arrived to help us continue downriver.

By any measurement the Fly is a mighty river and the last two weeks of non-stop mountain rain helped explain why. The reach at Kiunga is long enough to accommodate an Otter seaplane and about twenty miles downriver at D’Albertis Junction where the Catalina sometimes landed, it became mightier, as it was joined by the Alice (Ok Tedi), itself a large river. Two days or more further down it was joined by the outflow from Lake Murray and then by the mighty Strickland which drains the Southern Highlands from three sources. By then it rivals some of the world’s great rivers and dwarfs anything we have in Australia; 50 km inland its mouth is 60 km wide.

The trip down was fairly boring except at night when the crocodiles barked and coughed close by, and the odd porker squealed as it was ambushed. We tied up each night as the skipper wasn’t cleared for night flying. I think he was a Daru local, probably from Kiwai Island. I remember feeling snug on the deck and I remarked to the skipper one morning that it was lucky crocodiles couldn’t climb only to be told that further downriver they did. It turned out he was talking about the tree climbing crocodile of the Western District a large monitor somewhat like a giant goanna. They grow to five and six feet.

We made a major port of call at Boset which is a Papuan (Australian) village sometimes on the western side of the River. Some 180 km north of where the Strickland joins the Fly, the Fly makes a major deviation to the west before turning back eastward again and over a distance of about 80 km it becomes the border with West Irian. Boset is somewhere in that loop and was obviously eminently forgettable. The only reportable incidents were running down a swimming muruk and a swimming pig both of which were eaten by all except me, and seeing three or four deer swimming across the river to one of the delta islands. Of Indonesians we saw none. The highland guides and police returned to Telefomin, probably through Bolivip.

Daru was like a wild west town but less interesting. I only had time for one beer and a look at the crocodile farm sporting a 20 ft monster before the charter DC3 arrived and back we went. I had spent my last night in the New Guinea bush (for six years anyway).

Peter A Stokes (2001)