Sunday, October 17th, 2010
In this excerpt from his book, Conversations With Myself, Wallace Peters paints a humorous and fascinating account of life as a medical scientist in PNG during the 1950s.
Sourced from his blog:
I overslept this Sunday morning or, rather, I was dozing. Again my mind turned back to old memories of Papua New Guinea in the late 1950’s. It was my job and good fortune to travel widely in many smaller islands off the main coast, in the lowlands and in the highlands of this vast territory. Hardly surprisingly, I encountered a wide range of terrain, people and of wild life. Here are some more excerpts from my manuscript , this time about the western highlands.
One of the fascinating features of the populations of that region was the variety of their customs which incorporated regular pig feasts, dances, the wearing of brilliant traditional head dresses by the men, and inter-tribal village battles. The last could have been equated with weekend football matches as we know them, except that they were conducted with bows, arrows and spears and frequently ended in loss of life. That, in turn, would be good reason for a return match, and so the situation would spiral. On one occasion I accompanied an Australian patrol officer and his policemen to a very remote area near Tari where matters had been getting rather out of hand. The intention was to arrest some of the ringleaders, but we ended up beating a hasty retreat before we became embroiled ourselves (and I have this rather shaky photograph to prove it).
The exotic nature of the mens’ head gear and facial adornment which was an everyday affair, and not restricted to ceremonial occasions, was soon to attract attention internationally, and probably contributed to the eventual opening up of the area to tourism. Moreover, the clearing of such areas as the Mount Hagen end of the Wahgi valley has led to the massive agricultural and other development of this region, the town of Mount Hagen now being the third most populated in TPNG with an international airport to access it.
However, it was different in our day. Over the next few years I made many visits to Minj and, in due course, was able to publish with my colleague Stan Christian an analysis of the epidemiology of highland malaria and recommendations for its control. Meanwhile we were both interested in studying the general mosquito population of the Wahgi valley. With the help of some of Stan’s staff and porters from the local village, I set out to climb into the moss forest above Minj to position some light traps to capture mosquitoes and other insects.
The traps were heavy and had to be run all night from 12-volt car batteries, but such loads posed no problem for the porters. To my embarrassment, I found that I was totally incapable of climbing the steep clay-based footpaths that ascended the mountain and ended up having to be virtually passed from one man to the next until we reached a suitable collecting site. There we hung the traps in trees, attached them to the batteries, then descended for the night, I mainly skidding down on my backside. When we made the ascent again the following morning, I was delighted to find that we had succeeded in trapping a large assortment of insects that we discovered later included a number of previously unknown species.
Well worth the effort.
Source: Peter's Blog: Conversations With Myself
http://peters.aegauthorblogs.com/2010/10/
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