THE CIRCLED CONTINENT.

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BY RANDOLPH BEDFORD.

(All Rights Reserved.)

THE TOPARCHS OF MORESBY.

From Hall Sound to Port Moresby at irregular intervals along the coast, and especially in Redscar and Caution Bays, Idlers Bay, and at Palli Point, are many bamboo and nipa palm thatch villages sitting up to their knees in water within the reefs. The Papuan coast tribes are landless sailors, who were always at war with the terrible bloodthirsty, well-fed men of the mountains and the jungle, and for reasons of safety from aggression and facility of retreat when the battle went against them they have always lived on stilts and do so now that the necessity has departed. Being pirates, they are also the keenest of commercial men, and are the greatest native traders, and the only native traders of enterprise in the Island.

The entrance to Moresby on a sunny day is a thing of great beauty. On a stormy day, with a despairing little steamer panting up to the harbour at a two-knot gait in the face of a gale, I confess that the beauty is not so easy of identification. The quarantine station on Isle Dango, a palm-fringed atoll low in the sea, the surf breaking behind it in a line of milk, a streak of sage-green in the shallow water of the middle distance, and the blue of depth by the ship side; many breaks of coral domes and gables showing, and the sea eroding them into caves and then bursting flashes of daylight through them; the mirage of sun heat on sea plane magnifying cay and shoal, surf and island, which—like most famous men—become smaller the closer they are approached.

Two canoes in line—one in the deep blue one in the light green above the reef; two canoes with peculiar V-shaped sails, their crews of naked brown men—the one-time pirates squatting in the dugouts and fishing.

The barren hills of Port Moresby dotted infrequently with stunted gums and riven and flanked by little silent, sour, and barren flats of scrubs, are representable in a thousand places on the Australian coast. Certainly this is the end of the dry season, and February will see these baked hills like the now brown Islands of Torres-Straits, covered with an alluring carpet of green. But the soil is valueless. It is behind Moresby, in the ranges, the jungles, and the great plateau of the Astrolabe that floral and tree beauty and soil values begin. On the eastern flank of the harbour are Government offices, the one hotel, and the two stores of Moresby. North, in the belly of the bay, and on a high grassy hill belted with cocoanuts, is the Government Residency, sheltered behind the white staff and the crossed flag.

West of the Residency, its houses on stilts in the saline water, is the village of Anahanbada; further west again, the head station of the London Missionary Society, which has been established here for 25 years.

The cargo handling of Port Moresby is very properly done by native prisoners. They came aboard and attacked the cargo listlessly —a dozen not very "desperate willins" chained at the ankles by handcuffs, which they lifted from the ankle-bones by cane suspenders tied above the knee. But for an abbreviated clout at the waist, broad-arrow marked, they were naked; and as they mishandled the cargo there were accidents to toes, and much Papuan profanity. The great flat-bottomed, broad-beamed water-boats, with an enormous water-bag spread at the bottom of each, were lowered away, and in the first boat two fuzzyheaded, copper-coloured men of Moresby pulled up the bay. At the steps we found a police boat, manned by six native policemen in blue and red kimonos—civilised, although the artistic sense of one of them was alive in the spike of frangipanni thrust behind his ear. But I found that this was not the result of an artistic sense, but of mere vain-glory of carcase; when I saw a highly-polished yellow man in torn trousers and a battered straw hat wore a garland of hibiscus and a frangipanni around the hat.

The street of Moresby village is one-sided, the stilted houses rising only from the sea. Ladders go up to each platform. The scavengers are the tides, which often return half they take, the pigs which look like half-fed dogs, and the dogs which look like starved pigs. Villainous faced old men, dressed in earrings and string, lay about the platforms; a few small girls, too young yet to have succeeded to the woman's heritage of labour, playing with humourously wretched pigs and with skeleton dogs, lower in the animal scale than the dog retinue of an Australian blacks' camp; two ancient native ladies, suckling each a child on one breast and a piglet on the other. Dirt and squalor, insulting the divine air and sea and the divine palms; laziness incarnate in the men who basked on the platforms and drugged themselves with the smoke of their bau-baus— the great bamboo pipe of the Papuan, in which the tobacco is not smoked as with us. The smoker takes a great mouthful of smoke, and fills the bamboo with it through a small hole in the upper surface, afterwards reinhaling the smoke from the hole at the end of the bamboo, a hole which is the total inner circumference of the wood. When the native man or woman—for all use the bau-bau—opens his mouth, and puts the base of a full-grown bamboo therein, it is a sight to fill the simple with wonder.

The bulk of the men were in the water at the back of the village preparing the great lakatois for sea. The lakatoi is a collection of dugouts placed side by side, decked over, and propelled by two great mat sails shaped like a crab's claws. Every year the lakatoi is put to sea— if hugging the land and keeping on the landward side of a reef may be called putting to sea —with the last of the south-east monsoon. They take from 25,000 to 30,000 cooking pots of baked clay, and sail to the sago swamps in the Gulf of Tapu—200 miles or so to the westward, returning at the beginning of the nor'-west monsoon with sago cargoes aggregating 600 tons.

The men on the lakatois engaged in the light work of bending their great mat sails and fixing running gear, and this they did to the accompaniment of cries and broken singing, that their importance might not be overlooked.

The real workers are the women. They squatted by their heaps of blue clay and yellow sand at the western end of the village, shaping the pots without a wheel or implement other than the naked hand. The pots are beautiful in form, very shallow-necked, and in their regularly swelling sides all that simplicity and symmetry which is the highest art. That wondrous sentient tool, the human hand, had done it all.

They baked the pots in open fires of wood, withdrawing the finished product with a small stick and the bare band, occasionally burning themselves and shrieking for a moment, and a moment later putting the burned hand on another red-hot pot and burning it again and shrieking some more. The fires blazed every half-dozen feet over a vegetationless rise belted by cocoanuts; everything female, even to the very young, who tried to do the impossible, had found its task while the men smoked and sang and slept; the woman relieving Adam of Adam's curse. Ten lords of the earth, all aged under 12, walked about mother naked, throwing toy spears and arrows; leisured in the presence of all this effort—the fire-making, the pot-making and burning, and the cooling and colouring of the clay by blows of a brush of cocoanut husk dipped in dyed water. The young girls, the ancient gins, and a dozen supercilious yellow matrons, fat, tattooed, heavy-legged and armed, dressed in blue tattoo marks and a red sarong, or a wood bracelet, and a grass rami. They were all busy; while the weary brown man loafed.

As I turned to leave there happened a thing which proved to me that the uneducated father— black, white, brown, or yellow—is one the world over. A small boy of 7 walked unknowingly through a fire covered with white ashes, staggered out of the fire and yelled his agony. His father came to him and beat him on the head for the crime of hurting himself, took the wounded feet in his hand, and with his nails tore off the burned skin, struck the boy again and departed. The child immediately stopped crying, picked up his toy spears and hobbled to the fire, speared the ashes three or four times, while speaking words of rage, and departed in his turn satisfied.

Once the native of Moresby was manly enough within his limitations as a savage— to-day Government protection and missionary ministrations have degenerated him into an aristocracy. The women are the hope of the race—if the race have a hope at all. They still do the work that in warlike tribes properly belongs to the women—the home, cooking, weaving mats and sails, twisting cordage, making pots, nets, and lines; and sex tops off artificial conditions with the supreme labour of child-bearing. In the old days the men paid for these services by protecting the women and children; the Government does that now. The colossal task of burning and hacking out canoes with flint axes is no more; the herculean labour of making tomahawks out of the rock is forgotten now that civilisation brings its three and sixpenny tool to supplant it; the art of making the stone club, and the more scientific kind of arrow; and Government has brought nothing in their places.

There are the Toparches of the ban-ban, rotting away their days with pipe, betel-nut, and lime pot, while their women work. Governor MacGregor, with the intention of providing the various native with occupation, enacted the compulsory planting of cocoanuts. The ordinance has never been observed. Once Port Moresby had a fair export trade in sandal-wood and rubber of the Ficus rigo. A few sandalwood -getters were allowed to cut more than they could transport in a reasonable time, and the patches were almost cut out. Rubber trees were stabbed and allowed to bleed until the trees died of their unstopped wounds; and when the mischief had been done, the Government prohibited sandalwood and rubber getting.

To-day Moresby, the oldest settlement in the Possession, and dating back for twenty-five years, has no industries beyond three small coffee plantations on the beautiful Astrolabe plateau, 3000ft above Moresby, reachable in 20 miles— a perfect climate and with sufficient coffee lands for hundreds of planters. Yet it has but three, and one of them is a Toparch.

There are charges made specifically and openly of misappropriation of Government reserves; meantime the passage of a camel through the eye of the needle is expedition itself compared with the land laws and their administration. There are cases where the applications of "outsiders" for land have been hung up for 18 months and more; while one applied for 150 acres of coffee land on the Astrolabe plateau and was in possession within a fortnight. In 1901 a trader applied for a quarter of an acre at Lese, near the Biaro River, in the Western Division, as a trading station— he waited three years, and may not have it yet. An intending grazier applied for 6000 acres near Port Moresby two years ago, and, after waiting until he was weary, abandoned his project.

The whole business of dealing with native lands is fatal. First an application is necessary to the Lands Office at Port Moresby, which instructs the Executive, which notes it and returns the application to the Lands Department, which sends to the district resident magistrate for a report as to advisability and possibility of purchasing the land from the natives. The magistrate's report goes to the Government Secretary, who sends it to the Executive; it is acted on according to the report, and returned to the magistrate with instructions to buy or it is refused or shelved.

I came one afternoon down to the beach and took the boat for the steamer. The four rowers pulled away strongly, and for a moment a big black and cobalt butterfly settled on the glistening black shoulder-blade of a Kiwai boy, and fluttered back to land as it felt the sea airs ruffling the wing bloom.

Away in the dirty village and on the lakatois making ready to be a sago argosy the retired pirates were singing to the winds, partly for their own habit of superstitious fears, partly maybe their song of the romance of the Change of the Seasons.

Ahead two lakatois completed for sea, loaded and prepared to leave the haven next dawn, sailed there on a preliminary cruise around the harbour with certain weird ceremonies of consecration.

The great crabclaw sails of woven palm leaf were golden in the sun; decorations of saffron yellow palm fronds swung from every point and mast; there were bright orange wings bound to the arms and shoulders of the brown men at the broad beam and at the stern; two girls on each backstay, and half a dozen brown youths swimming before the lumbering craft that hogged the water on its seven keels.

I was looking at practically the only export of Moresby despite its twenty years of occupation some of the 25,000 cooking pots to be exchanged for the pith of a palm; the freight of baked clay barterable for on argosy of sago. So much for the ladies of Anahanbada. The great white man exports little except complaints.

Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954), Saturday 18 November 1905, page 6