In Pursuit of Cannibals

In March 1969 Arthur Marks and I arrived at the capital of the Western District of New Guinea located on Daru, a small island off the south coast. Both of us had over ten years’ service. The District Commissioner Ian Holmes asked, “Have either of you got your District Court powers through?” Arthur had just had his gazetted. I was still waiting for mine. “Right. You, Arthur Marks, are now Resident Magistrate, Daru; and you, Rob Barclay, will be Assistant District Commissioner, Nomad. Your job will be to stamp out cannibalism, bring the Biami to heel, and contact any groups that we haven’t seen yet. The Deputy District Commissioner Robin Calcutt and I will brief you tomorrow. I want you up there in forty-eight hours to take over.”

Arthur was naturally enraged. Nomad was a plum hairy-chested posting. There was no time to lose. First, I opened accounts at the Daru stores, and ordered plenty of tinned food for the projected heavy patrol schedule, and a standing freezer order to come up on the weekly aircraft supply run. My meagre possessions, I was told, had already arrived from the Sepik. Next, I plucked out the Nomad and other relevant reports from the District Office files, and settled down with a pen and notepad, to familiarise myself with the area.

The Western District was a vast region of swamps and thick jungle covering 110,000 square kilometres frequented by wild pigs, crocodiles, cassowaries and pythons. The maps give very little away—“detailed relief data unknown” was a frequent notation. The rainfall at Nomad last year was 212 inches, but it doubled and even tripled as you approached the central ranges. The middle region was 30,000 square kilometres and consisted of an almost uninhabited no-man’s-land stretching from Balimo in the south to Nomad in the north. Beyond Nomad the district extended further north and east for another 150 kilometres, rising to the majestic Muller and Karius central ranges at 4000 metres above sea level.

In the briefing the following day, I learnt that Canberra was still brooding over the bucketing Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had given them years before over their interference in Soviet bloc affairs. He apparently said, “You Australians can’t talk; you still haven’t contacted everybody in your colonial outpost in New Guinea, and you’ve got cannibals running around eating everybody.” Canberra had been pressuring Moresby over the issue ever since. The Biami cannibals east of Nomad had terrorised the surrounding tribes perhaps for millennia and treated the government forces with contempt.

I was told my job was to bring them under control with a saturation patrol program. I was to regard any visits to uncontacted groups as a side issue. I didn’t agree, but I kept my views to myself. Having unvisited groups still running around was bound to give the United Nations, the Australian government and Moresby considerable angst. The Australian media would have plenty to say as well. Still, seldom had District HQ instructions been so simple, or the threat of official censure for failure so clear.

I was still thinking about this when I boarded the weekly Cessna 185 shuttle the next day. The 350-kilometre flight took two hours over never-ending swamp and thick jungle. The trees, grass, and even the very air seemed saturated with moisture. We landed at the Nomad airstrip, a tiny rectangle of green grass carved out of the forest wilderness. I greeted the two welcoming officers, Colin Young (Assistant District Officer) and Bill Patterson (Patrol Officer) with relief. Colin took me to the tiny two-bedroom bungalow we were to share. He immediately brought me up to speed on the Biami. Shooting pigs to deter primitive peoples from attacking patrols was standard practice, but it didn’t work with them. They wanted us out, never to return. There was an uninhabited buffer zone around the Biami homelands which provided some protection for the surrounding tribes, who were all potential items on the Biami menu.

The balance of the Biami diet was sago and bananas, insects, and very occasional wildlife. Hunters would be absent deep in the forest for a couple of weeks at a time. The accompanying village curs would bail up the game after lengthy pursuits though the jungle and even then success depended on a lucky arrow shot. Alternatively, hunters would sit motionless for days in blinds adjacent to game trails in the usually forlorn hope of arrowing a wild pig or a cassowary. More productive hunting happened when the sun went down. Primitive men were deathly afraid of the dark. It was the time when the evil spirits were abroad. No sensible person would leave his barricaded hut to see what might be happening beyond the light of the fire. The Biami had no such qualms. They moved through the jungle by the fitful light of the moon and by the faint starlight, earning for themselves the title of “meat-eating flying foxes”. The flesh of their victims was an integral part of their diet, and their only really satisfying source of protein. Most cannibalism around the world is ritual, the aim being to imbibe the powers of your victims, making you ever stronger and eventually invincible. But the Biami had no such tradition; they only wanted meat.

Their approach was highly organised. Raiding parties would steal silently through the night, and carefully deploy through the tangled gardens of the targeted long house, stationing themselves at the minor exits. At the first glimmer of dawn, making the maximum uproar to disorient the sleepers, some would leap through the main entrance, howling like madmen, indiscriminately clubbing and axing the occupants. The remaining house dwellers would pour out through the lesser exits, or simply barge straight through the walls in a mad panic to escape. The waiting warriors would axe them down as they bolted out of the house, and chase the more agile through the gardens, finishing them off there.

The corpses would then be dismembered, the manageable portions stuffed into string bags and borne off by the triumphant chanting warriors to be partially roasted on the long house fires. Brains, eyeballs and testicles were particular delicacies. Much of the catch would be eaten practically raw. Eligible young women captured in raids would be forcefully married into the Biami to produce more warriors and women workers. Barren women were eaten or became slaves.

Saturation patrolling had commenced the previous year. One led by Patrol Officer Allan Johnson was attacked by the Adumari, a group inhabiting the northern Biami. His firearm demonstration had only grazed the targeted pig, ricocheting off the skull, and furrowing along its spine. This unconvincing revelation of government power did nothing to deflate Biami arrogance. Johnson was lured on by the crafty Adumari elders who gave their traditional signs of peace, the clicking together of two rocks. But Johnson quickly realised that the large number of armed warriors were about to attack. He made a strategic withdrawal when arrows were fired at the patrol. There were further harrowing moments as the warriors closely shadowed the patrol all the way out of their territory and beyond. The government forces had been triumphantly seen off.

I left two days after my arrival at Nomad with police and carriers for a quick seven-day reconnaissance patrol. The track was overgrown and muddy, made worse by tree roots projecting from the surface. The legs of all personnel quickly became bloody from the knees down so periodic stops were necessary to remove the clusters of leeches from our legs and from under our shorts. We did it with matches and cigarette ends, while the carriers scraped them off with bush knives, which often left leech heads buried in the skin with subsequent infection. During this operation legions of sweat flies attempted to crawl into our mouths, eyes and ears, while sandflies feasted on any exposed skin. We were quickly targeted by march flies and bullants as well. We reached Obeimi Base Camp after eight hours walking through pouring rain.

We spent the next few days visiting the surrounding long houses. Much of the walking was through old gardens where we balanced on greasy logs anywhere from three to twenty feet above terra firma. The exact height was an educated guess as the tangled undergrowth gave no view of solid ground. A slip would give you a better estimate, but at the cost of probable serious injury. A course in tightrope walking would have been useful. The long houses were surrounded by small garden houses. Large areas of jungle were cut down at each settlement, using the haphazard slash-and-burn technique of shifting agriculture. This laborious task was still being done with stone axes, although steel axes were slowly replacing them. Areas were cleared by notching trees from the bottom of the hill up, and then cutting down one or two giants at the top to fell the rest on their way down. The undergrowth was initially burnt and the gardens planted and allowed to grow without human interference. The ensuing tangled wilderness was a deliberate defence mechanism; there was usually only one practical route through this jumble to the long house, which was easily guarded.

We received a surly welcome at one long house, due to our inability to catch any of those responsible for the killing and eating of one of their number by the uncontacted Kabasi, who lived some days walk away to the south-east. There was an astonished reception and blank stares at another long house as I attempted to explain the dodgy hygiene aspects of rubbing the juices of a decomposing corpse into their skins in order to imbibe the spirit of the departed. Three overgrown long house sites were pointed out to me where whole populations, probably more than 200, had been simply wiped out by past raids. Five separate acts of recent murder and cannibalism were listed, including another by the indefatigable Kabasi, all to be investigated. But the most important action was to be against the truculent Adumari, who had vanished from their usual haunts. The first job was to find them.

Back at Nomad, I cleared it with Daru District Office for Colin Young and me to do an aerial survey to the north after the weekly Cessna supply run. We spotted new gardens about a day’s walk north of the Adumari’s regular haunts. As we circled, some old people rushed out and waved, others knelt and covered their heads with their hands. We estimated numbers from the size of the settlement at a hundred.

The next day Colin Young and I left with eight police, three interpreters, our two cooks and forty-eight carriers. The Adumari would be watching for us on the normal track, so we canoed the swollen Nomad River, and then crossed a further flooded tributary by felling a large tree across it. We camped in virgin jungle for the next two nights, and followed a circuitous route well to the west of their domains, plotted with the aid of our compass bearings from the aerial survey.

On the third morning, our guide informed us that we were entering Adumari territory. We quietly instructed the patrol to close up. Police were issued with ammunition, and dispersed through the carrier line. Strict silence was enforced. A long house was spotted on the opposite bank. My aides and I forded the river out of sight, and we sneaked up through the undergrowth. Two men let out a yell and reached for their weapons. We quickly trussed them up. We avoided alerting the groups upriver by securing the captured males to prevent any overnight escape. A heavy guard was posted. Sandflies made sleep impossible. A thunderstorm raged overnight: all personnel were soaked and freezing cold due to the leaking tents. The river rose two metres, and floodwaters swirled through the front of our tents.

Moving on at dawn, we surprised and secured two men and five youths in an old house. They said one of the warriors of the Adumari group had died, and that the bulk of the group were assembled at a long house on a ridge further along for the corpse ceremonies. It was a great opportunity for us to capture them—and a great chance for the assembled warriors to engage in a pitched battle with us. We had no time to make considered decisions. Colin immediately moved half our force to the west, while I blundered east with the rest through a ravine covered with thick undergrowth, in an attempt to contain them in a pincer movement. I captured one youth in a lean-to on the way, but three men darted off.

When Colin was moving into position not far from the long house, he was spotted by a youth as he quickly dropped behind a log. The youth ran off, raising the alarm. Colin yelled, “Let’s go!” and sprinted towards the house, rushing through a small garden house, fully expecting a descending axe, and then on to the long house, where the massed warriors stood, weapons ready. Halfway there, he realised he had heard no patter of back-up feet, and looked back. His team was waiting at the edge of the forest, to see what happened to him before making any moves. Colin displayed remarkable sang-froid, diffusing the nasty situation by calmly rolling a cigarette, sitting on a log, and smoking it, much to the amazement of the thunder-struck warriors. Only then did his forces, thus reassured, move up. My group and I then arrived, a further deterrent to any hostile acts. The warriors, at this crucial moment, had lost the initiative. Colin could easily have retreated to his apprehensive watching aides. Had he done so, the tribesmen, thus emboldened, would have been encouraged to attack before I arrived.

The occupants were persuaded to down weapons, come out of the long house, and call out to the remainder of the group hidden in the surrounding jungle. Some forty warriors trickled in during the next two hours. The corpse of the unfortunate male, Hila, lay in state in the house. Decomposition was well under way, judging by the smell and the attendant myriads of iridescent blue flies. The women had seated themselves under Hila’s seething, heaving stomach, wailing in sorrow while their hair filled with falling maggots and their bodies were splashed by pungent exudates.

After one man effected his escape by darting out through a small side entrance, I ordered the rest to sit outside the house, where patrol members surrounded them. Constables Hima and Suni pointed out the two men who had threatened Allan Johnson and another who had attempted to shoot his corporal the year before. We reassured the remainder that those detained would return after a sojourn at Nomad prison. We told them that these men had also been arrested for engaging in threatening behaviour towards previous government patrols. Many bows and arrows were confiscated. A heavy guard was posted during the night.

In camp the next day, we interrogated those in custody, and charged eighteen of them. We were both astounded and relieved. We had been able to subdue the most powerful and aggressive Biami group with no casualties on either side. The remaining people were told that the government would return with the eighteen prisoners after they had served three months each. A firearms demonstration was given, but like the previous year’s one, it fell flat. Only the elderly were impressed. I radioed Nomad and arranged for patrol officer Bill Paterson to collect the prisoners from Colin at Sefalobi, a day’s walk to the south.

Close questioning revealed that the people thought the aerial survey plane was a gigantic dragonfly under the government’s spell. “We crouched down in the open, and hid ourselves under our hands, so that it could not see us. We told the elderly to wave so that the beast could see we were friendly and not land and take us away to eat us.”

We discovered that the hostility to Johnson’s patrol was due to his use of guides from Sedado, home of their traditional enemies. We asked, “But why attack such a powerful government force?” They responded, “They had so much body meat that we just had to have them.” Both sides had recently engaged in the retaliatory killing and eating of a number of their enemy’s people. We spent the next eight days contacting scattered groups to our north and making sago from purchased and wild trees to feed the hungry carriers. We contacted some sixty people who had not been seen by previous patrols, and rested a day at the largest settlement to dry out our sodden gear, which was starting to rot and stink. We gathered information while the exhausted carriers recovered. Some of the people had terrible cases of yaws, and shocking tropical ulcers. Like the rest of the Biami, nobody ever washed. Medical Orderly Kamon gave them penicillin injections, which has miraculous healing effects when it is first administered.

We went on to Obeimi base camp, where Colin was usually stationed, and found that the store had been raided. We spent the next three days there, and put the carriers to work making new gardens. The headmen from Obeimi and Ugubia were questioned about the store break-in. They both accused the other’s people. We gave them two weeks to find the culprits. They never did, but they returned some of the gear, and surprisingly, Colin’s red-and-blue rubber Lilo mattress. They had long watched the red-and-blue Australian flag being raised and lowered on the flagpole, and they assumed the Lilo was part of this powerful white man’s magic.

Village names were in a confused state. The Biami never stopped anywhere for long, as the heavily leached soils were quickly exhausted. After eighteen months they made new gardens and built a new long house at another location. Every village was eventually required to build a rest house complex for use by government patrols, so we decided that all groups would be called by the name of the mound where their rest house would be built. To date there was only one. We camped under tents.

The patrol moved on to Sabasigi, six hours walk through the thick jungle to the south-east, in an attempt to deal with its second major objective, to discover the whereabouts of Ouli and Saia, who had killed a Soia woman supposedly accused of witchcraft in January. The whole group had eaten the corpse. We passed an abandoned long house and heard the sound of a chopping axe in a garden ahead. A shout five minutes later indicated that the patrol had been spotted. We sprinted forward, and a group of armed men darted into the bush to the south. We apprehended the two slowest and moved on to a partially completed long house that was said to belong to Ouli.

As the patrol was now out of food, we despatched constables Okomba and Suni and ten carriers to collect food from the gardens directly below the house where we camped. Payment was made to the Sabasigi men who we had taken into custody. An exhausted carrier stumbled into camp soon after to inform us that constable Okomba had been speared and killed, and that a carrier had been wounded in the hand with an arrow. Colin and I immediately left the camp with five police. We charged through the garden and into the jungle. A small house near the jungle’s edge was deserted. We ran further uphill, spotting a boot print of Okomba’s heading into jungle. Loud yodelling was heard from the camp. Colin and I looked at one another and froze. Colin and two police immediately charged back in case the ever-resourceful Ouli had made an opportunistic attack in our absence.

Four police and I followed a track that the warriors had recently used, and discovered footprints of Okomba. Biami footprints diminished in number, suggesting that they were peeling off individually into the jungle. The tribesmen were adept at leaving the track and heading straight through the virgin jungle, leaping on logs, rocks and tussocks to avoid leaving prints. We soon arrived at a small house on the edge of a stream, where the last of the tracks petered out. We returned along the same track, carefully examining the verges, but we saw no signs of a large body of men leaving it. Approaching darkness made it difficult to distinguish features in the dense jungle. That night, apart from the cooking fires we were in darkness, as we were out of torch batteries and lamp kerosene. Our police guards were changed regularly, to enable them to stay alert in the impenetrable blackness of the forest night.

Interpreter Nogoi offered to talk to the spirits and went into a self-induced trance, swaying and then falling to the ground, twitching and rolling. He recovered and announced, “Okomba will return when the first bird chirps.” The Adumari and Sefalobi sang to the spirits for much of the night, in an attempt to discover Okomba’s whereabouts. We were told that he had not been killed, but was in hiding. Thus “reassured” we went to bed; but not to sleep. Colin and I spent the rest of the night unsuccessfully searching for telling phrases in the English language to use in the report to Headquarters to soften the blow of having a policeman murdered, dragged off and eaten.

We were overjoyed when Okomba returned to the camp at daybreak. He had thought that the garden house contained only a man and a woman. Instead, it was packed with warriors. He had given his shotgun to a carrier to keep his hands free. Men came boiling out of the house, and Okomba and a carrier secured one each. The remainder, some eight to ten warriors, seeing only a small arresting force, decided on direct action. An Adumari carrier heard one shout, “There is only a few of them, let’s get our weapons and kill them.” The carrier shouted to Okomba, and then hared off into the bush with the rest of the panic-stricken carriers, clutching the empty shotgun, and leaving Okomba to it. Okomba, in possession of the now useless shotgun cartridges, and finding the warriors between himself and the camp path, was forced to sprint off in the opposite direction, hotly pursued by the enraged warriors. He was able to shake off all but two shrieking fighters. One was armed with bow and arrow, the other with an axe. A number of arrows were fired at him during the pursuit, one of which lodged in his shirt, which he instantly discarded. His oversized commando boots (an old pair of mine) slowed him down, but he managed to unlace and discard them at a dead run: no mean feat. Twice he slipped and fell, and twice he hid behind a tree, and each time he was discovered. Finally eluding his pursuers, he climbed a large tree as darkness fell, and strapped his arm to a branch with his belt. But his troubles were not over. He soon found he was not alone. Soft talking and whispering around the base of the tree seemed to go on interminably. Eventually he felt that the shadowy figures had left, and he judged it safe to begin to relieve himself, as he was in real pain. Frighteningly, he then sensed more figures were gathering again under the tree, and he froze in fear. They remained silent and motionless for a long time, seeming to seek the source of the smell, and listening for the sound of any movement. A slight rustling much later seemed to suggest that they were moving off. But how far? Had they left a guard hidden by the blackness of the night? He couldn’t chance it, and moved his aching muscles only infinitesimally to relieve the debilitating pain.

Just before dawn, when the first bird chirped, he gingerly climbed down, fully expecting an attack. But there were no warriors to be seen. Relieving himself caused him absolute agony. Hiding in the jungle, stealthily moving beside the tracks, he eventually came across our prints, and finally returned to camp to our rapturous reception. I was more than a little angry. His instructions had been to supervise the gathering of food for the patrol and return to camp, and not to conduct investigations or attempt any arrests in the dangerous environment the patrol found itself in. No disciplinary action was necessary beyond a reprimand, as nothing I ordered could duplicate the effect of his traumatic experience. He was an excellent policeman, energetic and normally reliable. His wish to effect what had seemed to be a simple capture was understandable.

The patrol was now completely out of food, and as the Sabasigi group were now in deep hiding, there was nothing to be gained by any further action. We decided to return to Nomad—six hours walk away—to obtain fresh supplies and a new carrier line. On arrival, we received the bitter news that twelve of the eighteen Adumari prisoners had escaped early that morning. We were devastated. They should have been flown to the Kiunga Corrective Institution weeks ago. The most dangerous prisoner had our only remaining pair of handcuffs still attached to his left hand.

Before we had gone on patrol, I had asked for more police. To my surprise, six had been flown in from the Police Training College at Bomana in Moresby, for a month’s field training. They were all big powerful lads, part of the police rugby team. Colin and I left Nomad as soon as we had resupplied, with seven police, four of them the Bomana trainees, medical orderly Kamon, and thirty-five carriers. After a hard day’s trek we made camp about half an hour from Sabasigi, so we wouldn’t be detected. Even so, loud talking and fires were prohibited.

We had a pre-dawn start, as the Sabasigi could be in any of four houses. We crept carefully though the bush, using as little torch light as possible. We tried in vain to quell noises and prevent indiscriminate torch flashing at the back of the line. But when we arrived at the first long house, shouts from a sentry showed we had been spotted. Interpreter Nogoi immediately bolted and disappeared into the bush: so that was goodbye to any interpreting. Volleys of arrows were fired at Colin and me. They made a strange thrumming sound as they flashed past our ears. I yelled, “Go!” as we drew our revolvers, and Colin and I slipped and slid along the greasy logs. The arrows keep coming, so halfway to the house we fired either side of the warriors’ heads to deter any frontal attack. This caused them to disengage and bolt, except for the lookout who lined his bow and arrow up on us. Our stalwart Nomad constable, Suni, the only policeman with us, sprinted forward and hit him like an express train, and they both went down. We leapt forward, and trussed him up with rope. I had heard no patter of police feet behind us, and I flashed a wondering backward glance. The Bomana police trainees had prudently hidden themselves behind large trees. The Nomad police, stuck in the tangled undergrowth, finally moved up to join us.

As we ran on to the long house, I lost my footing and a hidden warrior charged me with an axe. Colin Young’s cook, Puis, parried the blow with his shotgun, and the warrior sprinted off into the jungle. Still in shock after this near-fatal incident, I slowly put up my weapon, greatly relieved that I hadn’t had to use it. The pre-war Administrator Sir Hubert Murray’s famous dictum still applied: you could only legally defend yourself after you were dead; if you did it while alive a manslaughter charge was automatic.

We found out that the Bomana police trainees had shone their torches deliberately to warn the warriors and so avoid hostilities and personal harm. Our regular police had been regaling them overnight with tales of sorcery and cannibalism to the point where their nightmarish fears had rendered them useless. Never has so much muscle power produced so pathetic a result.

We moved on and confiscated a large quantity of weapons. We discovered that the bulk of the warriors had hidden themselves in a lean-to some fifty metres away. A perfect encirclement was impossible in the tangled undergrowth where there was a high risk of serious injury in the pitch darkness by falling off greasy logs into the unplumbed depths below. Backtracking, we surprised one male, whom we trussed up. This brought our captured tally up to nine out of twenty known offenders. They were difficult to capture: of four attempts by us and previous patrols, our catch had been less than half. Ouli was still in hiding, skilfully directing operations against us. It was impossible not to admire the man. During interrogation, we discovered that the lookout man was Ouli’s chief lieutenant Goiaba. Our threats to use our powerful white man’s magic against him and his people if he didn’t assist us produced an arrogant shrug and the comment, “We don’t care about the white man’s magic.”

We spotted a small garden house with smoke curling out of the roof. We attempted to surround it by crashing through the tangled undergrowth. The inhabitants spotted us and sprinted off, leaving behind a little boy and a small girl paralysed with fear. We called out to the hidden watchers to collect them. After protracted discussion, we eventually sent them off into the jungle—we had no wish to add kidnapping to our problems. We spent the next two days combing the area, but there was no sign of recent activity. The group was now well in hiding. We were able to accurately map new and old dwellings, gardens and footpaths, to prepare us for another similar bout of frenzied activity sometime in the future.

We moved on for six hours to an old house of the Dagagumosom people, where we camped, and brought food. The local village headman had organised the whipping of two women accused of sorcery on a villager who died as a result of their alleged activities. A previous patrol had sentenced him to a month of hard labour at the Nomad prison, but he escaped and was still at large. Our attempts to find him failed.

When his police guard fell asleep during the night, Goiaba unpicked his rope bonds and bolted. We had no handcuffs. Colin and I had slept too soundly, exhausted, bitten and battered after this tough patrol.

We started before dawn the next day, and surrounded each of the four Sabasigi houses in turn. All were deserted. Disappointed, we returned to Nomad and stood the thirty-seven-day patrol down. Bill Paterson greeted me with a pair of handcuffs.

“It was worn by one of the Adumari escapees,” he said.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“He is still at large. He attempted to smash off the cuffs with a rock, but only succeeded in ratcheting them tighter to the point where gangrene seems to have set in, and he was forced to chop his hand off. The cuffs were given to a third party to bring in, as he didn’t want us chasing him through the bush for them. The talk is that he refuses to come in for treatment, as he doesn’t want to go back to jail.”

Our pacification work had a long way to go. The warriors had to be shown who was boss in this Darwinian world before any administrative progress could be made. We weren’t even sure how many Biami groups we had. The government had been engaged in targeted law-and-order expeditions, and “showing the flag” until now.

The population had been estimated at between 2000 and 3000, perhaps more. We didn’t really know. My next job was to do a detailed census, pinpoint the long houses of each group, and establish those vital traditional alliances and their equally important natural foes. Using this information, I could then organise rapid responses to future incidents, and be anywhere in the Biami within two days from receiving word. I wanted to catch at least one group red-handed with their guard down, still feasting on their victims. But I first needed a secure prison in which to house them. I planned to build an impregnable stockade using local materials.

Years later, I saw a notation on the report in the HQ archives. “Prepare for a press release?” But the idea had been canned. Too embarrassing to draw attention to such activities when the country was on the verge of self-government.