The Star Mountains

Copyright © 2016 Tom Hayllar.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-0329-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-0330-9 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 11/07/2016

The Country of the Expedition – Maps

Map showing location of the Star Mountains in Papua New Guinea Map: Tom Hayllar

Expedition routes to and from Telefomin the Star Mountains Map: Barry Craig

Dedication

to

Barry, Paul, David, Mike, John and our carriers.

Between latitude 5 degrees and 5 30’ and the longitude 142 degrees east lay a belt of mountains and unknown country, the Star Mountains, extending along the 5th parallel from the Dutch border and the Victor Emanuel range further east. Austen (a patrol officer) had explored the foothills of the ranges in his three expeditions and he found them to be composed of coral limestone in which water was very scarce and travelling almost impossible.

From: Ivan Champion’s Across New Guinea from the Sepik to the Fly

The narrative is an account of the first crossing by Europeans of the rugged, 12,000ft Star Mountains Range of the Australian Trust Territory of New Guinea. The Star Mountains are east of the West Irian border in the vicinity of Telefomin. The crossing of the mountains was accomplished by a party of six men, including Hayllar, who set out from Telefomin on February 25, 1965. The men climbed two of the highest peaks in the ranges, Mt Capella and Mt Scorpion, and visited a sheet of water called Lake Vivien which had not previously been seen by natives of the area.

Archival description from: Australian National University. Pacific Manuscripts Bureau: Collection MS 83 - Scorpion - Central New Guinea. Narrative of exploring expedition.

The manuscript by Tom Hayllar described here is the basis of this book.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1   The Star Mountains

Chapter 2   Preparations

Chapter 3   Underway

Chapter 4   Telefomin

Chapter 5   Into The Moss Forest

Chapter 6   The Royal Highway

Chapter 7   On The Mountain Slopes

Chapter 8   Boxing The Compass

Chapter 9   Ad Astra

Chapter 10   Sinkholes, Plateaux And Dogs

Chapter 11   Dark Days In Bark Huts

Chapter 12   Scorpion

Chapter 13   Capella

Chapter 14   Me Go ‘Fraid

Chapter 15   Across! Busilmin!

Chapter 16   A Little Gold Fever

Chapter 17   Full Circle

Chapter 18   Previous Exploration – More Detail

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Images

CHAPTER 1

THE STAR MOUNTAINS

At the beginning of the twentieth century, though the coastal plains of New Guinea were known, the interior still remained a vast, cloudy enigma. A central spine of mountains close to the island’s heart had only been glimpsed by a few travellers who risked everything to voyage up its two mighty rivers, the Sepik and the Fly. In the centre of New Guinea the Sepik flowed to the north, the Fly to the south and in between, near the international border, was the great watershed containing to the west the plateaux and peaks of the Star Mountains.

The first European to approach within sight of the centre from the south was the Italian explorer, Luigi D’Albertis who in 1876, on his voyage up the Fly River, reached the limit 400 miles from the mouth and wrote of the view:

At last I have seen the lofty mountains of the interior of New Guinea. I have seen them like giants of different heights towering one above the other and extending from the principal chain down the river. But we are still far from these Papuan Alps – forty or fifty miles or even more. My mind is on the rack. I feel like Moses in sight of the Promised Land, destined never to enter it.¹

The highest summits of the Star Mountains are close to the West Irian border. They are domes and splinters of limestone rising to over 12,000 feet and dominating a confusion of lesser highlands smothered beneath moss forest.

Just before the First World War a Dutch military expedition, with infinite persistence, penetrated the lowlands south of the central ranges. From these they saw the high peaks to the east and named the nearest Scorpion, Capella and Sirius. They called the whole central range, the Star Mountains.

In 1965 the mountains remained unvisited by both native highlanders and Europeans. It was too difficult to carry on shifting cultivation, or build villages in the harsh country and cold air above 6,000 feet. Administrative patrols visited locations where there were people to be contacted, these areas being identified by signs of habitation in air photos. To make first contact one patrol had, in 1963, visited some tiny hamlets scattered to the south of the mountains. It was led out by a Mr Fitzer from Kiunga, a small village on the Fly. On the northern slopes of the mountains there were more numerous hamlets and these had been visited by about half a dozen patrols. However, the Star Mountains themselves remained unexplored because the approaches are guarded by formidable walls. On the south side of the hidden plateau is a line of huge cliffs rising to 6,000 feet, and some 2,000 feet above them rise the mountain summits. For over 20 miles those cliffs stretch to the west as a seemingly unbroken barrier.

The great bluffs forming the southern ramparts of the Star Mountains Photo: Tom Hayllar

Fitzer’s patrol succeeded in making contact with the Stone Age cultivators who live in the very shadow of these cliffs. He also discovered the existence of a pass through the cliff barrier, although he was unable to penetrate through to the plateau. At an altitude of 8,000 feet his carriers sat in their final camp shivering from the intense cold and from a fear of the unknown, refusing to go on, and Fitzer had to abandon the attempt to climb higher. In his patrol report of the 13 April 1963 he wrote:

Conditions are the worst we had encountered in the course of the patrol with terrain that beggars description. Extreme cold, constant dampness and no more than one to two hours free of cloud.²

Now with the island criss-crossed by air services, it seemed impossible that we were looking at a map of central New Guinea and rather fearfully planning to climb and cross, for the first time, the Star Mountains, the mountain barrier that separated the headwaters of the Sepik from those of the Fly. It was 1965 and the mysterious ranges and peaks that stretch along the extreme western end of the New Guinea-Papua border were the last unexplored mountain range in the Australian territory. The awareness of this cloudy mystery and where it might lead was the prelude to an adventure in New Guinea.³

CHAPTER 2

PREPARATIONS

The idea of our expedition started with the conviction that there must be unknown cave systems in the limestone areas of the New Guinea’s highlands. So when Gordon Bain, the president of the Port Moresby Speleological Society, took Christmas leave from his commercial job to visit Sydney, he found some of us Sydney cavers very enthusiastic about the limestone potential way up north.

As we discussed vague ideas for an expedition we soon realised that the extreme western highlands of Australian New Guinea was largely unexplored and uninhabited. The administration and the army did not seem to be immediately interested, so we wrote and learned that our request to run an unofficial expedition of three months duration would be permitted if we agreed to conditions laid down by Sir Donald Cleland, the administrator of Papua and New Guinea. He sent a list of conditions that tried us mentally, physically and financially. We needed to be ‘extremely fit and experienced mountain climbers’; we were not allowed to violate the international border; we were to maintain radio contact throughout the expedition; and we had to ‘carry out adequate area reconnaissance prior to the start of the expedition’.⁴ Gordon was still wrestling with these conditions when he got himself simultaneously married and employed in a new position, and was consequently unable to participate any longer in our expedition. Meanwhile a character called Barry Craig contacted us. He was living in Telefomin, the last government station in the highlands before the international border. The tops of cliffs forming the southern walls of the Star Mountains could be seen from Telefomin and he was interested.

Barry and his wife Ruth were anthropologists. Although Barry had taken a job as a school teacher so he could share in the life of the Telefomin people he had often wondered what kind of people lived in the distant mountains. He was present when Fitzer’s patrol returned from the southern side of the mountains and reported that they were probably uninhabited.

In December 1963 Barry decided to clear up the mystery and charted a Cessna to fly him among the peaks. The flight revealed that there was no population in there. Disappointed, he shelved the idea of a journey till, months later, he heard of the expedition being organised in Sydney and realised that if he went on it he might be able to get to know the people who lived on both sides of the foothills. He offered to recruit carriers and pay his share of expenses and with his command of Pidgin, the language Telefomin people commonly used, Barry would be an asset. However, over the months we received long lists of items which Barry called ‘necessities’ such as camp stretchers, enamel instead of plastic mugs and a shower bucket with adjustable rose. The three of us in Sydney had planned for a small, simple kind of expedition, perhaps the kind on which members cut the handles (or even the bristles, as someone said) off their tooth brushes to save weight. Under Barry’s insistence, I was the first to weaken. After all in the wilderness an adjustable shower rose could be desirable as a morale-building symbol of comfort and self-respect. I edited Barry’s lists sympathetically and his shower rose eventually went with us as necessary expedition equipment.

Expedition Members: Back Row; David Cook, Paul Symonds, Tom Hayllar: Front Row; John Huon, Barry Craig, Mike Shepherd. Photo: Barry Craig

David Cook, a geologist working in Mount Isa, Queensland, received, I think from Barry, ‘an invitation to attend an expedition.’ His wide experience in geology certainly qualified him. Barry in Telefomin soon began to send David duplicate copies of his equipment lists and soon he too was leaning towards the heavyweight, mid-Victorian style of expedition that was apparently fashionable on the big patrols run by the Administration. Soon David was sending us long lists of his own, insisting that all the gear was necessary for his geological work, even a big alarm clock. Neither Barry nor David had yet sent us photos of themselves and we remained apprehensive about their age, strength and fitness until we finally met them.

Two more characters joined the expedition in the second half of 1964. Paul Symons was a psychologist with the Immigration Department in Canberra. He was in his early thirties and so was altogether a bit of a father figure. Not tall but light on his feet and tough he was a rock climber, caver and walker with endurance, who loved the Snowy Mountains and liked to sip good tea while reciting poetry. He was a disciple of Eric Shipton⁵, the English climber who proclaimed the need for small, lean expeditions to mountainous areas around the world.

Paul was outraged by Barry and David’s lists which were in his opinion luxury prone. Shipton’s mountaineering epics are sprinkled with descriptions of climbers rising before dawn and setting off grimly on a bowl of tea and a handful of oatmeal. Paul was determined that we too must not grow slack and later, on the expedition, was always up grotesquely early groping in the darkness for his boots, then blowing the fire’s embers into life under the tea billy. However he was sometimes beaten to the draw by another character described later.

Mike Shepherd was the last to join the expedition. He was English and had been studying geomorphology for four years at Sydney University on an English scholarship from a Guild of Weavers. The first we knew of his existence was a phone message to say that a man who had come second out of a hundred in a walking race wanted to join the expedition. Mike had received permission to write his science thesis on aspects of limestone erosion in the Star Mountains. We were puzzled as to how he knew they even existed. On the other hand, he had never heard of the rugged Eric Shipton, although Paul quickly enlightened him. Accordingly, Mike crammed his water analysis kit of reagents, pipettes and litmus paper into a large plastic lunch box that could be strapped on top of his pack and was ready to go. While waiting to go, he prepared himself for the rigours of expedition travel by eating a bowl of raw oats soaked in cold water and running five kilometres as often as possible. He also bought an old-fashioned leather cap with fur-lined ear flaps that could be bound over the top by a press stud. When wearing this he resembled a wood chopper out of an old German folk tale.

However, these four companions and I were not the only characters who wished to go on the expedition. There was also an estate agent, the alleged daughter of an American state governor, who drove more than three hundred miles to Sydney from somewhere in country NSW, questioned us for five minutes, refused a cup of coffee, leapt into her car and presumably drove all the way back again. Once we almost became part of a huge British caving expedition to the Star Mountains; however, somewhat wistfully, as we watched that expedition dwindle and vanish for lack of funds, we filed away our applications for future reference.

John Huon de Navrancourt, descendant of an aristocratic French family, first appeared in writing. He was 47 years old and had behind him 13 years of medical patrol work in New Guinea. He sent an account of his experiences that read like a hard-hitting western. Apart from his wide knowledge of Territory conditions, he was a founder of the Club Martel de Nice, the famous French speleological society. However, when brief correspondence between New Britain where he stationed and Sydney faded, we felt a strange mixture of relief and disappointment. We were not to hear of John Huon again till we were on the high seas bound for New Guinea with supplies and equipment for five not six expedition members.

Finally there was me. In the several years since my graduation with an arts degree from Sydney University I had been teaching high school, patiently and earnestly rather that competently and inspirationally. At one stage I threw it in and, because I was a bush walker and caver, went walking and caving in the Kumaon and Kashmir Himalayas with a friend, Paull Rose, whose father had been a much respected manager of Jenolan Caves House. When Gordon Bain, the initial organiser our New Guinea expedition, invited me to the Star Mountains, I dropped out of the teaching game again and agreed to his request that I be the insect collector for the South Australian Museum during the proposed expedition.

It was not until December 1964 that Paul, Mike and I in Sydney were able to begin accumulating expedition supplies. The advocates of the elaborate expedition had persuaded us that we’d need at least fifteen carriers for three months. However, Shipton’s mean, lean theories looked like scoring heavily in the food department. We modified one of his favourite mountaineering food lists and based consumption on his figure of two pounds of food per person per day. Then Barry hastily wrote to remind us that the carriers of the upper Sepik had special tastes which must not be ignored. They needed rice when taro and kaukau (sweet potato), both cultivated edible roots, were not available. They also relished a species of Japanese pink mackerel that was only available in Wewak. Salt, tobacco, tea and sugar were essentials. The total amount of food for three months was 3,600 pounds, or forty pounds a day. It was a staggering amount. We had to consider air drops, but they were expensive and uncertain because of the heavy cloud that often covered the mountains. We decided that we could only afford three; one to the south, one in the mountains (if we ever reached them) and one to the north.

Facing three months of walking into and out of an area of about 10,000 feet, and with the altitude of the plateau from which the peaks rose at least a further 2,000 feet, we’d need a variety of warm and waterproof clothing which we bought in armfuls from an assortment of second-hand stores .

For shelter in the anticipated daily downpours, we acquired two huge sheets of heavy gauge orange plastic that could be stretched over a framework of wooden poles. The Pidgin word ‘sail’ was used to describe these shelters. We also had three small tents that could be pitched under the sails. For cooking we bought half a dozen petrol primuses and several gallons of fuel in case wood was not available or too wet. We also included a range of battered, blackened billies of various sizes.

We realised we needed footwear for the carriers and began to worry about the expense of fifteen pairs of boots until Barry told us that their feet were naturally hard and horny and it would be better to spend the money on their favourite kind of trade tobacco called ‘Paradise’.

We argued about our own footwear and finally decided on two pairs of boots each, one with spikes or tricounis for the moss forest and one with hard rubber treads for rock. For use around camp we chose sandshoes.

We bought two portable radio transceivers to maintain our contact with Telefomin and to arrange air drops.

Under the heading of ‘caves’, we packed overalls, helmets, carbide lamps, rope and ninety feet of flexible wire ladders since