Beguiling Adventure - John Wright

Beguiling Adventure with John Wright - Courier Mail

Courier Mail p32 Feb 16-17

SPREADING the Gospel in the Pacific islands in early colonial days could be a risky business, as the Wesleyan Methodist missionary Dr. George Brown found in the 1870s.

In 1878, three years after he set up the first Christian mission in New Britain, a part of what would become German New Guinea, villagers murdered four of his Fijian workers and ate them.

The remains of the mumu, or earth and stone oven in which they were cooked, are said to be visible still at a spot called Malmalvan Lookout, on the picturesque coastal road that winds south around Blanche Bay from Rabaul, in East New Britain, to the provincial capital, Kokopo.

Brown left New Guinea in 1881, but the cannabilism and murder, fuelled by the exploitation and slavery of local people by rival tribes, European traders and blackbirders, continued and climaxed in 1904 with the massacre of 10 German Catholic missionaries on the Gazelle Peninsula near Rabaul.

It is not easy for travellers to this remote and beautiful part of north-eastern PNG to grasp that slavery and cannibalism were going on there not much more than a century ago. But you can find lasting reminders of this colourful period of the region’s European settlement history in a tourism backwater off New Britain called the Duke of York Islands.

The islands lie in St George’s Channel between New Britain and New Ireland in what is known as the Bismarck Archipelago _ a region charted by explorer and buccaneer William Dampier in 1700 and rediscovered by European pearl, wood, copra and beche-de-mer traders in the early 1870s.

The Germans arrived in earnest in 1874, setting up a commercial post on Mioko Island and another at Rabaul, followed by the Rev. Dr. Brown in 1875 and the celebrated American/Samoan trader and planter Emma Coe Forsyth (known locally as ``Queen Emma’’), who also established a base on Mioko in 1878/79.

The islands were annexed by Germany in 1884 and stayed under its control until WW1, when they came under Australian military rule. They were seized by the Japanese in the 1942 invasion of Rabaul and, after WW11, they settled into comparative obscurity as part of a UN Trust territory administered by Australia. They officially became part of PNG with that country’s independence in 1975.

Nowadays, the Duke of York’s few thousand inhabitants make a living primarily from copra and cocoa. I first visited them in the early 1980s at the end of a copra-boat journey from Rabaul, which was preparing for an expected volcanic eruption that, in the event, would take another decade to happen.

These days, the easiest way to get to the Duke of Yorks is by fast ``banana boat’’ across St George’s Channel from Kokopo, the old German administrative centre which became the capital of ENB Province after the near obliteration of Rabaul by an eruption in 1994.

You get to Kokopo, a busy but rather dreary place compared with pre-eruption Rabaul, on daily commercial air services from the national capital, Port Moresby. The banana boat ride, which takes a little more than an hour, passes the impressive volcanoes of Rabaul and is one of the most beautiful water trips I have made.

There is virtually no tourism infrastructure in the Duke of Yorks, but I went there recently with Brisbane-based specialist adventure tour operator, True North Journeys.

True North has been taking small groups of travellers to the northern part of the main island in the group, Duke of York, and staying at the village of Molot which, incidentally, is where the Rev. Dr. Brown established his mission in 1875.

Known in its early days of European contact as Port Hunter, Molot has about 300 residents, an imposing but decaying United Church built in the mid-1940s and a fine, rain tree-fringed park where the women play football.

There also is a community hall and a school, neither of which has electric power, a monument to the Rev. Dr. Brown and a cemetery containing some of his missionaries, and a pier which juts out into an exquisite bay where dolphins play in the afternoons.

True North’s travellers camp right in the village on the grassy shores of the bay, and find inquisitive villagers who are keen to take them fishing or swimming with the dolphins, and who seem to delight in dancing and singing hymns in their own language, Ramoaaina.

In tourism terms, this is as sophisticated as it gets in Molot, and beyond a financial incentive provided by True North for them to stage a traditional welcome, the villagers have not yet begun to exploit the interest of visitors.

They produce no artefacts, but will sell you strings of shell money, or dewarra, which are small cowries strung on long, flexible strips of cane. Shell money plays an important part in the culture and is used traditionally for the payment of bride price.

Small winds of change may be blowing in Molot, however. The Duke of York Islands are a centre for the religious and quasi-political organisation in New Britain known as Duk-Duk _ a secretive, male only society notable for the extraordinary cone-shaped costumes worn by its members.

Few visitors to PNG get to see authentic Duk-Duk ceremonies and dances, but there are plans to allow future groups of travellers to Molot to witness them.

For the time being, though, the place offers a rustic but exotic simplicity in a tropical island setting that is quite beguiling. Add a fascinating culture and reminders of early missionary and WW11 history (you can snorkel on Japanese tanks just offshore), and you’ve got a destination that’s made to measure for any traveller looking for something special off the beaten track.