by Tim Flannery
Starting on the bottom rung of the museum hierarchy, Troughton soon rose to the prestigious position of curator of mammals, a post he held until 1957. His great work, The Furred Mammals of Australia, was published in 1941 and for decades it remained the definitive book on the subject. Indeed he was so esteemed by his peers that he became the first life member of the Australian Mammal Society. Today, the society’s highest award—the Troughton Medal—is named after him. Between the 1920s and 1940s Troughtie, as he was widely known, undertook a number of heroic collecting expeditions to the Pacific Islands. In 1944 he collected the bandicoot that intrigued me. By then he had been seconded to the US Typhus Commission, which was set up to determine why so many soldiers were dying of the disease. Transmission from rats and bandicoots was suspected, which explains why Troughton, Australia’s leading expert on these creatures, was recruited to help with the inquiry.
Perhaps wartime duties, such as his responsibilities as museum air-raid warden, prevented Troughtie from examining the bandicoot closely. Whatever the case, by the time I arrived at the museum the remains of what was clearly a very distinctive new species had lain in obscurity for forty years. Nothing more had been reported of it, and one of my first jobs in my new position was to name it. I chose Echymipera davidi, for my newborn son David.
Although I never met Troughtie he was a very real presence in my life. On my first day at the Australian Museum I sat at his old wooden desk and could make out faint doodles imprinted, perhaps, by a young Ellie in a moment of boredom. After his lifetime of sitting at it, the desk was probably covered in his DNA; the museum library was certainly filled with his books and its collections replete with his specimens. Fascinated by the man, I began to ask older colleagues who had worked with him what he was like. It turned out that Troughtie had never married, being described as a ‘confirmed bachelor’. A colleague who had once visited him at home recalled that his personal library contained almost no works on science, but was instead crammed with books on theatre. Just occasionally his love of theatre can be glimpsed in his scientific work, such as when he gleefully describes collecting bats from a Sydney church, assisted by the rector playing a danse macabre on the church organ in order to keep the creatures on the wing.
Museums, like all institutions, have a rich store of anecdotes. One of his closer friends recalled that Troughtie’s greatest joy was to go to the Digger’s Club at Bondi to enjoy a beer and the impromptu show put on by the members, then recently back from the Pacific war. The building was a tin shed, filled with benches and tables, with a curtained stage at one end. After the men downed a few beers some Hawaiian guitar music would strike up, and the curtains would open to reveal a chorus line of out-of-form diggers hula-ing across the stage, dressed in grass skirts and sporting half-coconut shells as breasts, the denouement coming when the dancers lifted their skirts. He would also go to his local rugby league club and shout the players beers until they picked him up, tossed him in the air, and caught him again. Then Troughtie was in bliss.
Troughton never really left the museum. In a forgotten corner of that grand institution an ‘old man’s room’ was set up, with desks for the superannuated curators, and it was to this room that Troughtie ‘retired’ when he left the public service in 1958. For as long as his health permitted he came to this room, as punctually as if still employed. Another of my colleagues had once gone to see him there. Troughtie was by then a frail old man, who was sitting rather awkwardly at his desk. Curious, my colleague saw that his odd posture was caused by a large cardboard box which lay between the chair he was sitting in and the desk. It was full of old shoes—perhaps every pair that the ancient curator had ever owned. After a lifetime in a museum, the impulse to collect can manifest in strange ways.
Lester did manage to collect a single specimen of Echymipera davidi in Kiriwina, demonstrating that it still survived on the densely populated island. The DNA sample he took from it was vital in unravelling the evolution of the group. But all had not gone well for the expeditioners on Kiriwina and, when we met on Woodlark, Lester told me the whole sorry story. Greg Mengden had spent several frustrating days on the island without seeing any interesting snakes. Then, just moments before he was due to embark on the Sunbird to come to Woodlark, a villager arrived carrying a small serpent. It didn’t look interesting to Lester, who said it resembled a rather thick shoelace, but when Greg saw it his excitement rose to fever pitch. It was, he exclaimed, a Toxicocalamus, one of the most obscure of snakes, until then unknown on Kiriwina. The unexpected opportunity to photograph and study such a rare creature could be the highlight of Greg’s expedition.
As the Sunbird was anchored in the lagoon and had to leave on the high tide, there was not a moment to lose. Greg walked to the edge of the village, placed the reptile on the sand under a coconut palm, and started snapping away. The only problem was a fly that kept landing on the snake’s nose, and it was soon joined by others. Just why the winged creatures were so persistent did not become evident to Greg until he withdrew his hand from his camera, and he saw a brown smear on his fingers. A glance confirmed that the entire barrel of the lens was smeared with the same stuff, and it only took a whiff to confirm its identity.
Faeces had somehow besmirched his hands, camera and the rare snake before he had noticed, and now the flies were coming thick and fast. Wondering what diseases he had just contracted, yet unwilling to give up the splendid opportunity to photograph the rare beast, Greg washed his hands, and even took the time to give the camera and snake a quick clean. Still the flies came and, now that he’d noticed it, the odour was growing worse. Somehow, in his excitement, Greg had chosen the children’s latrine as the location for his photography session. Besieged by the stink and buzzing flies he finally gave up the attempt, straightened his back, and was about to bid farewell to the assembled villagers when a young boy approached with a coconut husk in hand and said solemnly, ‘Excuse me masta, there is excrement.’ ‘Excrement?’ thought Greg, marvelling at the unexpected excellence of primary school education on the island. Then the lad bade him bend over and, before the assembled crowd—which by this stage was in gales of laughter—used the husk to spoon an enormous turd from the seat of Greg’s jeans. It represented a tremendous effort by some toddler, and Greg must have sat in it when he first squatted down to shoot. His hand, which he extended to steady himself, had with unerring aim found another somewhat lesser offering, explaining the smears on the camera.
Desperation now seized our intrepid herpetologist—both to be rid of his shit-smeared clothing and to be gone from Kiriwina for good. Striding towards the beach, he waved urgently at a couple of kids sitting beside a small outrigger canoe and requested they take him to the Sunbird, which was lying at anchor about a hundred metres offshore in the lagoon. Greg weighed around 110 kilograms and he perched atop the tiny lakatoi like an elephant on a circus stool. Within moments of leaving shore the inevitable happened. Greg shifted his weight, and in response the canoe’s outrigger lifted slowly from the water and described a majestic arc through the air. With the canoe overturned, Greg was deposited into the sea, desperately holding the precious snake and camera above the briny with one hand, and urgently signalling to Matt Jumelett for rescue with the other.
Matt teased Greg relentlessly. But, freshly clothed and with a cold beer in hand, even Greg himself could see the funny side of things. After all, here he was aboard a catamaran afloat in a tropical lagoon gliding over a warm sea into the setting sun. And he could always photograph his snake at Woodlark. The world seemed good again. But then the slight swell that heralded the Solomon Sea began to be felt. The Sunbird had slipped beyond the protection of the reef. Greg said that the beer didn’t taste so good anymore, and the lingering whiff of faeces seemed to intensify. Then, Lester said, our herpetologist suddenly turned green. Not having sailed before, Greg was unaware that he rivalled the redoubtable Des Beechey in susceptibility to seasickness. He was to spend the twenty-four-hour journey in a welter of agony, ei
ther in the head (as ships’ toilets are known) or lying stupified on his bunk.
Despite his sufferings on the restless sea, when he stepped ashore on Woodlark Greg immediately set to work. He’d brought his own duty-free with him—a litre of Jim Beam whiskey—and this became his consolation as he faced the hundred or so bagged snakes that awaited him. By the time he had set himself up on a deckchair in front of our accommodation, it seemed that all two thousand Woodlark islanders were seated in front of him. The show was about to begin, and the masta bilong snek would not disappoint.
As the sun set, the circle of light cast by a kerosene lantern caught a mountain of a man at its centre, his face still somewhat green above his ample beard. On his left side lay a mound of snakes in bags, while on his right stood the bottle of Jim Beam and an assortment of hypodermic syringes and vials. After several mighty swigs from the bottle Greg turned his attention to the pile of snakes. The audience held its collective breath as he opened the first bag, drew out the snake and injected it with a chemical that promoted cell division in preparation for molecular sampling. For a moment it writhed wildly in Greg’s hand, causing several young ladies in the front row to spring to their feet and flee. An involuntary scream then swept the audience as Greg placed the creature, unrestrained, on the ground in front of him. He needed to wait for an hour or so after injection before taking his sample. If the creature attempted to slither towards the assembled crowd, Greg would just calmly retrieve it by the tail.
Anxious to be rid of the monster that had disturbed my sleep, I presented the near-escapee to Greg, who told me that it was a brown tree snake. I had seen brown tree snakes in Australia, but there they are usually brightly banded in brown and white, and much smaller. The brown tree snakes of Woodlark, Greg explained, were unusual in reaching such a gigantic size, and in being olive-coloured. Brown tree snakes belong to the family Colubridae—venomous snakes that have their fangs located towards the back of the mouth, are bad-tempered and frequently bite. A large colubrid has a wide enough gape to get its fangs into a human hand and can deliver a potentially fatal bite. It was the only reptile that Greg returned to its bag after injecting.
The crowd watched in fascination as the Jim Beam vanished and the pile of writhing snakes grew. The mood had reached fever pitch, each near-escape drawing howls of terror and waves of laughter as the creature slithered towards one person or another, scattering all. But they rushed back when Greg grabbed each offending snake so as not to miss a second of the fun. Then came the finale, as Greg began taking the blood and venom samples. He would seek a vein, slip a hypodermic syringe into it, and draw out a small amount of bright red blood, which he then emptied into a plastic tube. To take the venom, he’d get the snake to bite the edge of a small vial. Then he’d drop both tube and vial into the liquid nitrogen cylinder. It was like a magic show, the samples vanishing with a puff of white vapour and an ominous fizzling. All too soon, the marvellous evening of wizardry and derring-do was ended. With the Jim Beam bottle almost empty and all the snakes safely bagged again for release or preservation in the morning, Greg rose from his seat and lurched off to bed.
When the Sunbird returned from Kiriwina Matt discovered that the outboard on its tender (an aluminium dinghy) was not running well. He decided that the problem lay with the fuel-mixture screw, and so he set about trying to adjust it. Lester, who was keen to earn some brownie points with our captain, offered to help. Matt, however, fancied himself as a top mechanic—which he may have been in his younger days—and so the offer was brushed aside. The trouble was that the fuel-mixture screw compresses a spring, and if the screw is unwound too far it can jump out. Matt sat in the tinnie as it was tossed in the waves, his glasses fogging over with perspiration as he struggled with the screw, which he might not have been able to see. But pride pushed him on, and all the while Lester hovered nearby in case Matt realised that he needed help from a younger pair of eyes.
An ever-louder stream of Dutch expletives alerted me to Matt’s deteriorating mood as he struggled with the fuel-mixture screw. But it was only the curious sight of Lester’s boots and clothes, delicately balanced on the tip of his bush-knife and making their way towards shore, that alerted me to the full scale of the impending explosion. I arrived on the scene just in time to see Matt undoing the screw to its full extent. It and its accompanying spring pinged into the sea. Later, Lester told me that it had already popped off twice, but, fortuitously, it had landed in the boat. Suspecting that Captain Jumelett had keel-hauled his crew for lesser crimes than watching on as the captain failed to repair an outboard, Lester had quietly stripped off, perched his boots and clothes atop his bush-knife, and swum for the safety of the beach.
In spite of such diversions we kept working. One focus of our research was to learn more about the strange cuscus discovered by Albert Meek ninety years earlier. It is unique to the Woodlark Island group, where it is known to the local people as quadoi. Around the size of a large cat, it is one of the most peculiar marsupials I have ever seen. Quadoi from the dense eastern forests are predominantly black with small white spots rather like a quoll. But those from the drier regions have patchwork coats with random white, tan and brown splotches, giving them a strong resemblance to a domestic tortoiseshell cat.
Only the spotted cuscuses of the New Guinea lowlands have a variable coat colour anything like that of the quadoi. But they are more regularly patterned, and the sexes are differently coloured. Like the quadoi, but unlike other cuscuses, spotted cuscus females are larger than males. Unravelling the family tree of the cuscus family has proved extraordinarily difficult, but today the working hypothesis is that the quadoi is a distant relative of the spotted cuscuses whose ancestors became isolated on Woodlark a million or more years ago. Cuscuses are great island colonisers and have spread further from New Guinea than any other marsupial, being found as far west as Sulawesi and as far east as the Solomon Islands. I can imagine the ancestral quadoi afloat on a raft of vegetation making the crossing to Woodlark, which then lay closer to the mainland.
The sparse early records of the quadoi led me to suspect that it would be rare, but it turned out to be abundant around Guasopa; we even found it in young saplings around houses and gardens. Earlier zoological visitors, it transpired, had worked on the wet and densely forested southern and western parts of the island, and in those places it is indeed uncommon. This, along with the absence of species reliant on wet habitats and the presence on Woodlark of several species of rats that prefer dry conditions, seemed to suggest that throughout much of its history the island had been a rather dry place, at least seasonally. Today it is located in a region of seasonally ample rainfall, but before drifting north it may have lain in latitudes where the dry season was long and harsh.
The Oxford team was carrying out a detailed ecological study of the quadoi, so we took the DNA and other samples required for our evolutionary studies and shifted focus to the other mammals. As I wondered where precisely to explore next a magnificent Kula trading canoe hove into the lagoon and was pulled up on the beach in front of the village. She had come from Alcester Island, a remote speck of land a day’s sail to the southwest. The men who crewed her had a rugged, seafaring look, but they were very friendly, even a little shy. They explained that they had come to Woodlark because a young boy on Alcester had fallen out of a tree and broken his arm. Guasopa was the nearest clinic and the only place where treatment was available. While they waited in the village for the boy to be tended to I talked to them about the animals that could be found on their island. Alcester, they told me, was home to a cuscus that sounded rather like the quadoi. This was exciting news, for only a single mammal had ever been recorded from Alcester—a fruit bat collected a century earlier by some now-forgotten traveller.
If the quadoi inhabited Alcester, it would be the second island known to support the species. From a conservation perspective this is important. If the Woodlark population of quadoi were ever threatened, the species would have a refuge on Alces
ter. And a very real threat does exist for such long-isolated island creatures—the introduction of competitors or predators from the mainland. Even today cuscuses are carried about aboard canoes—either as takeaway food or for trade. If the common cuscus, which abounds on New Guinea and some islands of the Kula Ring such as Kiriwina, ever reaches Woodlark it could outcompete the quadoi, or spread diseases to which the quadoi has no immunity.
Sitting on the beach, I debated whether to cut short our stay on Woodlark and detour to Alcester. The southeast trade wind blew relentlessly, and young boys frolicked in the shallows, playing with miniature outrigger canoes. When placed in the right orientation to the wind, they shot across the surface of the sea like rockets, with groups of delighted children streaking through the water in their wake. Outrigger canoes might look simple, but they are among the most sophisticated constructions made by pre-industrial societies. As with a jumbo jet, no single person possesses all the knowledge required to manufacture one, and at times no single island could supply all of the specialised components, nor all the know-how required. Wherever they are still constructed, a traditional culture must thrive. Alcester lay on the Kula Ring, and the magnificent trading canoe that had been pulled up on the beach before me spoke of the survival of a vibrant, traditional culture there. We would cut short our stay on Woodlark, I decided, and go home via what is perhaps the most isolated and least visited island in the Solomon Sea.
CHAPTER 3
Alcester, the Lonely Isle
As we were heaving anchor on the Sunbird to leave Woodlark, a small outrigger canoe made its way out to us. On board was a triumphant young man holding a large goanna tied to a stick. Lester Seri—who had wanted to identify the goanna species inhabiting Woodlark Island—was delighted, and hurriedly paid the man for it. He then placed the creature, still tied to the stick, on his bunk and returned to assist Captain Jumelett with our departure. Mipi had a horror of reptiles. She’d not seen the goanna carried aboard, but when she heard that it was sailing with us she said emphatically that either the goanna went overboard, or she would. Matt finally persuaded her that it would be cruel to toss the creature into the sea so far from land, and she relented on the condition that it be killed and preserved immediately.
