by Tim Flannery
Since gaining its independence from Britain in 1970, Fiji’s political scene has been rocked by military coups, and I later learned that the chief I was drinking with was one of those behind the first coup, in 1987. The Great Council of Chiefs met once every year or two in a splendid ceremony, but as democracy began to be implemented in the 1960s the council’s influence waned, and upon independence its only power was to appoint eight of Fiji’s twenty-two senators. Perhaps disgruntled by the loss of influence, its members backed Sitiveni Rabuka in a military coup. The Great Council was rewarded by having the senate turned into an aristocratic body peopled solely by chiefs. But having dabbled in politics, the Great Council has since paid a high price. It was suspended in 2007 by Fiji’s first dictator, Frank Bainimarama. Its remaining authority had been sullied by its association with power. Today Fiji is in the grip of a full military dictatorship—the first in the Pacific region.
After leaving the kava hut we set to work stringing our mist-nets. The vegetation looked so low and scrubby that my expectations too were low. The following morning, however, we found several very unusual fruit bats in the mesh. They were a dark olive colour and where they were not naked they were covered in very short fur. But it was their long, powerful legs, and long bony tail—rather like that of a rat—that struck me. Indeed, overall they looked rather shrew-like, as if they were a living relic of the first bats to make the transition to flying. They were Fijian blossom bats, and DNA studies undertaken with the help of the samples we collected subsequently demonstrated that they are indeed very primitive members of the fruit-bat family. Their ancestors had presumably reached Fiji many millions of years ago when the fruit bats were only beginning to diversify. Elsewhere, such primitive species have either become extinct or evolved into something else. Fiji provides a refuge for this living fossil.
We remained on Viti Levu for about a week, surveying the Monasavu Plateau, but found no other bat species of particular interest. I would return to Fiji, however, with Pavel German, some years later, in order to survey another island in the Fijian archipelago.
CHAPTER 15
Fiji’s Garden Isle
Pavel German is one of the most capable self-taught field biologists and photographers I’ve ever met. Born in Russia, he had worked for many years as a biological collector for the state. This often involved travel to remote regions of the Soviet empire, such as the Muslim south, where infrastructure was rudimentary and life cheap. He was even granted permission to enter the forests around secret military bases and industrial sites, and had seen more of the Soviet Union than almost anybody else. Travelling in such regions is perilous enough, but carrying huge vats of preserving alcohol (which was often more useful than cash as a currency), Pavel was a prime target for robbers. He may well be alive today only because he’s a first-class boxer as well as a highly intelligent and perceptive person.
In the 1980s Pavel fled the Soviet Union, and eventually came to Australia where he began work at Taronga Zoo in Sydney. He had given this up, however, to pursue a career in photography at the time I began planning the Scott expeditions. In addition to his experience of working in difficult circumstances, his photographic skills were of enormous value to us. Indeed, Pavel remains the only person to have photographed some of Melanesia’s rarest and most obscure fauna.
After his experiences in the Soviet Union, Pavel found work in Melanesia a breeze. Even where his language skills were limited he had a way of establishing a rapport with people, and everywhere he went the locals loved him. After a hot walk, he would astonish them by drinking the contents of three coconuts in rapid succession, and the kids would vie with each other to climb the palms to chop more, eager to see just how many nuts this strange visitor could dispose of. Of an evening he’d tell stories about Australia or Russia, then amaze the village by beating all of its young men at arm wrestling. Even his loud snoring, which was my only frustration when travelling with him, was a source of fascination to the villagers.
Taveuni is Fiji’s garden island. Covered in lush green forest, it is the third-largest island in the group, and has escaped such scourges as the introduced mongoose. As a result, it is the only island in the Fijis to have retained all six bat species native to the group. In 1990 Pavel and I travelled to the island to investigate the biodiversity of Des Voeux Peak, the second-highest mountain on the island. Its unique biodiversity is legendary. Among the species the peak is renowned for is a creeper known to Fijians as tagimaucia (Medinilla waterhousei), which has been described as ‘Fiji’s pride and joy’.23 Its brilliant scarlet-and-white blooms stand out like burning beacons in the ocean of green that swathes the peak, and can be seen from quite a distance. Des Voeux Peak is also home to one of Fiji’s most unusual birds—the silktail. This tiny iridescent creature is placed in its own family. It had clearly evolved in isolation for a very long time, suggesting that its ancestors made their way to Fiji many millions of years ago. It was once believed to be a distant relative of the birds of paradise, but is now thought to be related to the monarch flycatchers. The species is only found on Taveuni and the adjacent island of Vanua Levu, and it is most easily seen on Des Voeux Peak. I was keen to see this living jewel.
Arriving by air, we soon settled into Somosomo village. It had a basic guesthouse and was located on the road leading to the peak, and so formed a good base for our explorations. The village was the ancestral home of the powerful kings of Somosomo, and it had a fabulous history. As the seat of power for much of Taveuni and the surrounding area, it had a reputation for savagery that chilled the blood of Fijians throughout the archipelago. As one early missionary wrote, ‘Even in the other islands Somosomo was spoken of as a place of dreadful cannibalism.’24 Yet, astonishingly, Somosomo was destined to become the site of one of the earliest mission stations in the Fiji islands.
The Wesleyan missionaries who arrived there in 1839 had been encouraged to come by the king’s son. They should have suspected that his motives did not stem entirely from a yearning for salvation—for he told them that as ‘muskets and gunpowder are true, [so] your religion must be true’.25 According to James Calvert, the chronicler of Fiji’s early missionaries, once the Wesleyans were settled at Somosomo with their families, they found themselves surrounded by ‘all the horrors of Fijian life in an unmixed and unmodified form’.26
The mission’s establishment could not have got off to a worse start. Within weeks of the arrival of the missionaries the favourite son of King Tuithaku was shipwrecked and then eaten by a hostile group. Suspicions arose in the village that this horrid misfortune had somehow been visited on the royal household as a result of their acceptance of the missionaries, and relations at once cooled. But worse, tradition demanded that several of the eaten prince’s wives be strangled, so that they could accompany him in the afterlife. When they learned of this, the missionaries pleaded with the grieving king for the women to be spared, but in anger at having his authority challenged the king increased the number to be strangled to sixteen, and had the whole lot buried just outside the door to the missionaries’ house.
Had I been a Wesleyan missionary, I think I might have left at this point. But they were clearly made of sterner stuff than I, and they stood their ground, virtually blockading themselves and their families into the thatch hut that was their home. Unfortunately for them, the village’s cannibal cooking ovens were situated just outside one of their windows, and the constant scenes of butchery and the fumes arising from the pit forced them to keep their blinds closed, depriving them of light and air. One can only imagine the conversations that must have gone on between husbands, wives and children in the stifling heat of the darkened hut beset on all sides by what were in their eyes scenes of utmost depravity. The great question must surely have been, ‘will we be next?’
Things did improve briefly for the doughty missionaries when a young chief became ill and was cured by a pastor. The chief was a strapping lad, ‘a head and neck taller than myself, and three times the bulk, every
part indicating the strength of a giant’, according to a European who measured him. But even the chief’s gratitude caused discomfort, for when he turned up naked at the mission to give thanks for his recovery, the sight of him ‘was enough to frighten Mrs Brooke’—a fright which seems to have turned into hysteria when the naked giant took her seven-week-old infant son into his arms and ‘put his great tongue in his mouth’. By 1847 the missionaries had fled to less challenging fields, leaving Somosomo to its traditional ways.
A detailed insight into life in traditional Somosomo was published by Thomas Williams, a missionary who visited the besieged mission station around the middle of 1845. Old King Tuithaku was by then feeble, and Williams went to visit him on several occasions. Knowing something of Fijian funerary rites, he was delighted to find the king’s health steadily improving. He was mightily surprised on 24 August, therefore, at being told that the king was dead and that preparations were being made, according to custom, to strangle all of his wives. Williams rushed to the royal house, determined to save the women, only to find that the killings were already under way. He wrote:
The effect of the scene was overwhelming. Scores of deliberate murderers, in the very act, surrounded me: yet there was no confusion, and, except a word from him who presided, no noise, but only an unearthly, horrid stillness … My arrival was during a hush, just at the crisis of death …
Occupying the centre of that large room were two groups, the business of which could not be mistaken. All sat on the floor; the middle figure of each group being held in a sitting posture by several females, and hidden by a large veil. On either side of each veiled figure was a company of eight or ten strong men, one company hauling against the other on a white cord, which was passed twice round the neck of the doomed one, who thus, in a few minutes, ceased to live.
As my self-command was returning, the group furthest from me began to move; the men slackened their hold, and the attendant women removed the large covering, making it into a couch for the victim. As that veil was lifted, some of the men beheld the distorted features of a mother, whom they had helped to murder, and smiled with satisfaction as the corpse was laid out for decoration. Convulsive struggles on the part of the poor creature near me showed that she still lived. She was a stout woman, and some of the executioners jocosely invited those who sat near to have pity, and help them. At length the women said, ‘She is cold.’ The fatal cord fell; and, as the covering was raised, I saw dead the obedient wife and unwearied attendant of the old King. Leaving the women to adjust her hair, oil her body, cover the face with vermillion and adorn her with flowers, I passed on to see the remains of the deceased Tuithaku.27
When he arrived at the royal death bed, however, Williams was astonished to find that the old man, though somewhat feeble, was clearly still alive and kicking! Perplexed, he approached the king’s son who, ‘seemed greatly moved, put his arm round and embraced me, saying, before I could speak. “See, the father of us two is dead … his spirit is gone. You see his body move; but that it does unconsciously.”‘28
Williams was now faced with a cruel dilemma. Should he try to save the remaining women and allow the old king to be buried alive, or should he argue that the king was in fact not dead, and risk the possibility that he would die later and the women be strangled while Williams was absent? Reluctantly, Williams decided not to debate the state of the king’s health, instead requesting that the remaining women be spared. Out of respect for the visiting European the request was granted, but not everyone was happy. ‘Why is it that I am not to be strangled?’ wailed one wife, who was consoled with the fabricated news that there was nobody present of sufficiently high rank to do the deed for her.29
After the role he had played in the affair, Williams could not bring himself to attend the king’s burial, but he was told by an observer that the king was heard to cough ‘after a considerable quantity of soil had been thrown in the grave’.30
As I sat in the lonely guesthouse in Somosomo, reading these tales of Taveuni’s past to Pavel by the light of a kerosene lamp, my skin tingled, and later that night my dreams were disturbed by gory scenes. The cannibal feasts, strangling and live burial had all happened right here in Somosomo, the place where we had just enjoyed a cold beer and a meal. Perhaps, I mused, the royal hut was located nearby; we were after all near the very centre of Somosomo. One hundred and fifty years—two human lifetimes—separated those days from mine. Yet the scenes Williams described seemed somehow hauntingly present.
Pavel and I had less than a week together in Taveuni before I went on to New Caledonia for more survey work. A paved road leads to the summit of Des Voeux Peak, which at 1190 metres is the second-highest point on Taveuni. The road, which serves a telecommunications tower, was a rare luxury in Melanesia. With our hired car it took less than an hour to reach the summit, and as we drove the road each morning and evening we occasionally saw scenes reminiscent of an earlier era. One morning we encountered a Fijian on a horse. He could have been a facsimile of the giant who stuck his tongue into the mouth of Mrs Brooke’s infant son, and he sat as proudly on his mount as a knight of old. He was, he said, going pig hunting, and in his hand was a lance of wood and iron that would have done a knight templar proud.
By the end of our first day we had strung ten mist-nets at elevations between 880 metres and the summit. The object of our search was yet another monkey-faced bat. This species, the Fijian monkey-faced bat, had been described in 1978, and is the only species of monkey-face to occur outside the Solomon Islands. It is also the only mammal unique to Fiji. It was known from just two specimens. We were keen to see if we could learn something of its ecology, evolution, distribution and abundance. Des Voeux Peak receives the highest rainfall in Fiji. It’s an exceptionally misty place—parts of it seem to be eternally swathed in cloud. Because of the persistent cloud above about 900 metres, a unique vegetation community has established itself. The tallest plants there are palms, ginger bushes and herbs, and delicate lichens, mosses and diaphanous ferns abound. It looked like a kind of fairyland, untouched by the outside world.
This illusion of virginal nature was shattered, however, when we reached the summit itself. When we returned that evening we found that spotlights kept the telecommunications tower constantly illuminated, and that they were attracting innumerable insects. Somehow cane toads had arrived even in this remote spot, and the ground below the lights seethed with huge, ugly specimens.
Our few days on the mountain had yielded no sign of the Fijian monkey-faced bat. We had, however, netted a few Fijian flying foxes, which were of mild interest. On my last morning on Taveuni it was freezing and we checked the mist-nets in the rain, only to find them once again holding just a couple of common flying foxes. My heart sank. As Pavel drove me to the airport various dismal possibilities occupied my mind. Perhaps the Fijian monkey-face was already extinct, or so rare as to be effectively so. After all, its habitat was tiny—just the few tens of square kilometres that make up the highlands of Taveuni. There was, however, one remaining hope. Pavel had agreed to stay on in Somosomo for a few days, continuing the program.
To my amazement and delight, after I left he netted not one but three Fijian monkey-faced bats. A change in the weather may have been responsible for this upturn, for a series of misty nights occurred on the peak—conditions that evidently favour this rarest of bats. Pavel recorded that all of the monkey-faces were trapped in mist-nets set at elevations above 1000 metres, indicating that the species was indeed restricted to the mountain summits. This good fortune allowed Pavel to take a magnificent series of photographs, the first ever of this species. Like other monkey-faced bats, its wings meet in the midline of the back, giving it tremendous lift and, most likely, the ability to fly backwards. In its tangled, misty habitat such traits would be invaluable. Indeed, we hypothesised that it might be protected from competition with the more abundant Fijian flying foxes by the mist that wreaths the peaks, for we never caught Fijian flying foxes in nets we set on mist
y nights.
The records Pavel made hinted at an unusual biology. The female monkey-faces had tiny teats, and when they were touched the milk shot from them with force. Most flying foxes, including other monkey-faces, have much larger nipples, which their newborns cling onto as they fly. Some bats even have false nipples in their groin to which the young attach themselves, providing more freedom to their mothers to manoeuvre their wings. The nipples of the Fijian monkey-face mothers were far too small to carry young, so we reasoned that they must keep their newborns safely hidden, perhaps in a tree-hollow, while they forage. Just how the young could stay warm on chilly Des Voeux Peak, however, we could not imagine.
Pavel’s photographs reveal a bat with ears so short that they’re entirely hidden in the silver-tipped fur of its head, eyes that shine like bright orange jewels and a very solid snout. The male and female differ in colour: the back of the female is khaki, while that of the male is golden. Colour differences between the sexes are rare among bats. Combined with what we know of its reproduction and what is known about the behaviour of the taki, the colour difference suggests that the monkey-faced bats can have a rich and unusual social life, but its nature remains almost entirely unknown.
As a result of Pavel’s work, the Fijian monkey-faced bat is now recognised by the IUCN as critically endangered. Further studies are under way and it is hoped they will lead to effective conservation. Of all the threats it faces, climate change is doubtless the most severe, for all mountaintops world-wide are warming, and the cold-adapted ecosystems at their summits are shrinking. Such a threat is difficult to counter, and the best that can be done for now is probably continued monitoring of the species.
