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John Wright

November 16, 2007 11:00pm

HE EMERGES from the bush slowly, silently, his broad hobbit feet almost as wide as the faint jungle path.

He has a cheap cotton wrap around his waist, a machete in his hand and a betel nut smile that splits his handsome brown face like a wound.

There are two naked boys by his side, one of them carrying something so unexpected that I miss it until my guide, Peter Gosling, says: "Look at what he has in his hands." And I see the short, smouldering branches and can hardly believe my eyes.

"They're fire sticks," Gosling says. "When they go anywhere in these mountains, they carry their fire with them." Gosling, a Brisbane-based adventure tour operator, had warned me we'd be going into areas where people rarely saw Western visitors, where life was simple and the culture primitive.

But I'm thinking, "Fire sticks in the 21st century, for God's sake. This stuff predates the wheel", and I'm wondering what other surprises I'll find in this remote and mountainous region of eastern Papua New Guinea. I don't have long to wait.

That afternoon, our tents pitched in a picture-book thatched village called Mondrabet and surrounded by wide-eyed children, we offer chocolate bars as gifts and I get another shock. The kids have no idea what to do with them.

So we show them how to remove the wrappers and we watch them slowly chewing the first chocolate bars they've had in their lives. And I find myself thinking, not for the first time on this trip, how remarkable PNG is and how astonishing it is that of just a few thousand Australians a year who find their way here, only a comparative handful go beyond their Kokoda Track pilgrimages and live-aboard dive boat holidays to explore the country and meet its people.

Tol Plantation, East New Britain, February 4, 1942:

"We were marched off into the long undergrowth. A Jap officer drew his sword and ordered other Japs to fix bayonets. After cutting the first man away from our party, he motioned him to go into the bush, which he did, followed by one of the Japs who had a gun with a fixed bayonet. Shortly afterwards we heard screams, and we knew what was happening. This went on with several men and after each the Jap would come out wiping his bayonet."

Few accounts of atrocity in war can match this one for unspeakable horror, written by a survivor of the massacre of more than 150 young Australian soldiers who had surrendered to Japanese troops at Tol Plantation, on East New Britain's Gazelle Peninsula, after the invasion of Rabaul in January 1942.

The Australians, hopelessly outnumbered in their Rabaul garrison and abandoned as "hostages to fortune" by the wartime Curtin government, were among many soldiers and civilians who, after brief resistance, fled into the jungles of the Baining Mountains and made for the peninsula's northwestern and southern coastlines in the hope of eventual rescue.

With no survival or jungle training, confronted by deep ravines and rapids and plagued by malaria, dengue fever, dysentery and tropical ulcers, hundreds nevertheless made it to safety. But those who ended up at Tol Plantation, about 90km south of Rabaul, were found by a Japanese sea-going patrol and surrendered under a white flag. They were executed, one by one, within earshot of the dying screams of their comrades. Six survived and 158 sets of unburied remains were found at the end of the war.

Sixty-five years later, the barely discernible jungle trails used by those who escaped the Japanese invasion are still being used by those who made them – the people of the Bainings – and, thanks to Peter Gosling and his company True North Journeys, are now presenting travellers with a chance to penetrate not only a remote and virtually unknown part of PNG but also a culture few foreigners have seen.

Gosling, a tall, fit man in his 30s, is an experienced trekker and mountaineer with a love of PNG and a conviction he should show it to adventurous Australians. Using local porters, he conducts guided tours out of Rabaul which include rigorous, four-day treks along those "Escape from Rabaul" jungle trails, from the village of Vunga, west of Rabaul, to Mondrabet, hidden deep in the mountains to the southwest.

Compared with the now well-worn Kokoda Track, this is pristine territory. The trails, which are no more than goat tracks at best, are not as steep as those on the Kokoda but present creek and river crossings and other challenges. Two of the four nights on the trek are spent camping in jungle clearings, two in Mondrabet with local villagers. To prepare for it, Gosling takes his primarily southern Queensland-based customers on conditioning hikes around Mt Barney, and he requires a good standard of fitness.

"You've got to be fit," he says. "If you're well overweight, don't bother. The trails we use are a lot more natural than the Kokoda, so you have more of a feeling of being in the jungle. If you do the Kokoda, you're essentially proving something to yourself; do this trail over four days and you'll be closer to nature and see things that will amaze you."

Not that those who travel into the mountains with Gosling and his porters need to feel completely isolated or worried about the remoteness. Among other items in his carefully chosen survival kit and other gear are: a Motorola satellite phone; a digital EPURB or emergency beacon; and a Garmin 60CSX GPS track-recording navigator.

The equipment includes European water-purifying digi-pens; a full professional medical kit, New Zealand camping equipment, US-made lightweight packs, MSR Dragonfly international petrol stoves and Leki trekking poles. The porters carry generous rations for every trekker, with luxuries like chocolate, coffee, fruit salad packs, lollies and other snacks. I have not seen a better-organised trekking operation in many years of travelling.

Mondrabet Village, September 2007:

The Bainings people, the original inhabitants of New Britain's Gazelle Peninsula, may have been driven inland to their mountain homes long ago by coastal volcanic activity that even now continues as a feature of life for the inhabitants of Rabaul, a town devastated twice by eruptions in the past 70 years. The Bainings were exploited as slaves by other tribes and "blackbirding" European traders in the late 19th century, suffered a massacre by cannibalistic Tolai people in 1896 and themselves massacred nine German Catholic missionaries and a Trappist brother at Vunamarita, near Rabaul, in 1904.

I am thinking about this as I sit outside my tent under a shelter in the most beautiful Melanesian village imaginable. It is a collection of thatched and palm-plaited houses, each surrounded by colourful tropical shrubs and fringed with produce gardens, about an hour's drive along a rough track from a logging community called Open Bay on the west coast of the Gazelle Peninsula. Gosling brings his trekkers here after their jungle experience and returns them by boat to Rabaul.

Knowing nothing of the Bainings language but helped by Gosling's porters, Wickly and Mutu, I'm talking to the village leader, Eliud, about World War II. He tells me the Japanese came to his village and some of the men were killed, but he's not old enough to have seen that and I don't know whether I can rely on what he tells me. I'm more concerned about the chocolate wrappings now littering the village clearing, and I tell him the children should pick them up. They are the only stain in this Garden of Eden and I feel guilty and worried.

Eliud tells me there is no word in the local language for "lollies". The village has no power, no radio, no telephone and no locally owned vehicle which might be used to ferry its children to school or its adults to the market in Open Bay. A battered Nissan pick-up "taxi" makes the run up from the coast to the dead end at Mondrabet once a day.

I'm told the last Westerners seen in the village came five months ago – the last time Gosling brought trekkers up here. He is their only regular contact with the world outside the Bainings and, primarily because of what they show him and his friends when they come, a source of considerable income for a village that is as far removed from PNG's provincial infrastructure and mainstream economy as it is possible to be.

Before the trip, Gosling had told me about an astonishing fire-dancing ritual performed by Bainings villagers and had promised me I'd see one. Now, the day after my talk with Eliud, children and old men are walking through the village at dusk and piling heaps of neatly bound branches in the middle of the clearing. Most of the other villagers have been missing all day, preparing for their ceremony. I have no idea what to expect.

A micro-storm is playing over the hills west towards a distant ocean when someone lights the bonfire, and then the women appear, dressed in fantastically decorated bark-paper masks and full-length grass and coconut fibre coverings. A rhythmic bamboo pole drumming starts, accompanied by chanting from the men. The women, ghostly and surreal against the firelight, shuffle around the bonfire endlessly in a ritual whose significance I can only guess at.

Later, the men emerge from the darkness of the scrub and I understand why they have prepared all day for this: dressed elaborately and beautifully in green jungle fibres and wearing full head masks of an incredible size, they begin a dance and a ritual which pulses in time with the drumming and chanting until, one after the other, they approach the blazing bonfire and walk, barefoot, right through it. Time and again they repeat this, kicking logs and sparks before them on each passage and waiting for children to bring more wood and build up the bonfire again before the next one.

After years of travelling the South Pacific, I know I'm witnessing something unique and I sit there mesmerised by the beauty and power of what I am seeing. I am dumbfounded and, the sparks from the last fire dance now scattered across the village clearing, I walk back to my tent in awe.

The next morning,

we head off through the jungle to the waiting Nissan pick-up. I count 20 people in the back of the ute, including me, a nursing mother, a schoolgirl with a jerry can of petrol and a boy with a captured kingfisher on a piece of string. The men and women are all chewing betel nut or smoking tobacco rolled in newspaper.

"I told you we'd see things that would amaze you," Gosling says.

Magic in the jungle of Papua New Guinea