Walkabaut in Irian Jaya
by Nancy Sullivan

I have walked through the highlands of Irian Jaya four times since 1989, and each time the experience has been entirely different. Things are changing rapidly in the highlands. In 1989 my friend Peter and I saw very little western clothing in villages outside Wamena, the administrative centre of the highlands. Coming from Mt. Hagen, we felt like we'd fallen through the looking glass to a ëtaim bipo,' where even our bad Bahasa Indonesian, the Indonesian Pidgin, was greeted with smiling incomprehension, and where everything we'd read in the anthropological literature seemed to hold true. There were other tourists in Wamena, of course: the hardy Dutch and Australian adventurers, mostly young people, who like to plot their own course. I remember Peter and I listening aghast to a young Dutchman brag about cadging a lift on the MAF cessna back from a remote part of the Brazza River region: he'd convinced a visiting doctor to offload some supplies so he could get back to Wamena.

Our guide in 1989 was a young Dani man named Sam, a loveable spiv whose flashpoint moods drove him to brandish a bushknife at another guide who'd dared to talk to us. Sam had already booked himself with a Dutch couple, to whom he had sworn allegiance and a hatred of Australians, and then double-booked with us, swearing his hatred of the Dutch. I'm not sure how we won his services, but his first plan was to walk us three days north, to his home of Bokondini, where we were to see ëvery traditional Dani culture and where, instead, we found a town that had been host to American missionaries since 1947. They lived in enormous Lincoln-log homes with well manicured lawns, and their parishioners lived in small box-like houses with padlocks on the doors. But the men in Bokondini still wore enormous penis gourds--the most exaggerated penis gourds around. Roughly ten centimetres in diameter, and maybe twenty five in length, they are secured with handsome wide red sashes around the men's chests. Sam showed us how men use them to carry betelnut and smokes, plugging the tops with cuscus fur. We watched one afternoon as a parade of up to a hundred men in cassowary feather head-dresses, red sashes and gourds, covered in charcoal and carrying spears, jogged slowly into town chanting in tok ples. They had come for their weekly Bible class.

Sam also regaled us with stories about the OPM and the German and Dutch tourists whom he said were supporting him in the struggle. Some were ready to send him guns, he told us. Then we watched as he openly fawned over Javanese officials at police check points and schools all along our walk. This was still a dangerous time in Irian Jaya. Just after the Dilli massacre in East Timor, before the world's attention had been thrown on Indonesia, it was a time when we could clearly hear the rat-tat-tat of automatic rifles putting down ëtribal fights' in neighbouring valleys. Our trip was a lesson in contrasts. We'd just left PNG, where the Bougainville struggle was at full swing, and where the coffee market was in such a slump that villagers were leaving red cherry on the trees. Crime was up--especially in the Highlands. And yet when we arrived in Irian Jaya, we found we could walk freely anywhere at any time; and we were greeted with uninhibited excitement and warm crowds in every village. We slept in huts and on schoolroom floors, and passed around photos of the Hagen and Goroka Shows to villagers who were either awe-struck or brought to tears by the spectacular bilas. Older men and women would cluck, snap their fingers on their teeth, and sigh with approval at the pictures in Paradise magazine. And yet we knew, we could feel, that this lawfulness and traditionalism had been bought at a high price. Just watching Sam bow and shuffle to Indonesian farmers living on Dani land--beneficiaries of the government's transmigraci program, which sent peasant from overcrowded Java to populate Irian Jaya--made us uneasy. We were made aware of how the Irianese live as second-class citizens in their own homeland.

But the Baliem Valley was an overwhelming sight. A wild river running through a twisting gorge that threw up spectacular views at every turn. Gardens as high and vertical as those in Simbu surrounded us like tall sloping walls. Here and there were strong vine bridges, and--I'll never forget--young kids scrambling across mere logs thrown across the raging whitewaters of the Baliem River. As accustomed as I'd become to arse-grass in PNG, it was also a very different thing to see men and women everywhere in traditional dress. The Dugum Dani men wear penis gourds and garlands of chicken feathers or flowers in their hair, sometimes with cowry or tambu shell headbands and pigs' tusks in their septums. Unmarried women wear full river reed skirts with one or two bilum bags (called noken) slung down their backs from their foreheads. Married women wear woven bilum skirts draped across their hips so low they defy gravity, eventually carving deep grooves in the women's thighs to stay in place.

One of the highlights of that trip in 1989 was meeting Pue, from Sioroba. As a child, Pue had starred in a now-classic ethnographic film by John Gardner, called Dead Birds. In 1961 Gardner had been part of the historic Harvard-Peabody Expedition to the Baliem Valley, along with the anthropologists Karl Heider and Jan Broekhuijse, the writer Peter Matthiesson (who wrote ëUnder the Mountain Wall based on the expedition), and the young photographer Michael Rockefeller (whose photographs illustrate Heider's book 'Gardens of War'). 'Dead Birds' chronicles the events surrounding a clan war on the valley floor just outside Wamena. Much of the story is told through the eyes of young Pue, a typical Dani boy with sad eyes and an enormous disarming smile. He had, by 1989, become a charming, soft-spoken adult with that same impish grin. Pue had come to town to shop for rice when our guide Sam found him and told him I wanted to meet him. That afternoon I stepped out of our hotel to find Pue--unmistakably Pue--waiting for me. Sam translated from Dani to English as Pue coyly explained that he was happy I'd seen Robert Gardner's film (--he hadn't), and wondered if I could come to a pig kill at Sorioba next week. I liked him immediately: he smiled that million dollar smile and my heart swelled. Suddenly a minivan pulled up and eight Indonesians tumbled out. They called Pue over and surrounded him for a group photo, assembling themselves arm in arm, careful not to touch Pue. Cameras were handed back and forth, several shots were taken, and then, with equal haste, the group disbanded and drove off again, leaving Pue with a 100 rupiah note (barely ten toea). I asked if he minded the intrusion, and he shrugged, smiling serenely. ìMore money for rice,î Sam the guide said.

I came back the following year and spent more time with Pue, videotaping a long interview with him in Sioroba and joining him at a pig kill with Wierdekek, an old man who had also been in 'Dead Birds'. But when I came back again in 1994, Pue was gone. He had died the year before. Someone said pneumonia, another said tuberculosis. Sad, said one young man in the village--but he was old already, he said. No he wasn't: he was 36 years old.

On my second trip, I met an Indonesian photographer and his assistant working for one of the airlines, and we travelled together to Kosarek, in the Star Mountains east of Wamena. Here the Yali people live in rugged remote mountain villages, and the men wear the most extraordinary everyday dress: a series of rattan hoops, widening from their chest to their knees like an ante-bellum hoop skirts in the American South. They're all held up by a metre-long penis gourd that is secured with cord tied around the chest. The outfit is at least as precarious, I imagine, as the Dani married woman's skirt, and it dwarfs what are otherwise small and delicate men. My companions flew out, and I took off for a two week walkabout with Yali porters and guide to the mission station of Angguruk. It was, bar none, the hardest walk I have ever made, climbing and descending two to four mountains a day and massaging my poor leg muscles at night. One of the older Yali men accompanying me brought along a three legged dog who, I noticed, was alot more agile than I. In fact both the old man and the dog clearly took pity on me. This same old man would follow me down steep mountain trails tap-tap-taping me on the shoulder, and I'd turn around again and again before I suddenly realised it was his penis gourd and not his hand doing the tapping.

Over the years, I have noticed increasingly more western clothes, more acrylic yarns in the bilums, more begging for smokes and rupiah notes, and more tourists in Irian Jaya. But there is a relationship between the exposure tourism brings and the quality of life for the Irianese, as I have also noticed fewer military police in the highlands every time I visit. It's possible that the Indonesian government has come to view traditional Melanesian culture as a valuable resource, now that tourism has proven itself to be viable there. When, in 1996, the OPM took western researchers hostage in the Baliem, the spotlight of international news agencies was suddenly turned on the plight of the Irianese. While the action certainly jeopardised tourism for the time being, it also may have guaranteed a certain security for the region, one that depends on the continued interest of media consumers around the world, whether or not the OPM achieves its objectives. .

To get to the Irian Jayan highlands, you need a police pass, or surat jalan, from the police station in Jayapura, where they will brief you on which villages are currently off limits to tourists. From Jayapura, you fly to Wamena in the highlands, where you can pick up a guide. Walking south through the valley is the best three or four day trip, and longer walks will bring you down into the Brazza River region where you can pick up a canoe to travel to the Asmat on the south coast. Garuda Airlines also now flies from Wamena to Agats in the Asmat. Or, you can check into MAF for flights into the Star Mountains and points north, from where it is possible to trek back to Wamena with a guide. Walking the Baliem Valley is not that difficult, but once you move out beyond it, the going gets harder, and the experience, of course, gets even more rewarding.