TIM FLANNERY
The island of New Guinea stretches for more than 1000 miles across the tropics north of Australia. To my generation of Australians, it was the last great unknown, the final frontier. In my early 20s I stumbled across New Guinea: What I Did and What I Saw by Luigi Maria D’Albertis, published in 1880. A tall, fork-bearded Italian who had grown up in Genoa and fought beside Garibaldi, D’Albertis sang Italian opera as he strode through mountains never seen by Europeans. He was a man of great passions, among them natural history and adventure. There were rumours, too, of atheism and affairs with muscular island men.
New Guinea is his diary, written daily during five years of exploration. It’s barely edited, which gives the work such immediacy and intimacy that I felt I was at his side as he shoots a bird of paradise whose courtship display he had just watched; he steps forward, yet is so filled simultaneously with triumph and regret that he’s unable to touch the dying creature.
As with many 19th-century books, each chapter has its own succinct summary, and it was these as much as anything that defined New Guinea for me: “footprints in the sand… severe illness… a new species… fruit trees, skulls… the natives charge us with causing the death of their children”. In a few words the strange beauty, the otherness, and the challenge of being a European in New Guinea is laid bare.
It’s not just the words that make New Guinea so powerful.
Its full-colour illustrations of birds of paradise, which at the time were completely unknown outside their native haunts, are glorious. Equally evocative are the drawings of stuffed human heads and marsupials, mummified bodies and ancestor carvings, with text curled elegantly around the sketches.
D’Albertis was no angel. When his Fijian cook killed a native, supposedly in self-defence, D’Albertis severed the victim’s head and preserved it for study. He even offers a fine illustration of the gruesome trophy, complete with trauma marks. As he travels up the Fly River with Lawrence Hargrave, the Australian pioneer of flight, D’Albertis sees to it that Hargrave bears the blame for failure, while he carries the glory. But like the celebrated 17th-century diary of Samuel Pepys, D’Albertis’s journal is so unsparing of the truth that we see the man in the round. And what a man! The passion, the acknowledged fear and brutality, the sheer derring-do – somehow D’Albertis became a magnetic figure in my young mind.
In 1981, 104 years after D’Albertis left New Guinea for the last time, I made my own expedition to the island. By then, of course, it was a very different place; the eastern half of the island was now the newly independent nation of Papua New Guinea. Standing high on a mountain, surrounded by perpetually dripping, mossy forest that seemed all but impenetrable, I marvelled at the man’s determination, and wondered how I would measure up as I set about documenting New Guinea’s mammal fauna.
During 26 expeditions spanning 20 years I walked in D’Albertis’s tracks, finding that parts of the hinterland had barely altered since his day. And I discovered 30 new species of my own, among them a labrador-sized tree kangaroo with dense black-and-white fur – a sort of marsupial panda. But changing times had made my road easier than his.
The specimens D’Albertis collected are kept in the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale in Genoa. I once laid out his mammal specimens and they didn’t even cover a desk top. Astonishingly, despite the many expeditions since, some remain unique – a tiny snapshot of a nowlost New Guinea preserved in the heart of Liguria.
D’Albertis bequeathed his considerable fortune to fund the first crematorium in Genoa. The man who collected so many human remains decided that his own body should be burned. His legacy is all but forgotten, even in his hometown of Genoa. But what he did and what he saw in New Guinea remain among the greatest achievements of the heroic age of exploration.