PNGAF MAG ISSUE # 10A–2 Part 2-C of 15th Jan 2024.
TECHNICAL and TERTIARY TRAINING and its CONTRIBUTION to PNG FORESTRY DEVELOPMENT until 1975.
PART TWO: CREATION
Part
THE START OF FORESTRY EDUCATION IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA –
3 Dear DickI have been attempting to write more about forestry training in PNG, but I have struggled with it., I found it difficult to remember all the individual students and the details of my interactions with them – after all it was more than fifty years ago. In addition, I was working then under a great deal of pressure, often writing the lectures the night before giving them. It did not give me much chance to socialise with them. I did better with technical matters, as I had my publications to help me.
However, the greatest problem arose over the past three weeks. My wife, who is in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease, had an infection followed by two falls which meant that I had to spend a lot of time with her in the hospital and the nursing home. I have virtually no progress and the prospects are also not good as my wife is still seriously ill.
I attach what I have managed to get done so far. I attempted to show how the training was structured to meet the key needs in PNG, such as the exploratory surveys. I have attached an extract form a syllabus for training and an example of how the botanical manual was complied. These two probably represent my main contribution to the training of foresters in PNG. I would appreciate your comments on what I have done so far.
Regards
Joe Havel.
When the granting of Independence became a prospect in the early 1960’s, I was asked by the Director of Forests to develop forestry education for the local staff. I was conscious of my lack of qualifications for the task- my work in PNG up to that time consisted mainly of plantation establishment in Bulolo and regional management in Rabaul. Though some staff training was involved in that, this was a big step up involved in specialising in education, so I requested a year of study of education and an opportunity to see how such training was being done by older forestry services in Australasia. This was granted and I studied education to a Diploma of Education level in my home state of Western Australia, including practical training at an agricultural high school. I also visited forestry training establishments in Western Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji, and informed myself through correspondence on sub-professional training in the other states of Australia. With exception of Victoria, there was not much happening other than in-service training.
On my return to PNG, I compiled a report on my observations, which was later published, and began to plan for forestry education in PNG.
My personal experiences came into it. Though I wanted to be a forester from an early age, my first real contact was at 16 through cleaning drains along forestry roads in Czechoslovakia during school holidays. The important lesson I learnt was forestry is not all glamour. On arrival in Australia at 18, I did six months at a sawmill, first cleaning locomotives and then stacking timber, again not much glamour. When given a choice, I joined a forestry gang in the jarrah forests for nearly two years, doing everything from cleaning road ditches through tree felling to fighting bushfires and repairing burnt bridges and telephone lines. When I started my professional studies, I was obliged under the terms of the scholarship to spend the university holidays on forestry work such as pruning pines in coastal plain plantations one summer and fire spotting and fire fighting in the karri forests during the second summer.
Before I went to Forestry School in Canberra, I had done altogether three years of practical work, which taught me a lot. It did not end there. We did not spend all the time in the classroom in Canberra but did a lot of applied training and travelling in between the terms to all mainland states doing practical work. At the end, I could have tried working virtually in any State, but went to New Guinea instead.
The previous experience elsewhere still came in handy when I came to PNG and had to train the local labourers in plantation work. It lead to the resolution that the people I trained would not just be theoreticians or clerks, but would be capable of demonstrating and supervising the work that they expected from the people under their direction, The ratio of lectures to practical work that I aimed at was approximately one to four, varying according to the specific topic. This was comparable to forestry education in New Zealand, the best scheme that I observed on my study tour.
Joe Havel with students studying botanical specimens at the PNG Forestry College Bulolo.
Photograph 1964 Dept. of Forests Port Moresby.
Whereas the training in the various states of Australia and in New Zealand had high proportion of subjects that go well with well-established forestry, such as silviculture and protection, it was obvious that in PNG much greater emphasis would need to be on exploratory surveys and assessment. This included training in Botany, as New Guinea has one of the richest tree floras in the world. Many of the two thousand of the tree species that were at the time not used for timber and plywood, therefore had no commercial value. They were just obstacles to resource assessment and to silvicultural treatment.
I proved the greatest challenge, as there was no botanical textbook that I could use. There was some simple war-time literature on the trees, but it was limited and already out of date. At the other end of the scale there was the classic taxonomic literature of the Flora Malesiana, which even I struggled with, and which the students would not be able to cope with at all, because of its specialised language and complex reasoning.
It was for this reason that I put the greatest effort into teaching of forest botany. It began with developing a school herbarium by collecting specimens of trees wherever I could get to, but
especially over the great altitudinal difference between the mangroves in Lae to the mossy forests on Mt Kaindi above Wau. In this I had the assistance of Aubeta Kairo, who had only lower school education but excellent knowledge of trees. We collected enough specimens of each tree to go to the Lae Herbarium for identification and distribution to overseas herbaria, as well as twelve copies for the school. Not only that, but Aubeta was able to collect for me specimens of fresh flowers and the fruits for illustration in the book that I was compiling. I did not limit myself to the flowering specimens, which is what a professional botanist relies upon, but also including the description of size and shape of the tree, its bark, its exudates and its wood, all of which are important to the forester because they are always available and are accessible from the ground. Even for the flowering and fruiting specimens I did not rely on the highly specialised nomenclature, but on illustrations. I also relied on illustrations for the wood structure as seen by magnifying glass. The priority was given to species that were either commercially or ecologically important. In total 151 tree species were described in detail.
An example is given for Octomeles sumatrana (Erima) below:
Another major departure for the teaching of forest botany was the underlying educational philosophy. Botanical literature starts at the top and works its way down from broad categories such as flowering plants (angiosperms) and non-flowering plants (gymnosperms), and gradually breaks them down to smaller and more precisely defined categories such as orders, families, and genera, finally arriving at the simplest and smallest category, the species. This is a deductive process. Only the species exists in nature and can be described in terms of its wood, bark, leaves, flowers, and fruits. All the higher categories are intellectual constructs that exist only in books and botanists’ minds.
Therefore, in my book I began with individual species. I used an inductive teaching approach, which starts with simple and builds up to the complex. If there was more than one species in a genus, I pointed out what defined them as the members of the genus. If there were several genera, I used the illustrations, not complicated scientific terminology to point out what brought them together as members of a family. My purpose in bringing in these higher categories was to help in identifying unknown species through recognising their similarity to known related species. That is a higher order of knowledge, but Aubeta and some of the students could recognise related species without formal training in botanical taxonomy. Heiner Streimann, who was in the last group of Australian trainees, had an aptitude for taxonomic botany and helped me in teaching the first group of indigenous trainees. He became lecturer in Botany at the forestry college after my departure from PNG.
I started this work in 1962. Much of the work was done in the evenings when I was free of teaching duties. I had the bulk of the book completed by the time I left PNG in 1965. Nearly a decade later, I collaborated with the Division of Forest Botany in Lae in updating the book for publication. It was still actively used when I visited PNG in 1997 and I believe it is in use
still and is being considered for updating once more. Presumably, this is because it is a practical book for foresters.
The teaching of the other subjects was by comparison easier, as relevant information was more available. I had the help of Arthur Ramsay, a forest ranger who had practical experience in exploratory surveys and timber assessments. I had detailed knowledge of the silviculture of hoop and klinkii pine and less detailed knowledge of the silviculture of teak, kamarere, taun and Anisoptera, which were then at the experimental stages. When Bill Finlayson joined me as deputy principal, he contributed his experience in managing mangrove forests, gained in east Africa, and took over teaching silviculture and management when I resigned.
As I have already mentioned, it was my intent to train the students entrusted to me to become proficient for their subsequent careers. Practical work and field trips were integral parts of that training. The forestry school was allocated a minibus which was of great help in introducing the students to a wider range of vegetation types than was available in Bulolo. We studied all the forest types accessible by road from the coast at Lae to Mt Kaindi above Wau- that is from the mangroves through lowland rainforest, ridge forest of Anisoptera, mid mountain forests of Araucarias to beech forest and mossy forest.
We did not limit the excursions to places that could be easily reached by road. We tracked on foot to the upper Wau catchment. I had to give the students a personal example of carrying my own gear, as the school finances did not extend to hiring carriers. The most challenging trip was to the Eastern Highlands where we climbed Mt Wilhelm, the highest mountain in PNG. It was so challenging that I would not like to repeat it.
My main regret about the training that I was involved in was that I was under such pressure to prepare teaching materials and give lectures, that I did not have adequate personal contact with students, except when bringing them up to basic minimums in English and mathematics. Even so, it took a great deal of patience and tolerance on the part of my wife to put up not only with my absences on field trips, but with evening work even when I was in Bulolo. She described her time in PNG as “having served ten years in the tropics” with same affection that one would have for a term of imprisonment. To me it was the most exciting part of my forestry career of 52 years.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Havel JJ (1964) Sub– Professional Forestry education in Australia, New Zealand, and Pacific Islands. Published by the Authority W R Suttie Director of Forests Port Moresby Sept 1964,
Dept of Forests Bulolo 1965 Syllabus for the Certificate of Forestry Papua New Guinea Forestry School.
Havel JJ (1965) Teaching Tropical Forest Botany Unasylva 19(4):179-83
Havel JJ (1965) Training Manual for the Forestry College Vol 3 Forest Botany Papua New Guinea. Dept of Forests 317 pp.