PNGAF MAGAZINE ISSUE #9B-5B4G1 of 20th July 2021 Eminent TPNG Forester Ken Granger

AUSTRALIAN FORESTERS in PAPUA NEW GUINEA 1922-1975

PNGAF MAGAZINE ISSUE # 9B -5B4G1 of 20th July 2021 FOREST MANAGEMENT. Eminent TPNG Forester Ken Granger Ken Granger’s story

Ken Granger’s1 TPNG Forests Pictorial History.

Editor R B McCarthy2 2021.

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Ken Granger TPNG Forests 1963-1970.

Dick McCarthy District Forester TPNG Forests 1963-1975.

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Ken Granger’s3 TPNG Forests Pictorial History Date Page Location 1964 21 Empress August Bay, Bougainville 1964 22 Empress August Bay, Bougainville 1966 38 Aiome 1965 29 Torlu River NB 1963 12 Warangoi R NB 1964 23 1965 1966 1965 1966

27 35 31 36

1966 37 1964 19

Empress August Bay, Bougainville Fulleborn NB Malenglo Nakanai West New Britain

1965 29 1965 1967 45

Arawe Empress August Bay, Bougainville Nakanai NB Port Moresby Brown River

1966 1963 1968 1968 1970

Linga Linga Kerevat Port Moresby Port Moresby Port Moresby

6 47 48 52

Details Money in the Swamp photo.

Photo credit Ken Granger

Terminalia brassii forest canopy near Mom Hill.

Photographing kamarere seedlings.

Torlu River kamarere.

Taun on the south bank Warangoi River Hongarai River pad before rain.

Ken Granger

Emergent Agathis in forest canopy.

Dr Ken. Clearing the Nakanai Plateau pad, Large E. deglupta (kamarere).

Ken Granger Ken Granger Ken Granger Ken Granger

My Arawe mackerel.

Peter Hurst (left) and Jack Fackrell.

Ken Granger Ken Granger

Nakanai Nothofagus.

Painting Minji Man RSL4.

Brown River burn Ken G & Alan Cameron.

Water skiing.

Kamarere plantation Keravat The kuskus.

The single station stereo camera rig, Forest resources map (in colour).

Ken Granger Ken Granger Ken Granger

Ken Granger Ken Granger Ken Granger Ken Granger

Ken Granger Ken Granger Ken Granger Ken Granger Ken Granger

Ken Granger TPNG Forests 1963-1970.

Personal communication Ken Granger 28th January 2021. Ken purchased Gerd Streihler’s painting of Minji Man for fifty quid in 1965.

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KEN GRANGER’S5 STORY Ken’s Early Life Ken was born in Goulburn NSW in 1941, the youngest of 6. His father was the fourth generation of his family to graze sheep on the Southern Tablelands of NSW, so Ken had plenty of exposure to rural life.

His oldest brother Harry became a surveyor and during school holidays Ken spent time with Harry in and around the Snowy Mountains where he was undertaking engineering surveying for the major transmission lines taking power from the developing Snowy Scheme. These excursions were ostensibly for Harry to improve Ken’s maths.

Ken won a teachers’ college scholarship and spent 1959 as a student teacher at the Wagga Wagga Teachers’ College. By the end of that year, he realised that he was not cut out to be a primary school teacher so dropped out. After working as a chainman to a Goulburn surveyor during 1960 Ken was appointed as a Technical Assistant in the CSIRO Division of Land Research and Regional Surveys (New Guinea Survey). It was in that job that he first was introduced to air photos including basic photogrammetry. As assistant to the survey transport officer John McAlpine, Ken spent 3 months in the Southern Highlands District supporting the scientific team assessing and mapping the land suitability for future development. This was his introduction to PNG and the various sciences that go to make up geography. Following that experience Ken joined the TP&NG Department of Forests as a Technical Office in July 1963.

Ken described in PNGAF Magazine # 7 of 11th January 2021, the fourteen integrated land resource surveys that CSIRO undertook during the period 1953-69, with the aim of identifying areas suitable for accelerated development. The resulting reconnaissance-level regional survey reports and maps provided extensive baseline information for national development planning.

Substantial botanical collections carried out during the surveys contributed greatly to the Papua New Guinea National Collection at the Lae Herbarium.

Background In November 1961, the UN Trusteeship Council commissioned the experienced British Colonial Administrator Sir Hugh Foot to head a visiting mission to the Territory of Papua and New Guinea (TPNG) to examine the political, social, and economic development in the Trust Territory of New Guinea. This was at a time of increasing decolonisation following WW II. The 1962 report of that mission recommended that the Australian Government move without delay to prepare the Territory for self-determination. Amongst the recommendations was the need to assess the TPNG forest resources as part of a national economic development program.

Paul Hazluck, the Minister for Territories in the Menzies Government since 1951, personally took a keen interest in the Foot Report and was able to garner the resources to begin the implementation of this process, including the recruitment of staff and the necessary budgets to get the job done.

The starting point In 1962 the Department of Forests was undergoing some change. The long-term Director Jim McAdam had retired and was replaced by Bill Suttee. The Department was structured around four divisions:

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Ken Granger TPNG Forests 1963-1970

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• • • •

Management: headed by Don Macintosh with Jim Cavanagh as his deputy.

Silviculture: headed by Kev White with Alan Cameron as his deputy.

Utilisation: with John Colwell as head and Jerry Vickers as his deputy.

Botany: with John Womersley as head and Ted Henty as deputy.

These were supported by a small administrative staff to cover finance and staff resources.

The Department’s headquarters were in an early post-war timber building in Konedobu close to the headquarters of Agriculture, Stock and Fisheries (DASF). The Directorate, Management and Silviculture Divisions as well as the administration section were housed in the headquarters building while the Utilisation Division was housed at Hohola, and the Botany Division was based at the Botanical Gardens in Lae. The headquarters also housed the large drafting office led by Keith Cullen.

For operational efficiency, the Department was further divided into three regions: • • •

Papuan Region: with Rob Levingston as RFO based in Port Moresby. The main focus of this region was the forest station at Brown River.

Mainland Region: with Norm Endacott as RFO based in Lae. The major forest station at Bulolo and the smaller station at Wau came under this region.

Island Region: with Frank Coppock (later Elliot Tuckwell) as RFO based in Rabaul.

The forest station at Keravat managed by Des Harries came under this region.

The majority of foresters were dedicated to the operation of the three forest stations and the silviculture program, especially in Bulolo to support the operations of the Commonwealth New Guinea Timbers (CNGT) plywood factory, the largest forest industry in the Territory. Most had been recruited as cadets and graduated from the Australian Forestry School in Canberra.

A small number, such as John Clark, were recruited from overseas (in his case from the UK).

A small cohort of technical field staff were involved in a range of activities including extension work, export controls and surveying. These included people such as Keith Pearson, John Lowien, David (Docker) Reid and Bill Jenkins.

The forest industry in TP&NG in 1962 was quite small and apart from the CNGT operations at Bulolo and its export of premium quality Klinkii plywood, it was largely confined to the supply of sawn timber to the main centres by commercial operators. A few of the larger Missions also operated sawmills for their own needs. A small number of log export operations were also active, mainly from New Britain.

To implement the Foot Report’s recommendations regarding the accelerated evaluation of the Territory’s forest resources called for a change of focus and the recruitment of more resources.

To achieve this objective in 1962 the Department stepped up its recruitment of Cadet Foresters, established the Forestry College at Bulolo to train both expatriate and national technical staff and recruited technical officers directly from Australia.

The resource assessment and botanical collection work undertaken by the Department was augmented by the series of integrated surveys undertaken by the CSIRO Division of Land and Regional Surveys (LRRS) between 1953 and 1969.

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My first two years In this part of my story, I describe how I came to join the Department of Forests in 1963 and my early experiences based out of Keravat. In the second part I will describe my experience on the large-scale helicopter-supported resource assessment surveys that I was involved in between September 1964 and July 1967. The final part will describe my experience working in Forests headquarters as Silviculture Clerk and later Management Clerk between July 1967 and December 1970 when I resigned to take up a position with Department of Defence in Canberra.

I was one of those recruited as a Technical Officer directly from Australia as part of the recruitment surge in response to the 1962 Foot Report. I had already gained some experience of New Guinea as a technical assistant with CSIRO which included three months’ field work in the Southern Highlands District in 1961. I had arrived in Port Moresby with John Travers, another direct recruit TO, and as part of our orientation we were taken out to the Brown River station by Evan Shield to go through the arboretum and to look at the Teak plantations. That visit not only introduced me to some of the forest species I would get to know well, but also to the “delights” of being done over by mokas (my crotch itched for a week).

After a fortnight of orientation in Port Moresby, I was posted to Keravat.

Rob Levingston’s house Brown River.

Teak plantations at Brown River 1963.

Keravat The Keravat Forest Station was located on the western side of the Tolai-dominated northeastern quarter of the Gazelle Peninsula about 30 km to the south-west of Rabaul. The station was based on the old sawmill that had been established in the early post-war period to supply timber for the reconstruction of Rabaul following its total destruction during the war. The mill used equipment salvaged from some of the 29 sawmills operated around the area by the Japanese Army between 1942 and 1945. By 1963 its role had declined somewhat as commercial operators such as Jack Chipper and Jack Hopper became established (also using salvaged Japanese equipment). It remained in service to train nationals in sawmill operations and skills such as saw doctoring. In addition, the station was base for the development of forest plantations established to the west of the Keravat River.

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Kamarere plantation Keravat 1963.

The main species grown in the plantations included the indigenous species Eucalyptus deglupta (kamarere) and Terminalia brassii, though the main focus was on the exotic species Tectona grandis (teak) with a small area planted to Ochroma lagopus (balsa). A large area to the southwest of the plantations had been selectively logged over the years and was under treatment for natural regeneration.

Keravat forest plantations 1969.

(E = kamarere; T = teak, B = balsa, NR = natural regeneration, RF = rainforest, G= gardens) 6

Beyond the plantation area and across the Vudal River was the logging area from which the Keravat sawmill drew most of its logs.

Keravat sawmill 1963.

Keravat plantation nursery 1963.

The Keravat Community In 1963 the station came under the overall control of the Rabaul-based Islands Regional Forestry Officer Frank Coppock, with Rex Wiggins as the Regional Clerk. In Keravat, when I arrived in July I, think Des Harries was in charge with Neil Brightwell managing the plantations. Nan Ring, wife of the local police Sub Inspector John Ring, was the secretary. The sawmill was managed by Arthur Mobbs while the harvesting operations and log yard was run

by Dick Riley, a tough old logger. A young mixed-race chap, John Smith, was the plant operator in the logging operations. Keith Pearson who managed the customs and royalties aspects of the fledgling log export industry was also based at that time in Keravat. The workshop was managed by Les Austin, assisted by Ken Weir and a local apprentice mechanic Botse.

Ken Weir (l) and Les Austin (r) 1963.

Botse painting the D-6 dozer, 1963.

The station labour line was supervised by Alan Wagner, with Robert Schnieder the main labour supervisor. The labour line consisted mainly of men from Maprik. The Warias form the Waria 7

River area in the vicinity of Bulolo were in the survey teams, while the small number of technical assistants were drawn from mainly Island districts such as New Britain, New Ireland, and Bougainville. They were housed in a compound located between the main road and the river.

I joined Rod Bartlett as the Technical Officer responsible for surveying and resource assessment work in the Islands Region. Rod was a graduate of the first Bulolo College course6 and had been brought up in TPNG (his father was the District Officer in Kavieng at the time) and his ambition was to be a pilot. From time to time “itinerant” expatriate staff would also come on strength to fill various positions.

Most of the expatriate houses dated from the early post-war period but were very solid timber construction. The house I shared with Rod had three bedrooms, a semi-detached kitchen and a large lounge room and a wide front veranda. I recall that the floors were the most magnificent old Kwila that polished beautifully with a coconut husk. It was one of four such houses (one of them was occupied by the police station) and there were also three or four more modern houses. The house had a lawn running down to the main road dotted with Hibiscus. A row of Kamarere had been planted along the main road.

The view from my Keravat house, 1963.

Adjoining the forestry station was the Keravat National High School, the only secondary school to service the whole Islands Region and alma mata for many of the men that became leaders of PNG such as Paulius Matane. Further up the Keravat River, and bordering the Teak plantations, was the Keravat kalabus (Corrective Institution).

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Also, amongst that first cohort from Bulolo were Chris Brown, Cliff Southwell, Tim Ward (later Sir Tim) and Robin Hoskings.

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Keravat plantations and the kalabus 1966.

Closer to the coast on Atalikilikun Bay was the Lowland Agricultural Experimental Station (LAES) which also hosted the North Coast Sports Club – the social centre for the expats from the government establishments and the various plantations in the area. LAES was the main experimental and extension station with a focus on improving both copra and cacao production as well as introducing new cash crops such as vanilla and pepper to local farmers. It was a very interesting and social expat community.

Experimental crop of pepper at LAES 1970.

On the job For the first couple of months at Keravat I worked with Rod Bartlett on road location and plantation compartment boundary surveys. For the most part these were fairly simple chain and compass surveys with Abney levels used where necessary. On the more important jobs, such as the compartment boundaries, a compass theodolite was used. Before I worked with CSIRO, I had spent 12 months working as a surveyor’s chainman in NSW, so I was quite familiar with this line of work. During one of our surveys in the Trans-Vudal logging area we came across the wreckage of a Japanese Zero fighter that had been shot down during one of the many air battles over the region between 1942 and 1945. It was a stark reminder of the traumatic 9

experiences that were suffered by the local population, as well as the 100,000 Japanese forces, in the Gazelle Peninsula during that time.

Wreckage of a Zero near Keravat, 1963.

The first resource assessment survey that we were tasked to do was of the area immediately to the south of the Warangoi River. The Warangoi marked the southern boundary to the traditional lands of the Tolai people, though much of the area along the northern side of the river had been alienated for soldier settler subdivisions after 1945. Rod and I did a brief reconnaissance of the area before starting the survey in late September 1963. The survey party consisted of Rod and me, an “itinerant” expatriate Neville Jennings, a labour line from Keravat and the technical assistants.

To get to the survey area we travelled by truck from Keravat to the plantation that was closest to the first camp site. From there it was a tough climb down to the river carrying our own gear in relays. That included the tents, camping gear, rations for the labour line (bags of rice, boxes of tinned beef, boi biscuits, sugar, salt, tea and twist tobacco as per the Native Labour Ordinance scale) as well as the rations we had bought in Rabaul (tins of brazed steak and onions, bully beef, ham, peas, pears, pineapple etc as well as onions and potatoes – plus a few bottles of rum) and the survey equipment including chain, compass, Abney Level, axes, and so on. We were accompanied by Lisa, the haus boi that Rod and I shared in Keravat, to do our cooking and laundry. Most of our gear was contained in metal patrol boxes that were carried, suspended from a sapling, by two people.

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Departing Keravat for the Warangoi, September 1963.

We established our first camp away from the river in a young coconut plantation. When Rod and I had done a reconnaissance a week or so beforehand, the river could be forded reasonably safely (none of the Waria labourers could swim). Unfortunately, rain in the headquarters a day or so after we had done the reconnaissance caused the river to rise to a level that could not be forded. We then spent four days constructing a bamboo bridge to access the area being surveyed. This work was enthusiastically undertaken by the TAs including Itam, Andrew and Ephraim while the labour line cut and carried the bamboo from along the river.

Rod Bartlett watches the bridge construction.

Our first Warangoi camp, 1963.

Warangoi bridge under construction.

Labourers’ first Warangoi camp, 1963.

The survey sampling plan was to cut lines due south from the south bank of the river and establish a sample plot every five chains by identifying and measuring each tree of a “merchantable size” that fell within a one chain radius of the five-chain mark. Girth 11

measurement was typically done with a tape at breast height (GOBAB = girth over bark above buttress) and the log length was estimated. Where the buttresses were too large the girth was estimated. We would occasionally check our height estimates by using an Abney level set at 45o.

The lines were spaced at about 20 chains apart and ran across the grain of the country for a distance of two miles. Each party consisted of one of the expat TOs, a couple of local TAs and two or three labourers. My TAs were a young Tolai lad by the name of Andrew Tagong and a New Irelander by the name of Itam. They did the tree identification and established the line by compass bearing while the labourers cut the line. I got to know them all very well over the next four years.

It did not take long for the survey routine to be established. Among the things that needed to be taken into account was the need for camp hygiene and the health and safety of everyone.

Water from the river needed to be boiled before use and pit toilets were dug well back from the river. Every Saturday everyone was issued with their anti-malarial tablets. Fortunately, there were no serious injuries or illness because we had no communications with the outside world other than to send a runner to the nearest plantation for assistance if needed.

We moved camp further downstream after a week and were eventually in the field for a bit over three weeks. The forest that we encountered were fairly typical New Britain lowland rainforest with taun (Pometia pinata and P. tomentosa) amongst the main species recorded.

Taun along the south bank of the Warangoi 1963.

On our return to Keravat I took on the job of writing the report and mapping the forest types from the 1948 vintage air photos that were available of the area. Tree volumes were calculated using a fairly basic tree volume table based on the girth and log length. These were summed for each plot to give a rough calculation of timber volume per acre. That number was then multiplied by the number of acres of the relevant forest type that I had mapped from the air

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photos to give an overall potential log volume for the survey area. This was the pattern of my existence for the next twelve months.

After the Warangoi survey Rod and I were sent to New Ireland to do a survey of a small area around the village of Munawai on the east coast. The locals wanted to set up a small timber business under what was known as a Native Timber Authority (NTA). We only took a small team and camped in the haus kiap in the village rather than take the full load of camping kit. It was quite rough karst limestone country, and the forest was fairly poor, but we did our sampling and produced a report. While we were camped there the village lululai asked us if we would like one or more of the village ladies, an offer we politely declined. As a substitute he presented us with two large pineapples – a much safer option. We had a spectacular thunderstorm one evening with great bolts of lightning out to sea.

Munawai storm, 1963.

At the end of November 1963, we were sent down to Cape Hoskins to start a survey of an extension to the existing logging area. This area had been identified as a good logging area prewar by Bill Suttee and was probably the first large scale post-war commercial saw milling and log export areas in the Territory. The labour line and TAs travelled down to Cape Hoskins on the coastal boat Chinampa while Rod and I flew. Apart from a break over Christmas when we returned to Keravat we were in the field until the middle of February. This was during the wet season and on one day in late January the sawmill at Kwalakessi recorded an incredible 36” of rain in 24 hours. Fortunately, the pumice soils of the area drained very quickly so we did not lose much time on the job. Fortunately for the first part of the job we were able to use a timber shed for our camp kitchen, so the rain was not too much of an issue.

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Cape Hoskins kitchen 1963.

Muruk anyone?

During our time back in Keravat a discussion was held with Elliot Tuckwell around the question of whether we could do a survey for a road location from Cape Hoskins on the north coast to Powell Harbour on the south coast. This had been a dream of Bill Suttee’s and we jokingly christened the project “the Bill Suttee Highway”. It was eventually decided that we had too many other tasks to do at that time.

During our time at Cape Hoskins the elections for the first TPNG House of Assembly were held and we were roped into assisting with the “whisper vote”. Because most of the locals were illiterate they would “whisper” their voting preference to a polling station person who would then mark their ballot paper. The main local candidate was a cargo cult leader by the name of Lima. He had the people around Cape Hoskins itself terrified and most of the voters would whisper “mi laikim Lima tasol” (I only want Lima). Lima did not win the seat.

After a break of a month in Keravat writing up the survey report and doing the mapping it was off to Manus for another survey to support a proposed village timber enterprise. This was for the village of Derembat on the mid-north coast of the island. Our team was augmented this time by Keith Parascos, a young mixed-race chap that had recently finished high school in Charters Towers (Queensland). Rather than take the labour line, we had arranged through the kiaps for the villagers to provide the labour of cutting lines and so on. We flew to Lombrum and then to Lorengau by road. After mustering our supplies, we were transported along the coast by a government workboat then offloaded to a canoe for the transfer to the village.

Going ashore at Derembat, Manus, 1964.

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In addition to surveying the resource we also had to cut and survey a boundary for the NTA. This was no easy task as the country inland was very steep and broken. Fortunately, our camp on the beach had a nice freshwater stream beside it and it was a very pleasant spot to relax after a day of toil. Close to the beach was a very tall tree that was the roost for a large flock of flying foxes and Keith was keen to shoot one for tucker. I suggested that the best way to be sure of hitting one was to get right under the tree and fire straight up. This he did, and with his shot a couple of hundred flying foxes evacuated their bowels! I do not think Keith forgave me for that advice.

After finishing the Derimbat report Rod and I, with our full team, went to Talasea on the Waimana to start a survey of the Bagum area at the base of the western side of the Willaumez Peninsula. That trip took five days because the Waimana stopped at just about every mission and plantation along the way. The Bagum area adjoined the area known as Kulu-Dagi that had been surveyed by Neil Brightwell and Keith Pearson a year or so before. To assist with the carrying of our gear we hired six local villagers as carriers and guides.

It was a fairly easy job because the terrain was relatively flat coastal plain. The main problem was that some of the streams were coming from solfatara fields and were almost too hot to walk through. They were also heavily contaminated with sulphur. This survey was memorable for two reasons: first, our oldest Waria labourer Yaki, who was regarded as a masalai man (a man with a connection to the spirit world), received a spirit message that his uncle had died back in the village. That set off the labour line in mourning (a telegram that we received four days later confirmed that his uncle had indeed died back in Bulolo on that day); the second was that I contracted dysentery.

I was able to control the dysentery for the most part when we moved on to Ruango village (adjoining San Remo plantation where the town of Kimbe was later to be established) which we used as a base to survey the boundary for the Kulu-Dagi timber rights purchase and start the collection of genealogies for the purchase documents. We used the government work boat the MV Toa to transfer people such as patrol officers Bob Willis and Hans Wetzler between Talasea and San Remo and to bring Jim Cavanaugh who had come over from Port Moresby for the purchase from Cape Hoskins. I had time to absorb some of his many stories about prewar forestry and his role during the war. He also encouraged me to develop my skills in photo interpretation.

The Toa at San Remo, May 1964.

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The timber rights purchase of the Kulu-Dagi brought £23,160 into the local economy in one go. Not surprisingly the Catholic Bishop from Rabaul arrived a day or so ahead of the pay out to conduct confirmations. He also brought a number of aluminium dinghies as cargo on the mission ship Louis Coupe that were quickly snapped up by the recently wealthy locals.

At the end of that job, I flew back to Rabaul via Lae after 42 days in the field and was only back in Keravat a day when I became very sick and was driven by Les Austin into Rabaul to see Dr Treblecock, the local GP. He diagnosed severe appendicitis and I was off to Namanula Hospital to have “a very hot appendix” removed. That was a close shave – a couple of more days in the field may have been fatal.

It took several weeks before the dysentery and my post-operation recovery to settle but by September I was fit for work again. Once back at work after 31 days on sick leave I was tasked to do a small survey of the timber on Kuriendal Plantation over on the far west coast of the Gazelle Peninsula. I only needed one TA for that job (Bruno), and we aimed to get there on the Chinampa, a small coastal trading vessel owned by a local character Pip Boulton. Our departure was delayed because HMAS Melbourne, flagship of the RAN, was in Rabaul to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the capture of Rabaul from the Germans at the start of WW I. Pip, an old navy hand, refused to sail while Melbourne was in port. I stayed at the old Cosmopolitan Hotel on the foreshore and was witness to seemingly the whole town of Rabaul go on a massive bender. There were games of Crown and Anchor rolled out in the beer garden, drunk sailors passed out under coconut palms, with the Toa taking excited locals out to the ship - one local even fell off the flight deck of the carrier. The next morning, we sailed out of Rabaul just ahead of Melbourne and Pip was really pissed off when he dipped the Chinampa’s flag in salute, but Melbourne did not reciprocate.

Rabaul goes wild during the visit of HMAS Melbourne, 22 August 1964.

To top that off the Chinampa broke down and had to anchor at Takis along the north coast. I finished the trip to Kuriendal in a Tempest aluminium speedboat used by Reg Wild, a logging contractor based just north of Kuriendal, to tow rafts of logs out to export ships. Because of the heavy work that it had been put to, the transom of the boat was loose, and I spent the trip continually bailing.

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Reg Wild’s Tempest towing log raft.

The Chinampa broken down.

While at Kuriendal I took the opportunity to observe the loading of logs onto the cargo ship and to check the measurements of some of the logs on the beach.

MV Slitan off Kuriendal, September 1964.

Loading logs onto MV Slitan, September 1964.

This was the last “conventional” survey that I was to do because on my return to Rabaul I was tasked to join the large-area helicopter-supported survey of the Empress Augusta Bay area on the west coast of Bougainville. This was to be my main job for the next three years.

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Helicopter-supported surveys 1964-1968 Up until 1964 all of the larger resource assessment surveys, such as Tonolai Harbour (Bougainville), Kulu-Dagi (New Britain) and Gogol (Madang) were undertaken using the “conventional” survey methods that I have already described. They were based on relatively small field parties, generally self-supporting, and operating in the field for several months at a stretch. This approach was proving to be too slow to meet the demands of completing a comprehensive coverage of PNG forest resources to meet the timeframe dictated by the Commonwealth Government. To speed up the assessment process it was decided to utilise helicopters to support larger teams in the field to cover larger areas in less time.

A trial of this approach, I am told, was conducted in the Gogol area of Madang District in 1961 but the first full helicopter survey was led by Eric Hammermaster and covered an area of 297,000 ha in the Vanimo area (West Sepik District) mid-1964. That survey demonstrated the advantages of a better sample coverage in a shorter time than would be possible using the older approach. Following the Vanimo survey it was decided to implement a program of larger-scale helicopter-supported surveys across the Territory. Over the next four years some 2 million hectares of forest were surveyed using helicopters to support the field operation. To the best of my recollection those surveys included: Vanimo Empress Augusta Bay Open Bay-Wide Bay Wanigela West New Britain Middle Ramu Bulolo-Wau Ioma-Kumusi Sagarai-Gadaisu

1964 1964 1965 1965 1966 1966 1967 1967 1968

297,000 ha 109,000 ha 280,500 ha 158,000 ha 473,000 ha 235,000 ha 200,000 ha 467,000 ha 140,000 ha

I was directly involved in the six major surveys shown in bold. To give some sense of how these surveys operated and the conditions we operated under in the field I will give a detailed account of the first survey I was on (Empress Augusta Bay) and provide some of the highlights (and lowlights) of the others.

Empress August Bay, Bougainville (7 September to 16 October 1964) I first learned about the planned helicopter survey in Bougainville from Eric Hammermaster and John Lowien when they visited Keravat in mid-August, not long after I had returned to work after my spell of post-appendix sick leave. They were on their way to Bougainville to do a reconnaissance and to organise the survey logistics. I was very keen to be involved.

The survey party consisted of Hammer, John Lowien, Gerd Streihler (draftsman), John (“Puddles”) Lake (recently graduated forester), Chris Brown, Robin Hosking (both Bulolotrained TOs) and me, together with 12 or 15 TAs and labourers from Keravat. We all assembled in Rabaul on 7 September and flew to Buin by DC-3 charter. We took over the helicopter from the CSIRO team that had just wound up their land system survey of Bougainville. The helicopter was a Bell 47G3B1 three-seater – much the same as those featured in the TV show MASH. We met the helicopter pilot Peter (“Thirsty”) Hurst and his engineer Jack Fackrell the following morning before the chopper started ferrying some people to our base camp site at the mouth of the Jaba River.

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Peter Hurst (left) and Jack Fackrell with the chopper 1964.

Chris Brown and I were among the fortunate ones to go in by chopper. Our first task was to clear the camp site while the rest of the survey team with the equipment and supplies travelled up by “road”. The track for the last 20 km or so was just two deep wheel ruts that were almost too deep for a Ferguson tractor and trailer to negotiate. The road was in that condition thanks to its incorrect use by the Catholic mission located in the hills behind Torokina run by an American priest, Fr. Moore. He had been donated two high clearance Unimog 4x4 which were the only vehicle that could travel those tracks during the wet season and their use on the track had effectively wrecked it for anyone else.

The camp was up and running by 10 September and Hammer and Gerd had started reconnaissance flights to identify suitable pads into which survey teams could be flown and to plan the sampling regime. It was an interesting location given its wartime history. In the process of clearing the camp site we unearthed an old bayonet and many other items of military equipment, but fortunately no unexploded ordnance. We were also less than 30 km from the active Mt Bagana volcano. At night we could see the glow from the lava flows near its summit.

Jaba River base camp, September 1964.

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I had been allocated Itam and Bruno as my TAs together with Poite as labourer. Before heading into the field, team leaders were briefed by Hammer and Gerd on the location, strip line start point, bearings, pick up times and so on. We were flown out to our first survey site to the south of the Jaba the next day. The pad was an old garden area along the Buin Road. The routine we established was to set up the fly camp before finding the start point. Once we had located the start point one of the TAs would start the line on the given compass bearing. The second TA would pull the chain while Poite would brush the line. I would stop the chain when it came to the end and the bois would mark the centre of the sample plot with a stick and start identifying the trees within a one chain radius. By the time I reached them they were ready for me to record the species type (on their identification) and record the dimensions and form of each tree in the sample plot. This procedure was repeated until we reached the designed end of the line (usually two miles). Along the way any topographic feature such as a creek or significant tree such as a fig would be noted to be used as check points on the air photos.

We completed two strip lines well before the helicopter was due to pick us up the following day. As the helicopter started to descend for our pickup I saw, out of the corner of my eye, that Poite had started to cut down a 3m high galip sapling that was growing beside the road where the helicopter was to land. The downdraft from the helicopter started to bring the sapling down and in spite of my frantic signalling to the pilot to go up, the tip of one of the rotor blades clipped the top of the sapling.

He landed quickly and after a bit of checking decided to fly back as far as the small government station at Konga taking Itam and I with him and leaving Bruno and Poite behind. He left us at Konga and then flew on to the camp at Jaba River where his engineer could check out the damage. The impact of the rotor blade with the galip sapling had caused the bonding between the main spar and the blade’s skin to come away for several centimetres, so the machine was grounded. I was joined at Konga the next day by Chris Brown with a tractor belonging to the local Siwai cooperative which we then used to recover Bruno and Poite and to continue with surveying another strip line. We then used the tractor and trailer to move north to Boku patrol post where we did another two lines.

The Bougainville District Officer, the legendary Des Clancy, was visiting Boku at the time and we had two very entertaining evenings at Boku before Clancy lent us his Land Rover to get back to the base camp at Jaba River where Hammer questioned me about the accident and tore (fairly gentle) strips off Poite. We were also debriefed by Gerd who checked our field notes against the air photos to make sure that our samples were in the right place.

The helicopter had been replaced by one flown by John Hurrell with his engineer Ray Harris and three days later we were dropped into tall pitpit near Mom Hill to the north of the Jaba.

The chopper hovered as low as it could and Indai and I jumped off into the unknown – a couple of metres into the pitpit. While the chopper went back to pick up the other half of the team, we improved the pad by slashing and flattening the pitpit and established our camp site.

The strip lines from this camp were into Terminalia brassii swamp forest. At times, the swamp water reached waist level and it was not uncommon to see small fish swimming past as we cut the strip line. Usually when the water got to crotch height (commonly referred to as BDS – ball-deep swamp) we abandoned the line. T. brassii are magnificent trees with large buttresses that are too difficult to measure with girth tapes, so we had improvised “girth sticks” – pieces

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of wood that we marked off to convert the diameter to girth. This technique became standard for all surveys where we encountered very large trees.

Itam with a girth stick measuring T. brassii Mom Hill swamp, September 1964.

We completed three strip lines from that camp and on the last day Hammer and Gerd came in to follow us along the line to see the forest for themselves. Hammer took several photos of the operation that ended up being published in the Courier Mail and the New Guinea Times Courier in November after the survey. The Courier Mail story prompted some hilarity with its headline “MONEY IN THE SWAMP” and a photo of me looking rather like a pirate.

The MONEY IN THE SWAMP photo, September 1964.

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Terminalia brassii forest canopy near Mom Hill.

After a night in base camp my team was again out into the field, this time to the Tsinamutu River some 60 km to the north. On this occasion we took an ex-Army 510 HF radio set to provide communications back to the base camp. We completed two strip lines through fairly ordinary forest but on our third night I had a recurrence of the pekpek wara that I had been afflicted with several months before. I was too sick to complete the fourth strip line the next day, but Itam and Bruno were able to do it without me.

Bruna, Itam and Poite, Tsinamutu River September 1964.

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Tsinimutu River camp 1964.

We were due to be picked up by chopper the following morning, but it did not arrive. Nor did it come the following day. I had tried to raise the base camp by radio, but it proved to be useless.

We were virtually out of food, but I was able to shoot several ducks and the others found bananas in an old garden site, so we lived off the land for two more days.

We were about 5 km inland from the Catholic Mission at Koraio on the coast, so I sent Itam there to see if they had a radio so as to obtain news of the chopper and also to obtain some rations. Apparently, the chopper was U/S at Jaba River, however two Government medical assistants were returning to Jaba River by canoe the next day, so we shifted camp into Koraio the following morning and joined the two medical assistants on their large outboard-powered canoe. There was a good swell running and at one point about 2 miles offshore the outrigger dug into the swell and the canoe lurched violently and almost capsized. Poite, who could not swim, was almost climbing up my back to be safe! We eventually reached Torokina where the chopper hove in sight to pick us up. It was a relief to get back to base camp, but we were off again the next morning to a site to the south on the Hongorai River. We landed there on the gravel bed of the river and established our camp up on the bank well above the river. That was just as well because that afternoon a storm in the headwaters caused the river to rise almost 2m to the top of its banks.

Hongarai River pad before and after rain, October 1964.

The Hongarai River was roughly the southern front line between the Australian and Japanese troops at the end of the war and there were still trenches and weapon pits clearly visible in some areas. The forest in this area was dominated by Vitex, a fairly ugly tree but fantastic 23

timber. After three nights in that camp, we were picked up on schedule by chopper the next morning – the first successful pick up so far! There was another changeover of chopper crew the following day (Peter Hurst and Herbie Ray again), so I relished a rest day in camp.

We were off again the following day, this time to the Reini River to the south-east of our base.

Again, we landed on a gravel bed and given our experience on the Hongarai we cut an emergency pad above flood level - just in case. Once we had established camp, I discovered that I had forgotten to pack my mosquito net and I had a rather poor night that was ameliorated to some degree by what I called “a Reini River mosquito net” – Old Kedge rum and river water!

Fortunately, the next morning Hammer and Gerd dropped off my mosquito net on their way out on a reconnaissance. I observed in my field diary: Old Kedge is quite a good mosquito net, but it loses its effect about 2 am.

I was not the only one on the survey that was having misadventures. Robin Hosking was landed in a village in the Siwai area to the south and was promptly stopped from leaving the village by the locals. It appeared that they had been stirred up by Fr. Moore with his claims that we (i.e., the Government) were going to steal their forests. Hammer was familiar with this tactic through his work a year or so before around Tonolai Harbour in the south-east of the island where he had come into conflict with Fr. Wally Fingleton (brother of the 1930s Australian cricketer Jack Fingleton).

This was also the time when the exploration of the Panguna copper and gold deposit had just started and the Church, under the American Bishop Leo Lemay, was effectively subverting development by spreading rumours about the government wanting to steal their land and resources. Fortunately, the newly appointed Under-Secretary for Forests in the first House of Assembly was Paul (later Sir Paul) Lapun, a leader from the Siwai area where Robin had been bailed up. Don Macintosh was able to get Paul Lapun flown across to Buin and then to the troublesome village to talk some sense to the people so we could proceed with the survey work.

Life was never dull in the camp. John (Puddles) Lake was fond of catching snakes and anything else that he could get a reaction from us with. He had caught a small snake that he put in the empty 44-gallon drum we used for catching rainwater and the next day he caught a baby crocodile that also went into the drum. It was said that there were no venomous snakes on Bougainville, and it was a bit of a surprise the next morning when both reptiles were found dead. Gerd did a fine job of skinning the little croc and when he got back to Port Moresby taxidermizing it in a very realistic way.

Puddles liklik pukpuk, Jaba River September 1964.

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We started to break camp and pack up our gear on 14 October. That evening Gerd and I were having a few quiet beers to mark the end of the survey and as he went to go to bed Hammer told us to “make sure you fill the fridge before you turn in”. Of course, in his best Teutonic way Gerd said that “to fill the fridge we must first empty it” – so we did. For the next couple of hours, I was entertained by tales of Gerd’s experiences as an artillery sergeant in the German Army on the Eastern Front and later in Italy. We were both a bit slow the next morning when we loaded everything and everyone onto the boat owned by Deck O’Donnell, a crocodile shooter, for the trip north to Buka. The fridge was definitely full of cold beer.

Unloaded gear from Deck O’Donnell’s boat at Buka, October 1964.

We flew from Buka back to Rabaul after just over four weeks in the field – it seemed a lot longer.

On 3 November I was advised that I was to be transferred to headquarters in Port Moresby to undertake the photo interpretation of the forest types of the Empress Augusta Bay survey area and assist Hammer in the processing of the field data. I was to become a permanent member of the forest resource assessment team specialising in the photo interpretation and mapping of forest types as well as doing strip lines and so on.

Fortunately, all of the subsequent surveys that I was on went off with far fewer misadventures, though they were not without their excitements. The choppers became a lot more reliable and our equipment, especially the radios, improved out of sight. The generator to charge the radio batteries could also power lights in the mess tent/office and we even had a large chest freezer to keep frozen meat and fish etc as well as small gas stoves to take into the field rather than rely on finding dry firewood.

Converting field data to resource knowledge While the field work was both exciting and challenging, the conversion of the raw field data into meaningful and quantified information about the forest resources was a slow and very unexciting process. First of all, the data in each field book needed to be reconciled against the aerial photos to make sure that what was recorded was actually where it was meant to be, and that the vegetation type being recorded was in accord with the air photo interpretation.

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After that, the log volumes needed to be calculated using a new log volume table that had been developed by Evan Shield taking into account log taper and irregularities. After a lot of number crunching, we were able to derive an average volume by species for each forest type.

The vegetation type boundaries from the photo interpretation were manually transcribed to the base maps by Gerd and again cross checked with the survey lines and plot details. It was also necessary to introduce a constraint of accessibility to the resource. It was decided that any slope above 30o should be regarded as inaccessible to logging using the techniques available in PNG at the time. This boundary was interpreted from the form lines or contours on the available wartime 1:63,360 topographic maps and checked against the aerial photos (circa 1949).

It was then back to the drawing office to calculate the area of each forest type from the boundaries transcribed from the aerial photos. Under “normal” mapping such as with cadastral maps, the main method was to use a planimeter to run around the boundary and derive an area on the ground based on the scale of the map. With vegetation boundaries which are quite irregular and with areas of the same type scattered all over the map, an easier method needed to be developed. It was either Phil Ainsworth or John van As that came up with the idea (bless them) of carefully cutting out each area of a given type with a scalpel and then weighing all of the pieces of that type on a chemical balance to come up with a total mass. Each type was treated in this way including swamps, gardens and regrowth, secondary forest and so on. The combined weight of all of those pieces represented the total area surveyed. That area could be measured from the base map with a planimeter and by a simple calculation, the areas of each type was derived as a proportion of the whole.

Now, given the areas and the average volumes it was possible to come up with a reasonable estimate of the overall log volume by key species across the survey area. It was then down to writing the whole lot up in an understandable report complete with tables and maps.

Following are some of the highlights from the rest of the surveys that I was on.

East New Britain (20 February to 8 July 1965) The plan for this survey was to start on the south coast with a base at Fulleborn Plantation, then move to Uvol Mission. At the end of that section, we would stage through Rabaul and then restart at Malalia Mission on the north coast near Cape Hoskins with moves to Bialla, Ulamona Mission and finally to Matanakunai Plantation. Eric Hammermaster would lead the south coast part and Neil (Brighteyes) Brightwell would take over for the north coast.

The South Coast: The south coast team was much the same as that used on Bougainville with the exception that I was to replace the draftsman as well as doing the occasional line. We set up our camp in the copra shed of the plantation which was close to the beach. We had prepositioned a Tempest speedboat to enable us to send parties along the coast as well as using the chopper.

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Fulleborn base camp, February 1965.

Tempest speedboat at Fulleborn, 1965.

One of the first teams to return was led by John Lake. They had been sent into the foothills to the north of Fulleborn. When Puddles came back into the camp he had something behind his back and said to Hammer “give us a kiss and I’ll tell you what I found”. With that he produced a small branch of Kauri leaves, the first indication we had that Agathis was present on New Britain. Next day Hammer and I did a reconnaissance around the Kauri area, and I was able to pick up a texture signature on the air photos that enabled me to map the extent of the stands quite accurately.

Emergent Agathis in forest near Fulleborn 1965.

After almost five weeks operating from Fulleborn we moved operations to Uvol Mission further to the east. Our base camp was under canvas and set up along one side of a large clearing that may have been planned as an airstrip at one time. Chopper operations went fairly smoothly, and we even had a smooth changeover of machines at one point. The chopper was always a magnet for the locals.

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Uvol base camp, March 1965.

Chris Brown (right) at Uvol, March 1965.

Curious locals at Uvol, March 1965.

I had picked up from the air photos a distinct pattern of forest in the higher areas of the Nakanai Plateau that we believed to be Nothofagus, so I took my old team of Indai, Poite and Bruno into the village of Au’una which was high on a ridge on the eastern end of the Plateau. The village had a little church and other permanent material houses constructed of corrugated aluminium which I was told had been physically carried up from the coast.

Au’una village New Britain, March 1965.

No sooner had we landed than the village lululai came rushing up saying that the catechist had gone long long and was smashing up the church! I followed the lululai to the catechist’s house where the villagers had him trussed up like a pig. As soon as he saw me his wild eyes flared and starting to praise me as Jesus come to save him (I did have a beard at the time!). I believed that he was probably suffering from cerebral malaria as he had only recently returned to the village after a retreat back at Vunapope. I subsequently learned through the Uvol mission that the catechist had died shortly after we returned to base and was buried by the villagers.

One of the easiest species to map from aerial photos was kamarere given it is grown on gravel beds and so on which produced an even-aged stand. The delta of the Torlu River east of Uvol 28

was a classic example. The Nothofagus on the Nakanai Plateau was also an easy type to map because it too also grew in almost pure stands.

Torlu River kamarere.

Nakanai Nothofagus.

It had become a tradition to burn the drop toilet and shower enclosure at the end of the survey so after a liberal application of avgas to the facilities they went up in a spectacular manner.

Uvol dunny explosion 1965.

We returned to Rabaul on one of the small government boats. As we crossed Wide Bay, we were hit by a very severe storm which had most of us looking for the lee rail. To make matters worse the boat was taking on water, so the bilge had to be regularly pumped. If the rocking and rolling from the storm was not bad enough the smell of stale bilge water and diesel made this a voyage to forget. We finally arrived in Rabaul and after unloading our gear had a good night’s sleep at the Cosmopolitan Hotel. Next morning, we discovered that the boat had sunk at the wharf!

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The north coast: On this part of the survey, we had the first of the nationals to graduate as TOs from the Forestry College at Bulolo so there was an early emphasis on training and checking their work. Among the first graduates to join the survey effort were James Isorua, John Toropis, Jenship Wazob and Missi. John Lake had been replaced (I think) by Rex Grattidge and Robin Hosking had gone on leave.

After establishing our first base camp at Malalia United Church Mission around the coast from Cape Hoskins, Neil Brightwell and I began our reconnaissance flights mostly into the interior of the island – i.e., along the route of the proposed “Bill Suttee Highway” that Rod Bartlett and I had been mooted to survey in 1964. Our pilot was, once more, Peter Hurst.

Our second base was at Bialla further to the east. We set up the camp along the beach front and the office in a haus wind right on the water. There was a log export operation under way just next to the old Bialla Plantation.

The Bialla office and pad, 1965.

After a reconnaissance into the Nakanai Mountains it was decided that we needed to get some strip lines into the Nothofagus forest on the Plateau. There was a very dicey pad on the edge of the plateau at about 5500’ ASL that would need to be improved before it was safe to send in teams. Keith Pearson and I with two labourers went in with minimal gear to fell enough Nothofagus to improve the pad. After felling a couple of trees, the chainsaw packed it in, so it was then into the work with axes. Once the moss and mulch of decades of leaves were cleared from around the base it was somewhat easier to fell the trees by cutting out their roots. A slow and rather hairy approach but it worked. We took the opportunity to do detailed log measurements and investigate defects.

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Clearing the Nakanai Plateau pad, April 1965.

Our third camp was at the Ulamona Catholic Mission and sawmill. The office and mess were again combined under the one structure. It contained a working space for the maps and air photos as well as the Crammond transceiver that we now had available to communicate to the outside world (via Rabaul Radio). Its call sign was VL8PN. We had also acquired small, transistorised HF radios for the field teams so that regular schedules could be had with the field teams to give them updates on pickup times and so on and for them to call in if there were problems such as sickness or injury.

Keith Pearson in the Office at Ulamona, May 1965.

(Note the Crammond radio in the background) 31

The mission was at the foot of Mt Uluwun (The Father), an active volcano. The sawmill sourced most of its logs from the stands of kamarere that grew on the old blast areas around the base of the mountain. The mill was steam powered and supplied all of the mission needs for sawn timber throughout New Britain. It was a well-run establishment managed by German lay brothers.

Ulamona sawmill operations, May 1965.

We had a visit from a volcanologist from the Rabaul Volcanological Observatory, Dr Giani D’Addario, during our stay at Ulamona. He had arranged for the use of our chopper to survey Ulawun and he and an assistant were lifted to the rim of the crater at over 7000’ by Peter Hurst to make their observations. Giani worked for the Bureau of Mineral Resources (BMR) in Canberra and had a rather interesting Northern Italian accent.

Returning from one of our reconnaissance flights “Thirsty” flew past the rim of the Ulawun crater before doing an autorotation onto the water in front of Ulamona Mission – i.e., he throttled the engine right back and “glided” down. I enjoyed it but I do not think “Brighteyes” did.

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Ulawun crater, June 1965.

It was a Saint’s Day the day we were due to move on to the next camp at Matanakunai Plantation, so the Brothers invited us to have breakfast with them before we left. Breakfast consisted of a peanut butter jar three quarters full of Bavarian brandy and a black cheroot! The thought was appreciated.

The Matanakunai camp was on a fairly new plantation, and we had the use of the plantation house for our office. Our pilot for the first time was Bill Wallace, an ex-RAF fighter pilot. He became something of an institution on future helicopter surveys.

Bill Wallace.

Matanakunai Plantation, June 1965.

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Three events stand out from that camp. First, one of the TOs, with his team, caught a 2 m crocodile just near their fly camp. They radioed in requesting permission to bring the croc back on the chopper and Bill was happy to do that as long as it was well trussed up. The second was that we appeared to have sparked a cargo cult in the southern Baining Mountains where the Mokolkol people lived. They were a semi-nomadic group that had had very little contact with the outside world, and it seems that they saw the chopper operating in and out of a small pad in their area with our teams and so started the “Golden Egg” cargo cult. The third was receiving the news via telegram that my father had passed away. It was not possible for me to realistically get from Matanakunai to Goulburn (NSW) in time for the funeral, so I stayed in the field.

Matanakunai pukpuk, June 1965.

I had by that stage been more-or-less in the field continuously for five months and was getting a bit twisty to the extent that I really understood the book Catch 22 that I read at the time.

Following the New Britain surveys, I was overdue for leave so I did not go on the next survey, this time at Wanigela in the Northern District. I did provide them with logistic support in between finalising the mapping and statistics for the New Britain jobs. The Wanigela survey was again led by Eric Hammermaster, with Gerd Streihler as the draftsman. They were accompanied by a film crew from the Commonwealth Film Unit to shoot the activities on survey for a film released as Tree Business. From all reports it was not a very happy camp because they were based at the Wanigela Guest House and the food they were served was predominantly frozen Wedgewood meat pies. The film crew finally rebelled, and gaffer taped a whole lot of frozen pies across the ceiling of the dining room. The film was a fairly faithful representation of survey work and life though it was a bit odd to hear Eric, Chris Brown and Gerd’s voices dubbed by actors though at least they did try to get Gerd’s German accent.

West New Britain (14 February to 20 May 1966) On my return from leave I was sent on a Plantation Manager’s medical assistant course at the Port Moresby Hospital. Under the Native Labour Ordinance anyone employing more than 50 locals in remote areas was required to have at least one person trained to this level. It was a fantastic course and covered everything from midwifery, to diagnosing and treating tropical diseases, to minor surgery (suturing wounds and lancing abscesses) to assisting with autopsies.

On qualifying we were licensed to have access to and use dangerous drugs such as morphine so armed with my new qualification I stocked my medical kit with enough penicillin, injectable chloroquine, local anaesthetics, and so on, to last for four months.

The survey team for this three-month effort was essentially the same as for the last New Britain job with Neil Brightwell in charge. Two freshly minted foresters also joined us for the job – Bob Bruce and Chris Borough, while Chris Brown had married just after the Wanigela survey

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and was otherwise engaged. Bill Wallace had agreed to be our pilot for the whole survey which reduced the need to brief new pilots after each change over.

Our first camp was on Malenglo Island to the east of Kandrian. This was the first time we had established our base camp on a village rather than on missions, plantations, or government stations and that introduced some interesting challenges. My medical training was fortuitous because shortly after we arrived on Malenglo an epidemic of whooping cough swept through the villages along the coast. I went through virtually all of the penicillin I had brought with me in a couple of days treating village children. There were also villagers with tropical ulcers to treat as well as several of our TAs who had come down with malaria and as soon as we started field work there were bush knife cuts to suture. Fortunately, things settled down fairly quickly and “Dr Ken” could get back to survey work.

Treating a village child with a tropical ulcer, Malenglo, February 1966.

The other challenge was to ensure that our bois did not get into trouble with the village meris.

There was one teenage girl in particular who wore a yellow laplap that had set her sights on Andrew Tagong, a strapping young Tolai TA; he was not too shy either. Near to the end of our time on Malenglo he came to me begging to be sent out on a fly camp because the father of “yellow laplap” had threatened “to cut his neck”.

Malenglo distractions, February 1966.

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The forest along the south coast was very rich with stands of kamarere and taun present in good quantities and sizes.

Very large E. deglupta (kamarere).

P. tomentose (taun).

From Malenglo we moved camp to Arawe Plantation to the west of Kandrian. Arawe was a very old plantation and one of the places that the US had made a landing during WW II. Operations from here were fairly routine apart from the visiting team from the Botany Division led by David Froden, a young American botanist who was trying to avoid his selective service (i.e., the draft) back in the US. He was collecting botanical specimens to test for their alkaloid content. He decided that he wanted to sample vegetation along a mangrove estuary, and I ferried him and his party to a site in the Tempest. He had taken with him the dinghy from the chopper and was planning to use that to access plants amongst the mangroves. After warning him about crocodiles I returned to Arawe.

The next morning his field workers called in on the radio to say that Froden had not returned to camp that night, so I headed back in the Tempest to their camp site. He had just struggled back into camp half an hour before I got there and was in a rather traumatised condition. That was not helped by the sighting of a good-sized crocodile about 100 m downstream of their camp as we came in. Froden had drifted downstream in the dinghy by himself and when he decided to head back to the camp could not progress against the run-out tide. He spent the night up a mangrove tree and waded back along the edge of the creek when it became light. He was known as “Rocky” (from Michael Rockefeller) after that.

Another incident at Arawe befell one of our TAs, a Papuan by the name of Bobby Gaigo. I do not recall how he had come to be working with Forests as he had something of a reputation in Port Moresby for his involvement in a land rights claim over Tatana Island. He was walking beside me through the old plantation when I heard a thud and was sprayed with an unknown liquid. I turned to see Bobby flat on the ground and as stiff as a board. A nut had fallen from 36

one of the palms and hit him flush on the top of his head. The liquid that splattered over me was the coconut water from the shattered nut. He eventually came to, and I was the first person he saw so from then on, he followed me everywhere. Apart from a good headache and concussion he was fine.

He did not stay with Forests for long and returned to his land rights claims and other lobbying duties. I think he stood for the House of Assembly in 1977.

The Arawe camp was very well set up with a 44-gallon drum for the shower. The fishing was also fantastic and was a good supplement to the diet.

My Arawe mackerel.

Puddles butbut.

The flash shower.

We moved to our third camp at the Cape Gloucester government station for one week and then moved on to Linga Linga Plantation on the north coast for the final three weeks of the survey.

As a distraction we also did some water skiing behind the Tempest on the lagoon at Linga Linga. It was interesting to observe the sharks in the lagoon and the crocodiles on a small island in the middle each morning as we flew out in the chopper. Fortunately, there were no further dramas except that when I was driving the Tempest back towards Volupai, to the west of Talasea, at the end of the survey the forward gear failed halfway across, so I had to drive it backwards the rest of the way. A pod of half a dozen killer whales took a rather uncomfortable interest in my progress at one stage.

Water skiing at Linga Linga, May 1966.

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The West New Britain survey was a very successful job thanks largely to the good leadership of “Brighteyes” and generally good weather. Neil had established the routine that no field party would be given less than 24 hours’ notice that they would be going bush; that they would not do more than five days in the field straight and would have an adequate break between field trips; and that the allocation of “easy” and “hard” lines would be evenly spread between teams.

This worked well for the morale of the camp. This was also improved by the availability of the fish we caught, the occasional pig caught by one of the field parties and fresh produce purchased from local villagers to supplement the diet of the whole team. I learned a lot about effective man-management and “soft diplomacy” on that survey.

“Brighteyes”.

Having Bill Wallace as the pilot for the whole job was also an advantage. Bill was quite a raconteur and a great promoter of “games of skill and chance”. Many an evening was spent at liar dice or seven card brag (for matches).

In the month between the end of the West New Britain job and the start of the Middle Ramu survey I managed to meet and fall in love with Judy.

Middle Ramu (22 June to 3 September 1966) This was the first major survey that Evan Shield had been on, so it took him a bit of time to adjust his views of survey management to those that had been established over the past two years or more. Our first base camp was on the government station of Aiome. Evan also had in mind that in addition to the resource assessment survey we should do some forestry extension work such as promoting the planting of wood lots around local villages. To that end we set up a small nursery and established some kamarere seedlings which I was asked to document.

Photographing kamarere seedlings at Aiome, June 1966.

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The first few days were given over to training new staff and in checking the work done by them on strip lines around Aiome itself. I was also fairly busy with medical treatment for a number of team members including one potential case of meningitis (that fortunately proved to be less serious).

Aiome base camp, June 1966.

The survey was slow to start because of delays with the chopper and the arrival of fuel. The fuel was flown in to Aiome in an Ansett Caribou and as a back loading it flew out a large volume of bagged dried leaves of Mitragyna that had been collected by the Botany Division for large scale testing of the alkaloids they contain. They were believed to have both antimalarial and analgesic properties.

Loading Mitragyna leaves Aiome, June 1966.

Once the chopper arrived it was full steam ahead. After one embarrassing situation of a team being sent into a pad to do two lines and forgetting to take the technical equipment with them (chain, compass, etc) I was commissioned by Evan to take photographs of a team with all its gear to use as a reference for teams before going into the field.

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Field team and their equipment, Aiome, June 1966.

I had to treat several cases of malaria in the first two weeks, so Evan instigated a regime of compulsory issue of anti-malarial tablets. I was also tasked to maintain detailed records of all medical treatments.

I had become the “expert” in cutting pads to extend the sampling into areas where there were no natural pads. This involved identifying a suitable ridge top on which to site the pad, work out the bearing from the nearest pad to the site and then go in with just the chainsaw and axes.

The idea was to get a sufficient clearing by around 4:00 pm for the chopper to locate the clearing and drop in the team’s tent, tucker, and other gear. This was usually done using a sling under the chopper. To help guide Bill to the site we had obtained some marine flairs that we could fire off to attract his attention as well as using the radios to guide him to us.

Sling loading for a pad cutting team, Aiome, July 1966.

Unfortunately, our chainsaws were not always reliable, and we had to resort to using axes. This was OK for some areas but where the trees were mainly kwila and hard Celtis it was another 40

matter. We were also tempted to adopt fairly risky tactics such as part cutting the trees downslope and then “driving” them down with a larger tree felled from the top of the slope.

This worked well as long as you did not get a hang-up with vines.

Early in July I had written to Judy asking her to marry me and she had responded with a telegram simply saying “YES, YES, YES”. I was out of camp cutting another pad when it came in and Evan came out on the supply drop flight with the telegram and a couple of cold beers – he went up in my estimation after that.

A typical cleared pad, Ramu area, July 1967.

We shifted camp to the government station at Usino after about six weeks. Much of this was done by aircraft but the camp freezer was too bulky to get into the DHC Otter we had available, so Bill decided to sling load it. We had recently restocked the freezer, so it was full of meat.

Just short of Usino the sling cable broke, and the freezer vanished through the rainforest canopy a couple of hundred feet below. The sudden loss of the load gave Bill a hell of a fright. The survey was wrapped up after another four weeks at Usino. I could not wait to get back to Port Moresby to fly south to get married!

Bulolo-Wau (14 January to 3 February 1967) This survey was to assess the forests around Bulolo and to the south and east of Wau. Evan Shield was again the survey leader. We started with our first camp on the Bulolo Forestry Station which was quite comfortable. Here again my routine quickly focused on medical work, radio schedules and camp discipline, with the occasional foray into the bush to cut pads. I had an opportunity to explore some of the old gold dredges from the pre-war gold rush. The fact that these massive machines had been fitted piece by piece into aircraft of the time in Lae and then flown into Bulolo was amazing.

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Bulolo dredge, January 1966.

After only 12 days in Bulolo we moved camp to the Wau Forestry Station for the rest of my time on survey. Some of the people in the areas that we were surveying, such as around Mumeng, were not happy that we were entering their land, so I spent quite a bit of time talking to the local government council and villagers to get things sorted out.

On 2 February I had driven down to Bulolo to repair two chainsaws in preparation for more pad cutting and as I drove back into the camp at Wau, Evan handed me a note through the window of the Land Rover that simply read “Tell Ken Granger that his wife had a baby this morning”! Our daughter had arrived about four weeks prematurely, so I abandoned the survey the next morning.

I was quite pleased to be off surveys for a while and was acting Management Clerk for a couple of months while Bob Laybut was on leave. That gave me some insights into the processes that needed to be followed to convert the information gathered during the surveys and their subsequent mapping and analysis to timber rights purchases and they are eventually opening up to logging.

Ioma-Kumusi (15 May to 14 July 1967) My final survey was again with Eric Hammermaster, this time in Northern District north from the Kumusi River (north of Popondetta) to the New Guinea border. Our base camp for the entire survey was on the Ioma government station. I was to be in my role as camp organiser because one of the new draftsmen that the Department had employed, David White, was to do the drafting work. Unfortunately, David suffered a severe asthma attack not long into the survey, so I was back doing the drafting work as well.

It was a fairly standard survey with six or seven teams being flown out to pads identified by Hammer and me during our reconnaissance flights. One deviation from the norm was to be dropped over near the coast to undertake a defect study of a stand of Anisoptera that had been impacted by a severe storm (some claimed a tornado) some years previously. I was away from camp for four nights and felled four trees, each of them with a diameter of more than a metre and systematically sectioned them to measure and piping or other defects.

The only other event that sticks in my brain was being woken by Bill Wallace at 1:00 am to be told that there was a native lady just near the camp and my medical services were required. The 42

lady had been walking from her village to the aid post at Ioma and had managed to get across the high wire suspension bridge over the river at the edge of the station when she went into late-stage labour. She was accompanied by her sister and had got to the edge of the camp when the baby decided to come. I was able to deliver the baby without any problems, clamp and cut the cord and hand the baby to its aunt. She promptly took the baby to the river and washed it – the trauma of coming from the warmth of the womb to being plunged into a cold river must have been incredible. The aunt then proceeded to gather hibiscus leaves and asked if she could make a tea from them to help expel the placenta. I had sent one of our lads to the aid post and once the placenta had been delivered the lady and her newborn daughter were stretchered off to the aid post with the aid post orderly. After a good stiff scotch, I went back to bed.

After a couple of months of processing field data and mapping the forest types I was offered the acting position of Silviculture Clerk working to Kev White and so ended my engagement with the resource assessment survey side of the forestry business in PNG. Some reflections The fact that a small group of foresters, technical officers, cartographers, and labourers had managed to develop a detailed understanding of the forest resources of the main resource areas of TPNG in the space of five or six years was amazing. When I consider the basic spatial information and technology that was available to us it is even more incredible.

The main aerial photographic coverage available had been flown by the USAF in the early post-war years (mainly around 1948-9) and was known as the MM series. This series had a notional scale of around 1:50,000 but coverage was limited mainly to the lowland areas of the mainland and islands. By the mid-1950s the Commonwealth Division of National Mapping had begun to commission photography over areas that were to be covered by the CSIRO integrated land system surveys, mostly in the highlands and the Sepik area. This photography was flown by the commercial firm Adastra Aviation and was known as the CAJ series. By the mid-1960s further commercial players such as QASCO entered the field.

For a period QASCO maintained an office in Port Moresby. They mostly undertook projecttype coverage, mainly in areas that had been identified for agricultural development such as the north coast of New Britain where oil palm plantations were being developed and the Panguna-Kieta area of Bougainville. Southbank Aviation also undertook project coverage of the more densely populated parts of the Gazelle Peninsula in 1969. That coverage included some of the first colour aerial photography over PNG. It was not until 1973 that Australia committed to produce a Territory-wide air photo coverage to facilitate the complete mapping program to be undertaken by the Australian Army Survey Corps (RASvy). That photography was flown by the RAAF and known as the Skai Piksa coverage.

The only topographic maps that were available in 1962 were the wartime maps which were generally limited to the areas in which fighting took place. The largest scale maps were at onemile-to-the-inch (1:63,360) and while they did have good planimetric representation of the major drainage their contours (or form lines) were not all that accurate. A smaller scale series at four-miles-to-the-inch (1:253,440) was also available. These had major blanks with annotations such as “no details”, especially in the highland areas. Some of the CAJ photography was compiled by National Mapping into uncontrolled photo mosaics covering areas such as the Wahgi Valley to support the CSIRO surveys. Cadastral mapping of the areas such as the Gazelle Peninsula and the major towns where there had been significant alienation of native land were maintained by the Department of Lands and were generally quite accurate.

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It was not until the early 1970s that the RASvy began to produce the modern and detailed 1:100,000 maps covering the whole Territory. They also produced 1:50,000 mapping over selected areas such as the Gazelle Peninsula.

Irreplaceable support The unsung heroes of the forest assessment survey effort were our wives. Most of us became married in the period between 1964 and 1968 and most of us started families fairly soon after that so when we went bush for three or four months at a time our wives were left at home to cope with pregnancy, babies, young children, and life in an alien society without our direct support and input.

These wonderful strong women supported each other in so many ways that we blokes will probably never understand. We, and PNG, owe them a huge debt.

Among these women I would simply acknowledge Pat Cavanagh, Barbara McIntosh, Mary Hammermaster, Sue Pearson, Lyn Brown, Vivian Shield, Deidre Cameron, Colleen Vickers, Mary Jenkins and of course my wife Judy.

Forestry Headquarters 1967-1970 Being married and with a new child it was time for me to forego the “pleasures” of field work on assessment surveys and stay closer to home. To that end I applied for the position of Silviculture Clerk when it came up in August 1967 and became involved in the operations of the Silviculture Division under Kev White. The work was largely clerical with the keeping of statistics on plantation areas and growth rates sent in from Keravat, Bulolo, Wau and Brown River. It also involved the writing of letters to various agencies and the processing of phytosanitary certificates to accompany select seed, such as Kamarere or Hoop Pine that was being sent from PNG to overseas countries, especially in Latin America. I had become a kuskus.

I was able to escape the office late in 1967 for the burn-off of a new plantation area in the Brown River plantations. It was probably the largest burn that had been undertaken at Brown River and was managed by Alan Cameron as well as the regional and station personnel. The operation was supported by signallers from the PNGDF for safety and control purposes. I am not sure why Alan was in the field because his wife Deirdre was due to give birth back in Port Moresby and indeed during the burn, we received a message via the Army signallers that Deirdre had in fact given birth. The strange thing that sticks in my mind was that Taurama Barracks could not raise the signallers in the field, but the message got through via the base in Vanimo!

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Alan Cameron and I on the Brown River burn, October 1967.

The 1967 Brown River burn under way.

In the “late 60s”, the Konedobu Club served as a virtual branch office for the headquarters folks especially on a Friday afternoon. It was a good place to keep in touch with people from other departments, especially DASF (the didimen).

Kev White and Keith Cullen (back to camera) “in conference” at the Kone Club, 1968.

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One of the projects that got under way at that time was an extension program to encourage villagers, especially in the highlands, to plant wood lots to provide firewood. The main species encouraged was Casuarina or Yar as it is called in Tok Pisin. The campaign was supported by pamphlets that showed how to “planim diwai yar”. John Lowien had taken up a new position in Mt Hagen and was the main coordinator of the project.

Kev had also become involved in the preparation of the new Hubert Murray Stadium ahead of the third South Pacific Games (and first for PNG) to be held in 1969. I was roped in to help with the landscaping and the establishment of the grass on the oval. It provided another opportunity to get out of the office.

Kev White, Port Moresby 1968.

With the main resource assessment survey program starting to wind up the next stage of developing the forest resource was to purchase the timber rights from the local people. I had had some experience of this process in New Britain, and I think I was poached by Jim Cavanagh to shift from the Silviculture Division back to the Management Division as Management Clerk with a focus on the process of formally gazetting the timber rights purchases that were starting to get under way. This process involved preparing the legal description of the boundaries of the purchase area. Given that the boundaries of most of the larger purchase areas were not surveyed, the description typically involved terms such as “from the mouth of the Toriu River at the coast upstream for approximately 15 miles to its headwaters then following the crest of the ridge that runs to the east for approximately 10 miles to the headwaters of the Bookoo River …” and so on. The whole lot was without punctuation and had to be vetted by the Lands Department before it could be formally gazetted.

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The kuskus.

Timber rights purchases were for a specified period (from memory 50 years), and they gave the Government the right to lease the resource to commercial operators. The land remained in the ownership of the local people, and they could still use the land for other uses including gardening and hunting. This was explained in terms such as “Gavman I no baim graun, I baim diwai tasol”.

This form of tenure was consistent with the traditional form of land tenure which, in most of PNG, were simple rights of use (usufructary rights) rather than ownership in the western sense.

A villager might be given the right to garden an area while another villager would be given the right to harvest galip nuts from trees on that land and another villager could be given the rights to hunt pigs on the same land. This approach was consistent with the Australian Government (and United Nations) requirement to limit the alienation of land to that which was essential for development purposes such as resettlement schemes, ports, townships, or airfield sites. At the time of Independence less than 4% of the PNG area had been alienated and most of that was in the Gazelle Peninsula. Those alienations mostly dated from German times in the 1880s and 90s.

The Vanimo area was one of the first major areas over which timber rights were purchased and the first area to be advertised internationally for expressions of interest to harvest the timber.

Jim Cavanagh was the point of contact for this marketing process, and he dealt with the representatives of major forest products firms from Canada, USA, and Japan such as the Weyerheuser Company and the Tuolumne Corporation. From memory the only Australian company that expressed any interest was Herons Creek from NSW. Around the same time the Gogol area was opened up to the Japanese firm JANT to exploit the forest for wood chips through the chip mill and loading facility on Madang Harbour. David (Docker) Reid was the Department’s man on the ground in Madang at the time.

With this increase in activity the Department began recruiting additional support staff, particularly in the drawing office and clerical support. Among the new faces that joined the Department between 1967 and 1970 were David White and Neil Morse (both ex-Army cartographers), Bob McKeowen (draftsman), John Ringwood (journalist to boost the 47

promotional work), Freddie Kleckham and Diane Flower (clerical staff - both children of longtime kiaps). There was also an increase in the number of foresters joining the Department after completing their cadetships and graduating from the Forestry College in Canberra. They included Chris Done, John Davidson, David Num and Dick McCarthy. Entomologist Barry Gray also joined to tackle the problems caused by the Sirex wasp in the hoop pine plantations of Wau-Bulolo.

With the new staff came new ideas and suggestions of new technologies. In the drawing office, Neil Morse started to make terrain models to use in the marketing of timber leases, the first of them was an area on the southern flank of Mt Giluwe in the Southern Highlands District. He followed that up with a model of the island of New Britain. These models were based on polyurethane sheets cut to the contours from the four-mile-to-the-inch maps and then using a two-pack material to smooth in the landforms. He and Dave White also established a gallery camera in the small demountable that we had used to store the field books from the various surveys. The gallery camera greatly improved the mapping and graphics output of the drawing office.

I had continued my interest in photo interpretation and with the encouragement of Jim Cavanaugh had started to develop a photo interpretation key as an aid for others to identify various forest communities using the experience that I had gained over the past five years. As part of that exercise, I developed a twin camera mount to be used from a helicopter to obtain stereo images from a single station. I was able to borrow a Rolleicord twin lens reflex camera from DIES to match my own Rolleicord and had a mount made up by one of the aircraft engineers at the Jacksons airport to hold them. They were released simultaneously with two cable releases. It was a bit of a “Heath-Robinson” device, but it was successfully trialled over Brown River in early 1968. It was a bit cumbersome to use because the film had to be wound on individually with each camera after every exposure and in a chopper that was a challenge – but it did the job.

The single station stereo camera rig, 1968.

I also experimented with using a range of film and filter combinations, as well as infra-red film, to see if they could enhance certain characteristics of tone, such as leaf flush, to make it easier to identify individual crowns in the forest canopy. All good fun but it did not go very far.

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Another innovation was developed to map the pulp wood volumes across the Cape Rodney area. The area had been surveyed using continuous sampling on a set grid pattern and Dave Num hit on the idea of using the format of a 136-character printer of an accounting machine to print the volumes in the same pattern as they were sampled on the ground. This was effectively the first computer mapping of PNG forests and possibly a first for Australia as well.

The late 1960’s were interesting political times in PNG as the push towards Self-Government and ultimately Independence were being openly discussed. The second House of Assembly was elected in 1968 and the first signs of what could be called “Nationalist” movements began to emerge among people in areas such as the Gazelle Peninsula and Bougainville. The newly opened University of PNG at Waigani also provided a forum for the first generation of “radicals” such as Leo Hannett, Leo Morgan, and John Kasaipwalova. Other voices began to emerge to advocate for various forms of Self-Government (e.g., John Momis on Bougainville) or the return of alienated land (e.g., the Mataungan Society and Warbete Kivung movements in the Gazelle Peninsula with leaders such as John Kaputin and Oscar Tammur). For the most part these political stirrings had little impact on Forests Headquarters, at least as far as I could tell. It was clear, however, that a career in PNG had a rapidly approaching use-by date.

I started studies in Geography (three years under Gerry Ward and David Lea), Political Science (one year under Charles Rowley) and Anthropology (one year under Ralph Bulmer) part-time in 1968. This was on the newly opened campus of the University of PNG (UPNG) at Waigani.

This was aimed at better equipping me for obtaining a reasonable job back in Australia when the time came for Judy and our young family to “go finish”. I found the environment at UPNG stimulating, especially given the increasing numbers of nationals in classes and tutorials and their preparedness to voice their own opinions and perspectives.

David Lea (Geography) lecturing at UPNG, 1969.

UPNG was to host the annual ANZAAS Conference in August 1970. Gerry Ward and David Lea had decided to produce an atlas of PNG to support the conference. They asked me if it would be possible to include an entry on the forest resources. After discussing with Don McIntosh, I prepared a map (in black and white) and the accompanying text, and it was eventually published with Don as senior author and myself as junior author. The map reflected our knowledge at the time.

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Forest resources map from the 1970 ANZAAS Conference atlas.

The situation on the Gazelle Peninsula was beginning to create concern in Administration circles, especially as the calls for the handover of expatriate plantations became more loudly heard. It was clear that the significant amount of alienated land, coupled with the rapid growth in the Tolai population since the War were creating a politically volatile situation. As part of my third year Geography course, I chose to undertake a “special study” in geography looking at the population and land issues on the Gazelle. I was supported in that study both by Don McIntosh and the Land Development Board.

This study was also made possible by aerial photography flown over the area in 1969 and the involvement of the Royal Australian Army Survey Corps (RASvy) to produce the first large scale topographic map of the area since WW II. As part of that project, I interpreted the new air photos to produce a very detailed land use typing at a scale of 1:50,000 that was eventually incorporated into the Army 1:100,000 maps. My study clearly demonstrated that the pressure on available land for subsistence gardens and cacao cash cropping at the village level was at the heart of the unrest and that the creation of resettlement schemes like the small-holder oil palm plantations being established around Kimbe in West New Britain, were not attractive to the Tolai.

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Gazelle Peninsula land use mapping from 1968 photography.

I was invited by Gerry Ward to present a paper based on my study at a seminar run by the ANU New Guinea Research Unit. This was the first time I had been asked to present a public lecture of this kind and it was reported in the Post Courier the following day, accompanied by a photo of John Kaputin. The article read: DISCONTENT “MAKES GROUP POPULAR” An administration official has attributed popularity of the Mataungan Association to “frustration and discontent”.

This was caused by under-employment in the Gazelle Peninsula, he said.

The official, Mr K.J. Granger, of the Department of Forests, said relief of the Gazelle land alienation stress demanded changes in social attitudes.

Mr Granger was delivering a paper to a seminar on “Population Growth and Economic Development” at the University of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby this week.

He said under-employment of some Tolais invariably led to frustration and discontent.

“This is evident in the popularity and support for the Mataungan Association and Warbete Kivung group,” he said.

There appears to be a close correlation between areas of most intense political unrest and those with a concentration of cash cropping.”

He said the correlation of unrest and alienated land was rather tenuous. The areas of strongest unrest were populous and had a high concentration of indigenous cash cropping.

The unequal distribution of land, particularly in areas of dense population, could be seen as the major problem facing the Tolais, he said.

A survey last year had shown that some people had far more land than they needed, while the resources of others were “very meagre”.

The desire for land was paramount among the Tolai people, Mr Granger said.

“Any large-scale transfer of alienated land to Tolai ownership would not only have a severe impact on the Territory’s economy but would also displace some 27,000 51

indigenes, a majority of whom come from land-short areas such as Maprik, Chimbu and Tari.

“Is the provision of land the solution to the problem? I would say it is only a small part.

Most of the landless Tolai are unskilled in commercial agriculture and lacking in wealth to establish themselves as cash croppers. They would require considerable assistance with finance and technical advice, neither of which is readily available in Papua and New Guinea,” he said.

Mr Granger supported the idea put forward by Mataungan advocate, Mr John Kaputin, whose proposed Development Corporation was aimed at providing employment in business apart from primary production.

“The combination of population increase, land alienation and changes in agricultural pursuits of the Tolai has created socio-economic stress. Relief of this stress demands change, not only of the demographic situation, but also of social attitudes. The wholesale provision of land may only alleviate the problem, not solve it,” he said.

I was also busy during this time writing the first drafts of New Horizons and accumulating photos to illustrate that work. The idea for such a book on the forest resources of PNG came from the increasing tempo of moves towards the development of the resource and the desire to promote the work of the Department. I had pretty well drafted the final text and set out most of the photos with assistance from Peter Eddowes, John Ringwood, Neville Moderate (photographer with DIES) and the publications staff in the Department of Territories in Canberra before I “went finish” in December 1970. Before I left PNG, I handed over the project to Richard Pape, an editor at DIES and Phil Ainsworth. I was at least credited as author of the forest resources map (in colour) and the population map when New Horizons was published by Jacaranda Press in 1971.

My eight years in PNG Forests provided me with a wide range of skills and knowledge and laid down a solid foundation for the rest of my career as a professional geographer.

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Life after PNG Ken, with his wife Judy and young family, left PNG at the end of 1970. Ken took up a position of Photo Interpreter in the Joint Intelligence Organisation of the Department of Defence in Canberra. Over the following 20 years Ken rose through various positions in Military Geography, Imagery Analysis, Current Intelligence, National Assessments as an analyst and manager. Ken completed a BApSc degree in Applied Geography in 1975. He returned to PNG from 1976 to 1980 as First Secretary (Political and Economic) in the Australian High Commission in Port Moresby. During that posting he was the only Australian-based member on the staff that spoke Tok Pisin and had some understanding of the “Melanesian Way”.

Between 1983 and 1988 he completed a MA in Geography (by research) at the ANU in which he demonstrated the potential use of the emerging technology of geographic information system (GIS) as a tool to manage disasters using the 1984 volcanic crisis in Rabaul as his case study.

In 1989 Ken was awarded a Defence Fellowship and spent twelve months working out of the ANU’s Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies (CRES) looking at the strategic military geography of Australia’s north and north-west. This was the first time in his career to that date that Ken had done work in Australia.

In 1990 he was appointed as a Scientific Advisor in the Chemical Hazards and Emergency Management (CHEM) Unit of the Queensland Department of Police and Emergency Services.

His primary role was to develop and introduce GIS tools and technologies to support all elements of the department (police, fire, ambulance, and SES). One of his first clients was the fire service where GIS quickly demonstrated the potential to model response times to events and to manage the boundaries of rural brigades.

In 1996 Ken was “head hunted” to lead the Geohazard Risk to Urban Communities Project (better known as the Cities Project) for the Australian Geological Survey Organisation (AGSO – now Geoscience Australia). This project was undertaken in close collaboration with the Bureau of Meteorology. Over the following 4 years Ken and his team completed demonstration projects examining the risks posed by various natural hazards (earthquake, landslide, cyclone, flood, heat wave and bushfire) to Cairns, Mackay, Gladstone, and the area of south-east Queensland from Caboolture to the Gold Coast. The techniques and spatial modelling tools developed under that program established the standards for disaster risk assessments across Australia.

Ken “retired” (for the first time) in 2001 but was again “recruited” into commercialising the experience and techniques that he had developed under the Cities Project to consultancies under various names. The last consultancy that he served a Managing Director was Environmental Risk Science and Audit (ERSA) P/L. Ken undertook his last consultancy (a bushfire risk to a major commercial nursery business on the Sunshine Coast) in 2018. He has been fully and happily retired with Judy on Buderim on the Sunshine Coast. Since 2001 Ken and Judy have indulged their passions for travel – typically expedition cruises to remote localities such as the Antarctic and Greenland: as well as caravanning to the more remote parts of Australia. Along the way they have become avid bird watchers usually with a group from the Sunshine Coast U3A. Ken also keeps his researcher brain occupied developing and presenting lectures, mainly with a geographic focus, to U3A groups on the Coast.

Ken is an applied geographer, and his career has been largely in the public safety field. He is a leading protagonist of the application of geographic information systems (GIS) as decision 53

support tools in the public safety environment. Ken holds BAppSc in Applied Geography (CCAE) and MA (ANU) degrees and is a member of several professional bodies including AURISA and the Modelling and Simulation Society of Australia.

Life was never meant to be boring!

Selected Publications 2001 to 2018 more than thirty major consultant reports to local governments in Queensland, NSW, South Australia, New Zealand, and Vanuatu relating to multi-hazard disaster risk management assessments, reports and guidelines.

2014 Ken Granger, Dimensions of disaster management, submission to the Productivity Commission Review of Disaster Management.

2014 Ken Granger, Disaster risk assessments for local governments: a practitioner’s guide, ERSA P/L. 2014 Ken Granger, Flo Bridger & Mikila Rosewall, ‘Emergency risk management in Australia and the Pacific: information, policy and governance’, Proceedings, Australian and New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management Conference, Surfers Paradise, Gold Coast (QLD).

2011 Ken Granger and Tony Batten ‘The path ahead for emergency management: informing decision making’, presentation to the Council for Economic Development in Australia (CEDA) Thought Leadership Forum Managing major catastrophes, Brisbane.

2007 Ken Granger and Graham Shorten ‘Evacuation and shelter in disasters and emergencies – some observations on the theory and practice’, unpublished contribution to a review of the Auckland (NZ) evacuation planning review.

2006 Ken Granger ‘Anatomy of a Southeast Queensland heatwave’, in Child R. And Hudson B. (eds) Queensland Geographic Perspectives, Geographic Monograph Series No. 12, Royal Geographical Society of Queensland, Brisbane.

2005 Ken Granger Safe, sustainable, and secure communities: a geographer’s perspective, Geography Monograph Series 11, Royal Geographical Society of Queensland, Brisbane.

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2003 Ken Granger ‘Cairns: a community at risk’ Editorial, Natural Hazards 30 (2), pp 109-128, Kluwer Academic.

2003 Susanne Schmall, Ken Granger, Graham Shorten and Purnima Naidu: “Blending custom knowledge and science to reduce risk in three settlements near Port Vila, Vanuatu”, Proceedings 2003 Australian Disaster Conference, Canberra.

2003 Ken Granger ‘Quantifying storm tide risk’, Natural Hazards 30 (2), pp 165-185, Kluwer Academic.

2003 Ken Granger and Klaus Schelling: ‘Homes amongst the gum trees: measuring bushfire risk in Pine Rivers Shire’, Proceedings, Spatial Sciences 2003 Conference, Canberra.

2003 Susanne Schmall, Ken Granger, Graham Shorten and Purnima Naidu: ‘Blending custom knowledge and science to reduce risk in three settlements near Port Vila, Vanuatu’, Proceedings 2003 Australian Disaster Conference, Canberra.

2002 Ken Granger: ‘Floods, information and GIS: improving our understanding of flood risk’, in D.I. Smith and J. Handmer (editors) Residential flood insurance: the implications for floodplain management policies, Water Research Foundation of Australia, Canberra.

2001 Ken Granger and Matt Hayne (editors): Natural hazards and the risks they pose to South-East Queensland, Australian Geological Survey Organisation, Canberra.

2001 Ken Granger and Marion Michael-Leiba (editors): Community risk in Gladstone: a multi-hazard risk assessment, Australian Geological Survey Organisation, Canberra.

2000 Miriam Middelmann and Ken Granger (editors): Community risk in Mackay: a multi-hazard risk assessment, Australian Geological Survey Organisation, Canberra.

1999 Ken Granger: An information infrastructure for disaster management in Pacific Island Countries, AGSO Record 1999/35, Australian Geological Survey Organisation, Canberra 1999 Ken Granger, Trevor Jones, Marian Leiba and Greg Scott: Community risk in Cairns: a multi-hazard risk assessment, Australian Geological Survey Organisation, Canberra.

1998 Ken Granger: ASDI (Australian Spatial Data Infrastructure) from the ground up, Australia New Zealand Land Information Council and AGSO, Canberra.

1995 Ken Granger and Wally Johnson: Hazard management: better information for the 21st Century, Emergency Management Australia, Canberra.

1992 Ken Granger: Geographic information and remote sensing technologies in the defence of Australia, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre Working Paper No. 253, Australian National University, Canberra.

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1989 Ken Granger: A very different place: Australia’s north-west frontier, Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University and Department of Defence, Canberra.

1988 Ken Granger: The Rabaul volcanos: an application of geographic information systems to crisis management, unpublished MA Thesis, Australian National University.

1971-1999 numerous classified intelligence reports and assessments, Joint Intelligence Organisation, Department of Defence, Canberra.

1971 Ken Granger: Territory of Papua and New Guinea population distribution, map at 1:2,500,000 scale, Commonwealth Division of National Mapping, Canberra.

1971 Ken Granger: “Population and land in the Gazelle Peninsula” in M. Ward (ed) Population growth and socio-economic change, New Guinea Research Bulletin No 42, New Guinea Research Unit ANU, Canberra.

1970 Ken Granger: Land use in the Gazelle Peninsula, report to the PNG Land Development Board.

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Ken Granger’s Bibliography.

NAME Year of Birth Date joined Forestry PNG Occupation Work localities

Departure PNG Life after PNG

Ken Granger 1941 7th July 1963 Technical Officer 1963-67 Management Clerk 1967-1970 My initial experience in PNG was with CSIRO survey in the Southern Highlands in 1961. With Forestry, I was initially posted to Kerevat and engaged in resource assessment in Manus; New Ireland; New Britain and Bougainville.

Posted to Port Moresby and continued resource assessment work in New Britain; Madang; Morobe and Northern Provinces until 1967.

Acted as Silvicultural Clerk for 6 months in 1967 and then occupied the Management Clerk position until I resigned.

16 December 1970 I left PNG to a position as Photo Interpreter in the Joint Intelligence Organisation of Defence in Canberra. Worked in various positions in strategic intelligence analysis till September 1990. This included 4 years (1976-80) as the JIO Representative in the Australian High Commission in Port Moresby. From 1990 to 1996 I worked as a scientific advisor in the Queensland Department of Emergency Services.

From 1996 to 2001 contract consultant to the Australian Geological Survey Organization managing a research project on analysing risks posed by natural disaster in urban communities 2001- 2017 consultant in disaster risk management.

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ACRONYMS ACT ACIAR ACLMP AEC AFS AFPNG AIF AMF ANBG ANGAU ANU APMF APPM ASIO ASOPA AusAID BA BCOF “Beer Time” BFC BGD BUC C cm CALM CFA CNGT CRE CRE

CSIRO CHAH DASF DBH/ dbh DEPT DPI DOF e.g.

Etc FAO F &TB FIM FPRC FRG FRI

Australian Capital Territory Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research AusAid funded World Bank Land Mobilisation program.

Administrators Executive Committee Australian Forestry School Association of Foresters of PNG Australian Infantry Forces Australian Military Forces Australian National Botanical Gardens Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit Australian National University Australian Paper Manufacturers Forestry Pty Ltd Australia Paper and Pulp Manufacturers Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Australian School of Pacific Administration Australian Aid Agency basal area British Commonwealth Occupational Force 1945-52 Any time.

Bulolo Forestry College Bulolo Gold Dredging Company Bulolo University College Commonwealth Centimetre Western Australian Department of Conservation and Land Management Commonwealth Forestry Association Commonwealth New Guinea Timbers Bulolo Commander Royal Engineers CRE is a term inherited by RAE from RE and is the term for the Commanding Officer of a RAE unit which is headed by a Lt Col. Although the officer is called the CRE the name is also used for the name of his unit.

E.g., CRE Aust Forestry Group or 1(NG Forests).

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria Dept of Agriculture, Stock and Fisheries Diameter at breast height Department Department of Primary Industry Department of Forests For example et cetera (more of the same) Food and Agriculture Organisation Forest and Timber Bureau Canberra Forest Information System Forest Products Research Centre Hohola Forest Red Gum Forest Research Institute Lae 58

Forkol GAB Gbhob Gubab GIS ha IBRD IFA IFY ITTO JICA L of N LRRS m3 MM NAA NARI NB NFCAP no.

NG NGF NGIB NGO NGVR NZ NSW NTSC OISCA P or p PIB PIR PNG PNGAA PNGAF PNGFA PNGFIA PNGRIS PNGUT POM Q QF RAE RPC RRA SFM SP UK UN

Bulolo Forestry College Girth above buttress Girth breast height over bark Girth under bark above buttress Geographic Information Systems Hectare International Bank for Reconstruction and Development Institute of Foresters of Australia International Year of the Forest International Tropical Timber Organization Japanese International Cooperation Agency League of Nations Land Resource Soils Survey (branch of CSIRO) cubic metre Military Medal National Archives Australia National Agriculture Research Institute New Britain PNG National Forestry and Conservation Action Plan Number New Guinea New Guinea Forces (relates to plant collection of Lae Herbarium) New Guinea Infantry Battalion Non-Government Organisation New Guinea Volunteer Rifles New Zealand New South Wales National Tree Seed Centre PNG Bulolo Organisation for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement International Japan. page Papuan Infantry Battalion Pacific Islands Regiment Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea Australia Association Papua New Guinea Australian Foresters Magazine Series Papua New Guinea Forest Authority PNG Forest Industries Association Papua New Guinea Resource Information System PNG University of Technology Port Moresby Queensland Queensland Forestry Royal Australian Engineers/Australian Army Royal Papuan Constabulary Rapid Resource Appraisal Sustainable Forest Management South Pacific United Kingdom United Nations 59

Unasylva UNE UNEP UNI UNITECH UNRE UPNG UQ US USA TPNG TUBL TA TA TRP Vol VSF WA WB

Journal of FAO of UN University of New England Armidale NSW United Nations Environment Program University University of Technology Lae PNG University of Natural Resources and Environment University of Papua New Guinea University of Queensland United States United States of America Territory of Papua and New Guinea Territory United Brewery Ltd Timber Area Timber Authority Timber Rights Purchase volume Victorian School of Forestry Western Australia World Bank

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