Throughout my many years in PNG and trips to other Pacific Island Nations I have at times found myself in the thick of things quite unknowingly.
Having lived in the “Land of the Unknown” for so long it is the “unknown” that can suddenly surprise you without any warning and it can be anything from a tribal fight, a shoot-out, a sudden earthquake, a pay-back killing, a sudden landslide along a mountain road, hitting a pig as you drive along, caught up in a bank robbery or to being lost in the jungle. I have been through them all.
My first experience was with a bush walking club in Port Moresby in the early 1960’s. A group of ten of us decided one Sunday to do a walk up in the mountainous region some 40 km out from Port Moresby near Sogeri. The “track” had been pre-planned and it involved a fair bit of trekking down very steep hills and gullies, crossing a river or two and to re-assemble at our starting point where we had left our vehicles.
We were all well prepared, each carrying water, mosquito repellents, matches, food and first-aid kits, compass and maps etc. We estimated the walk would take about six to eight hours to complete and we set out by 7.30am one Sunday morning.
The first few hours were reasonably easy going, lots of ups and downs, a creek or two to cross until we came to our first major obstacle, a river. It was strewn with small to very large boulders, about fifty meters wide and a really steep embankment on the opposite side. The water was from ankle deep to chest deep and flowing reasonably fast in places.
We decided to “split” into two groups of five. The first group to go across while the others waited on the embankment to make sure they got across safely. It took about ten minutes or so for them to make the crossing then they had to wait up along the track on the opposite embankment for us and this they did.
We were also aware that these rivers could have flash floods from a rain squall many kilometres away and by the time we had reached this second river crossing we could hear thunder in the distance.
Our group was about three-quarters the way across the river and we could feel the flow of the river increasing and we realised that a possible flash flood was on the way. We knew we couldn’t make it to the track on the opposite embankment but about fifty meters downstream was a natural wall of rocks that linked up to the opposite embankment so we let ourselves float down in the rising water and all safely scrambled up onto the rock wall and made our way over the boulders to the embankment. We found another track going up the embankment, started scrambling up it and we were about twenty meters up this track when next a wall of water about two meters high came charging down the river at a very fast pace and hit the wall of rocks and the water shot up into the air for about ten meters or so. It was indeed a spectacular sight to see but we also realised that had we been down there on those rocks none of us would have survived.
We started calling out to the other group but the roar of the water would have drowned out our calls. We climbed and crawled up this steep embankment and finally made it to the top, but where were we? By now the sun was low in the western horizon and we decided to keep walking along this very narrow track. We had all pre-arranged that should we get separated that whoever gets back to the vehicles to wait for as long as possible for the other group. While our group was  walking along this other track I climbed a tree and I could just barely make out the location of where our cars were (at least 15 km away through thick jungle) and by now it was getting darker so we decided to make a rough camp in a small clearing.
In the meantime the other group had got back to their cars, waited until around 8 pm then knew we could not make it out so went back to Port Moresby to raise the alarm
We had a really bad night on the track because of constant mosquito bites, very hard ground to try and sleep on and the possibility of snakes visiting us and the night itself was very warm and humid.
As soon as dawn broke the next morning (Monday), we started along the track and soon after I spotted smoke rising in the distance and knew it would be a native village. We reached the village about an hour or so later and the local inhabitants were quite surprised to see five white expats strolling into their village and all looking as if we had been through a war zone.
They had heard that a group of people were “lost” and as soon as the chief of the village saw us he ordered cups of tea be made, started putting their own local hand-made ointments on all our scratches and wounds, dealt with the leeches hanging from us and sent two native boys to race out to the roadside about a kilometre away to raise the alarm.
About an hour after entering the village our friends turned up to take us back to Port Moresby and after thanking the village people for their kindness we were all glad to get home to a nice cool shower and out of our dirty and sweaty clothes.
This was my very first foray into the jungles of New Guinea and what to expect and this incident proved very valuable to me in the future whenever I went in the jungles in other parts of PNG in later years.
Several years later in 1969 when Penny and I were living in Lae we decided to go for a Sunday drive up to Madang about 280km away. The turn-off to Madang along the Highlands Highway is about 90 km out. We were in the company Landcruiser which had a bull bar fitted on the front and as we passed through a village about 60 km out, (with huts on both sides of the road), a rather large pig suddenly shot out from nowhere right into the path of our vehicle. I swerved to miss it but I collected it on the corner of the bull bar and the pig shot up into the air for about two feet or so and landed in the grass on the edge of the road and didn’t move.
A pig to any of the tribes in PNG is a very valuable commodity indeed and it would be like us owning a very expensive Rolls Royce car, they are that valuable. I decided to keep driving on, for to stop would have put us in possible danger and a very hefty compensation payment. We drove on for about another five kilometres and stopped under a tree to think about the situation.
Being a Sunday morning, the village looked rather deserted when we passed through it, so we reckoned the inhabitants would have been at a church somewhere. I decided to return to Lae and as we approached this village I slowed down to about 50 km per hour, there wasn’t any “excitement” amongst the villagers to indicate a pig of theirs was dead and when we were about midway through the village we saw the pig that we had hit wandering around as if nothing had happened. We could only imagine that the pig was momentarily stunned when we hit it, hence it laying still on the edge of the road.
Believe me, both Penny and I were very relieved indeed to see the pig alive that morning. Over following years I hit about three more pigs in different locations around PNG but luckily they only had glancing blows. I’ve seen tribes go to war against each other over the road death of a pig and the compensation demands are extremely high running into thousands upon thousands of Kina (PNG currency).
Of all the places we lived in PNG through the years, the town of Mount Hagen up in the Western Highlands would have been the most “exciting”. I was the branch manager of Ela Motors during our nearly four year stint there, (1979-1983), and the branch itself and living compound were situated right next door to the main Police barracks which once used to be a small coffee plantation.

Police Barracks, Mount Hagen. This is taken from the exact spot outside my office where I was filming the police shoot-out. The deranged policeman was in front of the first building on the left (above the vehicles parked in the yard). The Police Commanders office is the wide door on the right. The armoury is behind the commanders office (not seen in this photot. The main highway is on the left.

28 new Toyota Police vehicles. I delivered these Toyota vehicles to the Mount Hagen Police the day before I took this photo also from my office landing. 

On Thursday morning 17th June 1982 around 9am I was talking with the workshop manager in his office when next my secretary came racing down to tell me that a policeman was shooting wildly. I raced upstairs to my office landing that looked over to the police barracks next door and I could see a native policeman with a rifle in his hand running to and fro and shooting randomly in all directions. I soon found out that he had broken into the police armoury, grabbed a fully loaded M16 semi-automatic rifle, gone and shot the police commander dead in his office and was out to kill anyone else who got in his way.
I raced down to our company house about twenty meters away in the staff compound, grabbed my movie camera, raced up onto the landing near my office and started filming the “action”. In the meantime, a rather large crowd of locals had gathered outside the compound along the roadway and whenever the policeman pointed his rifle in their direction they would dive for cover into the roadside gutters or just lay flat on the road.
In the meantime other policemen had armed themselves and were trying to get shots at him but as soon as he saw them he would let of a couple of rounds in their direction. From where he was to where I was on my office landing was over a hundred meters in distance and when he looked over towards me he must have thought that my movie camera that had an extended microphone on it to record sound onto the film was possibly a small weapon so he pointed the rifle in my direction and let off three shots.
The very moment I saw him turn in my direction I dived flat onto the landing and luckily I did for the three bullets he fired in my direction hit the wall barely a meter above me. Had I remained standing up I’m sure I would have been hit by at least one of the bullets. I then moved out along the roadway to try and get some more shots with my movie camera and soon after two other policemen came racing out from different directions from around a building and leaving their M16’s on automatic fire they managed to hit the policeman in the stomach with one of their bursts. He was to die later that night in hospital from the wounds he received.
This whole incident was over in about five minutes or so but it certainly made headlines in the news and newspapers. It appears that this “deranged” policeman was involved in a motor vehicle accident about a year previously and he had received some head injuries and every now and then he would go “mad” for a few minutes and became very aggressive. He should have been discharged soon after the accident because of his mental behaviour but they kept him on despite his illness which finally ended up with the tragic shooting of his commander.
A large funeral possession through Mount Hagen to the airport two days later for the police commander took place. I filmed the entire event including the special guard of honour for the deceased commander as they loaded his body onto a plane to be flown back to his home village on Manus Island.
Continued next issue