These arrows and this bow
belong to a man who has never seen a European face.
So does this house.
I'm in the middle of Central New Guinea
and these wonderful mountains all around
are one of the few places left on the surface of the earth
that are truly unexplored.
Until only a few months ago
it was thought that this area of Central New Guinea
was completely uninhabited.
And then Laurie Bragg, the Assistant District Commissioner for this area
was looking at some aerial photographs to try and map this area,
to make sense out of this tangle of mountain ranges and rivers.
And on the photographs he saw one or two tiny pinpoints,
which indicated to him that there there were gardens like this one
and houses and people.
People who had not been contacted ever by the outside world.
And so it was decided to send an expedition to try and find them.
Aeroplanes first arrived in this country back in the '20s.
The island of New Guinea is immense 1,500 miles long,
lying between Australia and the equator,
and 50 years ago its interior was virtually blank on the map.
The aeroplane has ever since been a key tool in filling in that blank.
Sometimes by dropping supplies to explorers who had marched for weeks,
sometimes by dumping men on a sand bank by an unknown river,
sometimes, as now by giving a man like Laurie Bragg
a view of what lies ahead of him before he sets off into new country.
And the view is hardly welcoming.
An unbroken carpet of green corduroy,
jungle as thick and as sticky as you can find anywhere.
(Attenborough) Does it look OK for the canoes?
(Bragg) Yes, there aren't many snags. It's hard to tell the current from here
but it looks pretty good.
(Attenborough) How many times have you been here?
(Bragg) I haven't. (Attenborough) Has anybody?
(Bragg) Not beyond here.
(Attenborough) There's a village!
(Bragg) It's the last known one.
You can start to see some snags in the river now.
It's a bit marginal for canoes now.
(Attenborough) There's some bad rapids. Will we get this high?
(Bragg) We won't get canoes here.
Could we go down and have a look at that junction? At the foot of that ridge?
(Man) There's the junction. (Bragg) That could well be it.
- I'm looking for that garden area. - (Man) Eh?
(Bragg) I'm trying to pick out that garden area I saw.
(Bragg) There's a big garden complex under the top of this mountain here.
(Man) Is that everything you want to see?
(Bragg) Yeah. Except for clouds.
(Attenborough) Back at his base at Ambunti on the Sepik River,
Laurie Bragg develops his plans
for a major patrol into those unknown mountains
to discoverjust what was there.
We'll move from Ambunti here downstream along the Sepik
in two work boats the Opal and the Sapphire,
and come into the Karawari River here.
Follow the Karawari upstream into the Korosameri.
The work boat should get to about here
and then the river'll be too shallow for the work boats.
We'll be towing canoes with the boats... the work boats
and the canoes will shuttle us and the rations and patrol gear
up to approximately here,
where I think we'll run out of sufficient depth of water to take canoes,
and from there we'll have to walk.
What's the walking gonna be like?
- Very difficult. - Is it?
- Yes, if we look at the... - Yeah.
Um, aerial photographs of the area, I don't want to shock you but...
(Attenborough laughs)
(Bragg) That's the Salamei River.
Er, we won't get that far with the canoes, we'll have to walk from here.
We'll be moving up to that junction there,
which I don't know what it's called
and then we'll be going to this ridge
and follow that to the crest of the Salamei-April divide.
You can see garden areas there. See them?
They're scattered across that face,
2,500-3,000 feet above sea level
and we'll establish ourselves on that ridge
somewhere where we find people and let the people come to us.
(Attenborough) Patrols are the means of administering this country.
Every few months government officers like Laurie Bragg
take a handful of armed native police, leave their stations
and travel for weeks visiting the people in their territory.
In the settled areas they see that schools are started and roads built
and that the people get some sort of medical help.
In the wilder parts the job's more dramatic.
Tribal feuds must be stopped and elementary law established.
This patrol would be different only because in addition to doing all that,
it was going to walk slap across
one of the last of those empty blank patches on the map
to try and sort out its geography on the ground
and, if possible, contact the inhabitants, who so far had never seen Europeans.
40 years ago the Sepik river was notorious for its head-hunters.
Indeed, it was news of a spectacular head-hunting raid
that made the government decide to establish the station at Ambunti
240 miles up the river, in what was then the dark interior.
The men of one village had raided their neighbours, lopped off 28 heads,
boiled them and scraped them, moulded them with clay
and stuck them up for display.
Even today it's not unusual to hear of a ritual murder in the remoter parts,
away from the main river and the eye of the government.
90 miles downstream from Ambunti we left the Sepik
and turned into a tributary that came in from the south.
This river was shallower and hemmed in by rafts of floating reeds
so we had to leave the two big boats
and carry on in three canoes with outboard motors.
On the Sepik we'd seen quite a lot of people travelling in canoes
but here there was no one, just flocks of ducks and eagles and herons.
After three days of travel we came in to land
at the last known village on this river - Inaru.
This was the end of the easy bit.
From now on we should be walking.
Patrols only come up as far as Inaru about once a year
and none had ever been beyond it.
For the villagers, our arrival was an important event,
and since there were only 50 of them
we represented an almost overwhelming invasion.
The people of Inaru live very simply.
They plant a few vegetables
but rely heavily on the forest to supply them with fruit and meat.
The river provides them with fish, mostly black, bony catfish,
and once a year it presents them with an enormous bonanza - mayflies.
For three days, millions of them hatch and rise
to swirl in blizzards over the surface of the water.
No one knows what particular chemistry in the river or change in the climate
causes all of them to emerge at the same time in this fashion.
But the Inaru people know well enough that this limitless gift of food
will only be here for a day or so.
All the women and children go down to the river to harvest it.
The newly-hatched insects are soft and juicy
and eaten still wriggling, just like oysters.
Our porters relished them just as the villagers did.
Life in the jungle may look blissful and untroubled
Adam and Eve in a primitive paradise.
But in fact only too often it's scourged by disease.
The headman had a tropical ulcer on his foot the size of a golf ball.
There were cases of yaws and malaria and skin fungus,
all diseases easily treated by the medicines we had with us.
The villagers knew that perfectly well and were delighted to see us.
Communication, however, was not easy.
Astonishingly, there are over a thousand mutually incomprehensible languages
in New Guinea. The Inaru language is only spoken by these people
and two other villages, about 200 people in all.
(Wailing)
If we were to meet any new people on the journey ahead
interpreters would obviously be invaluable
but plans to get them had already run into snags.
We were expecting to get a... Bisorio bloke to interpret for us...
but we haven't got him yet.
and the Bisorio people live in these hills over here.
And they're nomadic.
And, er, the local people here have agreed to go and look for them
but they're not sure they're gonna find them.
(Attenborough) When did they last see them?
Two blokes from this group, a month ago.
When they came in from the hills over there to trade for tobacco.
Er, since then they've had a party of their own go to look for the Bisorio
and they've found their last camp and the houses have been burnt down.
Probably an accident. I don't know. But...
they appear to have gone further north.
But they're a nomadic group and they're gonna go and look for them
but it might take four or five days.
How do you look? It's a hell of a big country and there are very few people.
They'll go to a house that's been burnt down and try to find a track from there.
(Attenborough) Do the Bisorios speak to the people we're interested in, directly?
There's nobody who can speak directly to the Bikaru,
which we think are the groups we're looking for.
The only people who can speak to the Bikaru
are the Bisorios, who are bilingual.
Or some of them are.
And one of our blokes round here somewhere
speaks the Bisorio language,
and we'll speak pidgin to our interpreter who'll speak Bisorio,
and the Bisorio'll speak to the Bikaru.
(Attenborough) So Constable Caius and two Inaru men
set off in a canoe to try and find us an interpreter,
a nomad, who might be anywhere in several hundred square miles of forest,
and who might not be too keen on being discovered anyway.
It seemed a fairly tough assignment.
The next day we would set off on foot,
following the river into the mountains.
Since from here on we should be in uncontrolled country
we might have to defend ourselves.
So Laurie issued bullets to the police,
and at the same time as the regulations insist,
gave instructions in pidgin on when and how a man was permitted to fire.
(Speaking pidgin)
(Bragg) Or you in supreme court long killing man.
(Attenborough) And so the march began.
There was no track so two men at the head of the column
had to cut a path wide enough for people burdened by bulky loads.
Because we had no idea when or where we might find villagers
from whom we could get food and shelter
everything we needed had to be carried with us on men's shoulders.
Tent, medicines, lamps, surveying equipment, radio gear,
personal baggage, trade goods such as beads and salt and knives
photographic equipment, axes, buckets and, above all, food.
Food for us food for the carriers of equipment
and more food for those carrying food.
We marched up the east bank of the river
but most of the unknown country lay to the west,
and so eventually we had to cross it.
At this point it was just possible for one man without a load to swim across.
But to get the whole party over we had to build a bridge.
The New Guinea forests provide everything you need
to construct a first-rate suspension bridge.
Primarily kunda, a kind of long, straggling cane
that grows throughout the forest,
draping itself over trees and along the ground like a carelessly laid cable.
It grows, astonishingly, to lengths up to 500 feet long
and it's as strong as any rope.
Three lengths bundled together will form the basic cable on which to put our feet.
One on either side will serve as handrails
and it's all tied together with string made from splitting kunda.
This kind of bridge is only made by mountain people.
Most of our patrol came from the swamps and plains around Ambunti
and had no idea how to do it.
Indeed, they regarded the whole operation with as much mistrust as I did.
But three of our men were true hillmen
and they immediately took over the direction of operations.
106 carriers, quite apart from ourselves, have got to cross that bridge.
106 sounds an absurdly, almost ludicrously, large number,
but the basic calculation is this - if one man carrying nothing
or carrying just a tent or trade salts or a radio
is gonna survive in the field for a fortnight,
he needs two other men carrying nothing but food
to provide him with food and them with food.
If you want to stay Ionger than a fortnight, and we do,
well, you've either got to arrange for an air drop
or else you've got to live off the country.
We can't live off the country because there are very few people here,
and anyway, turning up to dinner with 106 porters
is hardly a way to endear yourself.
Or else, of course, we could starve.
We're planning to get an air drop.
But first we've got to cross this river.
(Porters shouting in native language)
The forest, as we'd seen from the air was as continuous as a carpet.
There were no clearings, no patches of grassland, no meadows,
and in order to get enough space to pitch tents
we had to cut down dozens of trees.
And that takes time and energy.
So every day we stopped at about four o'clock in the afternoon.
That gave us time to make camp and get settled in before sundown.
But since by then we had been marching for nine hours anyway
it was none too soon for most of us.
(Yells in native language)
(Attenborough) Our tents were simply tarpaulins.
There's no point carrying tent poles in a forest thick with saplings.
Next morning at first light we packed up again.
Most of our gear was carried in these metal patrol boxes.
They seemed pretty heavy even when empty
but the porters preferred them to odd bundles.
They're also watertight and solved the problem
of making loads of roughly equal weight.
You have to watch where you put your hands.
If you grab a branch for support without looking at it closely
as like as not you will stab your palm full of long barbed thorns.
It's extraordinary how quickly you become a good practical botanist,
able to recognise some sorts of tree in a flash,
Now we had left the main river
and were travelling across the grain of the country.
That meant clambering up a steep muddy ridge several thousand feet high,
and then slithering down the other side to ford a little tributary,
before climbing over yet another ridge.
The first job on making camp in the evening
was to put up the aerial for the radio
so that Laurie Bragg could report back to his base at Ambunti
and they would know just where we were if anything went wrong.
(Bragg) Ambunti, Ambunti portable. Do you read?
Roger, now on the aerial photograph, photograph number 5188,
we're on the Salamei River immediately north of the nick in the top frame.
Our intention now is to remain at this campsite for one or two days
to allow Constable Caius and the Bisorio interpreters
he's gone to look for to catch us up. Have you got that? Over.
Yeah, roger roger. That's all, roger.
After three days of hard walking
a rest day is a blessing that everybody's grateful for.
Their bruises and cuts and strains get a chance to heal.
There's one man who's got a dose of malaria
and it also gives us a chance to see
some of the wildlife in the forests around here.
When you're tramping through it, 110 men lugging patrol boxes about,
you make a certain amount of noise,
so you don't expect to see much wildlife in the bush.
But moving alone, well, you've got a chance.
But this bush around here in New Guinea
is a very strange sort of bush.
There aren't any big mammals, there are no monkeys,
no elephants or tigers or lions.
In fact, there are no big mammals at all in New Guinea.
But what this forest does have
and which gives it a unique excitement and splendour,
are birds of paradise.
We've heard them calling around the camp
and with any luck we might see some.
(Birds calling nearby)
And there is one lurking low down in a tree,
swinging his train of yellow plumes.
These marvellous birds assemble in the tops of trees
and display to one another every morning.
That is a wonderful enough sight, which few people have seen.
Now, however, it was afternoon
and it looked as though we might be even more lucky
and see a rare performance of the display dance in the full sunshine.
Undoubtedly these plumed males assembling in their display tree
were getting more and more excited.
Slowly they hopped onto higher and higher branches
until they reached the top of the tree
where they had stripped the leaves from one branch
so that they could dance unimpeded.
(Birds calling)
Now there were eight of these splendid creatures in a frenzy,
displaying to one another as their performance mounted to its climax.
This is a males' dance only,
a competition not to impress the females but to gain dominance over rival males.
It's always performed in the same tree, and that is their downfall
for some tribes hunt them for their plumes, which are used as money.
Here, however in this uninhabited wilderness
they can dance unmolested.
And this, apart from the pig, is the biggest mammal in the island,
an absurd and endearing creature - the tree kangaroo.
Above it was another, a baby.
It seems quite ridiculous that an animal shaped like a kangaroo
should have climbed into a tree.
Its legs, splendid for hopping, seem like a liability up in the branches,
and indeed, tree kangaroos are pretty clumsy creatures,
and always in imminent danger of falling out of their trees.
Another of New Guinea's splendid and extraordinary decorated birds,
the Goura Pigeon.
The largest of all the pigeons, with a silver-spotted tiara,
which it uses, like the birds of paradise, in display dances.
It spends most of its time on the ground,
and, unhappily for its own wellbeing, makes good eating.
The next day, seven days afterleaving Inaru,
Constable Caius, who had gone to look for the interpreter, caught up with us,
He gave his report to Laurie in pidgin, and it looked like bad news,
(Speaking pidgin)
(Attenborough) He had found no one, It was a real blow,
But there was nothing we could do except go on,
(Speaking pidgin)
Now that we had left the rivers
we were navigating for much of the time on simple compass bearings,
(Speaking pidgin)
And then suddenly, two weeks after setting out,
as we cut our way up a ridge,
the sharp eye of our trackers noticed an old break in a sapling.
Someone else, a few months ago, had passed this way.
That morning, we saw several more.
The ridge must be a route used by those people
whose houses we had seen from the air.
They couldn't be far away. Indeed, they might be watching us
as we crashed so clumsily through the forest.
And then, unexpectedly, we marched into a clearing,
and there ahead of us was a house,
It was big enough to hold an entire family group of 20 Orso people,
It was also, clearly, a fortress,
Built on stilts for protection, with loopholes through the sides
from which defenders could fire arrows,
The question was whether the fortress was manned
and whether we, without interpreters to explain,
would be taken as friends or enemies,
(Bragg) Oi!
Oi!
There was no reaction. Nothing moved,
The entrance was barricaded with a huge, heavy plank,
It looked deserted but we couldn't be sure,
It could be that the people were simply not at home
but out hunting somewhere in the forest,
Or that they had taken fright at our approach
and were nearby, watching what we would do,
Or it could even be an ambush,
This narrow corridor is a very effective fortification.
Nobody could get in, armed only with spears and bows and arrows,
if the owners didn't want them to.
And this is the only room.
These... I don't know what's in here.
From the weight it's quite light, perhaps it's a dancing skirt.
And here, carefully strung on vines...
These, I think, are the eggs of the bush turkey, the megapode.
The back here...
These dancing beads, dancing rattles...
And here at the back - jawbones of pigs,
carefully strung-up and preserved.
The pig, all over New Guinea, is of great ceremonial importance.
And this is unusual at least I've not seen it before
the jawbones of piglets too.
And this savage and effective-looking dagger...
carefully incised on the tip.
This is made from the leg bone of the cassowary,
the New Guinea ostrich.
And here are a formidable armoury of arrows.
These, with the bamboo blades are normally used for killing pigs.
And these, with the hardwood points, sometimes the bone points,
I asked one of the local people once what they were used for,
he said, "Oh, they killing man."
These are war arrows.
A rack of firewood.
And above me, the rafters of the roof
are most carefully and meticulously lashed with a decorative pattern.
The fireplace.
The stones are still warm.
They were here just recently.
Here's the...the fire stick that they use for making fire.
It's got those notches - you put it beneath your foot and...
pull it with a rattan cane.
So they were here quite recently.
But now the place is totally deserted.
We couldn't have stayed any longer for we were running short of food.
But although we hadn't seen the people themselves
we had learned a lot about them
from the house itself and the objects inside it.
The following day we were due to get an air drop of supplies.
Laurie had previously arranged the date for the drop
and picked a place which, judging from the air photographs, seemed suitable.
The ground was relatively flat
and the plane could get a decent approach run.
Our problem now was to get there on time and preferably with all our gear dry.
When we got to the drop site we felled trees to make an open space
and spread out tarpaulins as markers for the pilot to aim at.
And so several tonnes of stores weren't dropped on
the tarpaulins we used as tents, we concealed those with branches.
The pilot would need all the help he could get to find us,
so we lit a fire as well.
(Shouts)
Hopeless! Miles off target. The porters were furious.
It'd be a lot of work climbing around in the bush trying to find those bags.
For the second pass he came in much lower.
- Bang in the centre. - (Talking native language)
(All yelling)
Three passes, six bags on each drop,
18 bags of rice, tinned meat, sugar and salt,
that somehow had got to be found.
Each load is double bagged,
the theory being that the outer one splits but the inner one holds.
In practice, both bags split on occasion
and the forest is sprayed with salt and rice and tins of bully beef.
Some of those that land off-target get caught in the branches of a tree.
Others hit the ground so hard that the tins are split wide open.
That day our spirits were high.
We had been on short rations for some time
and everyone was looking forward to an enormous meal that night.
The next morning, things didn't look quite so good.
The loads which had been getting lighter as we ate our way through them
had suddenly become crushingly heavy again
with the stores from the air drop.
Always as we marched, Laurie took bearings on mountains and river bends
to check where we were on the air photographs,
and build up a detailed map of our progress.
One of the least attractive experiences of walking through forests like this
are these creatures -
ugh - a leech.
Fortunately I managed to get it this time before it started sucking my blood.
But there are plenty of its brothers round here
just waiting for me to pass their way.
I can see them even here, on the leaves.
The existence of the leeches in these forests is to me, really, a puzzle
because they are creatures which are very specially modified
to live only on blood.
Say, a human being's blood, or pig's blood.
But there are very very few pigs in these forests
and even fewer human beings.
And yet wherever we walk
every day we see dozens and dozens and dozens of leeches.
How they survive I don't know.
Where they get their food from I have no idea.
I just wish they themselves realised that their survival is an impossibility.
And this, on the other hand
is one of the most engaging - indeed, slightly lunatic -
inhabitants of the forest, the echidna.
An amiable, myopic creature similar to the duck-billed platypus.
It's got warm blood, feeds its young on milk,
and lays eggs.
The most dangerous animal in the bush, as well as the biggest, is the cassowary.
One kick can rip open a man's stomach
and they will attack anyone if they're guarding a nest.
If ever there was a bird that is sinister for me, it's this one.
There are poisonous snakes in New Guinea
undoubtedly in some numbers,
but they're hard to find and usually slither away before you can look at them,
This one is quite harmless, a beautiful, emerald green tree python,
And then, once more we came across signs of human beings.
This is a pig trap. The pig would come down this corridor
and trigger a log hanging above with a spear in it.
The trap was old and long since sprung
but at least it was a sign that the forest was inhabited.
Day after day we trudged on.
We made careful notes of all the rivers that we crossed
which way they flowed and how far apart they were,
of the different rocks we saw in the river beds
and the kinds of trees in the forest.
We took altitude readings and compass bearings of prominent peaks and rivers.
Certainly we left behind us a trail
that would make it much easier for anyone who had to come this way again.
As we made camp on the 25th night of the patrol,
it was no good denying that we were feeling pretty depressed.
We had all hoped to get some glimpse of the shy people who we knew lived here
but we were now within three days of coming out on the other side
of the blank on the map and we hadn't seen anything of them.
(Chatting in native language)
Laurie reckoned that we must be in the territory of a tribe
known to their neighbours as the Biami.
Their name was the only word of their language that we knew,
so that evening we sent out a porter to call that name over and over again.
Biami!
It was very cold that night. Next morning it was drizzling
and no one was anxious to move
until suddenly a porter called out, "Biami!" and there they were.
- (Man) Biami, eh? - Biami.
(Man) Bikaru.
Biami.
(Speaking Biami language)
Setifa. Setifa.
(Atttenborough) Setifa is the name of a river,
We tried to ask them by gestures to bring in their women and children
and to bring us food,
It was not that we really needed their bananas
but trade is a decent relationship
with dignity and respect on both sides,
We didn't want our meeting to become
just a question of the rich handing out gifts to the poor,
They might also persuade their neighbours, the Bikaru,
to come in as well
but with no proper words between us except for proper names
the message wasn't easy to get across,
(Speaking native languages)
One of the most popular gifts
in the remoter parts of New Guinea is newspaper.
It's used for smoking the raw powerful tobacco that every village grows.
Some people will carry a load for a day for a couple of sheets
but these people normally use dried leaves
and had no idea what to do with the paper.
They took it rather as though it were some sort of useless memento.
This, plainly, was not a success,
so Laurie tried salt instead.
This was much better received. And what with that
and cigarettes made for them from newspaper by the police, all looked well.
(Speaking native languages and pidgin)
(Speaking pidgin, Biami)
After about an hour when they started to leave,
they seemed to be as delighted by the meeting as we were.
That night we reported back to base in a much happier frame of mind,
Except that the radio was giving serious trouble,
I think that's through to base.
Our position is I-1, the bottom of I-1.
If you've got that give us a long roger.
Roger, roger... (indistinct)
Strength at half, we've got a broken wire in the set. Over.
(Radio, indistinct)
I think you said you had nothing for us, I didn't hear it properly.
If you're writing in to the DC
you could let him know we've found our first group of people,
our first group of people.
We'll stay here tomorrow and maybe some of them will come in.
(Attenborough) But would they be sure enough of us to risk another visit?
They had seemed happy enough when they were with us
but no one was taking any bets.
But the next morning there they were again.
And what is more they were carrying food.
(Speaking Biami language)
There wasn't much of it
not enough to make much difference to the rations of 100 men
but it was a proper basis for trade,
Now they seemed confident enough for me to look at their personal ornaments
and perhaps, in the process, discover a few Biami words,
In his ear he had what I recognised as a cassowary quill bent into a ring,
Evey one ofthem had two ritual punctures in his nose
and he had pegs in them - what were they?
It turned out they were just little wooden pegs,
There was a bone through his ear as well but from what?
- Kokoma. - Kokoma.
Kokomo? (imitates bird)
(Attenborough) Hornbill,
This was the claw of a tree kangaroo,
- Chalam. - Salam?
Chalam.
- Eh? - Chalam. Chalam.
(Attenborough) So the Biami word fortree kangaroo is salam,
And now, trading began,
(Speaking Biami)
This time one of the police offered glass beads,
again highly valued by other tribes,
But again, though they accepted them they didn't seem overjoyed,
(Muttering in Biami)
So we went back to salt,
(Speaking Biami)
Laurie now tried to put local names to some ofthe rivers on his sketchpad,
- Watifa. - Watifa?
- Watifa. Watifa. - Watifa.
(Speaking Biami)
(Bragg speaking pidgin)
(Atttenborough) The Biami decided that we wanted to count all the rivers,
The gestures used in counting vay from tribe to tribe,
If we could discover their method we might learn of their tribal connections,
so Laurie listed the names of rivers he'd already discovered,
Six,
(Speaking Biami)
Eight,
Nine,
Eleven,
The cost of bringing about this meeting has been considerable.
Over 100 men have marched for over four weeks.
There have been three cases of pneumonia
and a great number of bruises and abrasions and cuts.
Not to mention an air drop.
ls it worth it?
Well, nobody knows what are in these valleys,
it may be that there's gold here.
lt may be, like a valley a hundred miles away, it is rich with copper.
lf it is, and if the West - European man -
moves in here with all his technology,
the fate of these people is likely to be a very unhappy one.
All we know in the past of people like this
who've come face to face with Western technology
leads us to suppose that it's very difficult for them to survive that clash.
And so the only chance of bringing these people to terms with the world outside
is a gradual process, over years, over tens of years,
in which, gradually, they get to know what happens in the outside world,
and get to believe that people like ourselves
are their friends and not their enemies.
Gradually they have enough confidence in us
to allow us to give them medical help and educational help.
lt would have been easy, I daresay, for us have tried to dazzle them now
with some of our technological conjuring tricks,
to have played back their recorded voice
or to have taken their picture on an instant camera.
But when you're faced with encounters like this
such tricks seem tawdry and trivial.
It's not that we can do those tricks
that they have got cassowary quills through their nostrils
or that we happen to live on bits of cows' meat
wrapped up in a cunning way in bits of metal.
It is not the differences between us that are important, it is the similarities.
It's the fact that when one of us laughs the other knows what he's feeling.
That when one of us hits his stomach and scowls
the other knows that he's hungry.
These are the things that are the bond between us
and these are the things that we want to emphasise
I cannot suppose that they will give us their full confidence.
The next step we are going to try
is to ask them to take us down to their house.
Whether they will or not, I don't know but that is the next step.
They led off and we followed.
Though whether they had understood what we wanted we couldn't tell.
But suddenly our relationship had become a little uneasy, a little strained.
Perhaps we were pushing things a little too much.
Oi! Biami-o!
They had gone, Simply vanished into thin air,
- Biami! - (Bragg) Biami-o!
There was nothing to do but go on,
A hundred yards beyond we found a house,
(Bragg) Biami-o!
Two days later we were in known country again.
In a year's time perhaps another patrol would come through again,
following in our steps and camping on our campsites.
Maybe by then the Biami, remembering that we'd not forced ourselves on them
would give more of their confidence
and perhaps their world and ours might get a little closer to one another.
And meanwhile that empty blank on the map now contains, for the first time,
a few river names and altitudes and a thin, erratic line drawn across it.
(Biami men speaking)