Writer Joan Didion once said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Had she ever visited the Asmat people of Southern Papua, Indonesia, she might have added to that profound statement “… and to confirm the greatest of our fears”.
There is a reason that the Asmat is remote. It is an immense 18,000 sq km mangrove-covered delta that extends its shallow, muddy waters well out to sea, preventing any shipping from coming close; there is little dry land, hence few roads or landing strips. Labyrinthine river systems stretch to the rising peaks of inland Papua, which are high enough to have snow on them despite being near the equator.
Contact with the outside world was developed in the 1950s. What the Dutch discovered as they attempted to bring the Asmat under colonial rule was an intricate cultural network that had been refined over several thousand decades.
They also discovered, to their horror, that the Asmat engaged in a ritualised form of cannibalism. To the Western mind, this is murder of the worst kind. To the Asmat, it is an ancient cultural practice of avenging any wrongs brought on their ancestors and restoring a cosmic balance to the universe.
In 1961, the Asmat swamps became even more infamous when Michael Rockefeller disappeared there. Rockefeller, a member of one of the world’s richest families and son of the New York governor, was on an art-collecting expedition for his father’s Museum of Primitive Art. He was reported to have drowned after swimming from his upturned catamaran at the mouth of the Betsj River with two empty petrol tanks tied to his waist.
There was an extensive search for him funded by his father, but after two weeks with no body found, the Rockefellers retreated into their own private grief.
There were murmurs from the locals, but it wasn’t until Carl Hoffman’s book Savage Harvest came out in 2014 that things heated up. At the book’s core was the insinuation the Asmat had killed and eaten Michael Rockefeller in reciprocation for the murders of three chiefs of Otsjanep village by Dutch colonial officers. It was sensational and the book sold like hotcakes, hitting a vein of lurid fascination. Although little hard evidence was presented and sections of the book were entirely speculative fiction, this was overlooked as it boldly confirmed one of our greatest fears.
River journey
It feels as if we are in a Joseph Conrad novel, or at least that is what I tell myself, as we lower five Zodiac dinghies over the side of our ice-strengthened expedition ship on a hot October day. We are on a wildlife expedition in the eastern Indonesian archipelago that is about to take an anthropological detour.
Papua’s coast is not visible through the heat haze: the Arafura Sea, between Darwin, Australia and West Papua, is sheet metal and beginning to shimmer in the early morning sun as we load passengers and my fellow guides and head north on a compass course the captain had given us from the bridge. After an hour of motoring, a thin green smudge forms on the horizon and eventually a river inlet, guarded by mud banks on either side, reveals itself. We slip quietly up-river, destined for the village of Omadesep, where life goes on much as it has for thousands of years.
Our arrival at the village is an extravaganza. Omadesep receives few visitors, so what appears to be every male in the village has emerged from the mangrove forest in a stand-up canoe to escort us the final few hundred metres. What starts as a menacing challenge melts into the warmth and excitement of visitors being greeted. They are dressed in their number ones – full warrior garb – and are in equally full singing voice. The chief leaps aboard the Zodiac and guides us into a rickety timber jetty that connects to the village, which sits on stilts above the muddy waters. There is much “sing sing” and “tok tok (talk, talk)”; it appears they are as intrigued by us as we are by them.
After the formalities are out of the way, our visitors are whisked off to be shown the school, the church and the houses all perched precariously above the water. I am invited into the jeu, or long house. Inside, it is smoky, dark and hot as hell. It takes a while for my eyes to adjust while I sit cross-legged on the floor with the chief and an entourage of his men. They have dog-tooth necklaces and bore-tusk nose pieces and smoke homemade roll-your-owns like trains.
My eyes are drawn to the ceiling, where an intricate display of animal skulls and skeletons is arranged. There are no human skulls grinning back, as the Asmat know enough about outsiders and their ambiguous morals to hide them away in the bush. The chief, who speaks a smattering of English, notices my gaze and reads my mind.
“No headhunting any more … we Catholics now,” he says, grinning and gesturing with his cigarette toward one of the doors, which has a framed view of the dilapidated church slowly collapsing into the mangrove swamp. The cigarette smoke curls back along his outstretched arm, hovering over two rings of boar tusk above his elbow that denote the heads he has taken.
On the other side of the jeu, the doorway frames our Zodiacs tied to the jetty. The local kids are swarming all over them and, with shrieks, burning their bare bums on the hot black fabric of the side tubes. We talk canoes for a while.
“No good with spears,” says the chief, jabbing his finger at his hand as we all grin at the folly of an inflatable war canoe. I show them photos of our ship on my phone. As they crowd around, I say “ice breaker”, and it is clear by the puzzled looks that most of them do not know what ice is. “So cold that water turns to stone” is the best description I can come up with, prompting nervous chatter and incredulous looks. Cold is an abstract and scary idea in a place that is 32°C and 95% humidity all of the time.
After each topic of conversation, there are long pauses while ideas are digested and cigarettes puffed on. At the end of one of these pauses, the chief asks to be introduced to my family. I explain they are home in New Zealand. A strange look comes over his face, and he casts his eyes out of the jeu at some of the expedition guests who are chatting to the kids. “Are these people not your family?” he inquires. “No, just friends,” I say. The chatter in the long house comes to a stop. I detect a faint shiver of fear in the chief as he contemplates this morally corrupt and repulsive idea.
For the rest of our short visit, I am treated with sympathy by the chief and his men as if I have lost something vital, like my marbles. The tide has started to ebb, which is our signal to depart. The locals are pressing us with sago balls, shrimp and bananas for our long “paddle” to the ship. The kids have stopped their horseplay and look sad to see the best entertainment ever depart.
As we slip away from the jetty, we have traded our fears with the Asmat, leaving them with stories of our cold, lonely lives and returning to a ship that cuts water turned to stone.
Frequent Listener contributor Matt Vance has been a lecturer and guide for Heritage Expeditions for 21 years.