Travel: The Germans had a word for it. Tropenkoller means "tropical madness". It is a condition, according to Michael Moran, an addicted traveller of Australian birth and education, which may "affect white people after an extended period in the tropics". Reviewed by Patrick Skene Catling
After a lot of historical research and three strenuous months in the field, Moran has kept his anthropological cool and written a beguiling account, both romantic and fascinatingly horrible, of an abrupt transition from the Stone Age to the present era of high technology in the islands collectively called Papua New Guinea. There are said to be 800 New Guinean languages - bewilderingly many, but communciation is facilitated through a single,universal pidgin.
In a chronological appendix, which helpfully complements the maps and photographs, he notes that recent discoveries in caves in New Ireland (Hibernia Ubiquitous!) indicate that the islands have been inhabited for about 50,000 years.
"Possibily the world's first agriculturists originated in Papua New Guinea around 4,000 BC. " Traditional mystical nature-worship - and cannibalism - were practised virtually undisturbed until the 19th century, in some places, and persisted after that.
Situated approximately 146 degrees east of Greenwhich and 5 degrees south of the Equator, the islands are sufficiently remote from Europe not to have been systematically molested until rival Dutch, German and British imperialist, commercial and evangelical incursions into what Moran describes as a "largely unknown cul-de-sac of colonialism". There was a Japanese invasion in the second World War, featuring the customary Japanese atrocities. After the war, the Australians administered the territory until 1975, when the bird-of-paradise flag of the Independent State of Papua New Guinea was raised over Port Moresby.
The islands of the Coral, Solomon and Bismarck seas are beautiful, Moran found, from the beaches to the mountainous rainforests, but not entirely paradisal. Humid heat and heavy rains breed mosquitoes that spread lethal fevers. Until a relatively short time ago, the cartoonists' missionary-in-a-pot cliché was often a grim reality. Volcanic eruptions are sometimes caused by the unpredictable grinding of tectonic plates. There are local rumours of flying witches. It is hardly surprising that the natives try to tranquillise themselves by chewing betel nuts and that many foreigners tend to hit the bottle.
Moran's interest in the region was stimulated by the works of Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, a Russian explorer, and Bronislaw Malinowski, a pioneer Polish anthropologist, who lived intimately among the New Guineans and wrote about them, Moran says, with "the Nabokovian precision of poetry and intuition of science". In 1929, Malinowski published The Sexual Life of Savages in Northwestern Melanesia, with a preface by Havelock Ellis, which "celebrates the magic of pagan love free of Christian guilt". Moran represents that freedom with a photograph of men of Manus Island performing their "penis-swinging dance", which, alas, appears to be more ludicrous than erotic.
Moran writes that Papua New Guinea has inspired "Macho Adventure Writing" since the time of Jack London, but has himself stayed well clear of that genre. He is a reporter with a painterly eye, a tape-recorder ear and a dry sense of humour that enliven all his encounters, both contrived and haphazard.
He learned that the islands have long attracted "romantics and eccentrics, missionaries and mercenaries, desperate speculators, searchers after extremes, explorers, adventurers, swindlers, prospectors and a thousand other misfits who fled from so-called civilisation". One of them was Errol Flynn, before he was misfitted in Hollywood.
Reading this picturesque book may be as good as visiting Papua New Guinea, perhaps better. If you decide to go there, take plenty of money and insect repellent, and beware of Tropenkoller.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic
Beyond the Coral Sea: Travels in the Old Empires of the South-West
Pacific By Michael Moran. HarperCollins 410 pp, £18.99