Leahy family helped open up Papua New Guinea Highlands to the outside world

By Rowan Callick, Asia-Pacific editor of The Australian

 

THE plane in which veteran pilot Richard Leahy almost died on a Papua New Guinea mountainside was appropriately registered as P2-MJL, the initials of his father Mick James Leahy - one of Australia's most colourful and successful explorers.

This was the feisty figure who led the expeditions in the early 1930s that established for the first time that the Highlands of PNG were not "empty" but packed with vibrant cultures.

Richard was born in Sydney in 1941 but soon with mother Jeanette joined his father, who had been in PNG since 1926.

His first wife Robin said yesterday: "He's been an aircraft fanatic since the age of four, it's his great love and interest. Practically every photo he has taken has an aircraft in it somewhere."

He extended this passion into his interest in history, discovering and photographing World War II plane wrecks all over the Pacific.

Richard learnt to fly in a Tiger Moth in Lae 50 years ago, and completed his training in Australia the following year, 1960. He bought his first Cessna - it was a Cessna in which he crashed on Wednesday - in 1967.

His father Mick - known widely as "Masta Mick" - died 30 years ago at Zenag, on a mountain top in Morobe province, where he is buried.

Born in 1901, he was the fourth of nine children of Irish migrants who had settled in Toowoomba. He and his brothers Paddy, Jim and Danny rushed to the Edie Creek gold strike in PNG in 1926.

There, writes historian Jim Griffin in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, "they learned the skills of prospecting and survival".

In 1930, seeking to trace gold upriver, he persuaded the Australian authorities to allow him to embark on the first of what were to become 10 expeditions into the Highlands.

Conventional wisdom held that the Highlands were virtually unoccupied, because the climate was too cold for tropical people. On an expedition with his brother Danny and Charles Marshall, they gazed over the Wahgi valley that was and remains one of the most populous parts of PNG - the first outsiders known to have ventured into the heart of the Highlands.

They found substantial gold only at Kuta in the Western Highlands. Mick summed up the Highlands to fellow expeditioner Jim Taylor: "Jim, good country, good climate, good kanakas, too good to find gold in."

Danny went on to become a coffee farmer, marrying a Highlander and establishing a separate dynasty that included Joe Leahy, the central figure in the widely applauded films of Bob Connolly and the late Robin Anderson, Joe Leahy's Neighbours and Black Harvest.

Connolly and Anderson had earlier made First Contact, which included footage of early expeditions of the Leahys.

Another Danny Leahy, a nephew of Masta Mick, who co-founded a distribution company, Collins and Leahy, became a major figure in rugby league and died a year ago as Sir Danny Leahy, the only member of the extraordinary family to be knighted - so far.