By MALUM NALU
Since I first travelled the Highlands Highway from
Goroka to Lae with my father, the late Mathias Nalu just before independence in
1975 as a seven-year-old, I have always been fascinated by this bik rot (big road) that links the port
city of Lae to the Highlands.
One of the things that touched me then, and does to
this day, was when we stood at the Rupert Havilland Memorial Lookout on top of
Kassam Pass, and gazed down into the magnificent panorama spread out from the
Markham Valley of Morobe province to the towering Finisterre Range.
Havilland was only 21 when he supervised of the
construction of the Kassam Pass Road, but upon return to Australia, died at a very
young age and his ashes were returned to New Guinea to be scattered over the
Kassam Pass.
Later, as a student at Aiyura National High School
from 1984-1985, I frequently travelled by road from my home in Lae to Aiyura
Valley.
Much, much later, while working with the Coffee
Industry Corporation in Goroka between 1998-2002, I had the chance to drive
throughout the Highlands, and even down to the coastal ports of Lae and Madang,
and began to appreciate more the value of this economic lifeline.
However, I have never been able to gather much
information about how the bik rot was
built, apart from the fact that the legendary kiap (patrol officer) Ian Downs was the main force behind
construction.
Things changed two weeks ago when I was invited to
accompany one of the original builders of the Highlands Highway, Bob Cleland,
to Goroka.
Cleland was one of those who helped build roads over
both Kassam and Daulo passes.
His widely-acclaimed book, Big Road, first published in 2010, but not widely on sale yet in
PNG, tells the story of the building of
the Highlands Highway, particularly the Daulo stretch between Asaro and
Watabung in Eastern Highlands in 1953, which he personally supervised as a
22-year-old kiap.
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| Bob Cleland shows a copy of Big Road during his recent visit to PNG |
Talking with Cleland and reading Big Road has answered all the unanswered
questions in my mind about the Highlands Highway.
The 'big
road' today is the Highlands Highway running from the port of Lae and through
the highlands provinces of PNG.
Big Road describes the initial
construction by hand, in 1953 and 1954, of the Daulo section of the road, which
runs over the 2,478m Daulo Pass and which gives access westward to the great
Waghi Valley.
Running right throughout Cleland’s book itself is
the ‘big road’ itself, the Highlands Highway that was carved out of mountains
and mud with shovels, sweat and tenacity.
Big
Road
is a pioneering tale that paints a vivid picture of the majesty of the
mountains and the mingling of two cultures.
Cleland, before the Daulo Pass, helped the late
Rupert Haviland built part of the road over the Kassam Pass.
 |
| Cleland checks out a section of the Daulo Pass road which he helped build almost 60 years ago as a young kiap |
The big road was neither designed nor built by
engineers but by kiaps, with local
villagers using only picks, shovels and thousands of hours of backbreaking
labour.
When Cleland arrived in the New Guinea Highlands in
1953, many tribes had just seen their first white man only 20 years before.
He was one of a team of young Australians charged
with introducing a new form of justice to tribes that had previously settled
disputes with spears, axes and arrows.
He was 22, fresh from university where he’d been
studying engineering.
As a kiap,
Cleland had a triple role of magistrate, policeman and administrator.
But he was not only a kiap, he was also the boss’s son.
His father Donald (later Sir Donald) Cleland was
administrator of Papua New Guinea for 15 years from 1951, so his trial by fire
in New Guinea was particularly intense.
Right from the start, Cleland was charged with
building some of the most-challenging sections of the ‘big road’, linking the
Highlands with the coast.
In the early 1950s there was no way into or out of
the Highlands except by plane or on foot.
Yet the region was densely populated, home to
hundreds of thousands of villagers, and alluringly fertile.
A road connection had to be built, and it had to be
constructed by hand – no bulldozers or diggers.
The Eastern Highlands district commissioner then was
the legendary Ian Downs, from Scotland, who first came to PNG as a 21-year-old
kiap.
He’d been posted to the Highlands only five years
after Australian explorers Jim Taylor and Mick Leahy discovered that hundreds
of thousands of people lived in extensive upland valleys amid what had always
been assumed to be impenetrable mountains.
“In 1953 Kassam Pass – the road into the Highlands
dreamed of by many, rejected as impossible by others – was now open for
traffic,” Cleland writes.
“Narrow and steep, with sharp ends, it was not a
road for heavy vehicles – but it was a start.
“The rough track from Lae remained difficult but the
reality of Kassam Pass gave the administration good reason to fund upgrading
work.
“Access from Goroka to the great Wahgi Valley and
beyond was blocked by a 3,000-metre-high spur of the Bismark Range.
“A road through a 2,440-metre (Daulo) pass and over
this spur would provide the final link to the Wahgi Valley.”
Towards the end of July 1953, Downs brought Haviland
and bridge builder Ludi Schmidt from Kassam to a temporary camp about a third
of the way towards the top of the Daulo Pass.
Haviland, however, had to go on leave and Cleland
was given charge of the project by Downs.
“Since 1933, the Koreipa Valley track had been one
of the routes used by patrols walking from the Benabena station towards the
large valleys and extensive populations further west,” Cleland writes.
“The track crossed the Asaro River at an altitude of
about 1,500m and after a kilometer-and-a-half of easy gradient, began an
increasingly-steep 10km climb to the top.”
To go into detail would fill archives, however, this
was the road that Cleland and his team of hundreds of local villagers built.
Boulders were broken up by heating during the fire
with fire and then allowing to cool at night, which made it eventually cracked.
Ludi Schmidt was the bridge expert using local
timber.
On September 24, 1953, district commissioner Ian
Downs drove to the top of Daulo Pass in his Land Rover.
On October 9, 1953, Ian Downs and his family, Jim
Leahy, ex WW11 pilot Jerry Pentland and Mick Leahy (with his wife Jeanette and
son Richard) drove through from Goroka to Mt Hagen.
“In 1933, it had taken Mick Leahy and Jim Taylor –
acknowledged as two of the 20th century’s most acclaimed explorers –
two weeks to get to the Mt Hagen area,” Cleland writes.
“Now here they were, 20 years later, making the
240km journey in a single day.
‘Big Road: a journey to the heart of the New Guinea
highlands, 1953-56’, by Bob Cleland [Red Hill Publishing, $30.45, 240 pp,
9780980672022]
