— Jan Carstensz.
The European colonialists of the early 20th century, fascinated by the exotic, in thrall to the notion of owning foreign lands, could hardly resist snow-covered mountains in the tropics.
The highest summit in what was formerly Dutch New Guinea (now the Indonesian province of Papua) was named Carstensz for the navigator who first described the white-capped peaks he had seen from the coast in 1623; in the first decade of the 20th century, with the scramble for colonies simmering and national pride at stake, a second mountain in the interior was given the name of the Dutch queen Wilhelmina.
'The Dutch had notionally held the western half of New Guinea since the 1850s but they had done very little by way of exploration,' said Dr Chris Ballard, a Fellow at the Division of Pacific and Asian History, RSPAS. There were at that time 'no known resources, there was little population, and they were much more focused on Java and Sumatra, which were the jewels in the Dutch East Indies crown'.
But by the start of the new century the Dutch realised that to establish their occupation, it was necessary to map and control the area. 'It started to occur to the Dutch that if they didn't go out and stake claims pretty strongly they were in danger of losing out to the Germans or the British,' said Ballard. Following recommendations by H. A. Colijn (later to become Dutch Prime Minister) to Governor J. B. van Heutsz, extensive exploration and mapping of the interior began.
The British, with colonial interests next door, were keen to mount expeditions to the interior of Dutch New Guinea too. 'What you had was a kind of colonial race to get to the snow. And it became a matter of national pride, and a competition particularly between the British and the Dutch.
'So there were a series of expeditions, which became military expeditions, from 1907 to 1915.'
In 1909, on his second expedition, Hendrikus Lorentz attempted the first ascent of Wilhelmina. 'At the same time there was a British expedition sponsored by the British Ornithologists' Union that was supposedly going out as a natural history expedition but became, very quickly, an expedition to get up to the snow.
'The Dutch viewed this with deep suspicion as a covert attempt to establish a land claim so there was a lot of skullduggery and the Dutch sent the British up a river that didn't go up toward the mountains. They knew this — they'd done some exploration in advance. Meanwhile they sent their own expedition up the right river. The British floundered around for ages, lost some appalling number of men and got quite despondent when they realised what the Dutch had done to them.'
Meanwhile Lorentz, his fellow-expeditioner Jan van Nouhuys and some of the Dayak carriers reached the snow but not the peak of Mount Wilhelmina.
A later British expedition, led by Alexander Wollaston, reached the snow of Carstensz in 1913, and in that same year a Dutch expedition, led by an army captain, A. Franssen Henderschee, reached the summit of Mount Wilhelmina.
World events intervened and it was not until 1936 that there was another major Dutch expedition — the Carstensz mountain still hadn't been climbed to the peak and this was 'the highest point, not just in New Guinea and in the Dutch East Indies but, for the Dutch, it was the highest point in Holland and the Dutch empire and so a matter of enormous national pride to get there'.
The man who led the 1936 expedition was Anton Colijn, son of H. Colijn who was then prime minister of the Netherlands. Anton Colijn was working for a petroleum company that was doing some exploration of Dutch New Guinea. He and some of his colleagues 'managed to rustle up enough leave time and purloin enough equipment to launch an expedition, which they did with aircraft support dropping supplies in', said Ballard. Frits Wissel, a pilot, dropped the supplies and then followed the path of Colijn and Jean Jacques Dozy, a geologist skilled in interpretation of aerial photographs, joining them before they reached the alpine camp. Together with their Dayak carriers, the trio succeeded in reaching some of the peaks of the Carstensz Range, helped by the Amungme people who lived in the highlands.
The landscape of the interior was fascinating enough — glaciers and snow-covered mountains; the people the climbers came across were probably even more tempting to the expedition photographers — different to the communities of the coastal plains — less well-nourished, shorter.
'People on the expeditions were taking a lot of photographs, particularly photographs of local communities,' said Dr Ballard. 'The British, because they hadn't made it first to the snow, trumpeted their discovery of what they called "pygmies" in the interior of New Guinea.
'Pygmies play a particular kind of role in the colonial imagination, very much in Africa where they inhabited the dark interior, the heart of Africa — huge forests with huge animals and tiny people.
And even before the Europeans had gone into the interior of New Guinea, they had imagined that there would be pygmies there, pygmies who, in the European imagination, were half-way between animal and human, ultra-exotic, almost-childlike and ultra-primitive, the bestial and the primordial. These were the tropes that were applied to Africans generally and to Melanesians but were taken to an extreme with the notion of pygmies.
'There was great scientific excitement when it was announced that "pygmies" had been found in the interior of New Guinea and this "confirmed" what people suspected — that this was an earlier race of humans spread out across the Pacific, Australia, the world in fact ... It was complete garbage. There was this notion that an earlier race of pygmies had gone out, followed by fully statured humans who had largely extinguished them or pushed them up into the forested interiors where no one in their right mind would go.
'There was a lot of interesting sleight of hand going on with people taking photographs of the tallest of the coastal Papuans posed alongside the shortest of the interior peoples.'
On the first expeditions to the snow, photographers had to carry huge glass plates into the field, laboriously develop them and carry them back. On the 1936 expedition they had Leica cameras which were small, more portable; and a movie camera.
Ballard, who had been studying human rights abuses and community relations at the Freeport mine in the 1990s, found himself following an important sidetrack in establishing community history which in turn helped establish claims to land.
He had copies of photographs from books and the Amungme people living near the mine helped him identify their relatives, putting names to people shown without identifying captions, and filling in the stories of their lives.
Ballard was interested in what had happened to the negatives from the expeditions' photographs. The British negatives were found at the Royal Geographical Society and colleagues sourced the Dutch negatives at the Tropical Institute in Amsterdam.
When he first presented some of the results of his research, at a public seminar at Leiden University in 1998, Ballard met a Dutch documentary film team which was interested in the Colijn expedition as well as, to his great surprise, an old man who turned out to be Jean Jacques Dozy, 89 at the time. Colijn had died in a concentration camp in World War II, but Wissel was also alive though he subsequently died in 1999.
Ballard was able to interview Dozy and Wissel. They gave him excerpts from their diaries and the original negatives. They found the film footage, which included dances and community life; it was converted to videotape, and taken back to show the Amungme community. Certain rituals from the film are no longer in use, says Ballard, 'by and large the people don't wear the clothes that they used to wear, there were ritual paraphernalia and certain sorts of weapons people hadn't seen in a long time. House forms had changed, certainly around the mine. But as a memory prompt it was invaluable.
'I found you could get so far with people's narratives and they would see a photograph and all sorts of things they hadn't thought about in 40 or 50 years would come tumbling out. They'd see someone in the back of a photograph they'd say, "These two people were together because ..." or they'd say, "I couldn't go because I was engaged in warfare with a particular group." It was a little bit like the Kennedy effect — a moment in time when just about everyone knew where they were and what they were doing — during the 1936 expedition.'
While Ballard found few people who had been alive at the time of the earlier expeditions, there were a reasonable number who remembered the 1936 expedition.
It was that expedition which had led, ultimately, to the establishment of the Freeport mine which has had such huge impact on the lives of the Amungme. Dozy took rock samples on that expedition which indicated the mining potential of the region.
Ironically, it is the photographs taken on that expedition which have helped the Amungme to prove their claims to the land and to receive some restitution for the use of it.
Photographs from the expeditions were collated to form an exhibition in 2000–2001. The exhibition was shown at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and the plan was then to move the material first to Jakarta and then on to the Freeport area to display it there and give it to the Amungme community. The collection is currently still in Jakarta, held up until the political situation allows it to move on according to plan.
The exhibition was funded by the Tropical Institute and will form part of a cultural restitution program with documents and maps.
'One of the astonishing things in taking photographs back is that it is obvious no-one there had seen them, particularly the 1936 photographs. There is often an incredible emotional charge in the response. People see relatives they haven't seen in 50 years, who have died in wars or from disease, they recognise them in photographs and burst into tears. I felt awful at first. I asked, "Should I not have brought them?" but they said, "No, it's just that in our society when someone goes we never see them again."
'When you have access to interviews or to oral accounts the photographs just come alive. It is a real transformation in your relation to the photograph.'
In the catalogue for the exhibition Ballard says the 'extent to which photography was employed as another technique of collection becomes apparent only on inspection of the wider range of negatives from the BOU [British Ornithologists' Union] expedition, amongst which there are no images of birds, or insects, or live or even dead mammals, for all these items had been collected and could be returned to London. Thus almost the only subjects deemed appropriate for photography were those that could not otherwise be collected: the humans and the landscapes.'
While the expedition photographers were documenting their journey they were also documenting culture. 'In many ways the fascination is now not the landscape but the Highlands people. Many are indeed quite short — there were poor soils, nutrition was fairly poor, but they are not pygmies at all — their descendants today are all heading for six feet in a hurry.'
Ballard has been giving these descendants cameras so that they can begin to construct images of themselves in the way they would wish to be seen, rather than as represented by outsiders. He is interested in how the Amungme will represent themselves not just to the outside world but back to themselves.
