Throwim' Way Leg: Tree-Kangaroos, Possums, and Penis Gourds (1999)

$2 today 11/7/11. Did not think I would find this one 2nd hand. wheee! Includes colour photos and maps/illustrations ( )

Flannery comes across as a bit of a contradiction in this narrative of years spent searching for rare mammal species across the length and breadth of the island of New Guinea. His work takes him into the high mountains and tropical rainforest, yet he has an abiding fear of spiders and snakes, and suffers from altitude sickness. He collects (and more often pays the local people to collect) extremely rare species, but in all but one case the animals are killed (and usually eaten). A radio tracking exercise results in the death of two of the three animals tracked, apparently from wounds inflicted when they were captured and tagged. His interest in a taboo area which is a refuge for rare animals apparently prompts the locals to have the an exorcism conducted, following which the locals destroy these refuge populations.

Flannery I suspect would argue (although he does not do so here) that the advancement of scientific knowledge justifies some casualties. But this moral question is an interesting undercurrent in the book, more so for Flannery never actually bringing it to the forefront. What he has done is be absolutely candid about what he is doing. The reader then is left to draw their own conclusions, or perhaps find themselves (as I suspect Flannery finds himself) suspended somewhere between the beauty of the knowledge and the horror at the methods by which it is obtained.

What makes this book much more than a ´narrative of a collector´ is Flannery´s descriptions of the life of the native peoples of New Guinea which is based on his real sympathy with their lives and situation, and coloured by the strong friendships he has made wherever he travelled. As he talks of the people he talks about their relations with the natural world they live in, and how that relationship is changing, and largely changing for the worse. In the same vein, he talks about the relations between peoples, the traditional owners and the newcomers; and of the tensions between tradition and modernity. And here, perhaps, Flannery comes hard up against the final contradiction, his acceptance of support from the mining companies to assist his animal research versus his growing distaste at their methods and impact on the local peoples of Irian Jaya. One has a sense that, at the very end of his book (and a few postscripts describing the deteriorating social situation in Irian Jaya) that Flannery is beginning - just beginning - to examine his own role in that world.

So as a story of New Guinea and wildlife this book is very highly recommended. Flannery writes well and graciously. And as a commentary on the extraordinary social situation in New Guinea, where stone age meets the 21st Century daily, this is a useful addition to the field. But I like the book most of all for its honesty, and that very faintest of threads of a story, the gradual troubling of a social conscience in the mind of the scientist/collector. ( )

Mammologist Tim Flannery travels to unexplored regions of Papua New Guinea to search for unclassified animals, facing death, disease and his own murder from a tribe of cannibals along the way.

Flannery is a genial author and this non-fiction tale is not only informative but a joy to read. ( )