Travel Book Review ~ THROWIM WAY LEG by Tim Flannery

I read Throwim Way Leg when it was first published back in the ye olden days of 1998. I found it captivating at the time and it is a pleasure to thumb through it again all these years later, it is one of the books that has stuck in my mind and heart.

In Throwim Way Leg, biologist and Australian-of-the-year Tim Flannery tells of his expeditions to New Guinea, living with the locals out in the sticks in search of rare wildlife...

That evening the hunters returned loaded with possums. They were anxious to eat, so Ken and I had to work fast extracting samples and labelling specimens. One of the possums, a Coppery Ringtail, was brought in alive. We have never killed an animal before and wanted to dispatch it humanely. Fortunately Ken and I, anticipating such occasions, had brought a bottle of ether along with us.

After allowing the possum to inhale what I though was enough ether to fell an ox, Ken and I set to work. There were testicles to be cut for chromosone studies and liver and kidney samples to be taken. To my horror, when we were nearly finished, our possum began to show signs of life. Quickly I fastened the ether-soaked rag to its muzzle and held it there until I was sure it was well and truly defunct.

As the hunters began their evening meal, excited chatter broke out among them. Finally, Andrew Keno (a Goilala who spoke a little English) came up to me and explained that the hunters had misidentified one of the possums. It was not the common Kovilap (Coppery Ringtail), but another, very rare kind. Indeed it was one of the very rarest and most delicious possums of all. They brought me a piece of the meat of the marvellous animal, which I tentitively bit into.

Immediately my tongue was afflicted with an appalling dead palsy.

Ether fumes assaulted my nose and stung my eyes. The gas had travelled throughout the body of the massively overdosed possum, and a brief roasting had done little to abate its potency.

Horrified by the thought of what the ether might do to the Goilala, I spent a largely sleepless night. As the hours passed, I monitored the snorts and groans of my companions. Finally, to my enormous relief, they all awoke fit and well in the morning.

After this, I learned to kill the larger marsupials with a sharp blow to the back of the neck. It brought virtually instantaneous death if done correctly and I was certain that the animal felt very little pain. It also ensured that the meal eaten by my friends was untainted.

I like this nice little passage on pidgin English:

I soon noticed the best and cheapest places to eat in Port Moresby were they Chinese cafes. The Diamond cafe in Boroko became my favourite. Its laminex table-tops and simple menu reminded me of the Chinese restaurants of my childhood, of my father bringing our own saucepans to be filled with fried rice and sweet-and-sour pork. One night I noticed, I noticed that a curious addition had been chalked on the menu board. Below the chow mein was written 'Papa Fell Over'. Intrigued, suspecting it to be some exceedingly alcoholic local brew, I ordered a small one with coffee.

Startlingly renamed in Melanesian Pidgin, and trans-mogrified in a Chinese kitchen, that distinctively Australian dessert pavlova never tasted so good.

Throwim Way Leg is a great read recommended to anybody into New Guinea and rufty-tufty travelling. We usually have a copy in stock, click here to see if we have one available right now.