First Contact

The opening few quotes of this documentary suggested to me just how the Inca might have felt when Pizarro arrived on their doorstep in the 16th century and made his presence felt amongst natives who had never seen a white man. Those that these people did see were Australian prospectors who had moved inland from their increasingly impoverished local coastal locations on the island of New Guinea in search of gold. What we are now shown is an impressive collection of archive from these virgin territories in the 1930s where little had changed for the lives of the natives for generations. Needless to say, the new arrivals were better armed and placed to impose themselves on the more primitive culture they encountered, but although there were initial casualties there seems to have emerged a certain degree of cooperative synergy between the two peoples which this film quite poignantly displays. The narration is augmented by some engagingly frank contributions from both the indigenous peoples - many rather incongruously dressed in shirt and tie - and those explorers who come across as more collaborative than you might have expected. Now, of course, much of the thrust of this is predicated on a degree of colonial supremacy that can make this a tough watch nowadays, but those attitudes were prevalent, even benignly so, at the times of filming both the feature and the subsequent interviews and are sometimes just as illuminating as the photography of the gorgeous terrain. In many ways, the tribes are portrayed as if they were children engrossed by their visitor's colour and their technology - especially their aircraft. The commentary reports rather bluntly that there were labour issues on the island and so fairly swiftly we see an army of people engaged in the more traditionally exploitative activities of panning and mining, with a rather condescendingly delivered comment from one of the miners suggesting that this was in some way a voluntary and fun activity! I wonder? The politics aside, if you can, this is quite an astonishingly well presented look at a curious and welcoming culture that appears to have willingly embraced their visitors - even if their chances of sharing in any of the wealth they discover is slight at best, and it would be quite fascinating if someone were to go and make a follow up forty years on.

I saw this movie during an anthropology film festival years ago, then taped it when it appeared on PBS. Years later it still haunts me. The Leahy brothers, opportunists, knew they were witnessing history, and had the foresight to film the natives. Most compelling to me are the expressions on the faces of the villagers when they first encountered the explorers. If you haven't seen this film, and can get your hands on a copy, you will be astonished. It's been too long since I've seen the film (lost my own copy), but I believe it also includes a revisit to the villages many many years later which is also extremely interesting to hear the villagers who recalled the explorers. This is a great film.

If there is anything else Like this film, someone please let me know. To my knowledge, there is not and cannot ever BE anything like this ever made, EVER AGAIN (!) ... it is the only recorded example (of which I am aware) that provides actual visual first hand EVIDENCE (yes, i'll call it Evidence) of a long ago passed and never to recur moment in human history, that of the ''First Contact'' between the 'modern world' and ''primitive'' Peoples with absolutely NO IDEA that Any People OTHER THAN THEMSELVES existed ANYWHERE ON THE PLANET !!

This is singular material that was recorded perhaps at the Last Possible moment in the worlds history that Ever Again there might BE people who'd be Actally UNAWARE that anyone existed Other than themselves, anywhere in the world.

What is Unique in this case and Most significant -- it is very likely too that these people had never even seen an airplane in the sky !!

At that Time the film was taken -- only a year or two after Charles Lindberg's flight across the Atlantic, the airplane was still a relatively 'rare' machine ...and certainly while in today's world there is probably no one, no matter How remote, who hasn't at least SEEN an airplane fly overhead, at the time these films were taken it is actually Very likely that these people had never before even been 'overflown'.

I think it is truly 'too bad' that so few people have seen this film. If I were King of the World, no one would get a diploma from ANYWHERE without having seen this film. Not a diploma from a barber school or Oxford. Come to think of it, wouldn't be able to run for political office or have a gov'rnment job either, unless you'd seen it.

Australian documentary about the exploration of the highlands of Papua New Guinea in 1930 by Michael Leahy, first film directed and produced by the couple Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, filmed by Dennis O'Rourke (Ileksen) and Tony Wilson (The Confessions of Ronald Biggs) and narrated by Richard Oxenburgh (Front Line), made in association with the former ethnological Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies and with thanks to professor Andrew Strathern (Ongka's Big Moka).

Mick Leahy, author of Explorations into Highland New Guinea, was an Australian tough adventurer. Searching for gold, he decided with his younger brothers Daniel and James to venture into the then unknown interior, "one of the last unexplored regions on earth", hoping to find the "El Dorado". The documentary uses black and white footage taken during the expedition, and color present interviews of the people formerly involved in these events. Daniel and James, the surviving brothers of Mick, deceased in 1979, share with us their past hope to get rich, and their feeling to have done the right thing.

Testimonies, subtitled in English, are more mitigated among the Papuans, for Mick was "a very hard man". He has left no good memories in Sari, in the Enga Province, where he shot to death several people, including the chief Pingeta. In the Wahgi Valley between Kundiawa and Mount Hagen, the remembrance is more positive, while people were impressed with the gramophone, the celluloid doll and above all with the "huge bird" come from the sky, this airstrip preparation for landing by a dancing sing-sing having been fictionalized in the 1956 Walk into Paradise.

The "first contact" was indeed impressive for these people for whom, if they were "unknown" to the outside, the outside was unknown to them. The white men were first seen as "spirits", "dead ancestors", "lightning from the sky", in any case "more than ordinary humans", until the natives discovered they were plain men as their excrement were the same than theirs.

Trading with the outside was to upset the life in the highlands, for the white foreigners had very valuable things: steel axes, knives and above all the precious shells, only real wealth with pigs. This allowed them to buy for them and their carriers women, who were "terrified" as an old woman remembers. Will they finally find the golden wealth they had come for? They could thus make the natives to participate in this great progress of the salary work.

The documentary, contrasting with the propaganda footage shown in the beginning, is very interesting, showing through the memories of people of this time the great and violent shaking come with the intrusion half a century ago of the modern world, having made the highlands part of the evolving new Papua New Guinea.

I've had a long fascination with Papua New Guinea which, at the time of writing in 2022, remains a place unlike almost anywhere else in the world, in terms of the cultural norms which still operate over much of the country- still partially resistant to global westernisation.

As a result, I stumbled across the Lonely Planet travel guide to the country which highly, highly recommended this film. I found it in full, by watching it in two halves which were posted on Vimeo, and was absolutely blown away.

The film follows the Australian Leahy brothers, as they are the first Europeans to enter New Guinea's interior, and their consequent encounters with local tribes, in the densely populated highlands, which were completely unknown to westerners. The video footage alone is god-smacking, but it's masterfully put together with interviews from the Leahy brothers, and locals who were children at the time, as 'giant birds' (planes) and 'spirits' (white people) rained down from the skys.

The edits won Connolly and Anderson several awards and nominations, and didn't shy away from the darker side to exploring an area rife with tribal warfare in search of capital gains, and the documentary starts and ends with an explosive ethical dimension.