It was a long day indeed and the only way I could prevent more deaths between the two clans was to cut down the vine bridge over the Lai River.

It took a further two days to get everyone settled enough to talk.

Shortly after this I was tasked to build a post at Akom, a few hundred metres north of the Lutheran Mission at Amapiaka, for which I surveyed and purchased land.

After seven weeks of constructing police houses and a medic’s house and with my own donga almost complete, another war broke out in the same area.

This took all the police and kiap resources of both Wabag and Wapenamanda to stave off what would otherwise have been a kill fest.

As it was we used almost all the ammunition of the combined stations. We called for help and after the District Commissioner flew over to ‘inspect’ the fracas at about midday, we got a mobile squad to reinforce our situation by five o’clock.

It took over a week to bring relative peace to the area sufficient for talks to begin.

They are a fierce people and I would not like to be there today.

As an aside, I did a calculation whilst at Wabag and during my first six months there (September 1969 to March 1970 we averaged a full blown tribal war every 10 days.

It was only considered full blown if there were fatalities, others were merely skirmishes.

More from Barry Taverner here: https://www.pngattitude.com/2014/12/-the-weird-world-of-seismic-stress-mud-dirt-heat.html