Obuituary of Dan Leahy
By Bob Connolly
The Independent (London) Dec. 2, 1991

DANIEL LEAHY was the last of a famous group of Australian explorers who opened up Papua New Guinea's interior to the outside world.

Leahy first arrived at Mount Hagen, in Papua New Guinea's central highlands, in 1938, as a member of the famous Wahgi Expedition, led by his brother Michael Leahy. Prospecting for gold, the Australians were the first outsiders to penetrate this unexplored region - the massive and fertile Wahgi Valley - and to make ''first contact'' with the hundreds of thousands of people found to be living there. Their existence had not been suspected by the outside world, and the ignorance was mutual: the highlanders had considered themselves alone in their universe and took the newcomers to be mythological ''skymen'' or more prosaically the spirits of their own dead. Aztecs thought the same of Cortez, who was also looking for gold, and indeed it could be said that Dan Leahy's death brings to a close the 500-year epoch of European colonial expansion that began when the Spanish went to Central and South America. Like Cortez, Michael and Daniel Leahy went looking for fame and fortune but they found a small gold deposit near Mount Hagen and when Michael Leahy left for greener pastures Daniel settled down to mine it. With a few short interruptions he spent the next 58 years living in the Mount Hagen region, as a goldminer, trader, businessman and coffee-planter. He was the first to introduce all these activities to this vigorous, warlike people, along with a good many more of the concepts and values of the West.

Leahy followed Alexander's dictum (''Marry among the people you have conquered'') and took as wives the daughters of three highland ''big men'' (clan leaders), thus starting a clan of his own with 12 children and dozens of grandchildren. But he brought them up to be Australians, not highlanders. A man of his time, Leahy never regretted terminating the pristine isolation of the highlanders in their lofty, beautiful valleys. While some of his exploring contemporaries eulogised in later years their Stone Age way of life, Leahy tended more to the ''nasty, brutal and short'' view. ''There was nothing in their lives,'' he told me, ''that was better than what we brought them.''

Leahy himself came from a large Irish-Australian family living in Queensland. His father was a railway guard. Dan came of age with the Great Depression. New Guinea was ripe for the Australian plucking and in 1931, aged 19, Dan joined his brother Michael, who had already made a name for himself as a prospector/explorer in the Mandated Territory, administered by Australia for the League of Nations. New Guinea's interior was then thought to consist of sparsely-populated mountainous country. Michael Leahy exploded that myth in 1930, when he trekked inland looking for gold. Leahy and his companions were astounded to encounter instead broad fertile valleys teeming with people. There were enticing traces of gold there too, and Michael, now joined by Dan, spent the next four years searching for his own modern-day El Dorado. In a series of dazzling expeditions the two Leahy brothers opened up vast stretches of the interior, moving among hundreds of thousands of people whose addition to the island's known population effectively doubled it.

But the climactic journey was the Wahgi Expedition of 1933, underwritten by the British-owned New Guinea Goldfields Company but sanctioned by the cash-starved Australian Administration, which sent the District Officer, Jim Taylor, along as well to plant the flag. This was arguably the most famous of all the inland explorations of Papua New Guinea. Both Michael and Dan utilised a motion- picture camera on this expedition, capturing perhaps the most remarkable pictorial record of first cultural contact in the history of European exploration. Michael Leahy screened some of his material to the august members of the Royal Geographic Society when he visited London in 1936, but the footage was more widely seen around the world in the Australian documentary film First Contact, in which Dan Leahy supplies the central narrative.

Michael Leahy (who died in 1978) would have claimed that right himself, had he been alive. He was the driving force in the partnership and Dan was the kid brother, which he himself was the first to admit. Those who did know the older man speak in awe of the force that emanated from him, of his indomitable will. But I came to know Danny very well over the last 10 years of his life, and to me he seemed possessed of those same qualities in abundance. He was a big powerful man and very much a force to be reckoned with, despite the physical disabilities which so blighted his later life.

The disabilities resulted from Leahy's heroic exploits for the Australian military in New Guinea during the war. Utilising his deep knowledge of the country and its people Leahy led daring rescues of Europeans caught in the path of the invading Japanese, as well as a series of long-range reconnaissance patrols - often conducted under the very noses of the Japanese. But he was to suffer the consequences of these privations with the gradual loss of his eyesight and hearing.

After the war Leahy went back to New Guinea as soon as he could, and played a pioneering role in the development of the region. In the Thirties he had often been the sole European living in the area, but by the late Forties the Highlands became the centre of intense colonial activity as the missionaries, government officers and later white settlers (planting the coffee that Leahy had introduced) all sought in their various ways to introduce to the highlanders their notions of how humans should conduct their lives.

Throughout these decades Leahy presided as the living embodiment of the Australian Imperium, going steadily blind and deaf but still managing to rule his own roost with a rod of iron. He was regarded more in awe than affection by the highlanders, and this suited him fine. Certainly they held him in deep respect as a man who had proved himself down the years to be every bit as tough and ruthless as they if he had to be. Michael and Dan shot to kill when they judged the situation warranted it, and the Hageners still recall the time before the war when Dan, the sole European living there, faced down a mutiny by his workers. As an offsider covered him with a pointed Colt 45, Dan invited each of 30 workers into his hut for a ''chat'', beat each of them senseless and threw each in turn down his veranda stairs.

Leahy was a straightforward man, no deep thinker, but a man I found it impossible not to like, and indeed to respect enormously. By the time I first met him in 1980 he could not see and could hardly hear, and was crippled by a stroke. All this doomed him to long periods of awful, silent isolation, but I never once, in the ensuing 11 years, heard him utter a single complaint or give a suggestion of self-pity. I have never imagined land exploration to be a calling for weaklings, and Dan Leahy certainly attested to that notion.

In his lifetime Leahy witnessed the region's evolution from ''the Stone Age'' (not a popular term these days but one Leahy thought quite appropriate) to full independence in 1975. Housebound in later years by his disabilities, Leahy was shielded from the turbulence that has marked the later post-independence period. Coming late in the imperial day and ending almost as soon as it began, the Australian colonial stewardship never more than glazed over the powerful forces of highlands tribalism. The glaze is now cracking everywhere, with law and order breaking down and tribal warfare once more endemic.

This is a development waspishly predicted by many of those Australian colonists who went home en masse at Independence, something Danny Leahy was never going to do. Mount Hagen was his home and he would die there. He was the first of them to arrive and the last to go. There are still very remote places in the highlands, and so the word will take some time to spread among those old highlanders who remember back nearly 60 years.