Review of 'Throwim Way Leg'

By Allegra Gellar

I admit I picked this book up because of the eye-catching cover and title. Please bear with me while I try to communicate just a few reasons why his impulsive read turned out to be one of the best I've had, in a very long time.

Tim Flannery is an Australian wildlife biologist, who has spent a good portion of his life in search of undocumented species of mammals in remote New Guinea. Throwim Way Leg spans a dozen or so of those years, and reads like a series of Science Fiction adventures on alien landscapes, and philosophical cautionary tales.

To say that the book is about Flannery's search for rare mammals is a good place to begin, but the more memorable observations and descriptions concern the Melanesian people, and their unendingly beautiful but rapidly disappearing environments.

The fact that male echidnas (Platypuses) possess four-pronged penises is indeed interesting, but the indigenous people's fashion of wearing gourds they attached to their genitals fascinates me even more.

The said gourds serve different functions, according to the age of the wearer:

Young men favor small, wide gourds, just big enough to store small items at the hollow end, like a sort of "fanny pack". These gourds protect the genitals (from insects?), and are compact enough, not to interfere with the need to run and hunt.

The older men have different priorities. Some of the older men sport gourds so long, they threaten to poke themselves in the eye (You have to see this to believe it). And yes, they wear them to attract attention.

As for the remarkable landscapes that were described in winsome detail-I was moved to greenest jealousy while reading Flannery's account of discovering an enormous, subterranean waterfall inside an even more enormous cave, while searching for what was thought to be a long extinct species of giant bat. He was fumbling about in total darkness, and it took him a while to realize that the strange thundering noises and the eerie mist was from an unseen waterfall!

I wasn't as jealous of Flannery's diet-while in the Morriceli Mountains, he subsisted on gray sago, (what's that?!) rancid pork and fly-blown cassowry fat. The roasted Giant Rats and Possums started sounding supremely delicious, after reading about one young man's curious habit of pulling tapeworms from the intestines of newly killed tree-possums and immediately eating them....

There are many themes in this book, most of which I don't want to take the time to try to begin to do justice, here.

I found many things in this book touching and illuminating; there were many instances in which the culture I'm most familiar with was brought into sharp relief, from a completely different perspective:

One night, a satellite travels overhead, and Flannery tells the locals what they are. He explains about President Ronald Reagan, and "Star Wars", and that the idea was to gain the ability to target and shoot our enemies from space.

After several moments of thoughtful consideration, a twelve year old boy then asks Flannery if he would mind asking Ronald Reagan to shoot some pigs (from space) for his father, who is too old and blind to hunt any more.

One of my favorite parts of the book occurs towards the end, when Flannery has completed a successful search for assorted creatures with a group of local hunters, including a man with an aversion to amphibians. Tim makes fun of his own fear of spiders, (which he encounters plenty in New Guinea) telling how he and the frog phobe would each grab and bag the specimens according to the other's reaction of revulsion upon discovering a specimen.

Flannery videotaped the excursion, and the showing of the video was like a party. Everyone involved laughed at each other and themselves, and pretended they were big movie stars. All of a sudden, a tight close-up of a toad filled the screen, and Mr. amphibian-phobe leapt over the back of a couch, and had to be forcibly prevented from leaping out a second-story window to get away.

When questioned later why he had reacted so strongly to the large image of a a toad on a screen, he explained that The toad appearing so large was very bad, indeed- but the possibility of hearing the sound ALSO being made much larger (amplified), well, was unthinkable!

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