The Last True Explorer: Into Darkest New Guinea

by Philip Temple

Forty years ago, a young New Zealand mountaineer headed into the unknown interior of West New Guinea (now Irian Jaya) on one of the last great journeys of exploration. Travelling at first with the legendary German mountaineer, Heinrich Harrer (author of Seven Years in Tibet), Philip Temple made the first ascent of the Carstensz Pyramide, which has come to be regarded as the technically most difficult of the 'Seven Summits of the Seven Continents'. Later he was the last to witness the tool-making rituals of a stone-age culture before it was overtaken by the modern world. Facing daunting physical odds, he went on to explore a swathe of unmapped central New Guinea Highlands, and he risked his life to recover the human remains from a US aircraft that had crashed on a sheer mountain. Copiously illustrated, Philip Temple's narrative is one of the great stories from the classical age of exploration. Dramatic, humorous and colourful, it is also a valuable anthropological record, for he tells of living among the Dani people before their primitive way of life was overtaken by the outside world

Genres: Travel

250 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Philip Temple is a multi prize-winning New Zealand author of fiction, non-fiction and children's books. His latest book is the adventure novel 'The Mantis' which explores why people risk all to be the first to reach the summit of an unclimbed mountain. Another new novel is due mid-year. He is also currently researching for a major biography of NZ author Maurice Shadbolt.

Philip was born in Yorkshire and educated in London but emigrated to New Zealand at the age of 18, becoming an explorer, mountaineer and outdoor educator. With Heinrich Harrer, of 'Seven Years in Tibet' fame, he made the first ascent of the Carstensz Pyramide in West Papua, one of the seven summits of the seven continents, and later sailed to sub-Antarctic Heard Island with the legendary H.W. ‘Bill’ Tilman to make the first ascent of Big Ben.

Philip's first books reflected this adventurous career and 'The World At Their Feet' won a Wattie Award in 1970. After a period as features editor for the New Zealand Listener, he became a full time professional author in 1972. Since that time he has published about 40 books of all kinds and countless articles and reviews.

In the fiction field, his nine novels include the best-selling 'Beak of the Moon', an anthropomorphic exploration of the mountain world seen through the eyes of the mountain parrot, kea. This, and its successor 'Dark of the Moon', are rated as unique in New Zealand literature. In more recent times, his Berlin-based novels 'To Each His Own' and' I Am Always With You' controversially tackle issues around German guilt and historical experience.

Philip’s non-fiction range is wide, from books about exploration and the outdoors to New Zealand history and electoral reform (MMP). His book about the Wakefield family and the early British settlement of New Zealand, 'A Sort of Conscience', was NZ Biography of the Year in 2003, and won the Ernest Scott History Prize from the University of Melbourne. Philip’s award-winning children’s books, in collaboration with wildlife artist Chris Gaskin, are unique to the genre.

Over the years, Philip has been awarded several fellowships, including the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship (1979), the Robert Burns Fellowship (1980), the 1996 NZ National Library Fellowship, a Berliner Künstlerprogramm stipendium in 1987 and the 2003 Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers Residency. In 2005, he was invested as an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) for Services to Literature and given a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement. Following examination of his work, Philip was granted the higher degree of Doctor of Literature (LittD) by the University of Otago in 2007.

Philip Temple lives in Dunedin with his wife, poet and novelist, Diane Brown.

Reviews

[Sarah Lodge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vicariously through Philip’s writing I feel as though I have been to this fascinating part of the world during a very interesting time in recent history. This book really holds some historical and anthropological value.
It is a ripping yarn!

[Zora · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5/5