This article was published in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 10, (MUP), 1986
Michael James (Mick) Leahy (1901-1979), explorer, was born on 26 February 1901 at Toowoomba, Queensland, fourth of nine children of Irish migrants Daniel Leahy, railway guard, and his wife Ellen, née Stone. He was educated at Christian Brothers' College, Toowoomba. He eventually became leader of the most enterprising expatriate 'clan' on the New Guinea frontier, where from the 1930s a million people were brought under Australian control. He can be said to have closed the European freebooting saga begun by Cortes in the sixteenth century.
After a 'rough and ready' childhood, Mick became a railway clerk but abandoned the job as a dead end. A non-smoker and near-teetotaller, tall, well-built, brown-eyed, ruminative, eloquent, commanding, restless and indefatigable, he abandoned freelance timbercutting in 1926, leaving his 'T-model Ford on the side of the road' on hearing of the Edie Creek gold strike. Misgauging the rugged, humid terrain, lacking equipment, suffering from near-fatal malaria, he retreated to contract construction and labour management and, joined by his brothers Patrick (1899-1963), James (1909-81) and Daniel (b.1912), learned the skills of prospecting and survival.
In 1930 Mick and Michael Dwyer were staked to prospect the Ramu tributaries. Tracing the Dunantina they glimpsed the Goroka valley, then unexpectedly were led south to the junction with the unknown Wahgi where bloated corpses intimated dense populations westwards although the interior of New Guinea was thought to be 'simply a continuation of precipitous mountains and miasmic jungles'. With only sixteen carriers and few guns, they encountered Highlands groups who perceived them as ancestors and tried to rub off their white skins, crossed the cordillera and descended by canoe to Port Romilly on the Gulf of Papua to learn they had traversed the mainland and discovered the Purari headwaters.
In November 1930 Leahy and Dwyer were the first Europeans into the Gafuku (Asaro) valley. Mick accepted a stake from New Guinea Goldfields Ltd in 1931 and, after aerial reconnaissance, a decisive factor in Highlands exploration and then almost unique to New Guinea, led an expedition into the Watut valley. On a second trip to the Watut, Mick was caught unprepared for a Kukukuku pre-dawn attack, was battered and partly deafened by a 'pineapple-stone' club and his brother Paddy was seriously wounded. No longer crediting the dictum that 'nothing more lethal than a walking stick was needed to patrol or prospect', Mick henceforth went well-convoyed, demarcated his camps with fishline and sentinels, practised forbearance but shot to kill. According to his adulatory retainers 'Masta Mick' never missed; between them some hundred warriors were shot. Women, children and non-belligerents were sacrosanct; protecting his carrier line and teaching the heinousness of killing white men were paramount. His attitude on preventive measures hardened ('I'd like to murder the murdering bastards') as he became increasingly disgusted by Highlanders' indiscriminate savagery, though he admired their virility and ceremonious skills. Uncharacteristically solicitous for that time, he lost only one 'boy' through illness during ten expeditions.
Spurred perhaps more by fame than fortune, Leahy took correspondence lessons in photography and journalism and carefully kept a diary. His meticulously organized expeditions in 1933 brought himself, Danny and Charles Marshall of N.G.G.L. to a Pisgah view of the populous Wahgi valley from Mount Erimbari on 15 February. In April with J. L. Taylor, representing an administration urged by the League of Nations to fill in cartographical blanks, the Leahys crossed Chimbu territory to Mount Hagen, tracked the Baiyer River towards the Sepik and, via the lower Jimi, returned to climb Mount Hagen and explore south to the Wahgi-Nebilyer divide. Although Mick providently wrote to his friend, Father William Ross, at Alexishafen, to bring his mission quickly to 'the real New Guine