a', he could not take communion because of the nubile girls who were offered transactionally and who gave themselves so unabashedly to verify, as one acknowledged cheerfully fifty years later, his appetising humanity. Mick deprecated the passing of perceived primeval sexual freedoms and detested mission-civilized (especially Lutheran) 'pimps'. To Taylor, Mick said: 'Jim, good country, good climate, good kanakas, too good to find gold in'.
Further expeditions in 1934 began with a punitive sortie against the killers of prospector Bernard McGrath at Finintigu, followed by probes north, south and west of Mount Hagen, the climbing of Papua's highest peak, Mount Giluwe (14,340 feet, 4371 m), the penetration of the Enga to twenty miles (32 km) past Wabag and confirmation that the Wahgi joined the Purari. The Highlands were now open: aerodromes were enthusiastically stamped out by myriad bare feet and villagers sent to the coast to bring back amazing tales of white men's cargo. Mick's photographs and films remain a unique record of the saga of 'first contact' in an award-winning film of the same name (1983).
When Sir Hubert Murray submitted that the Papuan patrol officer Jack Hides had discovered Mounts Giluwe and Ialibu and the Purari source, an acrimonious public controversy erupted. Mick went to London with his brother Jim in 1935 and forced a hearing with the Royal Geographical Society, after branding its members as 'phonies'. In 1936 he received its Murchison grant and his reports were published in its journal. The Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society then protested about the killings to the League of Nations. An administration enquiry duly conducted by Jim Taylor exonerated Mick but Italian diplomats noted his reprisals in justifying action in Abyssinia. Further recognition came in Britain and the United States of America where with ghost-writer Maurice Crain he published The land that time forgot (1937). In 1959 he was made an honorary member of the U.S. Explorers' Club and in 1971, with moon-walker Neil Armstrong, received its Explorers' medal. They had explored respectively the last terrestrial and the first extra-terrestrial 'unknowns'.
The Leahys found appreciable pay-dirt only at Kuta (Western Highlands). On 5 March 1940 Leahy married at St John's Church, Darlinghurst, Sydney, a 19-year-old North Queenslander Jeannette Gwendolin Best; she was an alumna of Sydney Church of England Girls' Grammar School. Jim Taylor was best man; Margaret Dovey (later Whitlam) was bridesmaid. They had five children who went into professions and business but Mick could not acknowledge three mixed-race sons at Mount Hagen who came under Danny's patronage and thrived. When the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit offered Mick only a sergeant's rank, he organized an assignment to the U.S. chief engineer as a Royal Australian Air Force flight lieutenant. He glided into remote Telefomin to build an airstrip and was awarded the U.S. Medal of Freedom with bronze palm in 1948.
Post-war Australia offered him in 1952 a mere M.B.E. which he temporarily declined when refused a £25,000 war service loan. He felt he had earned generous Highlands agricultural leases, and saw vendetta in being overlooked but, after years of delay, acquired mixed farming properties at Zenag on the Wau-Lae road. He locked horns with kiaps and villagers over policies, rights and tenure, was left off the Morobe District Advisory Council until protests were lodged, and was a hapless litigant against the administration. Yet he prospered after Papua New Guinea's independence although he had fulminated in the press against E. G. Whitlam's campaign for it, envisaging aid from 'hardworking, frugal and generous Australians' being despoiled by cargo cultists. In 1968 he could decline to have a black university student in his house because it would upset his servants and, though well-read, hoped George Wallace would win the American presidency. Survived by his wife, he died on 7 March 1979 and was buried at Zenag with Catholic rites. Ewunga, his trusty 'shoot-boy', aft