he 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 Guinea', 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