Matthew Moore and Karuni Rompies – They look like barbeque chips or mulga roots and exude a comforting smell drifting between fresh timber and flowers. Burn them and they produce rich smoke said to warm the lungs and drive out asthma. Distil them and they'll produce oil so potent it can perfume a beard for weeks.

This is gaharu, lumps of resinous, aromatic wood now in such demand that the best specimens can ring more per ounce than gold. In the southern tribal swamplands of the Indonesian province of West Papua (formerly Irian Jaya), gaharu fever has hit hard.

Whole tribes are leaving their villages to comb the jungles in the hunt for the perfumed wood that brings instant access to a new world of liquor, gambling and sex.

Each discovery of a patch of forest rich with the fungus-infested trees brings a wave of new fortune-seekers. In the remote riverside towns, bars and gambling joints have sprung up in places where missionaries' churches once dominated. Traders from Java and Sulawesi have arrived with fair-skinned prostitutes to take upriver where their services are swapped for choice bits of gaharu gathered by Papuan collectors.

Southern Papua is so close to Australia that its canoes regularly wash up on our northern coastline.

Buts its vast tangle of rivers has kept roads and visitors out and it remains one of Indonesia's most remote and inaccessible quarters where such developments take place far from view.

The arrival of missionaries in the 1950s gave the world its first glimpse of this region dominated by Asmat tribes. It quickly became famous for their spectacular woodcarvings, for totem poles five metres high carved with chains of tiny figures clambering skywards, for intricately worked shields and for elaborate prows on huge dugout canoes.

It was these spectacular works that brought Mark Rockefeller, brother of the then New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, to the region 43 years ago. He was at the mouth of the river Betsj collecting art for a new York exhibition when his boat broke down midstream. After waiting all night, he set out for shore.

Although a strong swimmer and a young man, the spectacle wearing Rockefeller was never seen again, prompting worldwide headlines that he had been caught and eaten by headhunters. The media contingent that flew in with his brother found no conclusive evidence, although talk of a white man's skull and a pair of glasses (virtually unknown in the area at the time) continued in the villages for years.

As in Rockefeller's day, travel through the swamps is still by dugout canoe, except for the new crowd of rich outsiders who have the money to get around in banged-up speedboats powered by specially made kerosene outboards that use the heavily subsidized cooking fuel. Headhunting and cannibalism have long since stopped, but the area remains unpredictable, something we were reminded of when approaching a canoe well upriver to ask permission to take photographs

As usual, the two oarsmen were standing upright as they paddled. But as we slowly got closer, one briefly dropped to the bottom of the boat and sprang up a moment later, his right arm already straining to hold back the rattan bowstring behind the arrow he was ready to fire at us. As we ducked instinctively, the skipper of the boat sped off and explained what had happened, 'He's scared because there's a wharf being built down the river and there's a story that the builders need some human heads as a sacrifice. He was scared that we were coming to take his.'

If you pick the right tides and can find enough kero on the river, six or eight hours in such a boat will get you from Agats, the capital of the Asmat region, upstream to Eci, the current gaharu hot spot.

Until a few years ago, Eci was so small it's not even on the few maps of the area. Now it has swelled to become the biggest settlement in the vast mangrove swamp that is southern Papua. It's a booming frontier town with no real roads or cars but plenty of satellite dishes, where scores of shops sell axes, spades and pressure lamps to new waves of gaharu hunters, and each week throws up another rough-sawn timber and corrugated iron building to sell TV's stereos or sex.

At last count there were nine brothels in Eci bbelieve the local police chief. Liquor is freely available and drunks stagger home by night and day.

The sand track that serves as Eci's main street is lined with tiny shops owned mainly by Chinese traders from Java or by Bugis ( traders from South Sulawesi).

From each open doorway floats the thick, sweet smell of gaharu made by scores of men sitting inside, where they scrape away earth from the piles of roots the collectors bring in (the best gaharu occurs in the wood, but fungus infested roots are also harvested). With the dirt removed, the gaharu is placed on tarpaulins and dried outside in the tropical sun before grading. This street is Eci's financial heart where shops have sacks of gaharu stacked against walls like bank vaults packed with cash.

Eci is awash with money and the police and soldiers from the local military base are taking their usual cut, receiving 'security fees' from the traders to ensure that their gaharu reaches its destination in far-off Jakarta or Singapore. Such payments are not bribes, the traders tell you, just gifts given in a culture where refusal would be impolite.

Gaharu is its Indonesian or Malay name, but it is also called eaglewood, aloeswood, agarwood and jinkoh and is sometimes confused with sandalwood, which is not found in Papua. Once common across much of Asia, gaharu has disappeared even faster that the region's tropical forests. Most is sold through Singapore where dealers like Mr C.P. Ng supply the world market.

It's 40 years now since he started buying it from Assam, in north-east India before stocks ran low.- 'When it ran out there the trade moved to Bangladesh, to Indochina, then to peninsular Malaysia, to

Sumatra, Kalimantan and then to Irian Jaya and Papua New Guinea. When there's no more there, and nowhere else to go, maybe we have to go to South America', he jokes.

Gaharu is really a form of natural incense and it has been traded for at least 1000 years. It is mentioned in the Bible, is a key ingredient in some traditional medicines and is highly valued in Muslim and Buhddist ceremonies. Most of it is sold to the Middle East, where it is called simply 'ud' (or 'ood') band where it is used in everyday life as well as religious festivals.

In Yemen, men dab gaharu oil onto their beards and their shirts, the distinctive scent surviving three or four washes. They add it to tobacco mix in water pipes and burn it to impart a fragrant woody smell to clothes. A Yemeni man explained to American author Eric Hansen why it was so sought after: "When you walk by woman in the street and you smell 'ud, you know that she is from a good family. It is a sign of wealth, good breeding, refinement and status".

In visits to the royal families in Dubai and Saudi Arabia, Ng found gaharu used in a big boiler 'to give the whole palace a good smell'. The smoke, he says, "keeps the whole body warm .. and it's good for sex problems."

As supplies run down, the price has climbed. Ng classifies gaharu in a up to a dozen different grades, with top quality super AA weighed on jewellers' scales and selling for about $A2700 a kilogram. From Vietnamese trees hundreds of years old comes the most highly prized gaharu, called keena or kannam, which Ng says now brings $A24,000 to $A27,000 a kilo. This thick black gaharu is so dense that it sinks in water and to ensure none of its precious smack escapes, Ng stores what he can find in special airtight containers. With so much of the gaharu trade unregulated, it is difficult to know the size of the market but Ng estimates that gaharu worth more than $A 1.6 billion goes through Singapore each year.

In cyberspace, Western businesses offer gaharu for sale at up to $20,000 a kilo. Enfleurage, an aromatherapy store based in New York's Greenwich Village, attributes almost supernatural powers to it and the oil it produces. 'Deep, rich, earthy and personal, its sweet yet sharp balsamic woodiness will enter you through all of your senses. Beyond a pleasant smell, a drop of agarwood will softly invade your lungs, your mind, your body and spirit taking total possession of you .. the body heats, the heart expands, other scents retreat in the presence of oud. Oud is sexuality, passion, ecstasy and love".

The source of this unusual wood is certain species of Aquilaria trees, once reasonably common in Asia's lowland forests before they were felled in the hunt for the treasure within. Many trees were cut unnecessarily, as most do not contain the dark woody resin that can take decades to form. No one knows why, but trees recovering from injury seem to be the ones that develop gaharu, in the heartwood of the tree that is normally white.

Professor Robert Blanchette, from the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of Minnesota, has

spent 10 years studying the reasons some Aquilaria trees contain gaharu and has managed to produce it in plantation trees that have been deliberately injured.

Working with the Rainforest Project Foundation, his team has been conducting experiments in Vietnam, Thailand, Bhutan and PNG, hoping new trees might replace the old-growth gaharu- bearing trees that have almost all gone.

He says gaharu in the experimental new trees grows quickly, has an "extremely fine aroma" and might eventually provide a commodity for poor farmers in rural areas. In the meantime, the gaharu hunters in Papua are going flat out to grab what's left.

In the tiny regional capital of Agats, a boardwalk town built on piles above the coastal mudflats, a Papuan man in his late 20s explains what happened when gaharu fever hit.

With no jobs, Lukas and his wife Paula (not their real names) were quick to join the early expeditions in the late 1990s. They joined friends taking longboats upriver and set up base camps in the forests, which soon grew into little towns with shops and food stalls servicing the mainly Papuan collectors.

The routine was always the same. Villagers built bamboo-framed shelters, lined them with sago leaves, then set off to gather the treasure. "We could make millions of rupiah in one day, sometimes one million ($A150) in one hour", Lukas recalls. But they never knew if they received fair prices because all transactions were done in the forest with police and soldiers on hand to provide "security" for the traders, who paid then to attend.

"When the Bugis came into the forest to buy, they were always accompanied by TNI [soldiers] in plain clothes who bought their rifles", he says, "So we couldn't bargain about the price because we were afraid of the TNI."

"If we asked for a higher price the TNI would get violent and threaten us, but sometimes, if the locals knew how to deal with the TNI, we could get a little bit more."

They never saw anyone shot or injured by the soldiers but the risk was there. sometimes we got drunk and fought and the TNI would fire warning shots into the air", says Lukas, who fears repercussions from TNI members still in Agats if his real name is published.

Paying soldiers was just one way the traders managed to keep the prices down. "In the early days we exchanged gaharu for the women", Lukas says.

Paula says that the pale-skinned prostitutes the traders brought with them from Java and Sulawesi were irrestible to the dark-skinned Papuans. "They all went to them; they were pretty, and at the time people had not seen women like that", she recalls, "even the old men would go after them".

But as the gaharu stocks dwindled around Agats, the town has grown quieter, the brothels have closed and the gaharu hunters have moved on, upriver to places like Eci.

Tadeus Hanahagi says he was the first person there to find gaharu when the commander at the military post showed him some wood from Borneo and asked if similar trees grown locally, A member of the Auyu tribe, the traditional owners of the land around Eci, Tadeus says the commander explained "inside this tree you can find something valuable."

"I told him that it came from a koro tree, which we have always used to get long strips of bark to weave into bags." After searching in the forest, Tadeus says that he found 130 kilograms of gaharu and took it to the post commander who gave him 10,000 rupiahs a kilogram, or about $200 for the lot.

"I bought a Polytron radio cassette player and then someone borrowed it and turned it on and then everyone knew that I had money and since then more people have been going into the woods to find gaharu.

Soon the post commander did not have enough money to purchase the gaharu, so Chinese traders came and the alcohol arrived and soon after that the prostitutes came blike a city, we had karaoke, girls, things that never existed."

Eci is a town split in two, Although the terrain is dead flat, everyone calls the two halves "up" and "down".

The old village, two kilometers inland from the river bank, is up. It's where the original Papuan villagers have lived for decades in simple huts now roofed with tin. The sago and jackfruit plants dotted around the place provide some of the food, and men still fish and hunt pigs with bows and arrows. If they weren't out chasing gaharu, they'd still go to the little Catholic church.

New Eci is down, a sprawling settlement by the riverbank where the split trunks of coconut palms form makeshift footways through the mud, leading to the karaoke bars and gambling houses.

Sheltering from a savage sun under a tree, the head of the old village, Matius Hanahagi, sits on his bench in the dust and contemplates the lumps of gaharu on the table in front of him. "Everyone in the family goes searching for this and once they have it, the men take it down, over there, to sell," he says with a wave of his arm. "Then they go gambling. They can spend two million ($A300) instantly. They are not used to getting money. Once they have, they get drunk and go to the brothel."

As he slowly and deliberately makes his points, those in the village who are not our gathering gaharu gather round, anxious to back up his stance. Their anger is clear, especially in the faces of the women who complain that they are losing their men.

"It's a lie if the police said there's no prostitution here", calls one woman standing barefoot in the dirt. "We discussed the prostitution problem with the pastor but he can't do anything".

"Every week the police receive 1.5 million [rupiahs] from the gambling and the alcohol." calls out a mother with a child on her hip.

"If the police chief comes from Merauke, they will usually close everything up for two days," a young man says. "This is their pantry, you cannot solve the problem, The police control everything here" another shout.

A proud grandmother in her 40's, Devota Armi badly wants to explain the impact the discovery of gaharu has had on her community. "At the time, in the 1990's we were very naA/ve, there was a lot of alcohol and night life and then husbands abandoned their wives and children."

Her husband stayed but she has watched many of her friends as their families broke up, including one female relative. "Here husband loves to stay in the bar now. They have one child, aged two and the father is always drunk, the bar is his second home. Gaharu men, they go into the woods for a week or two. He leaves his wife at home and when he gets back he goes straight to the bar."

While most in Eci want life to return to the simpler ways of the past, Devota Armi agrees that some like the new life, including some of the men who complain most loudly. "Small people like us want this unhealthy night life to be stopped, although there are probably some who love bars and gambling and women. There are two opinions among the people."

Pastor Decky Ogi has spent two years working at the little St Yosep's Catholic church now reckons gaharu now provides 80% of the town's income. He readily admits ht he has failed to stop the impact of the gaharu business.

"Kid's don't go to school now, they go to the wood to search for gaharu, they get money so they don't see any need to go to the school. The teachers also get only small incomes, and things are expensive, so some teachers don't teach anymore, they go looking for gaharu instead. Their salaries are 700,000 to one million rupiahs a month [$A100 to $A150], but in two weeks searching for gaharu they can get 10 million."

Two years ago his complaints prompted the deputy regent of the regional capital Merauke to make the long trip to investigate Eci.

"He came, he closed the hotel where the prostitutes worked and he replaced the police chef but now it is happening again," says Ogi. "They have the authority but there is no political will. They behave as f they can do nothing. Are the police so stupid they don't know what' going on, or are they part of the problem ?" He has reported what is happening in reports to his bishop in Merauke, hoping to force the regional government to act. But the involvement of the police and the army in the illegal business has defeated him.

Hundreds of kilometers from Papua New Guinea, way upriver, Eci seems a strange place to even have an army base. The soldiers are there thanks to former Soeharto, who left behind a territorial command system where the army has a presence in every town across the country. Suharto said soldiers were needed to guard against internal threat. The old dictator might have gone but his system remains, the big money made in resource-rich Papua ensuring its survival.

As well as "security fees" for providing the safe transport of gaharu, soldiers in Eci impose their own taxes on the flourishing illicit businesses, taking 200,000 rupiahs ($A30) for each ton of beer that's brought in, according to locals.

The officer responsible for the Eci troops, Lieutenant Colonel Paulus from Merauke, seems surprised buy questions about gaharu and refuses to give his full name. He has received "no reports" of his men working in the business. Asked if his men ever go to the forests with the local gaharu collectors, or work as middlemen for the traders, he replies, "I'll check".

Like everyone in Eci, the head of the local government, Yohannes Sumbung, knows how the game works. In theory he is the boss of the police chief but after 10 years in the town, he's not about to make enemies by taking him on. He agrees most of the community want him to close the bars and brothels, but he lacks the will and perhaps the power to do so.

Asked bluntly who really benefits from these businesses he replies: "We can't say who's behind then but there's sure to be someone who we know and it's someone stronger than the government", he says, breaking into a smile. "Yu know who it is and we know."

Just before sunset, when the sting has gone from the sun, Eci's Police Chief Riyanto likes to ride his motorbike though his town, visiting the gaharu traders, casting an eye over the bars. With no real roads, there are few motorbikes in Eci, but Riyanto has one of them. He is freshly showered, his white singlet highlighting his ample brown biceps, his authority further enhanced by his holstered handgun, six spare bullets snug in black leather rings.

Down at the aptly named Rizky karaoke bar, the owner Iwan knows who's in charge of his business.. Te day that we visit he has told Fanny from Blitar in east Java and the other girls to take the day off. "Riyanto told us to close the bar for a day or two because his boss was coming from Merauke", Iwan says. "Usually he sends one of his officers Pak [Mr] Piet to tell us when we can re-open."

Riyanto refuses to be quoted in the article, to discuss gaharu or who makes money from it. Still the diamond rings on both hands and his gold wristwatch suggests that he enjoys an income well beyond his monthly salary of $A200. He may not talk openly about gaharu but he clearly knows the business, proudly producing a key ring made from a lustrous, golf-ball sized lump of the best black gaharu we saw anywhere in Papua,

In towns dotted through the forests of Southern Papua, women have fought the same battles repeatedly when gaharu fever hits, the liquor and prostitutes arrives and the communities disintegrate. In Agats a few years ago, local women joined the wives of soldier and traders from other parts of Indonesia to form an anti-prostitution group called 'Birds of Paradise Against the White Doves' (birds of paradise are the symbol of West Papua). Their demonstrations and complaints to the military commander in Merauke finally had some effect and he issued a decree to stop the sale of alcohol and sex in the forest.

Upriver in Atsj it's been several years since women demonstrators forced the prostitutes to flee the town's only hotel. Traders still buy gaharu there but now the karaoke bar provides songs and no other services.

Women have tried the same direct action in Eci. Nearly three years ago, a group of mainly Papuan women demonstrated outside one of the bars, then forced their way in. One woman witness, who does not want to be named, was there as the demonstration turned violent.

"They just went straight into the bar where the girls lived and most managed to escape but one could not get away. The women beat her and kicked here and one

had a bottle of chilli and poured it onto her genitals. We waited at the clinic for her to be admitted but she did not come. Months later we heard that she died becase of that chilli."

When another demonstration got rowdy, Pastor Ogi says police fired warning shots as "an obvious mechanism to intimidate".

The town's only medico, Dr Pratono, has honed his suturing skills stitching wounds in women attacked by drunken husbands.

"There's a lot of drunks, fighting and killing," says the young doctor, who despairs at the medicine he's been forced to practice since big money from gaharu transformed the town, "At night they drink and gamble and go home and attack their wives. I've seen axe wounds in the head, axe wounds in the face. One woman was holding her eight year old daughter when her husband threw an axe at her and she swerved and it hit her daughter and opened up a 10 centimetre gash in her skull."

The 30 to 40 prostitutes living in the town at any one time also keep him busy. He has a HIV testing program in place and has taken blood from at a hundred. So far, 20 have bee positive and Pratono says that half number have developed AIDS.

Because of the big money that gaharu brings, Pratono holds little hope for his efforts to stop the spread of disease among his isolated communities. He's putting his efforts into teaching the community about the dangers of HIV and runs a clinic for the prostitutes, where he explains the disease and the need for precautions. But with six prostitutes already lost to AIDS, he's deeply pessimistic.

He is frustrated that he can't get the government and security officials to take the thereat seriously, because they don't want to jeopardize their financial interests. "The biggest problem is there's no coordination. If we had the police and the others on side, it would be better. But the police chief is always trying to cover up the HIV cases. He says, "You should test then but you don't have to publish the results, don't tell the community".

Most of the traders in the main street say Eci's days as the gaharu centre are already beginning to fade and that good quality gaharu is becoming increasingly scarce. As has happened across the region, the Papuan villagers will be forced to travel further and stay away longer to find it.

And as they move further upriver, deeper into the forests, Pratono's job will get harder. "The prostitutes are going into the forest because it's getting quieter here," he says, "Right now there's a camp four or five kilometers from here and there are five prostitutes there, three Papuans and two Javanese."

He doesn't have the time or resources to visit these camps, to provide the information, the condoms, or do the blood tests that he wants. Without something changing fast, he sees little hope. The gaharu will run out, the traders will move on, but the doctor is convinced its legacy will linger. I think it will be mass death there."