PAPUAN CUSTOMS

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 95, 23 April 1935, Page 8

PAPUAN CUSTOMS

SIR H. MURRAY'S REPORT'

ROMANCE IN OFFICIAL

DOCUMENT

(From "The Post's" Representative.) SYDNEY, April ,12.

The annual reports of the LieutenantGovernor of Papua (Sir Hubert Murray) are always eagerly awaited by a host of people in Australia and other parts of the world, j Unlike most official documents, they invariably contain a wealth of romance, and they combine vividness of description, lively thought, deep knowledge, and a fascinating subject with a graceful style.l that one would expect from the brother of that famous classics scholar, Professor Gil: bert Murray. Sir Hubert has been the ruler of Papua.for more /than a quarter of a century, and by taming a jungle wildernejs and a fierce and warlike race/he has come to be recognised as probably the greatest living British administrator of native peoples. In his reports reviewing the annual progress of Australia's' "colony," he invariably hurries through the necessary but less . interesting subjects;of economics and finance, and proceeds to a description of. the people he knows so well. ' LETTING THEIR FEELINGS GO. Thus, in his latest report, presented to Parliament this week, Sir -Hubert Murray has some interesting things to say abouf the Papuans.; For example, he describes the queer ways in which they sometimes give vent to their feelings. "Mr. C. Chapman (an1 administrative official) gives an instance," he writes, "in which a man burned down th,e communal house because his wife had run away with another man. I remember a casein which a man was asked to fetch water: when yhe was tired, and he, too, set flre to the communal house. Another burned down his own home because his brother re? fused to singe a pig that he had caught, and yet. another, overwhelmed with grief at the death. of his1 child, and finding another: native up a breadfruit tree, proceeded to cut down the tree and to kill the native with his axe. One, annoyed at the crying of a baby, killed his own mother; and another, unable to fmd his knife, split open the head of a friend- who was sitting next to him. The friend had never seen the knife, but that made no difference.

"But, after all," adds Sir Hubert, in a delightful comment, "we act sometimes in very much the same way ourselves. I have read that in Australia a man whose wife had eloped gave vent to his feelings' by trying to wreck a train. The wife was not on the train, but the act of violence relieved him. The same principle is illustrated by the : story pf the AngloIndian colonel who, cqming from the War Office after an-unsatisfactory interview,- relieved his feelings by administering a violent ikick to a perfect stranger who was tying1 his bootlace in the street." ■ ' \ :' PATIENT WORKERS. In his' previous report Sir Hubert Murray referred to the rather disconcerting ingenuity of Paputns who had derived a method of opening handcuffs with a piece of string an 4 forcing a Yale lock with the key of;a meat tin. "We find now;" he writes, "that the very primitive folk, knipvn indiscriminately by the grotesquely unscientific name of Kukukuku, have found some method of cutting up axes and shovels so as to form Waives and other tools. These natives *c always on the look-out for a'chanbe to rob the miners'.camps of anything made of steel and iron, and Mr.iZimmer, Resident Magistrate, relates that threequarter axes have been grounfi out by these people in such a way as to make two narrow axes, blades of 1 shovels have been cut into strips for, use as knives, and the digging end of la mattock has been cut off, leavirig the cutting end so that it could be i^ied as an axe. Mr. Zimmer 'suggests} that sand and a flat stone—and a (great deal of patience—were probably! used to carry out the work. • Probably this suggestion is correct, for some ptone clubs are made in this way, but it must be a tedious process." \

The Rev. Lawrence A. North arrived in "Wellington today from Christchutch. Mr. North is to conduct a series'; of meetings in the Lyall Bay Baptist Church. '■