NEW GUINEA TRIBES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23320, 12 October 1937, Page 10

NEW GUINEA TRIBES

UNTOUCHED BY MODERN INFLUENCE Crossing the coastal dividing range in New Guinea last year, I found the people less sophisticated than on the coast itself, and still further into the interior I met people still living in the Stone Age—killing each other with stone axes, stabbing one another with daggers of bone, writes A. J. Marshall in the Daily Telegraph. These people of hinterland New Guinea are often completely untouched by European influence. They have never seen a white face, and would not know what a gun was. They wear fantastic headdresses of fur and feathers, and live in much the same manner as did their ancestors of, say, 1000 years ago. New Guinea is the last place in the world to-day where men living under completely Stone Age conditions" may be studied. Sago, or sak-sak, is the staple diet of these savage natives. Sago is obtained from the inside pith of the trunk of a spiky palm which grows in the swamps—the sago pahru The palms are felled with “stone axes, split open by the men of the tribe, and the women wash the fibrous pith in an ingenious contrivance made from a hollow palmfrond supported by a series of sticks over a creek or pool. The women do all the cooking, and when the dry sago is ready to be converted into a meal they put it in a special carved bowl and pour boiling water on it. It then becomes the grey gluey mess which, varied with such vegetables as faro, yams, sweet potatoes, and various kinds of native cabbage, spinach,- and bananas, forms the bulk of their diet. The vegetables are usually cooked in long, hollow tubes of green bamboo; water is boiled in earthenware pots,. As you might imagine, one must buy a considerable amount of food every day to feed comfortably 30 hungry native porters. Rarely did we find difficulty in bartering for enough kaikai, as food is called throughout the Pacific. We carried beads, bright calico, razor blades, and coarse salt as “ trade.” Years ago the natives used to shave with fragments of quartz; later with bits of broken bottles. Now they like cheap razor blades. Salt with them is a luxury. It is difficult to get in the interior, and they eagerly lick it from their hands just as a white child would a sweet. And when hinterland natives are brought to the coast to work on the plantations, they sometimes walk into the sea and lap up salt water in huge enjoyment, gaspin'? at the very wonder of it. Villages are invariably built high up on precipitous ridges. The houses are thus moderately safe from enemy attack. for the one or two paths that lead up from below can always be well guarded, and they are so steep that a couple of home-defenders could hold the village against an army. On some ridges access to the villages is further complicated in a most ingenious manner. Giant fig-trees grow abundantly on the heights, and from their lower branches trail curious aerial roots, which grow downwards and finally reach the soil. The native has learned to train these trailing roots into ordered pattern, and he builds with them a twisty, living fence of tough, thick roots through which not even a pig could enter or leave the village precincts. It is often eight or ten feet high, and may only have one opening—a small tunnel a couple of feet high through which one must creep to enter the -village. Again, one man could hold the village “ gate ” against overwhelming numbers. I found them to be a happy, unspoiled people, these natives of the New Guinea hinterland. I often think that we, the civilised, could learn many lessons from them in the art of living. They wear exactly enough of the right 'kind of clothing to suit the weather conditions of their environment. Everybody has enough to eat, and a house to live in. The greatest and wisest man in the community has no better house than an ordinary man, and the whole community feasts when food is plentiful and the various crops are harvested, and fasts together, too, on the rare occasions when food supplies inexplicablv fall.