CURIOUS CUSTOM

Stratford Evening Post, Volume II, Issue 227, 24 April 1933, Page 8

CURIOUS CUSTOM

Girls Kept in Cages

The curious custom of natives of Tanga, New Guinea, of incarcerating young girls in wickerwork cages within darkened huts for a period of 12 months or more, is one of the interesting problems which Mr. Frank Bell, a master of arts in anthropology at Sydney University, proposes to investigate shortly. The native girls, it has been suggested, consider the confinement not as a punishment but as a privilege. Mr. Bell, who is the assistant librarian of the Sydney Municipal Library, will leave this month for New Guinea, on a seven months' anthropological investigation of the natives of Tanga, a group of islands off the north-east coast of New Ireland, mandated territory of New Guinea. His investigations, which are being made for the Australian National Research Council, will include a study of the social organisation, economic life, general conditions, system of government, magico-religious system, and recreation of the inhabitants.