Edward Pollard

Tari Gap, Papua New Guinnea. November 2005

He cannot have been more than 5 foot tall.  He was wearing a skirt of palm leaves, carrying a sharpened stick and was sporting a particularly natty leaf in his hair.  He was the baggage handler.  We had made it to Tari, nestled in the middle of the near mythical highlands of Papua New Guinea, homeland of the Huli (Hoolee) wigmen.  My regular travelling companion Audrey and I had talked about this trip over martinis in Washington and Kunming, Bali and Belmopan, it still did not seem real that we were actually here.

As we boarded our decrepit Chinese bus I asked our guide how long far it was to Ambua Lodge "oh only 25Km, it will take about 2 hours", what !  Did I really hear that correctly.  The lodge has another bus, but the road had defeated that one.  It was broken, or 'gone bugger-up' as they say in pidgin.  We were the only passengers as the bus bumped out of the bustling municipal centre consisting of 28 houses, a grass landing strip and a market square.  A market of sorts appeared to be in progress.  There were a couple of stalls selling limp bananas and a women selling clothes that probably originated from some charitable donation in the US Midwest.  A young boy walked passed tenderly clutching his most prized possession, a rather content piglet.

Most people however were more interested in darts than shopping.  Darts and gambling that is.  Large groups of men gathered around 5 or 6 dart boards mounted at the side of the road.  These were ragged things attached to the top of 2 metre pole.  They were not against a wall, nor did they have any backboard.  It was a small disk on the end of a long stick.  Punters stood about 4 metres away and hurled darts at the board.  This was no graceful flick like that produced by some of the finest athletes the bars of North-west Europe can produce, but more like a wild lunge.  They hit the board with worrying frequency.  On occasion however the dart would arc by the target and snag on a mangy dog, or unfortunate passerby.

We rattled out of town and across the Tari basin, a large valley at about 1600m above sea level, that is home to one of the oldest agricultural systems in the world.  All this was unknown to the outside world, however, until 1931.  That was when the Leahy brothers, a couple of Australian chancers in dangerously short shorts, went to look for gold.  They did eventually find some, but they were also more than a little surprised to find 3/4 of a million people living in the middle of the island.  The Huli too were amazed and dismayed to learn of the existence of Australia.  And anywhere else outside of their valley, for that matter.  A landing strip, roads and cast off gap t-shirts aside, things have not changed all that much in the last 70 years.

The bus crept along between high hedgerows and tangled banks.  Every few hundred metres we would pass a gateway of wood and bamboo.  These were all heavily bolted shut.  Each of these enclosures is known as village.  They are home to a single extended family group which is the basic unit of Huli culture.  The most important things to a Huli man are his land, his pigs and his women.  In that order.  And many battles and wars have been and are still being fought over them.  Family groups may well all be ethnically Huli, but they are connected by complex, but essential, ties of allegiance.  Infractions and disagreements are dealt with in a customary and often violent way.  In the Huli system of Payback the concept of an eye for an eye is taken quite literally.

Behind the barricade the family lives and farms.  Men in one house, women and children in another.  Around them are beautifully tended gardens of taro, yams, bananas, sugar cane and sweet potatoes.  The soil of the highlands is extraordinarily rich, giving rise to one of the highest rural population densities in the world, and they have been farmers for a long time.  This started 10,000 years ago, long before farming in Europe.  They domesticated local taro, yams, bananas and sugar cane.  The most important staple is however sweet potato.  A large part of each enclosure was dedicated to growing sweet potato in very neat circular mounds about 1 metre in diameter.  On the flight in these could be seen spread out across the whole valley, giving it a slight pixelated appearance.

One thing always confused me about this.  Sweet potatoes come from the Andes.  If whiteman didn't reach the highlands until 70 years ago, how did sweet potato come to be such a vital crop.  As it was when the Leahy's look for gold.  It turns out that it has been grown up there for about 400 years.  Think about it.  This would need marauding conquistadors to have taken a pause from rampaging the Incas in 1533 packed up a bag of spuds and sent them back to Spain.  This bag o chips would then have had to made it into the hands of a Moorish merchant who carries them to Java.  There they are passed on to a Bugis trader who happens to be passing New Guinea on his way to Australia to collect sea cucumbers.  This, by then rather rancid bag, has to make it all the way into the interior, along with cowries and hornbill feathers.  This never appeared to be very likely to me, and has bothered me for some time.  And I've just found out.  It was the Polynesians, cunning seafarers that they were.  It seems that they made it to south America 1,000 years ago, and brought sweet potatoes back with them across the Pacific.  That's how they made it to the Tari basin, that that's what led to a huge population, complex social rules, more or less constant conflict and the occasional raid by malaria ridden, cannibalistic neighbours from the far less productive lowlands.

I have to add that contrary to all the stories of warring clans, rascals and cannibals everybody we met was incredibly warm and friendly.  As the bus bounced around a corner I would see a group of men by the road.  Most of them were wearing traditional clothes.  Unusually enough not because of the tourists, but just because they still do.  Like the baggage handler they wore palm leaf and woven grass loin clothes.  Bright yellow and red stripes of paint adorned their faces, and their heads were crowned with magnificent wigs.  These are what the Huli are most famous for, their wigs.  As a right of passage adolescent boys ago to what is oddly called 'wig school'.  Here they spend their youth growing out and shaping their hair into a large domed afro.  After 7 years it is carefully shaved off, decorated with bird-of-paradise feathers and kept for special occasions, or sometimes to dress up a bit when you go for a walk with your clansmen.  Particularly diligent youths do this again, for another 7 years, to produce a second wig.  This is placed upside down on the first to create a huge crenulated castle of hair.  Once you have your wig you have to keep it for life.  You can't grow another one, and it is a huge taboo to wear somebody else's.  I looked out of the bus window at these stern men with spectacular hair.  They stared back stoically.  I waved gleefully like a giddy schoolboy on a field trip.  Their faces cracked into huge grins, their eyes would sparkle and they all waved enthusiastically back.