NEW GUINEA KILLER STICK

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31113, 16 July 1966, Page 16

NEW GUINEA KILLER STICK

Department of Agriculture inspectors confiscated a New Guinea killer stick from Mr J. O. F. Hamilton at Christchurch Airport yesterday.

The killer stick is used by natives of the remote reaches of the Upper Sepik river for fighting each other. The weapon was confiscated by the inspectors when Mr Hamilton, who is technical director of C. W. F. Hamilton and Company, Ltd., returned with his wife from a jet-boat 'expedition to an area rarely, if ever, visited by white men. Mr Hamilton said he hoped to get the killer stick from the Agricultural Department, once it had been fumigated. “I don’t blame them for tak-

ing these precautions against diseases,” he said. Mr and Mrs Hamilton have been on a geological expedition since May for the Australian Bureau of Mineral Resources. The tip of the killing stick is fitted with the sharp claw of a flightless New Guinea bird, the muruk. No headhunters were seen by the Hamiltons in the Upper Sepik, which is reputed to be one of the last remaining headhunting regions in the world. “Our carrier boys found three human skulls hanging in a variegated tree in a clear edge of the bush,” said Mrs Hamilton. “There was no explanation. The human heads were those of two men and a boy. “There were also shoulder-

blades of a pig and the heads of a kangaroo and a dog. “When I went over alone to look at the heads it made me feel eerie.” Mrs Hamilton said that a New Zealand geologist who led the expedition, Mr Dow, thought that the skulls were at the scene of a feast. The Hamiltons saw hundreds of big flying bats, called black bokis, flying overhead at the Sepik. To supplement their normal diet of tinned food and fresh fruit they ate native guria pigeon, the tapioca root 'and a sweet potato known as kaukau. The natives who worked for them were generally paid in the currency of the area—lumps of salt, beads and beadstring in the form of nylon fishing line.

The honesty of the natives particularly impressed the Hamiltons. At no time did a native attempt to touch large quantities of valuable equipment left unattended in one of the jet boats. The natives, said Mr Hamilton, would accept discarded empty food tins only when given to them. Then they peeled the advertisement labels off the tins and fitted them into their wigs for extra adornment. Mrs Hamilton said that one Sepik river native wore the “size 10” label off her cotton socks on his forehead for three days. The photograph shows Mrs Hamilton demonstrating on her husband how the stick is used.