CUSTOMS OF PAPUAN CANNIBALS.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume XI, Issue 3491, 20 May 1920, Page 5

CUSTOMS OF PAPUAN CANNIBALS.

SYDNEY, May 4.

Although Australia is steadily extending her hold over Papua, by far the greater portion of the wide and wild interior is still the home or numerous cannibal tribes, who are as yet quite untouched by civilisation. . A Magistrate named Mr Beaver, who had pentrated deeply into this region, and studied the customs of the cannibal tribes, wrote an intefestirig report before he went in 1917 to the War, where he was killed, and his observations are contained in a recently-published report of the Administrator of Papua. Among most of these tribes no male -is considered to 'Fave reached mauf hood until he has the scalp of another man at his ibeft. Each tribe has curi~ ous ‘customs and o'er-emonies surrounding the business of man-killing. , In most cases it is an essential that the body of the slain man be brought into the home village and eaten. When the killer rc’.'.urns with the killed he wears a kind of red amaranthus in his armlets. As soon as he arrives, all his friends and relatives gather round, and do obeisance. The corpse is hung up for ‘a time—varying from one to seven days—and strips of cloth are threaded through the slayer ’s armlets,.which he wears for a month. The corpse is insulted in various Ways, both in song and action. In due course it is eaten, with much cere--Inouy—but the slayer never, in any circumstances, eats the body of the man he has slain.

The slayer has rather an uncomfortable time of it. For a. week he must not sit on the ground, but only on sticks; he must eat nothing except roasted taro and bananas ,and his only drink is muddy Water and hot cocoanut milk. Then comes an elaborate ceremony, by which he is admitted to manho-cd, the badge "of which is a different kind of sporran. It is a common custom for the slayer to take his victim’s name, or combine it with his own. When the newlycreated man, having done this, finds the new name distasteful, he gets out of the difliculty by killing another man. whose name he is then permitted to take. _ H

The interior of this great islancl, New Guinea is the largest: island in the world——contains the most- untgamjw ed and dangerous nativ_eS..in....ih.e,« world, with the possible excepfi9n’;of some parts of Africa_ H <