LIFE IN PAPUA

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 226, 6 January 1911, Page 2

LIFE IN PAPUA

A LAND OF MURDER. An article appears in the Empire Review from the pen of the Lieut.-Governor and Chief Judicial Officer of Papua, as British New Guinea is now generally called. Mr. Murray and his subordinates have to deal with the people that are ''half devil and half child," a people to whom human life has less sanctity than the life of a dog has with us, a people who live in a world of amazing superstition. The death penalty is inflicted in Papua only for the murder of a white man; this is necessary for the protection of the white community. To inflict it for the murder of a native by a native would be more barbarous than to give a New Zealand cyclist penal servitude for riding on a footpath. The Papuan native cannot help taking human life when the impulse seizes him. In some districts homicide confers a mark of distinction. It entitles a man to wear a I certain kind of feather, and as the girls prefer men who are entitled to sport this plume, it is not surprising that murders are frequent . It is not difficult to win this distinction, for the killing of a mere baby is sufficient. The custom is put forward seriously in Court in mitigation of sentence. Mr. Murray once had to deal with a man who killed an old woman as she drew water from a river. He pleaded that he was paying attention to a married woman, and as she objected to the suit of a man who had not murdered anyone, he took the first opportunity of repairing the omission. When Mr. Murray remonstrated with him on the impropriety of carrying on with a married woman, the man replied that all the girls in the village had been killed and eaten in a recent raid. The judge saw the difficulty of the position, and took it into consideration in passing sentence. Among one tribe it is not permissible to paint a house in a certain way unless a man has been killed to celebrate the building of it. Men have, in their grief over a relative, set fire to their houses, without taking the trouble to see that no one was inside. In a sudden fit of fury men will sometimes MI on the slightest of "pretexts. A man killed his mother because his baby would not stop crying. Another smashed a man's head in hecause he could not find his knife. In one part people who have headaches or feel otherwise out of sorts, discharge arrows at random, A prisoner at Samarai explained that he killed his victim because "all the time he talk, he talk—he talk too much."