The stone age island; New Guinea today by Williams Maslyn

Author:Williams, Maslyn
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Papua New Guinea -- Civilization., Papua New Guinea -- Description and travel.
Publisher: Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday
Published: 1964-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

ent by which an average New Guinean can raise his financial status, or share in the creation of a prosperous community, except by utilizing his land in ways that are often opposed to the traditional ways of the tribe.

For instance, leadership, under the old tradition, is based on a tribally acknowledged authority to allocate land to individuals within the clan, or to decide when and for what purposes land shall be used, or when it shall be planted or harvested or burned for hunting, or for making new gardens.

Traditional marriage customs, and the economics of interclan relationships, are inextricably entwined with the allocation and inheritance of land through lines of descent. Land is the symbol of prestige and the only source of wealth. A man without land is a "rubbish man," less than a "bush kanaka" who eats his dead. All of which means that to advance in any direction at all, the New Guinean may need to change the whole design of his life and not simply learn to speak English and add up.

This was Leon Bridgeland's reasoning and it seemed sound enough to me; but at the time, I think, he was railing against the government's two-million-pound budget for education, and less than half that amount for agriculture.

I had spent that day with Bridgeland at the Kerevat Experiment station, where he and other scientists were engrossed in researches into cocoa bean fermentation, and the development of disease-resisting strains of cocoa plants, and were producing tens of thousands of carefully bred plants for distribution to the villagers.

There was other interesting work going on, especially in the entomological field which, so the specialists say, is exciting in New Guinea from the purely academic point of view, there being so many strange insects to collect and study; and at the same time, there is much challenging practical work in dealing with expensive pests like the rhinoceros beetle that deflowers coconut trees, and the cacao tree borers that ruin cocoa crops.

It was approaching eleven o'clock as we pulled into the cocoa fermentary at Ngatur, one of the fifteen fermentaries on the peninsula owned and managed by Tolai local government councils.

Between them these fermentaries are pouring the approximate equivalent of half a million dollars into the villages of the peninsula, and this, together with the continuous if modest income from

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