Fishy business. The Social Impact of SST.pdf - Act Now!

might say today. This is certainly an ethos throughout the Sepik region, especially the interiorTorricelli Mountains area where physical and social health are closely related.Since the turn of the 20 th Century Kairiru, like most of the Wewak offshore islands, has beenheavily missionized by the Catholic church. This has had certain implications for the way localpeople now address the cash economy and new forms of wealth. “Many villagers have come tosee superior European wealth as rooted in a superior form of harmony and cooperation, and theytend to see such cooperation as having magicoreligious as well as directly instrumental effects,”says Smith. Ibid). Cooperation, harmony, and the New Testament have all become vehicles to amodern lifestyle.To be sure, all Sepik cultures share the ideal of cooperation (see Mitchell 1990, for example).These are not like highlands ‘bigmen’ societies where the accumulation of clan wealth isspearheaded by a single ambitious and charismatic individual. There are Sepik big men, buttheir authority comes from “heritable rights to esoteric magicoreligious knowledge for controlof food production, weather, curing, and other areas of general concern.” (Smith Ibid:217).Leaders may be as arbitrary or ruthless as highlands bigmen, but the difference is that theirquest is less material, and the community still exerts some control in an effort to maintain groupharmony over any kind of intra-group competition.In 1934 Australian anthropologist Ian Hogbin was living on Wogeo (sometimes refered to asVokeo) Island in the Schouten Islands farther offshore from Wewak than Kairiru (se Hogbin1970). If one were to step back from the map of PNG and look at the cresecent shape of NewIreland and New Britian, you need only follow the western tail to the mainland through theSiassi Islands, to Karkar, Manam and the Schouten Islands off Wewak, all of which seem touncoil like the flick of a tail. Kairiru and Muschu are much closer to the mainland althoughdefinitely within the same cultural complex as the Schoutens. These are all male initiationsocieties with taro as their staple food. Garden magic, love magic and sorcery are the mainstaysof authority and preeminence in these societies, although each village and/or clan also has itsheadman. Still, there are not paramount chiefs; they are more like governors than primeministers. It should be noted, however, that even as these are strongly patrilineal societies, thereare matrilineal descent reckoning and women are key players in the social and economy life ofthe community. Girls celebrate first mearch, and boys ritually imitate female menstruation as aform of purification by ceremonially incising their tongues and their penises so as to bleed outany ‘bad’ blood. (Hence Hogbin’s book is titled The Island of Menstruating Men).In the twenties, what looked like an oil source at Matapau, near Angoram on the Sepik River,attracted the first oil exploration in the area, by Ormildah Mining of Australia. Although this wasdiscovered to be seepeage from farther inland, Ormildah was followed by Oil Search Limited.The first gold prospector in the Sepik District was W.A. MacGregor in 1928. But wasn’t until1934, when J.C. Mullalay, A.H. McHutchinson, B. Costello, and W.L. Heron began dreging onthe Mingim River, two days walk from Wewak, that people started to move up from the Morobefields in search of new claims. Eventually the Screw , Siling and Nagum Rivers were also beingdredged. In her forward to District Officer Townsend’s memoir, one miner’s wife, Judy Tudor,writes that. But prospecting was never lucrative in the District.The birth of gold prospecting also gave impetus to aviation in the District, and work started on anairfield in 1937. At this time Bob Parer arrived in Wewak and set up a freezer works roughlyopposite the present Westpac Bank, where fresh vegetables and imported foods arrived every sixweeks from the Burns Philp ship. At this time the original owner of Moem, Boram and Brandi30