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Huli wigmen - old man |
The vast Tari basin is the home of the race of wig-wearers that are known as the Huli.
These sturdy, warlike people are subsistence farmers, growing their sweet potatoes, taro and sugar cane in the fine fenced gardens that flank their scattered garden hamlets. They have many notable characteristics, perhaps the most striking being the great flower-decked wigs of human hair worn by the adult males, a custom shared by their neighbours and close cultural relatives, the Duna, and by certain groups in the Western Highlands and Enga Provinces.
There are some 38,000 of the Huli, and the total area of their territory exceeds 2,500 square kilometres.
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Huli wigmen - young boys |
It is a country isolated by geography and by history, guarded by the massive bulk of the Muller and Karius Ranges to the south and the Central Range system to the north, this country is in the very centre of the mainland New Guinea. The Southern Highlands was the last of the Highlands provinces to be explored. The first patrol, in 1935, approaching from the south, took months to break through to the Tari Basin and lost three of its number from sickness and exhaustion. The discoverer of the Huli country called it the "Papuan Wonderland".
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Huli wigmen - ceremonial drinking water |
Although the Huli had no village settlements, and lived in homestead groups and family units throughout their garden lands, their society was organised along complex lines. As always in Melanesian societies, land and rights in lands were of overriding importance. In an account of this nature, one cannot avoid generalising, for the subject is tremendously complex. For our purposes it can be assumed that among the Huli a man had land rights wherever he could trace an ancestor. The typical Huli male had not one, but several households, in the land of his father's clan, his mother's clan, the clan of any known ancestor. Given the relatively dense population distribution of the Huli, the result was a complicated network of rights and obligations, often cut across by feud and warfare. These people had of course, no written language but genealogies could usually be traced for four or five generations back: sometimes considerably further. This was the basic factor regulating land rights.
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Huli wigmen - sing sing group |
The Huli boy was removed from the household of his mother to that of his father at a very early age. His progress to full manhood was marked by elaborate ceremonies, culminating in the bachelor's ritual in his late teens. During this period of his life the young Hull was expected to avoid all association with women, particularly sexual association. For eighteen months or so, the young initiates of the age group received instruction and training from well skilled elders, and then were entitled to wear the elaborate, beautifully made red wig of the young bachelor. Their faces carefully painted in identical patterns with red and yellow ochre, their bodies a shiny red with applications of tigaso tree oil, groups of the young bachelors would stalk silently throughout the land, their crescent shaped wigs trimmed with strips or cuscus fur and the iridescent blue breast shield of the Superb Bird-of-Paradise, and with the plumes of the cassowary - objects of admiration to all. The young bachelors would parade, at regular intervals over periods of twelve months.
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Huli wigmen - sing sing group |
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Huli wigmen - ceremonial look |
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