Motuan Traders Abandon

Ancient Lakatoi Custom

From Our Own Correspondent.

Pt. Moresby, Jan. 15.

FOR practically the first time since the trade was initiated some hundreds of years ago, the lakatoi fleet did not leave Port Moresby district this season for the annual trading expedition to the west.

Formerly at the beginning of October a fleet of a dozen or more lakatoi with their curious crab-claw sails would sail from Port Moresby, with 30 or so Motuan natives, for the deltas and rivers of the Gulf of Papua. Loaded with tobacco, earthenware pots, and articles of trade, the lakatoi would sail up the coast and anchor off the shores of Gulf and Delta division villages to barter with the in habitants. In three months’ time the

fleet, laden with sago, taro, and yams from the Kikori, Vailala, and Iari people, would return triumphantly to their own villages.

These trading expeditions made up for the inadequacy of food-gardens in the barren soil of the dry belt, and the lakatoi custom became so firmly established that even after the coming of the white man, when small sailing craft were available to the natives at a very low cost, the making and sailing of the lakatoi still went on.

The custom has declined of late years.

As the district became more and more settled under the white Government, the Port Moresby natives found courage to

make their gardens farther afield, and they are now firmly established on the banks of the Laloki River, 12 miles in land. Produce is brought in by native owned lorries: and its volume is so great that the need for the sago brought in from the western areas by the lakatoi has disappeared.

The queer design of the lakatoi plaited mat sails, in the shape of a crab’s claw, was always used on these trading trips to the west. According to an ancient legend it was to the wisdom of the crab that the Motuan traders owed the favour able results and freedom from danger of these annual expeditions.

Mr. Hubert William Holden, of Holden’s Air Transport Services, Ltd., who was well-known and respected in Australia and New Guinea, died at his home at Warrawee, Sydney, on January 25. He was born in Adelaide in 1867, and, after a varied career in Western and South Aus tralia, founded an agency business in Sydney. When the late Captain Les.

Holden, who had been freighting supplies on the New Guinea goldfields, was killed in an aeroplane smash near Byron Bay, N.S.W., in September, 1932, Mr. H. W.

Holden took charge of his son’s New Guinea affairs and formed the present company, of which he was chairman of directors.

Lakatoi carrying Motuan traders and their wares setting off from Port Moresby harbour on one of their annual excursions to Western Papua.