New Guinea'

'Prettiest Girls In New Guinea'

“The prettiest girls in this part of the Pacific,” is how P-NG malaria expert. Dr. Peters, described the girls of the Mortlock and Tasman Islands in December. “Why, they’re beautiful,” he said. “. . . .

And they are the happiest people in the world.”

Dr. Peters might be right at that, so long as “this part of the Pacific” definitely refers to Papua-New Guinea. The Territory is not exactly noted for the beauty of its indigenous females. They are not in the same class as the Samoans and the Tongans.

When it comes to tissying themselves up, pretty fashion, the warriors outshine the ladies in most areas of P-NG.

I visited the Mortlocks and Tasmans (they are about 300 miles north-east of Bougainville—out where the NG Trust Territory ends) in 1955 and, like Dr.

Peters, I was struck by the good-looks of the local girls in comparison to what is offering elsewhere in the Dark Islands.

Geographically, the Mortlock Islanders (who are happier and better looking than those on the Tas mans) are Melanesians, but in most other ways they are Polynesians. They are colourful remnants, long since intermingled, of people who migrated from Polynesia at a time so long ago that their story has been erased from memory. They have light brown skins, not the tar black of the Solomons. There are big men in the Mortlocks and big women, after the Polynesian fashion. The name of Tauu, which is another name for the Mortlocks, is a reference to Samoa, and many of the islands of the atoll bear Samoan names although the islanders do not know their meaning.

Their singing has a Polynesian lilt to it, and so have their dances —the girls in this picture were dancing to their own song as I photographed them.

The Mortlocks are off the tourist routes and visitors are not welcome by the P-NG Administration. The islanders have little immunity to outside diseases because of their comparative isolation.

Log books of some of the early Pacific voyagers told of heavily manned canoes of Mortlock Islanders,

looking for blood. As recently as the middle of last century a whaler and its entire crew were destroyed by the then numerous Mortlock people. But the gods were not kind, and by the end of last century the population had dropped with astonishing rapidity.

In 1909, it was 20. But now it’s on the increase and

there are 300 to 400 Tauu islanders.

Stuart Inder.