Up Front

with the Publisher

With apologies to the happy couple, whoever they were and wherever they might be now, but the photograph below is so dreadful that one is almost embarrassed to print it. I found it in the files while looking for something to illustrate the Port Moresby story on pll, about Prime Minister Somare’s decision to establish a regular day each week on which Papua New Guineans wear national dress. Behind the plan is the hope that PNG will develop a national dress of its own and take pride in it, instead of wearing the mish-mash that one sees as a result of European influence, and I think this photograph of a pre-war wedding ceremony graphically il lustrates the excesses that can follow the European example.

Papua New Guinea of course has plenty of colourful traditional dress.

Visitors who attended the Independence celebrations last September were fascinated by the ex amples from every district displayed by students from Sogeri (and I notic ed that not a few Papua New Guineans were equally surprised at the variety). What the country lacks is a national dress, and with already such a wide divergence of dress and peoples from the Sepik to the Tasmans perhaps a truly national dress won’t be developed any more quickly than a national identity.

It should be easier to develop a national style for men. Shirt, lavalava and sandals have long been establish ed in Fiji, the Samoas and Tonga, and the dress is both neat and dignified. It is being used more fre quently in Papua New Guinea rather than trousers, or shorts with those very British long socks. Michael Somare is a leading exponent of shirt and lavalava.

But unfortunately PNG’s women don’t take advantage of Jhe long graceful lavalava (under its various names) so widespread in Polynesia.

This Surprises me. In those areas you could these days describe the long lavalava as national dress, although it developed from the grass skirt and the topless grass skirt at that.

Perhaps, as more PNG women travel outside of the country, they’ll bring it back and develop it with their own special refinements as other Island women have.

Anyway, Prime Minister Somare has certainly launched an interesting, and useful, exercise with his Toana Day.

Stuart Inder