Going down the Sepik with my hosts, we had a short stop in a village, at their haus-wind (the community’s gathering place). There, under the roof, I saw a bunch of crocodile skin rolls.
It was my second trip to West Sepik, staying with the locals, recording folk tales and joining them in daily activities. I heard many stories about pukpuk (crocodile, in PNG Pidgin), pukpuk spirits, pukpuk monsters, etc. I saw crocodile skulls under porches, teeth on necklaces, carvings, paintings and men with ritual pukpuk-skin scarring.
I took my stuff from the canoe and I remained there for two weeks.
Manu, a young guy from the family I lived with, and his father were hunting and trading crocodile skins. The money, sometimes the only income in the community, was used for buying small things for the house and most of it was saved to buy an engine for their dug-out canoe and to pay the boarding school fees for Manu.
The skins, collected by a trader from East Sepik, are sent to Moresby, Singapore or KL, and end up in China, Europe or Australia. During the last years, the price for crocodile skins dropped on Sepik, even though the crocodile population decreased. Don’t rush to jump to blame the local hunters with “animal lovers” cheap speech.
Mainland Holdings Ltd, an Australian established business, is collecting, every year, tens of thousands of crocodile eggs from the Sepik River, for their farms in Lae. And this is not the worst.
There is increasing pressure over the indigenous to give in their lands to oil-palm plantations (run mostly by Chinese from Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia) and gold mining companies (mainly Australians). The forests and rivers which used to provide a life for small communities are now a source of limitless economic development for foreign companies, which at their turn are pressured to produce cheaply within the consumerism economy. With over 70% illiteracy and no trace of development brought in by the government, there are not many options for the indigenous.
I post here photos I took with Manu and his family, in Beimaf, West Sepik, 2015.
