MY FIRST EXPEDITION TO NEW GUINEA 53 



That is an optimistic view, which I believe is partly 

 shared by his Excellency the Administrator. If it is 

 fully justified, then the recent attempt to pass a 

 Labour Ordinance compelling the Papuan natives 

 to do a certain small amount of work was not unwisely 

 vetoed by the Australian Parliament. But the 

 opinion I have formed from my travels in New 

 Guinea is that, except in the first greed for the white 

 man's ic trade," a greed which soon passes, the 

 natives will not work in the steady fashion which 

 civilised enterprises demand, unless some slight com- 

 pulsion is enforced. 



At that time at Nadi all the natives had skulls hung 

 up as adornments for the gables of their huts. These 

 were trophies of the old days when head-hunting 

 was permitted. Now of course head-hunting is 

 forbidden by the British authorities, but occasionally 

 in my time tribes used to come down from the Bush to 

 attack the coast natives and carry off a few of them. 

 I did not notice that the New Guinea natives at that 

 time set any very great value on the human skulls 

 that they had collected. Once I was able to purchase 

 three for a single stick of tobacco. But in the 

 Solomon Islands the natives set a very great value 

 on their human skulls, and will hardly part from 

 them at any price. In New Guinea they seemed to 

 be accounted just like ordinary trophies of the chase, 

 of the same value as turtles' heads, or the lower jaw 

 of pigs. 



