17_birds

This film, made for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, unravels an exchange ceremony of the Wola people of the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The fusion of myth and drama makes this portrayal of their ceremonial exchange featuring the cassowary (a large flightless bird) both powerful and informative.

Sabkabyinten, the thunderwoman, is the mythological guardian of cassowaries and it is she who sent them to the Wola. The Wola relate status to the social exchange of wealth and one of their greatest symbols of wealth is the cassowary. The film shows the social and symbolic life of the Wola through their use of the cassowary and focuses on the middle section of the sa ceremony. During this recently adapted ceremony, which apparently takes three years to prepare and occurs only once every fifteen years, cassowaries are killed and the cooked meat is given away. The photography is superb bringing out the brilliant colours of the birds and scanning the stunning Highland landscape. This film won the Australian Logie Award for the best single documentary shown on Australian television in 1980.

The film is recommended for secondary school and university courses in geography, sociology, anthropology, and those that touch upon the uses of myth and symbol. Catalogue number (16mm): 5RA145 £15.

P. Sillitoe, 1978. `The Thunderwoman's Bird'. Paradise, No. 14, pp. 11-14. (Reprinted in G.Dick (ed.) Paradise Plus. Pacific Publishers, Sydney.)

P. Sillitoe, 1979. Give and Take: Exchange in Wola Society. Australian National University Press, Canberra. [The theme of both film and book is ceremonial exchange; they relate closely and so form a useful teaching package, having been used as such as the core of a course "Exchange and Society" given by the Australian equivalent of the Open University.]

P. Sillitoe, 1981. `Dance with the Cassowaries'. The Geographical Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 8, pp. 534-38. [This article and `The Thunderwoman's Bird' deal with the film, its content and how it was made.]