Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip depicts shark calling on New Ireland in Papua New Guinea. A Kontu villager sits in front of his house and expresses his fear that the skill of calling the sharks for men to kill has been lost with the death of the last shark caller. A young man is then shown at sea in a narrow outrigger canoe, thumping the water with his paddle, explaining that he is performing magic to attract sharks. He shakes a coconut-shell rattle in the water, catches a shark, beats it to death with a club and hauls it into the canoe. The film includes subtitles and a voice-over narration.

Educational value points

• The vital importance of shark calling to the Kontu people is suggested in the villager’s fear that the practice has been lost but the clip then dramatically shows that it continues into the next generation. Believing that the spirits of their ancestors dwell in the mako shark, the shark callers are not only hunting but also maintaining a connection with their ancestral past. The villager expresses his sense of the vulnerability of this connection.

• Despite the loss of some of the complex skills over the generations, the fact that the skill or ‘magic’ of shark calling continues into the next generation is powerfully conveyed in the extraordinary scenes of the young shark caller luring and killing a shark. The clip shows him softly ‘calling’ the sharks with his paddle before picking up the larung, or coconut-shell rattle. Smaller sharks such as the one seen in the clip are bludgeoned to death but larger ones are asphyxiated by being left to fight the buoyant propeller that holds the noose.

• The shark caller seen in the clip would have prepared carefully for his task in ways that reflected both respect for the spiritual nature of the task and an understanding of the ways of sharks. He would not have been allowed to eat wild pig or crayfish, accept food from the hand of a fertile woman, have sex or step on excrement for up to 3 days before setting off. Before calling the shark, he would have anointed himself and the canoe with herbs and prayed to the shark god.

• The shark shown in the clip is almost certainly a mako shark, as the shark callers believe that the spirits of their ancestors inhabit only this species. While a number of shark species frequent the reef off Kontu, they are not the target of the shark callers because the callers are not in fact calling the sharks themselves, but calling to their ancestors.

• The presence of the filmmaker, Dennis O’Rourke (1945–), in the small narrow canoe on the ocean is fraught with danger as he films from one end of the canoe while the shark is snared and bludgeoned to death at the other. However, the shark caller does not appear to be at all distracted by his presence and O’Rourke is able to capture this remarkable scene with such a sense of immediacy that the viewer may feel as if they are in the canoe with the shark caller.