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Clip description
McAllister (Chips Rafferty) asks the nearby highland tribes to perform a traditional 'sing-sing’, or ceremonial dance, in order to flatten the grass for an airstrip. Hundreds of warriors oblige, dressed in full regalia, staging a mock battle in the process.
Curator’s notes
Movie cameras were taken into the highlands of PNG for the first time in the early 1930s, with the exploratory expeditions of Jim Leahy and Mick Taylor, but the images were in black and white (see clips from First Contact, a film by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson). These images, in colour, reveal the extraordinary decorative richness of highlands traditional dress, and something of its variety. Sing-sings are still a major part of highlands life, a kind of ritualised form of battle, in which tribes do their best to outdo each other. The Leahy expeditions included a similar event – the trampling of grass for an airstrip. Much of the fictionalised script here appears to have been suggested by their expeditions.
