Sling

FE000217; Sling; net; Papua New Guinea

This is a very early collection item in Pacific Cultures Collections that was collected in 1881 and purchased by the museum in 1914. It is possibly a pikinini (children’s) sling given it’s elongated shape.  The sling has been woven using the same technique of interlocked tupla lip (tulip tree) fibre that is employed to create the esteemed bilum, and part of the larger family of “net bags."

Three Papua New Guinean women, from the Sepik region and West Papua, who visited pointed out the dyed blue fibres that had been woven into the sling to create a design (16 October 2025 visit). This sling was collected in 1881 by Hugh Romilly, an administrator and writer who lived in the Pacific, and was in the collection of Augustus Hamilton who served as director of the Dominion Museum (1903-1913). One of Hamilton’s focuses was on building the Museum’s ethnographic collections which this sling along with other material from the Pacific would have fallen under at the time.

Sources:

BILUM & BILAS | Handwoven Jewellery and Bilums from Papua New Guinea
Storeroom visit, 16 October 2025, with Loretta Hasu, Nini Wooff and Esther Smith.