A Treasure-Trove Of Storyboards In Chimondo
by Nancy Sullivan

The Lower Sepik is the Sepik River's well-kept secret. It is, on the whole, quieter than the Middle Sepik, less populated, and its villages are widely dispersed along tributaries as well as the main river. But this region of the Sepik has always been a watershed of cultures, trading in from the sea and mixing the language, ideas and ferocity of traditional head-hunting societies with the customs, materials and more open outlook of their coastal neighbours. As a result, the area from Tambanam Village to the west, up to the Murik Lakes in the northeast, Cape Frenseski in the east and all the way down to the foothills of the Shrader Mountains in the south, marks a little-known hotbed of cultural diversity. Angoram is it's administrative center and the town to find villagers from all over the region at the weekly markets. But one of the best-kept secrets of the entire Lower Sepik is Chimondo, a handsome little village on the banks of the Keram River, just west of Angoram.

If you find yourself impressed by the storyboards sold in the Angoram market-the low-relief scenes of village life carved and painted on the extruded roots of gum and sometimes mangrove trees-then take a trip to their source.

It takes half a day by motor canoe to travel up the Keram and reach Kambot or Yip or Bobten, legendary homes of the storyboard. But it only takes an hour or so by motor canoe up the Keram to reach Chimondo. Here, one of the most beautifully decorated haus tambarans in the Lower Sepik stands tall at the river's edge and faces visitors with an elaborately painted overhanging gable. Inside, most unexpectedly, is a virtual treasure-trove of traditional carvings and giant storyboards.

They say it was a missionary or government worker who encouraged villagers on the Keram to begin carving the clay paintings they had always made on the flat surfaces of gum roots. The invention transferred the local skill of relief-carving on war shields and spears to these gum boards and gave rise to ingeniously descriptive graphics of village life, legend and history as 'storyboards.' A good idea became a master craft and now, as can be seen from storyboards hanging in homes and hotels across the country, a thriving cottage industry. There is no other art form in PNG that so successfully weds the old with the new and offers a literal tableau of 'the good life' in PNG.

There is a young man named Michael in Chimondo whose skill is seen everywhere inside the haus tambaran. Michael has carved beautiful tables and house ladders and totem poles and figurines, as well as storyboards. These are distinctively charcoal-darkened carvings with dramatically etched lines of white lime. They have humour and charm that sets them apart from the norm.

Here there one finds graphics of a pig-faced man, from a local Chimondo legend. The story goes that a woman bore a pig-faced son in the bush and was so horrified she ran off, never to return. The child was raised by the village and slowly grew angry at his mother's abandoning him. So he took to killing people in revenge.

At either end of the haus tambaran the main posts meet crossbeams in fantastic gable paintings much like the one that presents itself on the outside. These graphics, so much like the storyboards they look over and seem to protect, are at once funny and scary and riveting to the eye-like a sea of lurid tales in a 15th Century Hieronymous Bosch painting.