HUNSTEIN 101 ORIGINS OF THE HOOK CARVINGS There are two recorded origin stories associated with these cult hooks. For the Sanio people, a Bekapeki man named Dabaru told Craig: A man heard a sound like wind; his sister went to see what it was but when she got close to the sound it stopped. The man said that it the spirit being wouldn’t stay for a woman to see what it was so he decided to go and see. He got closer and closer and then he saw the aleki and komkii with spots as on the cult fi gures, he couldn’t get them only saw them. So he returned to his house and made these creatures from wood and put them in a cult house.24 Meinhard and Gisela Schuster relate a Bahinemo myth in which a culture hero, a man called Wimegu25 from the headwaters of the April River, created all the material things people needed: bows, arrows, drums, etc. He also created the garra hook carvings and gave each a personal name. To make sure everyone received these precious items, he stemmed the fl ow of the river with a giant tree trunk, and once this dam broke everything fl oated downriver to the villages that needed them. After this event, Wimegu is said to have turned into a boulder in the middle of the April River. For the Bahinemo, knowledge of this myth is traditionally important because without if man could not make arrows, bows, fl utes, and garra properly, and otherwise “everything would be bent and crooked.”26 POST-CONTACT CARVINGS As in similar circumstances elsewhere in the Pacifi c, the production of cult hooks as articles of trade with foreigners occurred very shortly after initial contact. Langford noted during the 1971 patrol in the Hunstein region how effi ciently the small handful of commercial artifact dealers had “vacuum cleaned” the area of most of the traditional objects, and the art forms of the Bahinemo were changing toward easier-to-create reproductions to supply a developing market.27 Traditionally, garra were inherited objects, but if they deteriorated they could be replaced by any initiated man. The female garra from Attenborough in the National Gallery collection (fi g. 9) is likely the replacement for an older garra of the same form that entered Berlin’s Museum für
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