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Dorey Villagers Are Great Carving and Painting Artists by Alfred Russel Wallace
The floats of their fishing-lines, the wooden beaters used in tempering the clay for their pottery, their tobacco-boxes, and other household articles, are covered with carving of tasteful and often elegant design. Did we not already know that such taste and skill are compatible with utter barbarism, we could hardly believe that the same people are, in other matters, utterly wanting in all sense of order, comfort, or decency. Yet such is the case. They live in the most miserable, crazy, and filthy hovels, which are utterly destitute of anything that can be called furniture; not a stool, or bench, or board is seen in them, no brush seems to be known, and the clothes they wear are often filthy bark, or rags, or sacking. Along the paths where they daily pass to and from their provision grounds, not an overhanging bough or straggling briar ever seems to he cut, so that you have to brush through a rank vegetation, creep under fallen trees and spiny creepers, and wade through pools of mud and mire, which cannot dry up because the sun is not allowed to penetrate. Their food is almost wholly roots and vegetables, with fish or game only as an occasional luxury, and they are consequently very subject to various skin diseases, the children especially being often miserable-looking objects, blotched all over with eruptions and sores. If these people are not savages, where shall we find any? Yet they have all a decided love for the fine arts, and spend their leisure time in executing works whose good taste and elegance would often be admired in our schools of design!
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Expedition in New Guinea
In 1858 a great British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace conducted an expedition to Dorey bay (now Manokwari town of West Papua) in New Guinea in search of paradise birds. The following stories were translated into Bahasa Indonesia from Chapter XXXIV of his book entitled The Malay Archipelago
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It
is curious that a rudimental love of art should co-exist with such a
very low state of civilization. The people of Dorey are great carvers
and painters. The outsides of the houses, wherever there is a plank, are
covered with rude yet characteristic figures. The high-peaked prows of
their boats are ornamented with masses of open filagree work, cut out of
solid blocks of wood, and often of very tasteful design, As a
figurehead, or pinnacle, there is often a human figure, with a head of
cassowary feathers to imitate the Papuan "mop." 