Where does Bilum (string bag) come from?
The bilum comes from New Guinea, above all from Papua New Guinea, where women loop string by hand into stretchy bags. It carries everything from garden crops to babies, and people there call it the most Papua New Guinean thing there is.
Looped from bark string
Traditionally the string was made from the inner bark of plants such as mulberry or fig, chosen for the job: some fibres take colour well, others last in the wet. The maker rolls the fibres into two-ply string between hand and thigh and adds length as she works, so spinning and looping take turns. No knots are tied, and unlike knitting or crochet, a looped bag does not unravel around a break. In Tok Pisin, bilum is the name of the looping technique itself.
A bag for every load
In the Western Highlands, around Mount Hagen, women wear the working bag with its strap across the forehead and the bag over the upper back. Women do much of the hard garden work there and carry up to 20 kg of sweet potatoes, yams, taro or firewood in it. The loose looping lets the bag stretch around any load, and the word bilum also means 'womb'. Nursing mothers wear a second bilum as a baby carrier, and small, dense bags hold amulets or mementos of the dead.
Gifts, trade and fashion
Papua New Guinea has more than 800 languages, yet string bags were used nearly everywhere, and places that did not make them traded for them. Bilums are given between relatives and friends to show love; among the Melpa of Mount Hagen a bride brings new bilums to share with her sisters-in-law. Today makers also loop wool, acrylic and plastic. Florence Kamel of Goroka designs bilum clothing and made bilum dresses and neckties for Papua New Guinea's athletes at the 2006 Commonwealth Games.
Sources: horniman.ac.uk ↗ · rotterdam.wereldmuseum.nl ↗ · australian.museum ↗ · en.wikipedia.org ↗
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