Fern Ridge (Safla Rama) Digest

Late Dr. Regis Stella.PNG writer and scholar His father was killed during the Bougainville Crisis. After the Crisis his mother and sisters fled in-land and settled at a plateau on a rolling hill at Bana in the Nagovis area. They planted coacoa to regain their strengths and lives back. Last Christmas he returned to the village to put up his mother’s headstone. On leaving the village to Port Moresby, the late Regis Tove Stella told his sisters that it was the last time he would return home alive. Instead a few months later his body was flown back to his village to lay next to his mother. For two nights and two days the people from all over the area to mourn his passing. On the week he died I did a book review of his latest book: Unfolding Petals: Readings in Papua New Guinea Literature , which would have been launched a day more if he had remained alive. Dr. Regis Tove Stella was someone I shared part of my life with for the better...

Young Milky Pine ( Alstonia scholaris ) The importance of plant names in the local language is an example of a complex structure of   meaning. Different plants are used for specific purposes in our traditional societies. The same plant known by a common name can have sacred names to different people. Most often these sacred names are linked to myths, rituals, and spiritual powers. Many people know the general names for plants, but different species have a different name or an additional word to indicate colour, wild plants, domesticated plants, or cultivated.  Where plants have medicinal and ritual values they may have sacred names known only to those who claim ownership of the plant and its powers. The tanget ( Cordyline fruticosa ), for example, is generally known in Nagum Boiken language as hawa . This name includes the cultivated ones, which are red in color and appears in long and short round leaves. The green wild ones are...