Huli people

Ethnic group

The Huli are an indigenous Melanesian ethnic group who reside in Hela Province of Papua New Guinea. They speak mainly Huli and Tok Pisin; many also speak some of the surrounding languages, and some also speak English. They are one of the largest cultural groups in Papua New Guinea, numbering over 250,000 people (based on the population of Hela of 249,449 at the time of the 2011 national census). The Huli are keenly aware of their history and folk lore as evidenced in their knowledge of family genealogy and traditions. Unlike many other Highland peoples, they have not relinquished much of their cultural expressions to the new and innovative ways of the colonizers and outsiders who settled to live among them in 1951. They live in the Tagari River basin and on the slopes of the surrounding mountain ranges at an altitude of about 1,600 meters above sea level. The Huli live in a land of perpetual Spring where it rains seven out of ten days and where the temperature ranges from eighty degrees F. during the day to forty five F. during the night. Occasional frosts do blanket the valley and sometimes destroy the people's mounded gardens. The Huli landscape consists of patches of primary forests, reed covered marshes, kunai grasslands, scrub brush, and mounded gardens traversed by rivers, small streams and man made ditches which serve as drainage canals, boundary markers, walking paths, and defensive fortifications.

There is every indication the Huli have lived in their region for many thousands of years and recount lengthy oral histories relating to individuals and their clans. They were extensive travellers (predominantly for trade) in both the highlands and lowlands surrounding their homeland, particularly to the south. The Huli were not known to Europeans until November 1934, when at least fifty of them were killed by the Fox brothers, two adventurers unsuccessfully looking for gold who had just parted with the more famous explorers Mick and Dan Leahy.