HEIRLOOM TECHNOLOGY
By Tim Anderson
Papuan Speargun
This speargun gets its power from a strip of red rubber.
1
Spear:
1. Barbed spearhead
2. Steel shaft
3. Tail ring and notch
3
4
2
Gun:
4. Spear tether
5. Elastic sling with sling wire
6. Bent wire trigger
5
6
PAPUAN SPEARGUN: Built in 1978 by
Abram Waromi. Still used by his son
John Waromi (above) in 2004.
If you see a fisherman with cracked, faded elastic
on his speargun, you’ll know that his family is not so
well connected by the sort of human networks that
once brought cowry shells to the high mountains of
Papua and fine stone adze heads to the coast.
Before World War II, Jayapura was a collection of
villages called Hollandia, with a population of a few
thousand. Then hundreds of thousands of American
troops moved in for the war in the Pacific.
When they left, they dumped equipment and munitions in the harbor. Those underwater dumps have
become something of a hardware store for the locals.
The barbed head of Waromi’s spear was made
from stainless steel welding rods. The shaft was
pulled from the edge of a discarded mattress. The
tail is forged into a ring, which the trigger wire fits into.
A notch is cut in the shaft near this ring to engage
a wire loop tied to the tail of the elastic sling. The
spear shaft and the gun are both about 4 feet long.
»
John Waromi lives in Jayapura, Papua, Indonesia.
He went to college in Jakarta and traveled the world
in a theater troupe before returning home. When he
fishes, he uses the speargun his father made, sailing
his outrigger canoe out to a fishing spot in the bay.
This speargun gets its power from a strip of red rubber. It came from the inner tube of a giant mining truck
at Tembagapura, the “city of copper.” The copper mine
is hundreds of miles away, across mountains so high
they have glaciers despite being near the equator.
Waromi has a cousin who works in the mine. He
was driving a giant mining truck in a convoy of three
when he saw the other two disappear in a landslide. The other crews were killed and the trucks
destroyed. Waromi’s cousin would be considered a
very distant relative in our Western kinship system,
but they belong to a kinship system that would
make our cousins into brothers and strangers into
cousins. Waromi’s got family everywhere, and his
speargun has fresh, bright red elastic as a result.
Illustration and photography by Tim Anderson
Tim Anderson ( mit.edu/robot) is co-founder of Z Corp. See
hundreds more of his projects at instructables.com.
154 Make: Volume 19
