You’ve seen this before in my stories, the bilum. It’s the way to carry your personal belongings in PNG and everybody uses them, men women and children. Bilums are made in all kinds of styles. Recently some women have even started to make bilum wear. During the common wealth games in Australia this year (games organized for countries that belong to the common wealth only) the PNG athletes did their honorary round while wearing bilum wear. To explain to you what kind of styles there are I’ll use my bilums and those of my colleagues to explain. Of course I don’t have pictures of all the styles available. People in PNG are always very curious about what you are carrying in your bilum. Usually they’ll have a feel or a look. This is not a negative thing if you know the person of course.

We’ll start of with the first one, the baby bilum.

Sorry for the dark pictures. I decided to take the pictures one evening. Anyhow, this bilum is used to carry large amounts of something around, but also to carry babies around. You’ll see a woman with this walking around with the handle of the bilum around her head. So whenever I get the chance now I do what PNG people do, look in the bilum to see what’s in it. The style this bilum is made in is the raunim-style. Translated it means the “round the bilum” style.

This next one is also a raunim-style.

But this bilum is not a baby bilum. This one is not as big and used to carry all kind of things. Standard equipment of a bilum; knife, money, cigarettes and beetle nut.
Than we go on to the other ones.

This bilum is a typically made in Madang. It’s my favourite bilum. I use this one all the time. The style is recognized by the color and the patterns.

This is a bilum with a noodles pattern in the middle.

This one has little PNG flags on it. This one is not a baby bilum even though the handle has been split in the middle.

This is a bilum comes with a cap. It’s in the PNG flag style.

This is a KK bilum, because of the pattern. This one belongs to a colleague of me, her name is Lina. We call her mums, because she is the boss of the department.

Here we have a snake bilum by another colleague.

And this is a diamond bilum.