Dudugera

Also Known As: the leg-child of a folk tale from Wagawaga on Milne Bay, as spelled by C. G. Seligmann in 1910
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Papua New Guinean Mythology, Melanesian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Dudugera is a boy fathered by a great fish and born from a cut in his mother’s thigh, who climbs a pandanus tree into the sky and becomes the sun.
Role in Mythos: He is the subject of the one recorded Wagawaga tale of how the sun began, and of why it now rises behind cloud.
Relation to Humans: As the sun he dries up the water and kills crops, animals and people, sparing only the kin he warned to shelter under a great rock. His own mother ends the killing heat by sprinkling lime across his face as he rises.

Above a beach on the south-eastern tip of New Guinea, a woman kept a garden and weeded it every day. One morning she saw a big fish playing where the surf broke on the reef, and she walked out into the sea to meet it. The fish rubbed against her legs and nuzzled her thighs. She came back the next day, and the day after that.

That is how the story of Dudugera opens, and nearly everything known about him sits in a single page and a half of print. The anthropologist Charles Gabriel Seligmann took the tale down at Wagawaga, a village of the Southern Massim people on Milne Bay, and published it in 1910 in *The Melanesians of British New Guinea*, on pages 378 and 379, as the first of his Wagawaga folk tales. He gave it the title of the birth of the sun. No second telling from another village or another collector has come to light. What follows is a report of that one record.

The woman’s thigh began to swell. Poultices of hot leaves did nothing, and the pain grew, so she asked her father to cut the skin with a flake of obsidian, which was the ordinary treatment. He made his cuts, and a baby boy burst out of one of them. She washed him, cut the cord, lay down by the fire and nursed him. Seligmann calls him the leg-child, Dudugera.

He grew up among the other children of the village, and he was not easy company. One day the boys were throwing toy spears at tree stumps and bushes. Dudugera threw his at the other boys. They shouted that his father was a fish and that he ought to go back to him, and then they went home and told their mothers.

His mother was angry with him and afraid for him at once. She asked her own mother what to do, and the old woman’s advice was to give the boy to his father. So she walked him down to the beach. The great fish swam up, took the child in his mouth, and carried him off to a far country in the east.

Before he went, Dudugera gave his mother a warning. Her relations were to pull up their sugar cane, taro and bananas and plant them again in the shade of a great overhanging rock called Duyau, and they were to live under that rock themselves. He was going to climb a pandanus tree and go from it into the sky. When he did, every tree, plant and person in every village would die. Only those under the rock would be spared.

It happened as he said. The water dried up. The trees withered and the gardens stopped bearing. The pigs died, then the dogs, and last of all the people, killed by the heat.

Then one morning his mother took her lime pot and climbed a hill. As the sun came up she sprinkled lime from the gourd across his face, and he shut his eyes. The day was cooler. A little rain fell. The next morning there were clouds, and the sun rose behind them, as he still often does.

The fish has a name. It was of the kind called *wadumo*, and Seligmann adds that this fish is a clan totem across a wide stretch of the south-east, though not for any of the Wagawaga clans. On the island of Tubetube it is called *warumo* and is paired with the fish-hawk. The tale does not call the fish a god. It is the boy’s father, it comes when it is wanted, and it knows the way east.

The story travelled from there by one road. In 1916 the American scholar Roland B. Dixon retold it in his *Oceanic Mythology* and cited Seligmann’s page as his source. Most later accounts descend from Dixon. Along the way the fish has turned into a dolphin god, the sun has begun hurling spears of fire, and the lime has sometimes become mud. None of that is in the record. The only spears in it are toys, thrown by a child at his playmates.

Much is simply not said. The tale does not tell what Dudugera looked like, how long he lived with the fish, or what he did in the east before he climbed. It gives no reason for the burning beyond his own announcement of it. It names no one but him and the rock. His mother, who bears him, gives him up, and then closes his eyes with a handful of lime, has no name at all.

His power is plain enough. He can kill a country by looking at it. His limit is just as plain, and it is domestic. The lime pot was an everyday thing on that coast, a gourd of burnt-shell powder carried for chewing betel nut. The sun was beaten by something his mother had in the house.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Dudugera?

Dudugera is a boy in a folk tale from Wagawaga, a Southern Massim village on Milne Bay in Papua New Guinea. He is the son of a woman and a great fish, and he climbs into the sky and becomes the sun. The tale was recorded by C. G. Seligmann and published in 1910.

How was Dudugera born?

Dudugera was born from his mother’s thigh. A fish rubbed against her legs each day in the surf, her thigh swelled, and when her father cut it with a piece of obsidian a baby boy came out of the cut. This is why Seligmann calls him the leg-child.

How did Dudugera become the sun?

Dudugera was sent away with his fish father after he threw toy spears at the other village boys. The fish carried him to a far country in the east. He had told his mother he would climb a pandanus tree into the sky, and after that the heat dried up the water and killed plants, animals and people.

How was Dudugera stopped from burning the world?

Dudugera’s mother stopped him. She climbed a hill at dawn with her lime pot and sprinkled lime across the face of the rising sun, which made him shut his eyes. The heat eased, rain fell, and the next day the sun rose behind clouds.

Is Dudugera a dolphin god’s son who throws fire spears?

Not in the original record. Seligmann’s 1910 text says the father was a big fish of a kind called wadumo, and the only spears are toy spears Dudugera threw at other children. The dolphin god and the fire spears appear only in later retellings.