Abun

The Abun are a coastal people of the northwestern Bird's Head Peninsula, around Sausapor in the Tambrauw country. Their tradition remembers them as the Wen of the Tambrauw Mountains; after groups moved to the shore and mixed with Biak seafarers they were called Karon. When that name acquired hostile overtones they took the name Abun, originally their language's name and meaning tribal language.

Linguists count Abun as an isolate. The Abun are banana growers, recognising twenty-one kinds of banana, and their villages are governed by a headman named Yekwesu, whose standing rests on bravery, generosity and Timor cloth. Their Salara dance enacts ancestors who took snake form and led the people from the mountains to the beach.

On this coast the Portuguese Jorge de Menezes landed in 1526, and from the sixteenth century Tidore's overlordship reached Sausapor through Biak middlemen.