ABSTRACT
A great number of different types of food was sold at Rabaul market. The convention of selling in terms of monetary units rather than by weight made trading a lot easier but it also created certain difficulties. It was much easier to calculate prices in set units of 1/- rather than to have to add up pence and shillings; with items such as beans, which are small and where the quantity could be easily varied to change the price, no difficulty arose. At the beginning of each market day prices varied between different vendors, though only slightly. This was so because vendors gauged the size of the 1/- lots they prepared for sale by the supply offered from their own parish. For instance, if several vendors took lettuce to the market from Tinganagalip, the women from that parish arranged 1/- bundles each containing three lettuces.
