Wobowi is the mythic mortal at the centre of the eastern Iatmul deluge story. Deceived by a cousin into killing his own wife, and then denied the village's participation in his mourning, he took shell valuables and animals to the swamp home of the crocodile-spirit Mendangumeli and begged for destruction. Following the spirit's instructions he raised a platform on a coconut palm and gathered his family and possessions upon it; the flood that came drowned everyone else, and the crocodile bore him to dry land. Wobowi thus embodies the Iatmul theme of grief and slighted kinship escalating into world-ending catastrophe, a human counterpart to the ancestral spirit whose waters he releases.