Ambat is the great culture-hero of southern and western Malekula, the foremost and most cunning of five brothers who all carry the same name and are told apart only by their birth-order. He is imagined as pale-skinned and long-headed, and it is from him that the peoples of the South West Bay derive the arts they most prize: the shaping and firing of clay pots, the building of the outrigger canoe, and the bow. Around him gathers a cycle of tales in which his brothers by turns assist and envy him, and in which he is pitted against the ogress Nevinbumbaau, whom he alone is clever enough to unmask and evade. His distinctive elongated skull is the model for the head-binding once practised on the island and for the tall modelled heads of the funerary effigies, so that the dead of rank are made, in death, to resemble him.