Paliau Maloat, of Baluan Island in the southern Admiralties, was the prophet and organizer of the Paliau Movement, the religious and social reform that swept Manus from 1946 and remade village life within a generation. Preaching a syncretic gospel that fused Christian teaching with ancestral ideas, he set aside much of the old ghost cult, and was credited by his followers with supernatural knowledge and, in some accounts, with a messianic standing. In the later Wind Nation phase of his teaching he became bound up with the movement's doctrine of a supreme creator. A historical man who acquired mythic stature, he stands at the head of the continuing religious tradition of the Admiralties.