Papua New GuineaPapua Niugini

People reached New Guinea at least 50,000 years ago, when low sea levels joined it to Australia in a single landmass called Sahul. They spread along the coasts and up into the mountain valleys, and for most of history the island's peoples lived in small, self-governing communities separated by ridges, rivers and rivalry. In the swamps of Kuk, near Mount Hagen, archaeologists found drainage ditches and mounds showing that Highlanders were farming taro and bananas perhaps 7,000 to 10,000 years ago, making New Guinea one of the few places where agriculture was invented independently.

Around 3,000 years ago Austronesian-speaking seafarers, associated with the Lapita pottery found on the Bismarck Archipelago, settled coasts and islands and went on to populate the remote Pacific. Their descendants and the older Papuan-speaking peoples mixed along the shores, which is why coastal and island cultures differ so much from those of the interior. Trade networks such as the Hiri voyages of the Motu people, who sailed pots west to exchange for sago, and the kula ring of the Massim islands tied communities together without any central power.

Europeans charted the coasts from the 16th century, but colonisation came late. In 1884 Germany claimed the north-east and the Bismarck islands for plantations, and Britain took the south-east as a protectorate that became the Australian Territory of Papua in 1906. Australia seized German New Guinea in 1914 and ran it under a League of Nations mandate. Missionaries, labour recruiters and patrol officers (kiaps) pushed inland, but the Highlands, home to perhaps a million people, were unknown to outsiders until gold prospectors and government patrols walked into the valleys in the 1930s.

The Pacific War brought Japanese forces to Rabaul in January 1942 and made New Guinea a battlefield for three years. After the war Australia combined the two territories and, under pressure from the United Nations and a growing local elite, moved towards self-government. Papua New Guinea became independent on 16 September 1975 with Michael Somare as prime minister, a Westminster parliament and a constitution that recognised custom as part of the law.

Independence has been turbulent but democratic. Governments are formed by shifting coalitions, votes of no confidence are routine, and elections are often marred by violence. The Bougainville civil war of 1988–98, sparked by the Panguna copper mine, left thousands dead and ended with a peace deal and a 2019 referendum in which 97.7% voted for independence. In January 2024 a police pay dispute led to riots and looting in Port Moresby and Lae, and in 2025 the country marked 50 years of independence.

Papua New Guinea has about 840 living languages, roughly one in eight of the world's total, most spoken by a few thousand people or fewer. They fall into two broad groups: Austronesian languages along the coasts and islands, related to those of the wider Pacific and Southeast Asia, and dozens of unrelated Papuan families in the interior. Neighbouring valleys can speak languages as different as English and Japanese, a result of long isolation and of communities that defined themselves partly by speaking differently from their rivals.

Tok Pisin grew out of the plantation labour trade of the 19th century, when workers from many islands needed a common tongue. Its vocabulary is mostly English with German, Malay and local words, but its grammar is its own. Today it is the first language of many town-born people, the language of parliament debates and radio, and the easiest route to talking with people across the north, Highlands and islands. Hiri Motu, a simplified form of the Motu trade language, plays a similar role around Port Moresby.

The wantok system follows from this diversity. A wantok, literally one talk, is a person who shares your language, and by extension your clan, village or region. Wantoks are expected to help one another with food, money, jobs and protection, and the network is the real social safety net in a country with little welfare. It also shapes politics and business, since public servants and politicians face strong pressure to favour their own people.

For a visitor this matters in practical ways. Your guide's authority often ends at the boundary of his own language group, which is why operators hire local guides at each stop. Learning a few words of Tok Pisin opens conversations quickly, and people are generally delighted that an outsider has tried.

Japanese forces captured Rabaul in January 1942 and turned it into their main base in the South Pacific, with airfields, tens of thousands of troops and hundreds of kilometres of tunnels dug by prisoners and labourers. From there they aimed at Port Moresby, whose capture would have put northern Australia within bomber range. The Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942 turned back a seaborne invasion, so Japan tried the overland route instead.

In July 1942 Japanese troops landed near Buna and Gona on the north coast and pushed south over the Owen Stanley Range along a rough footpath through Kokoda. Outnumbered Australian militia and later regular battalions fought a fighting withdrawal through mud, rain and disease to Ioribaiwa, within sight of Port Moresby, before the Japanese, starving and overstretched, were ordered back. The Australians followed them back over the range, and the bloody battles for the beachheads at Buna, Gona and Sanananda ended in January 1943.

At Milne Bay in August and September 1942, Australian forces defeated a Japanese landing, the first time a Japanese amphibious assault had been driven off. The campaign across New Guinea continued until 1945, with Allied landings at Lae, Finschhafen, Madang, Wewak and Hollandia, and with Rabaul bypassed and cut off. Papua New Guinean carriers and stretcher-bearers, remembered in Australia as the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels, carried supplies and the wounded, often under coercion, and many local people died in bombing, fighting and forced labour.

Today the Kokoda Track draws several thousand trekkers a year, mostly Australians, and money from permits flows to villages along the route. Bomana War Cemetery outside Port Moresby holds more than 3,000 Commonwealth graves. Wrecked aircraft, ships and barges lie on reefs around Madang, Milne Bay and Rabaul, and Japanese tunnels survive around Kokopo. Remembrance Day on 23 July is kept as a public holiday.

About 97% of Papua New Guinea's land is held under customary tenure. It belongs not to individuals or the state but to clans, whose members inherit rights to garden, hunt and build on it according to rules that vary from one group to the next. There is often no written title; knowledge of boundaries is held in memory, genealogies and stories, and disputes over them can last generations.

This shapes every visit. A beach, a reef, a waterfall or a bird-watching trail belongs to someone, and paying a small fee to its owners is not a scam but recognition of ownership. Tourism operators build these payments into their prices. For mining and gas projects the same principle produces royalty deals, landowner companies and, when benefits are unevenly shared, protests and conflict, as at Panguna in Bougainville and Porgera in Enga.

Highland societies traditionally had no hereditary chiefs. Influence belonged to the big man, who gained followers by organising gardens, pigs and exchanges and by giving more than he received. Pigs, shell valuables and now cash move between clans at marriages, deaths and peace-making ceremonies. Bride price, paid by the groom's family to the bride's, remains widespread and has grown with the cash economy.

Compensation is the flip side of exchange. A death, injury or insult, even an accident, can create an obligation that the victim's clan will press. Paid, it restores balance; unpaid, it can lead to payback violence. The modern tribal wars of Enga and Hela, fought with high-powered rifles rather than bows, grew from cycles like these combined with elections, mining money and weak policing. Belief in sorcery remains strong in many areas, and accusations against women in particular have led to torture and killings that the government and churches are trying to stop.

A singsing is any gathering of dance, drums and song, from a village celebration to a regional festival. Performers wear bilas, the term for body decoration: feathers of birds of paradise and parrots, shells, pig tusks, cuscus fur, clay and plant oils, and painted faces whose patterns identify their clan. Each group's dress carries meaning and ownership, and performers may not copy another group's designs.

The big shows began in the colonial era. The Goroka Show was first held in 1957 and the Mount Hagen Show in 1961, partly to bring rival groups together peacefully. Today they bring together clans from across the Highlands and beyond, and they are the best-organised way for visitors to see Highland culture. The Asaro mudmen of the Eastern Highlands, in grey clay masks, and the Huli wigmen of Hela, in wigs of their own hair decorated with feathers, have become national symbols.

The Sepik River is the heart of PNG's carving tradition. Villages such as Kanganamun and Palimbei have haus tambaran, men's spirit houses with steep carved gables where initiations took place and sacred objects were kept. Among some Sepik groups young men undergo initiation that includes cuts that heal into raised scars resembling crocodile skin. Masks, hooks, stools and story boards are made for sale as well as ceremony, and buying directly from carvers is the best way to put money into the villages.

Other regions have their own traditions: the elaborate malagan carvings of New Ireland, made for funeral rites, the Tolai tubuan masked figures of East New Britain, the Trobriand yam houses and carved canoe prows, and the tapa cloth of Oro Province, the only part of PNG where it is still made. Bilum string bags, looped by women in every province, are the one craft almost every Papua New Guinean uses daily.

Minerals and gas pay most of the state's bills. The Ok Tedi copper and gold mine in the far west, Porgera gold mine in Enga, Lihir gold on an island volcano, and the PNG LNG project, which has shipped liquefied gas from the Southern Highlands to Asia since 2014, dominate exports. Much of the revenue has not reached villages, and Ok Tedi in particular caused severe pollution of the Fly River. Oil palm, coffee, cocoa and logging fill out the economy.

Most people still live in villages and grow their own food, but Port Moresby and Lae have grown fast, with settlements of migrants from all over the country. Formal jobs are few, and unemployment among young men drives the gangs known as raskols. Crime is the main reason foreign governments rate PNG as high risk, and why visitors move by car between guarded compounds.

Violence in the Highlands has changed. Clan fighting once followed rules and ended with compensation; since the 2010s, factory-made rifles, election rivalries and the money around mines have made it deadlier. Fighting in the Porgera valley and around Wabag has killed hundreds since 2024, and in 2024 a landslide at Yambali in Enga buried a village. Police and soldiers are too few to control the violence.

Papua New Guinea's position between Asia and Australia has drawn outside powers. Australia is the largest aid donor and signed a mutual security treaty with PNG in 2025 (check), the United States signed a defence cooperation agreement in 2023, and China is a major investor. For travellers, the result is a country with some of the Pacific's highest warnings and its richest cultures side by side: go with people who know the ground.