What’s New in New Guinea?

The face gets your attention. The person wearing it deserves the conversation.

In photographs of Papua New Guinea’s cultural gatherings, painted faces and elaborate headdresses can fill the frame so completely that little room remains for questions. Who prepared the adornments? What does the performance mean? What happens when the gathering ends and everyone goes home?

For an Australian traveller, those questions offer the beginnings of a journey.

The Sepik River, the Highlands and Madang’s coast provide three very different settings. There is art to encounter, history to investigate and water to explore. There is also the prospect of discovering how much we have overlooked in a near neighbour.

A river with something to say

The Sepik runs for more than 1,100 kilometres to the Bismarck Sea. Along its course, woodcarving, spirit houses and ancestral stories form part of the cultural life of river communities.

A visitor might begin with the wood.

A face emerges from it. An animal takes shape. The finished carving has an expression you recognise, or one you cannot quite place. You may know immediately whether you like it. Knowing what it means is another matter.

That is where the maker or a knowledgeable local guide becomes essential. The questions move beyond craftsmanship to ownership, purpose and the stories that can be shared.

The region’s spirit houses demand the same attention. Their architecture is an attraction, but their significance belongs to the communities that built and use them. The tourism authority identifies these buildings, together with carving traditions, among the Sepik’s defining cultural features.

For the traveller, the challenge is pleasantly simple: stay interested after taking the photograph.

A river journey offers time for that. Build the itinerary around opportunities to listen, with village access arranged locally and permission established before entering or photographing. Leave room for an explanation you could not have anticipated when booking.

The carving you remember may be the one someone helped you understand.

The work behind the appearance

In Hela Province, Tari is a gateway to Huli country. The Huli wigmen’s distinctive adornment and body decoration have made them prominent figures in Papua New Guinea’s tourism imagery.

Recognition, however, can be deceptive. A familiar image creates the comfortable impression that we already know its subject.

Spend time with a local guide and that certainty becomes something more useful: curiosity. Ask about the preparation, the knowledge involved and the occasions on which particular adornments are worn. Ask which details matter to the person explaining them.

The PNG Tourism Promotion Authority describes excursions around Tari accompanied by Huli guides from the area. Their role gives the visit its context and helps visitors understand local customs.

Even the map has changed. Hela became a province in 2012, formed from districts previously within Southern Highlands Province. An old guidebook can put you in yesterday’s administrative geography before you have left the airport.

Come prepared to revise what you think you know.

Watch what you cannot take home

At the Mount Hagen Show, cultural groups from across Papua New Guinea gather in the Western Highlands.

A camera gives the visitor something to do with so much visual information. Raise it, frame, focus, shoot. Repeat.

Try putting it down.

Watch a performance long enough to notice repetition and variation. Learn the group’s name. Ask a guide about a detail that keeps drawing your eye. Where conversation is welcomed, hear what participants want visitors to understand.

The difference will show later. You will have a story to accompany the image, rather than a folder of photographs waiting for captions.

Allow the gathering to occupy a substantial part of the journey. An event bringing different groups together deserves more than a hurried appearance between flights.

An older kind of new

Elsewhere in the Western Highlands, the evidence lies in the ground.

At Kuk Early Agricultural Site, archaeological remains record cultivation and wetland management extending back at least 7,000 years, and possibly 10,000. UNESCO identifies it as one of the relatively few places where evidence suggests agriculture developed independently.

Here, human ingenuity can be traced through mounds and drainage ditches: practical responses to the problem of growing food.

Kuk entered the World Heritage List in 2008. Its importance gives a Highland journey another subject, one less immediately theatrical than a cultural show but no less remarkable.

Consider the patience required to understand a landscape well enough to alter it. Then consider the generations who carried that knowledge forward.

For a story called “What’s New in New Guinea?”, several thousand years of agricultural innovation makes a useful complication.

Leave time for the coast

Madang changes the possibilities again. On the north coast, its waterfront and markets sit within a region of offshore islands, coral reefs and diving and snorkelling opportunities.

The temptation is to call this the relaxing part of the trip.

It can also be another beginning. Spend time in the markets. Find out what unfamiliar produce is used for. Arrange an island visit that includes time ashore as well as in the water. The tourism authority identifies Siar and Kranket among the islands offering water activities and cultural visits.

By now, the journey has accumulated different kinds of knowledge: something about a carving, a performance, a cultivated landscape.

Perhaps the best souvenir would be the ability to look at that first photograph again and notice what you missed.

Then turn it over and write down the person’s name.

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