History of Papua New Guinea

While American astronauts were orbiting the moon in the dying days of 1968, more primitive men on the banks of the Rentoul and Nomad rivers (Western Highlands) were eating each other.

While more privileged women played golf and chose the new season’s fashions, there were numbers of Papua New Guinean (PNG) women suckling young pigs.

At a time when millions of Englishmen, Americans, Japanese, Australians and Indians had travelled internationally, there were still Papua New Guineans yet to meet a white man, yet to learn the world extended beyond their valley or mountain ridge. In the darkest corners of this great, mysterious island, there were men still fashioning implements from stone, men who could be amazed by the sight of their own faces in a mirror or by the feel of cloth. For centuries time had passed Papua New Guinea; Papua New Guinea had slept undisturbed while change had overtaken the rest of the world.

A tour guide urges travellers to visit Papua New Guinea and “Travel 10,000 Years Back In Time”. An airline describes it as “The Land That Time Forgot”. Poet Karl Shapiro appropriately called it “The Last Known”. Each is, in its own way, the truth. The explorers de Retes, Torres, Schouten, Carstenz, Dampier, de Bougainville, d’Urville and d’Albertis had all visited the island between 1545 and 1877, but with the exception of d’Albertis all had gone away without seeing much of the interior.

Possession of the western part of the vast island (now West Irian Jaya) had been claimed by the Dutch as early as 1828 but Dutchmen had not settled on the coast or moved inland. Reports of the island, the third largest in the world, were conflicting, and in the light of subsequent knowledge proved that among its earliest explorers, Papua New Guinea could claim some of the boldest and most colourful liars in the long history of exploration.

A youthful Frenchman, Louis Tregance, announced in his book “Adventures in New Guinea” how he had been held captive for nine years by a tribe called the Orangwoks. These people rode about on yellow and white striped ponies and were armed with steel spears and swords, wrote Tregance.

Some of the Orangworks protected themselves with gold shields while others wore breastplates of the same precious metal. That was not all. Two tigers were tethered by twisted gold rope in the palace of the Orangwoks’ king and some of the buildings of the city in which he was held were six storeys high.

Earlier that year the Englishman Captain J. A. Lawson announced to the world in his report “Wanderings in the Interior of New Guinea” that he had found a mountain taller by nearly 4,000 feet than Mount Everest, trees which measured more than eighty feet around the trunk, huge apes and a black, brown and white striped tiger.

No-one knew enough about Papua New Guinea then to seriously question such claims, and it was not for some years that the writings of Tregance and Lawson could be judged to be more the product of their imagination than of their observations.

Exerts taken from: “New Guinea” by James L. Anderson & Donald Hogg.