GoKawiilWhen you talk about Papua New Guinea, people may say, oh, is that the place where:
But beyond these interesting tidbits, most people don’t actually have a conceptual understanding of what New Guinea is. Up until a few weeks ago, I had no idea either, until I randomly stumbled upon one of the most mind blowing books I’ve read in my life: First Contact: New Guinea’s Highlanders Encounter the Outside World, which describes the 1930 discovery of a million people living in the highlands of New Guinea—a group the colonial governments and local coastal populations had no idea existed, and who themselves had no knowledge of the outside world.
In 1930, the island of New Guinea was nominally colonized: the western half by the Dutch (now, Indonesia), and the eastern half (what is today Papua New Guinea) by Australia. Everything I say about the highlands applies to both halves. Despite this occupation, there was very little foreign governance or control in New Guinea.
In terms of geography, New Guinea is divided into two regions, the coastal region and the highlands. The coastal region mostly consists of malaria infested rivers, swamps, rainforest and jungle. The highlands, despite being just by the equator, have glaciers and snow, with peaks reaching just below 5,000 metres. At the time, the highlands of New Guinea had never once been explored, because from the outside, after you trek through the malaria infested jungles to get there, they look like massive impenetrable mountains permanently covered in cloud, where nothing could possibly live.
So in 1930, New Guinea was just thought of as the coastal region. It was believed no people lived in the mountains of what is now known as the New Guinea highlands.
This all changed shortly after Australians found gold in New Guinea in 1926 and started mining the surrounding territory. Looking for more gold, an intrepid Australian named Mick Leahy decided to venture as far inland as he could — making progress up the never before penetrated mountains.
To cut the story very short, in 1930 Leahy accidentally stumbled into the eastern edge of the highlands, only to find that the highlands were not empty mountains, but rather lush green valleys with no malaria and with roughly a million people living in them.
The book is not really a story, but a documentation of this exploration and first contact. Leahy brought with him high quality cameras and a movie camera, and documented with thousands of photos and hours of film the first encounter of hundreds of thousands of people. The book is filled with the most incredible photos of all the scenes surrounding this first encounter. Beyond the photos, there are details of Leahy’s next ten years exploring the highlands and accompanied by 1970s interviews with New Guineans who were living in the highlands at the point of first contact and offering their perspective.
This includes descriptions of how the highlanders thought the white men were ghosts of their dead relatives at first - and then, to investigate this, spied on them defecating and smelled the poop, only to realize that they must also be human like them. How the Australians would do demonstrations of “strength” and gather whole communities to watch them shoot pigs, or make New Guineans listen to records, play with child dolls, look at themselves in mirrors, watch airplanes land etc. mostly thinking everything was a holy spirit. How highlanders would take pieces of the Australians’ garbage like a Kellogg’s cereal wrapper, and wear them around their heads as prized jewellery. And to really show the highlanders the power of their world, they would take kids on their airplanes to the coast, make them see the sea and civilization and come back, so they could report to their relatives how powerful the white men were.
The most powerful story described in the book is the one of hyperinflation. The highlanders were obsessed with shells, then an incredibly rare commodity, the jewel that the leaders and most powerful men would wear to demonstrate their power, and the closest thing they had to a currency. But knowing this, the Australians brought shells in by the planeload, to use in exchange first for food and then also for labour. At first this felt like a great deal for the highlanders, who were willing to give up nearly everything for more shells. But the planes kept coming, and the price of everything in shells kept rising, until it went from one shell making someone a leader and “rich”, to almost all people, including children, being draped in hundreds of shells, and the shell eventually being worthless.
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