Goroka

The valleys around Goroka were farmed and densely settled long before any outsider saw them, by peoples speaking several unrelated languages who grew taro, then sweet potato, and raised pigs for the exchanges that ordered social life. First contact came in the 1930s, when Australian prospectors and patrol officers crossed the Highlands and found a populous landscape of gardens; a patrol post was set up in the Goroka valley, and an airstrip followed, which remains in the centre of the town.

After the war the post became the administrative centre of the Eastern Highlands. Coffee proved ideally suited to the valley, and by the 1950s and 1960s smallholders and planters together had made the district one of the centres of the country's coffee industry, with buyers, factories and a road link to the coast. The University of Goroka and the Institute of Medical Research, established in 1968, gave the small town an unusual concentration of institutions. The Institute's work with Highlands communities on kuru, a fatal neurological disease found among the Fore people to the south, contributed to research recognised with the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The first Goroka Show was held in 1956, on the initiative of Australian patrol officers, as a way of bringing rival clan groups together in peaceful competition, and it grew into the country's best-known cultural gathering. Since independence in 1975 the town has grown steadily rather than explosively, and its problems are those of the region: dependence on one highway, unemployment among young people, crime, and the strain of clan disputes in the wider province.

Goroka's reputation rests on the show. Each September the showground fills with clan groups from the Eastern Highlands and beyond, performing in headdresses of bird-of-paradise plumes, cassowary feathers, shells, pig tusks and clay and charcoal paint; the Asaro mud men, with their heavy moulded masks and clay-covered bodies, are the images that travel furthest. Behind the spectacle is a serious purpose, since the show was designed to turn rivalry into performance, and it remains as much an event for Papua New Guineans as for the handful of foreign visitors.

Eastern Highlands society runs on the same principles found across the region: clans, big men whose standing comes from what they can give away, bride-price and compensation payments, and obligations to one's wantok, the people who share a language and place. Bilum string bags, made and worn by everyone, are both craft and identity, and the province is known for its weaving, pottery and carved artefacts.

The town also carries a strong institutional culture, unusual for its size: teachers, students, researchers and coffee traders give it a mixed, relatively literate population, and the Raun Raun Theatre, built in the early 1980s and reopened after renovation in 2019, is one of the national institutions based here. Churches of several denominations are central to social life, and belief in sorcery persists alongside them, with accusations sometimes leading to violence that churches and women's groups work to prevent.

Around 29,000 people live in the town, with many more in the villages and gardens of the surrounding valleys who come in to sell, shop and go to hospital. Coffee sets the economic rhythm: smallholder blocks of a few hundred trees, buying points along the roads during the harvest, factories that hull and grade the beans, and trucks that carry them down the highway to Lae for export. Government offices, schools, the university, the research institutes and the hospital provide most of the salaried work.

Mornings are the working part of the day. The market opens early and is at its fullest by mid-morning, traffic on the highway builds with trucks and PMVs, and by late afternoon the centre quietens. Most families live in houses with gardens rather than flats, and food, firewood and bilum bags are part of household economics as much as cash is.

The town's concerns are practical: keeping the highway open, since everything arrives on it; the price paid for coffee cherries, which sets how much money circulates; land pressure as the population grows; law and order; and the reach of health services into valleys that are hours from a road. Young people leave for Lae and Port Moresby to study and work, and the university brings students in from other provinces.

Kaukau, the sweet potato, is the everyday staple, roasted in the embers or cooked with pork, greens and root vegetables in a mumu, the earth oven of heated stones and banana leaves that marks weddings, funerals and compensation feasts. Pigs remain the centre of celebration food, and meat is shared out according to relationship and obligation.

The cool valley grows an unusual range of produce for the tropics. Alongside taro, yam, bananas, sugar cane, corn, beans, peanuts and highland pitpit, a grass eaten as a vegetable, the market carries cabbages, carrots, potatoes, broccoli, ginger and peanuts, grown in food gardens alongside the coffee. In season the oily nut of the karuka pandanus is roasted and eaten in quantity.

Coffee is the town's signature. Arabica from the surrounding valleys is picked by hand, processed nearby and sold on to roasters abroad, and it is drunk here too, strong and sweet, in hotel dining rooms and at market stalls. Betel nut comes up by truck from the coast and is chewed everywhere; beer is widely drunk and a recognised source of trouble in the evenings; and a trade-store meal of fried chicken, lamb flaps, rice or noodles is the fallback for anyone in a hurry.