Mount Hagen

The Wahgi Valley has been farmed for a very long time. At Kuk, on the valley floor near the modern town, archaeologists have traced drainage ditches and garden mounds showing that taro, bananas and sugar cane were being cultivated thousands of years ago, making New Guinea one of the places where agriculture began independently. The arrival of the sweet potato, within the last few centuries, allowed far denser populations and much larger pig herds, and the valley became one of the most heavily settled parts of the island.

Outsiders knew nothing of it until the 1930s. In 1933 the Australian gold prospector Mick Leahy, his brother Dan and the government officer Jim Taylor flew over the valley and then walked in with a patrol, the first Westerners to meet the peoples living there, and found a landscape of gardens and a dense population. The first patrol built an airstrip at Kelua, a short distance from the modern town, which takes its name from the volcano to the north-west that the Germans had named after Curt von Hagen, a colonial officer, and mission stations, trade stores and a coffee industry followed. Aircraft, not roads, tied the new town to the coast for years.

After the Second World War the post grew into the commercial hub of the Highlands: coffee and tea plantations spread through the valley, the Highlands Highway eventually connected it to the port of Lae, and the town became the capital of Western Highlands Province. Since independence in 1975 Mount Hagen has grown quickly and struggled with the results — unemployment, squatter areas, crime and the spread of guns into clan fighting. In May 2012 three neighbouring districts of the eastern valley were separated to form Jiwaka Province.

This is the country of the Melpa-speaking people, whose social world is built on exchange. The moka, a system of competitive gift-giving in which pigs, shells and later money were handed over in ever larger quantities, once linked whole districts and made the reputations of big men, leaders whose authority rested on generosity and persuasion rather than inheritance. Its logic still runs through bride-price, compensation payments and church fundraising.

Decoration is the region's great art. Headdresses of bird-of-paradise plumes, cassowary feathers, shells, clay and charcoal paint are assembled with care and worn with pride, and the Mount Hagen Cultural Show turned that tradition into an annual gathering of clan groups from across the Highlands and beyond. It began as a way of bringing rival groups together peacefully and is now one of the largest cultural events in the country, watched as closely by Papua New Guineans as by the few foreign visitors present.

Churches are central: Lutheran, Catholic, Seventh-day Adventist and Pentecostal congregations all have a strong presence, and Sunday is quiet. Belief in sorcery persists alongside Christianity, and accusations have led to violent attacks, mostly against women, that churches, women's groups and the state are trying to stop. Rugby league is followed intensely, bilum string bags are made and worn everywhere, and Tok Pisin is the common language of the market and the street.

Some 46,000 people live in the third-largest city in the country, and many more in the villages and gardens around it, giving the market its scale. Coffee is the backbone of the economy: smallholders grow most of it on blocks of a few hundred trees, sell cherries to roadside buyers in the harvest season, and depend on the highway and the airport to move it. Tea, fresh vegetables for the coastal cities, transport, wholesaling, government offices, schools and churches provide the rest of the paid work.

Most residents live in the valley rather than the centre, in homesteads among their gardens, while the fast-growing settlements on the edge of town house people who have come in from other provinces looking for work. Days begin early and business is done in the morning; by mid-afternoon the market thins and by dusk the streets are empty. Compounds are fenced, shops have grilles and security guards are everywhere.

The town's difficulties are severe and openly discussed: crime, alcohol, unemployment among young men, the cost and unreliability of the highway, land pressure as the population grows, and the spillover of clan fighting from neighbouring provinces, which displaces families and sometimes closes the roads the whole Highlands depends on.

Kaukau, the sweet potato, is eaten at almost every meal, roasted in the ashes or steamed in a mumu, the earth oven in which heated stones cook pork, greens and root vegetables under banana leaves for hours. A pig killing for a wedding, a funeral or a compensation payment is the centre of Highlands hospitality, and the meat is distributed according to obligation rather than appetite.

Gardens in the cool valley grow taro, yam, bananas, sugar cane, corn, beans, peanuts and highland pitpit, a grass eaten as a vegetable, alongside introduced cabbages, carrots, broccoli and potatoes that fill the market and travel down the highway to Lae and Port Moresby. In season the oily nut of the karuka, a highland pandanus, is roasted and eaten in quantity, and marita, the red fruit of another pandanus, is cooked into a sauce in some districts.

The valley's most famous product is coffee: washed highland arabica, which makes up most of the country's crop, hand-picked on smallholder blocks and sold on as Papua New Guinean single origin abroad. It is drunk locally as well, strong and sweet, in hotel dining rooms and at market stalls. Betel nut, trucked up from the coast, is chewed everywhere despite the distance it travels, and beer is a visible and often troublesome part of town life.