The Highlands

The Highlands valleys have been farmed for thousands of years. At Kuk Swamp in the Wahgi Valley, near Mount Hagen, drainage ditches and garden mounds show that people were cultivating taro, bananas and sugar cane long before contact with Asia — evidence that New Guinea was one of the world's independent centres of agriculture, recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The arrival of the sweet potato, probably within the last few centuries, allowed dense populations to grow and pigs to be raised in large numbers.

Outsiders assumed the interior was empty mountains until the 1930s, when Australian gold prospectors, including the Leahy brothers, and patrol officers such as Jim Taylor walked into the valleys and found around a million people. Missions, government patrol posts and airstrips followed, and coffee growing spread. Towns such as Goroka and Mount Hagen grew from those posts.

Since independence the Highlands have been a populous and politically assertive region, and the site of its largest resource projects: the Porgera gold mine in Enga, the Kutubu oil fields in the Southern Highlands and the Hides gas field in Hela, which feeds the PNG LNG project. Hela was carved from the Southern Highlands and Jiwaka from the Western Highlands in 2012. Clan warfare, once fought with bows and spears, has become far deadlier with guns, and in May 2024 a huge landslide buried villages in Enga, killing many people.

Highlands society is built on the clan, exchange and the big man, whose standing rests on the wealth he can gather and give away. Pigs are the central measure of wealth, and large ceremonial exchanges such as the moka of the Mount Hagen area and the tee of Enga once linked whole districts. Bride-price and compensation payments, now often in cash as well as pigs, still settle marriages, injuries and killings, and unpaid debts can spark fighting.

Each valley has its own language and style of dress. The Huli of Hela are known as wigmen for their elaborate wigs, decorated with bird-of-paradise feathers. The mud men of the Asaro valley near Goroka wear masks made of mud, and the Chimbu and Melpa peoples have their own elaborate headdresses of bird-of-paradise plumes. The Goroka Show, begun in 1956, and the Mount Hagen Show turned these traditions into great public gatherings of clan groups.

Christianity is strong — Lutheran, Catholic, Seventh-day Adventist and Pentecostal churches are all important — but belief in sorcery remains widespread, and accusations have led to violent attacks, mostly on women, that the state and churches are trying to stop.

Most Highlanders live in scattered homesteads among their gardens rather than in nucleated villages. Mount Hagen and Goroka are the main towns, each with perhaps a few tens of thousands of people; Kundiawa, Mendi, Wabag, Tari and the Jiwaka centres at Banz and Minj are smaller.

Sweet potato gardens, pigs and smallholder coffee are the base of the economy. Coffee cherries are sold to buyers along the roads in the harvest season, and fresh produce travels down the Highlands Highway to the coastal markets of Lae and Port Moresby. Mining and gas projects bring royalties, jobs and conflict over who is a landowner. Days start early with work in the gardens, and town markets fill in the morning with women selling vegetables and bilum string bags.

Current issues are sharp: population growth pressing on land, tribal fighting that has displaced whole communities, the cost of compensation disputes, poor roads, and violence against women. The 2024 Enga landslide showed how exposed villages on steep slopes are.

Kaukau, the sweet potato, is the Highlands staple, eaten at almost every meal, roasted in the ashes or cooked in the mumu, the earth oven of heated stones in which pork, greens and vegetables steam under banana leaves. Pig killings for weddings, funerals and compensation feasts can involve dozens of animals.

Gardens also grow taro, bananas, sugar cane, corn, beans, cabbage and highland pitpit, a grass grown as a vegetable. In season the nut of the karuka, a highland pandanus, is roasted and eaten in large quantities, and marita, the red fruit of another pandanus, is made into an oily sauce in some areas. Introduced crops such as peanuts, carrots and broccoli now fill town markets.

Coffee is the region's great cash crop: arabica grown by smallholders and plantations around Goroka and in the Wahgi Valley, and exported for roasters abroad. Betel nut is trucked up from the coast and chewed everywhere, and beer is a central, and often troubling, part of town life.

In the east, Goroka hosts the Goroka Show in September, while the Asaro valley nearby is where visitors meet the mud men. The Highlands Highway climbs from the lowlands over the Daulo Pass on the way to Chimbu, whose capital Kundiawa sits in a deep valley. From Keglsugl in Chimbu, climbers set out for Mount Wilhelm, the country's highest summit at about 4,500 metres, passing Lake Piunde on the way up.

Further west, the Wahgi Valley opens into a broad plain of coffee gardens between Chimbu, Jiwaka and Mount Hagen. The Kuk Early Agricultural Site lies on its edge, and Mount Hagen stages the Mount Hagen Show each August. Lodges in the surrounding forests are among the best places to watch birds of paradise display.

In Hela, the Tari valley is the heartland of the Huli, whose wigmen perform for visitors near Tari, and the high forest and grassland of the Tari Gap are famous for birds of paradise. The Southern Highlands hold Mount Giluwe, an old volcano and the country's second-highest mountain, and Lake Kutubu in its forested basin, while Enga, around Wabag, is among the most troubled of the Highland provinces.