Tribal Papua New Guinea: Highland Sing-Sings of Goroka and Mount Hagen

The interior highlands of Papua New Guinea were long assumed by colonial administrators to be thinly peopled mountain country. That changed in 1933, when an expedition led by the prospector brothers Mick and Dan Leahy, with the patrol officer Jim Taylor, walked into the Wahgi Valley and found broad, densely populated valleys of carefully drained gardens. Later estimates put the highland population at around a million people, living in valleys that had appeared blank on outside maps.

They had been farming there for a very long time. The Kuk Early Agricultural Site, in the Wahgi Valley about 12 kilometres from Mount Hagen, preserves drainage channels dug in a swamp around 9,000 years ago, and later evidence of bananas and other crops. UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List in 2008. It is one of the few places in the world where agriculture appears to have developed on its own, without arriving from elsewhere.

That long, separate history is one reason the cultural variety is so great. Papua New Guinea as a whole has more than 800 languages, and in the highlands neighbouring valleys can speak different tongues, follow different customs and dress in completely different ways.

The Goroka Show began in the late 1950s, when Australian patrol officers, the kiaps, organised a gathering at which groups from across the Eastern Highlands could perform side by side. Some anthropologists credit a local leader with the original idea, and the history is still debated. The point, either way, was to bring together clans that might otherwise meet only in exchange or in conflict, and to do so on neutral ground with a crowd watching.

Mount Hagen followed in the 1960s with its own cultural show in the Western Highlands. Both events grew into the largest regular gatherings of traditional performance in the country. Goroka is held over the weekend closest to Independence Day, 16 September, and Hagen in August, usually over a weekend in the second half of the month. Exact dates are set each year.

On a big show day, around a hundred groups may take part at Goroka. They enter in turn, perform their sing-sing, and then join the slowly turning mass of performers in the arena. Judges award prizes, but most of the crowd is there to watch and to meet.

Between the two show towns, along the Highlands Highway, lies Simbu Province, also spelled Chimbu, with its capital at Kundiawa. It is some of the steepest country in the highlands, with gardens planted on slopes that look too sharp to stand on, and it has long been among the most densely populated rural areas in Papua New Guinea. The country’s highest mountain, Mount Wilhelm, at about 4,500 metres, rises on its eastern border with Madang.

Simbu groups bring some of the most striking performances to the shows. The best known are the skeleton dancers, whose bodies are blackened and then painted in white with ribs, spine and limb bones, the face turned into a skull. Accounts describe the paint as originally intended to unsettle enemies in war. Today it is a performance, and a source of pride, and the dancers often move with a slow, deliberate, slightly jerky step that makes the illusion stronger.

Other Simbu groups dress in heavier, more colourful bilas: tall feather headdresses, fur bands, shell ornaments on the chest, faces painted in red, yellow and white. The range within one province is a reminder that a provincial name hides many smaller identities.

The Asaro mudmen, from the Asaro Valley near Goroka, are perhaps the most photographed performers in the country. They cover their bodies in pale grey clay and wear large, heavy masks of dried mud, with long fingers made from bamboo or similar materials. They move slowly and in silence.

There is no single story of where the practice came from. Several oral histories exist, often involving a defeated group that emerged from a muddy river at dusk and frightened its enemies, who took them for spirits. The anthropologist Todd Otto observed that there seem to be as many versions as tellers. The image owes much of its fame to the Goroka Show, where the mudmen have been a fixture for decades.

From further west come the Huli of Hela Province, centred on Tari. Huli men are known for ceremonial wigs made from their own hair. Young men traditionally live for a period under the guidance of an elder, observing strict rules while their hair grows; it is then cut and made by a specialist into a wig, which is decorated with feathers and flowers for ceremonies and shows. Faces are painted bright yellow with red details. Huli groups often stand out at the shows, and they frequently win prizes.

Bilas, the Tok Pisin word for adornment, is not costume in the theatrical sense. Each element has a source and often a meaning. Feathers come from birds of paradise, parrots and cassowaries; fur comes from cuscus and tree kangaroos; shells, historically traded up from the coast over long chains of exchange, were wealth in their own right.

The gold-lip pearl shell, kina, was so valuable in the highlands that it gave its name to the national currency when Papua New Guinea introduced its own money in 1975. In the Western Highlands around Mount Hagen, shells and pigs moved between groups in the great ceremonial exchanges known as moka, in which men gained standing by giving more than they had received. Pig tusks, dog teeth and cowries still appear in adornment for the same reason: they show that a person is part of a network of obligations.

Plumes are borrowed, inherited and stored carefully between events. A complete headdress may represent the wealth of a whole family, which is part of why groups dress with such care.

A side note that has nothing to do with feathers. Much of the highland economy runs on coffee, introduced in the colonial period and now grown largely by smallholders in village gardens. Along the Highlands Highway, between Goroka and Mount Hagen, sacks of green beans wait by the road for collection, and Simbu in particular is noted for organically produced coffee from small family plots. Visitors who spend show week drinking instant coffee in their guesthouse are often sitting in the middle of a coffee district.

The shows are among the most photographed events in Papua New Guinea, and that brings its own etiquette. Performers are dressed for their own communities first. Many are happy to pose and talk; some may ask for a small payment for close portraits outside the arena, and it is better to ask than to assume. Long lenses help keep a respectful distance during the performances themselves.

Colour is the challenge. Strong highland sun on red and yellow paint, dark skin, white clay and iridescent feathers can overwhelm a camera’s metering, and the most even light often comes in the first hour of the morning or under thin cloud. The dressing areas before the parade offer the quietest moments: a father painting a son’s face, a plume being straightened, a mirror passed hand to hand.

Rain changes everything.

When the afternoon downpours arrive, the arena empties fast and feathers are wrapped in plastic. The pictures that follow, of performers waiting out the storm under shelters in full bilas, are often the most honest of the day.

Both Goroka and Mount Hagen have airports with domestic flights from Port Moresby, and the Highlands Highway links Lae on the coast to Goroka, Kundiawa and Mount Hagen. Accommodation is limited and fills quickly in show weeks, so most international visitors book through local operators who handle transport, entry and lodging.

Conditions in parts of the highlands can change quickly, and checking current travel advice before booking is essential. Some ticket types have allowed visitors into the arena among the performers, which brings the chance to talk as well as watch; everywhere, asking before taking anyone’s photograph is basic courtesy.

Travellers drawn to mountain cultures in other parts of the world might compare the highland shows with the clan traditions of Myanmar’s Chin State, the varied peoples of India’s Arunachal Pradesh or the festival calendar of Bhutan’s Himalayan valleys. More picture stories are collected in the photography section.

Arrive at the arena early on the first morning, while the groups are still dressing. The best moments of the day often come before anyone has formally performed at all, when a single drum starts up in the car park.