50 Fun Facts About Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea shares its only land border with which country?

Indonesia. The Dutch claimed the western half of New Guinea in 1828 and it later passed to Indonesia, which is why a single border now runs down the middle of the island.

What is the capital of Papua New Guinea?

Port Moresby. Royal Navy captain John Moresby charted the harbour in 1873 and named it after his father, an admiral; in the Second World War it was the Allied stronghold that the enemy never managed to capture.

Papua New Guinea has roughly how many known spoken languages, more than any other country?

840. Rough terrain kept small communities apart for thousands of years, so each kept its own tongue, and most of the roughly 840 languages have only a few hundred to a few thousand speakers.

Which English-based creole is the most widely used language in Papua New Guinea?

Tok Pisin. It grew up on colonial plantations, where workers from many language groups needed a common tongue, and many town children now learn it as their first language.

Which simplified form of a southern coastal language is an official language of Papua New Guinea?

Hiri Motu. It spread across the south because the colonial police force adopted it, earning it the nickname Police Motu, before it was renamed in the 1970s.

The 'Guinea' in New Guinea was borrowed by a 16th-century Spanish navigator from a coast on which continent?

Africa. Spanish navigator Yñigo Ortiz de Retez, coasting the island in the 1540s, named it after West Africa's Guinea coast because, by most accounts, the islanders reminded him of the people there.

In 1884 eastern New Guinea was split between the British in the south and which power in the north?

Germany took the north-east as Kaiser-Wilhelmsland in 1884 while Britain claimed the south; Australia seized the German territory in 1914 and later ran it under a League of Nations mandate.

Which royal represented the Queen at Papua New Guinea's independence celebrations in 1975?

Prince Charles. He watched the Australian flag being lowered for the last time on the eve of independence, and 50 years on, as king, he sent a message that was broadcast at the anniversary celebrations.

Who was Papua New Guinea's first prime minister, known as the 'father of the nation'?

Michael Somare. Chief minister before independence, he was voted out as prime minister in 1980 yet won the job back twice, serving about 17 years in all.

Which mountain, at 4,509 metres, is the highest point in Papua New Guinea?

Mount Wilhelm. Before dawn on 22 May 1944 a US reconnaissance bomber flew into the mountain at about 4,000 metres, and pieces of the wreck can still be seen on its slopes.

Which river, the longest on the island of New Guinea, winds across the northern lowlands to the Bismarck Sea?

The Sepik. It loops for about 1,100 km through a vast swampy basin, and in some villages on its banks boys are initiated with rows of cuts that heal to look like a crocodile's scales.

The shallow waterway separating Papua New Guinea from Australia's Cape York Peninsula is called what?

Torres Strait. Spanish navigator Luis Váez de Torres picked his way through its reefs and shoals in 1606, and the channel, about 150 km wide, is still hazardous for ships today.

Which region of Papua New Guinea keeps its clocks one hour ahead of the rest of the country?

Bougainville. The autonomous region moved its clocks forward an hour on 28 December 2014, so it now keeps the same time as the neighbouring Solomon Islands rather than the national capital.

Which metal came from Panguna, the giant mine at the heart of Papua New Guinea's separatist war of the 1990s?

Copper. Rebels angry at pollution and at profits leaving their island forced the mine shut in 1989; a 2001 peace deal promised a vote, and in 2019 almost 98 percent chose independence.

What is the 1997 scandal over hiring mercenaries against island secessionists, which toppled the government, called?

The Sandline affair saw Julius Chan's government hire Sandline International to fight island secessionists; army commander Jerry Singirok refused to let the contractors deploy and Chan stepped aside.

Who became prime minister of Papua New Guinea in 2019 after Peter O'Neill resigned?

James Marape, a former finance minister who had quit O'Neill's cabinet weeks earlier, was elected prime minister by parliament in May 2019.

The Kokoda Track, fought over in 1942, crosses which mountain range?

Owen Stanley Range. In 1942 Australian troops and Papuan carriers held an invading army on the foot track over these jungle mountains and then drove it back, one of the turning points of the Pacific War.

Which country lost by far the most men in the New Guinea campaign of World War II?

Japan. Well over 100,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors died, many times the Allied toll, a great many of them from disease and starvation after Allied advances cut their garrisons off from supply.

Which currency, named after a pearl shell once used as money, does Papua New Guinea use?

Kina. The word is Tolai for the pearl oyster shell that passed as money across New Guinea, and the currency took the name when it replaced the Australian dollar in 1975.

Which creature is silhouetted in gold on Papua New Guinea's flag?

A Raggiana bird-of-paradise in gold soars on the red half of the flag, opposite the Southern Cross on black; the design was a 1971 competition entry by 15-year-old schoolgirl Susan Karike.

The Kumuls are Papua New Guinea's team in which sport, the country's national game?

Rugby league. Australian soldiers stationed there around the Second World War spread the game, and it took such a hold that Papua New Guinea is the only country to count it as the national sport.

At Kuk Swamp, Papua New Guinea's first World Heritage Site, people were growing which fruit nearly 7,000 years ago?

Bananas. Traces of banana plants in the swamp's ancient garden plots are part of the evidence that New Guinea's highlanders invented farming on their own, one of the few places on Earth where that happened.

Which highlands city, host of one of the country's biggest cultural shows, is the nearest to Kuk Swamp?

Mount Hagen. Outsiders had never seen its valley until 1933, when prospectors came upon it and found it thickly populated; Kuk Swamp nearby shows people had been gardening there for thousands of years.

Which introduced crop replaced taro as the staple food of Papua New Guinea's highlands a few centuries ago?

Sweet potato. The plant from the Americas seems to have reached New Guinea only 300 to 400 years ago, yet it took over highland gardens that people had been tending for thousands of years.

Roughly what share of Papua New Guinea's land is held as customary land by communities?

97 percent. Almost all land belongs to clans and communities under custom, most of it never registered, and repeated efforts to bring it under formal title have had little success.

Which Papua New Guinean town was buried in ash in 1994 when two volcanoes beside its own harbour erupted?

Rabaul. The volcanoes Tavurvur and Vulcan had nearly destroyed the town once before, in 1937, and after the 1994 eruption the provincial capital was moved to nearby Kokopo.

Which river rises in the Star Mountains and reaches the Gulf of Papua through a delta?

The Fly. Boats can travel some 800 km up it, and one of its great bends puts the only kink in the country's otherwise ruler-straight western border.

The island of New Guinea is the world's second largest, behind only which island?

Greenland. New Guinea comes second, and where Greenland lies mostly under ice, New Guinea carries the third-largest rainforest on Earth.

Which butterfly, found only in a small pocket of Papua New Guinea's rainforest, is the largest in the world?

Queen Alexandra's birdwing. Females can span 28 cm, and the collector who found the species in 1906 brought his first specimen down with a shotgun.

Which is the largest of Papua New Guinea's offshore islands, home to a volcanic peninsula with famously fertile soil?

New Britain. The volcanoes whose ash makes the Gazelle Peninsula's soil so rich have also wrecked the island's main town twice, in 1937 and again in 1994.

Roughly what share of Papua New Guineans live in towns and cities?

About 1 in 7. Most people still live in villages, and the capital itself is cut off: no road links it to any other major town, so travellers must reach it by air or sea.

In March 2025 Papua New Guinea's parliament amended the constitution to declare the nation what?

A Christian country. The change passed with only a handful of votes against, wrote the Father, Son and Holy Spirit into the constitution's preamble and made the Bible a national symbol.

What is Papua New Guinea's kinship-based network of mutual obligation called?

The wantok system. A wantok is someone who shares your language, and anyone who prospers, politicians included, is expected to repay that tie with money, favours or a job.

The huge mine on Papua New Guinea's Lihir Island produces which metal?

Gold. Lihir holds one of the largest gold deposits in the world, in ground so hot that a geothermal plant on the site supplies part of the mine's power.

Which port city, Papua New Guinea's second largest, stands at the start of the Highlands Highway?

Lae. In July 1937 it made world news as the last place Amelia Earhart was seen: she took off from its airstrip for tiny Howland Island, far out in the Pacific, and vanished.

What name was given to the 19th-century trade that took Pacific islanders by trickery or force to Queensland's plantations?

Blackbirding recruited islanders by deception or force for Queensland and Fijian sugar plantations, and labourers who came home brought back the plantation pidgin that later grew into a national language.

In the highlands' moka exchanges, leaders win prestige by giving away large numbers of which animals?

Pigs. Highland 'big men' inherit no rank: they earn their standing by amassing pigs and then giving them away, and each gift has to outdo the one it answers.

In Papua New Guinea, the MP who wins a province-wide seat normally also becomes that province's what?

Governor. A 1995 reform abolished the provinces' elected premiers and handed their job to the national MPs who hold the province-wide seats, tightening the centre's grip on the provinces.

Papua New Guinea elected its MPs under which system from independence until the 2000s?

First past the post. With so many candidates splitting each seat, MPs could win on a small fraction of the vote, so since the 2007 general election voters have ranked three choices instead.

A 1971 law, repealed in 2013, let Papua New Guinean killers plead that their victim had practised what?

Sorcery. After a run of brutal public killings of people accused of witchcraft, parliament scrapped the Sorcery Act in May 2013, and in the same sitting widened the death penalty to cover more crimes.

Which two provinces, Papua New Guinea's newest, were carved out of the Southern and Western Highlands in 2012?

Hela and Jiwaka. They became official on 17 May 2012, weeks before a general election, so each could vote as a province in its own right: Hela, home of the Huli wigmen, split from Southern Highlands and Jiwaka from Western Highlands.

Papua New Guinea founded which bloc in the 1980s with the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu?

Melanesian Spearhead Group. It grew out of a 1986 meeting to back independence for New Caledonia's Kanaks, and their liberation movement, not a state at all, sits as a full member beside four countries.

Which fatal brain disease, an epidemic among Papua New Guinea's Fore people in the 1950s, was spread by funeral cannibalism?

Kuru. Mourners caught it by eating the brains of dead relatives at funeral feasts; once the practice ended around 1960 the epidemic faded, and studying it led scientists to the infectious proteins called prions.

When ice-age seas were lower, New Guinea and Australia formed a single landmass known by what name?

Sahul. Even with the seas at their lowest, its first settlers could not walk there from Asia: they had to make a series of sea crossings from island to island.

After 1945, Australia answered to which body for its New Guinea trust territory?

United Nations. The pre-war League mandate became a UN trust territory, which Australia ran together with Papua in the south under one administration, the forerunner of the modern country.

Which ceremonial exchange of shell necklaces and armbands did Malinowski document in the Trobriands?

The Kula ring. Men risk long canoe voyages to hand shell ornaments of no practical use to partners on other islands; what they gain, Malinowski found, is prestige and partnerships that last for life.

Which 1968 autobiography by Albert Maori Kiki was the first major work of PNG literature?

Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime recounts Albert Maori Kiki's journey from a Papuan village to national politics; he went on to serve as deputy prime minister at independence.

Which organisation gave Papua New Guinea observer status in 1976?

ASEAN. The country won observer status a year after independence, yet as of 2025, almost half a century on, it was still only an observer, while later arrivals such as Brunei and Vietnam had long been members.

Which pottery-making culture of Austronesian seafarers, ancestors of the Polynesians, reached the Bismarck Archipelago over 3,000 years ago?

Lapita. Known by their tooth-stamped pots, these seafarers sailed on to islands no human had reached, among them Vanuatu, Fiji and Tonga, in the last great migration into unpeopled lands.

Which province's capital, Goroka, hosts a famous September sing-sing show?

Eastern Highlands. The Goroka Show was first staged in the 1950s to bring the highlands' many tribes together, and about 100 of them now gather there each year in feathers and paint.