New Guinea, the world’s second largest island, contains about three million people of a bewildering range of physical types, living in one of the most mountainous and swampy regions on earth, speaking more than one thousand mutually unintelligible languages and varying greatly in their social and political development from unrepentant headhunters to university students. This book is primarily concerned with eastern or Australian New Guinea, where Australia now spends about one hundred million dollars annually to prepare its two and a quarter million indigenous people for independence. Papua and New Guinea is one of the last white-administered colonies left on the face of the globe, and the biggest. What is its destiny? The colour photographs in this book, taken by some of Australia's leading photographers, vividly illustrate the beauty, the wildness and inaccessibility of New Guinea, and the striking contrasts between the island's traditional societies and the New Guinea of twentieth-century towns, roads and airstrips. The articles, by experts with long experience of New Guinea affairs, bring the problems and paradoxes of the world’s most fascinating island into challenging perspective.

Written in 1971. PNG is independent since 1973.

De tekst is in het Engels, geschreven in 1971. Papua New Guinea is een zelfstandige natie sinds 1973.
De artikelen, geschreven door experts met jarenlange ervaring in Nieuw-Guinea, plaatsen de problemen en paradoxen van 's werelds meest fascinerende eiland in een uitdagend perspectief.

HAPIN - Papua Support Foundation besteedt de volledige opbrengst van de verkoop aan ontwikkelingsprojecten en studiebeurzen in West Papoea