PAPUA NEW GUINEA

officially Independent State of Papua New Guinea, island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It encompasses the eastern half of the island of New Guinea (the western half, Irian Jaya, belonging to Indonesia) and its offshore islands as well as the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago (New Britain, New Ireland, and the Admiralty Islands) and those of Bougainville and Buka. Together these islands cover 178,704 square miles (462,840 square kilometres) of the southwestern Pacific, stretching from just south of the Equator to the Torres Strait, which separates New Guinea from Cape York Peninsula, the northernmost extension of Australia. The official languages of the country are all introduced: English, Tok Pisin (Melanesian Pidgin), and Hiri, or Police, Motu, the last being a simplified form of the language of the people who lived around what is now the capital, Port Moresby, when it was first established in 1884. The islands that constitute Papua New Guinea have been settled for tens of thousands of years by the mixture of peoples who are generally referred to as Melanesians, and one of the principal challenges facing those who govern the modern state is the difficulty of welding together hundreds of diverse, once-isolated regional societies into a viable modern nation-state. officially Independent State of Papua New Guinea island country in the southwest Pacific Ocean, encompassing the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and a chain of tropical islands (including the Bismarck Archipelago and Bougainville). The capital is Port Moresby. Papua New Guinea is bounded on the west by Indonesia's half of the island (Irian Jaya) and on the north by the Pacific Ocean, on the east by the Pacific and the Solomon Sea, and on the south by the Coral Sea and Torres Strait, which separates the island from Australia. Area 178,704 square miles (462,840 square km). Pop. (1991 est.) 3,752,000. Additional reading The best general work is still H.C. Brookfield, Melanesia: A Geographical Interpretation of an Island World (1971), a comparative survey of geography. Many aspects of European exploration are included in James Sinclair, Kiap: Australia's Patrol Officers in Papua New Guinea (1981). Essential historical coverage is provided in J.L. Whittaker et al. (eds.), Documents and Readings in New Guinea History: Pre-History to 1889 (1975). J.A. Ballard (ed.), Policy-Making in a New State: Papua New Guinea, 19721977 (1981), examines political decision making; and the Melanesians' view of change is discussed in Gernot Fugmann (ed.), Ethics and Development in Papua New Guinea (1986). Among the best anthropological works are Lawrence S. Grossman, Peasants, Subsistence Ecology, and Development of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (1984); Roy A. Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People, new ed. (1984); and Marilyn Strathern, Women in Between: Female Roles in a Male World: Mount Hagen, New Guinea (1972). Fraiser McConnell, Papua New Guinea (1988), is an informative bibliography.