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A road being built in north-western Western Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), addresses local desires for mobility, for development, and for establishing materially beneficial relationships with people living west of the border in the Indonesian province of South Papua. This road is explicitly intended to reach beyond the nation and, like all routes to border-crossings, exposes differences even as it connects. On the Indonesian side a new sealed road reaches the border at Yetetkun, which is being established as a third official Indonesia–PNG cross-border post. More resources are committed to the Indonesian project than to the PNG project, a difference that is materially apparent at the border. The potential exists that the construction of roads and cross-border posts of these kinds, in combination with triggers arising elsewhere in PNG, may fuel persistent dissatisfactions within Western Province and tempt realignment to the west.

Pipelines constructed to carry oil or gas often cross the lands of people who find themselves low on the list of potential beneficiaries of the projects they are hosting. Where rights to benefit are acknowledged, it still may be difficult to confirm the legitimacy of claimants or to find an uncontested method to establish legitimacy. Local-level protests are not uncommon. This problem has been to the fore in Papua New Guinea [PNG]. It is illustrated by contrasting approaches to identifying landowners for the pipeline servicing the PNG Liquefied Natural Gas [LNG] project. We offer suggestions to minimize the likelihood that similar problems emerge with future LNG projects in PNG.

In February 2018, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake had devastating consequences for thousands of people living in remote mountainous areas of Papua New Guinea. As the physical world around them collapsed and decayed, many sought to understand what had happened within ontological frames grounded in science and Christianity. Both these speak of decay in physical or moral order, and an inexorable end that is without human cause. The ultimate effect of these new schemas negated the possibility that earthquake-affected local people might view themselves as agents of cause and control with respect to natural disasters, contrasting profoundly with traditional beliefs and practices.

In Papua New Guinea COVID-19 has been experienced in various ways. The public statements of Prime Minister James Marape evolved within his strategy of outsourcing the country’s response and risk from the virus to God. In a remote area of Western Province, people learned that western science could not cure COVID-19, while their Christian beliefs were challenged by the re-appearance of practices that purported to identify sorcerers who might harness the power of the virus. Some people in East New Britain Province revived the use of shell money. Confronted by collapsing certainties, local people resurrected the past as a means of creating an apparently ‘new normal’. Living with uncertainty, people sought a knowable future, grappling with issues of trust and authority, and resuscitating older truths and practices.

In Papua New Guinea COVID-19 has been experienced in various ways. The public statements of Prime Minister James Marape evolved within his strategy of outsourcing the country’s response to and risk from the virus to God. In a remote area of Western Province, people learned that western science could not cure COVID-19, while their Christian beliefs were challenged by the re-appearance of practices that purported to identify sorcerers who might harness the power of the virus. Some people in East New Britain Province revived the use of shell money. Confronted by collapsing certainties, local people resurrected the past as a means of creating an apparently ‘new normal’. Living with uncertainty, people sought a knowable future, grappling with issues of trust and authority, and resuscitating older truths and practices.

Recent literature has usually invoked the name Canis hallstromi Troughton, 1957, though with varied taxonomic interpretations, when writing of dogs thought to be unique to New Guinea. The name Canis familiaris novaehiberniae was proposed for dogs from the New Guinea region 130 years before Troughton published Canis hallstromi but has been overlooked in the recent literature, as has Canis familiaris papuensis Ramsay, 1879 from southeastern New Guinea. The taxonomic status of New Guinea dogs remains controversial but if dogs from New Guinea and New Ireland represent a single heterogeneous gene pool, then C. hallstromi Troughton and C. familiaris papuensis Ramsay would be junior subjective synonyms of C. familiaris novaehiberniae Lesson, 1827. Recent studies of New Guinea dogs are weakened by their failure to attend carefully to the history of discovery and nomenclature of these animals.

In a previous post to EnviroSociety we described the immediate impacts of a huge earthquake on Edolo people of Papua New Guinea. At the time we wrote, the people were in desperate straits, with minimal access to government services and reliant on support from several mission-connected NGOs. In this sequel, three years later, we write of ways in which the people themselves have been re-establishing a hold on what had been, and in places still remains, a shattered landscape.

Reports of patrols through remote areas of Papua and New Guinea led by officers of the Australian administration have much to contribute to understandings of the work entailed in rendering both land and people legible to the colonial state. But these must be read with care. Using the text and maps produced by one patrol, led by John McGregor in 1968, we demonstrate how topographic maps, produced well after particular patrols were undertaken, may be used to both refine interpretations provided in such reports and reveal factors that shaped the knowledge patrol officers produced.

Pre-independence patrols through remote areas of Papua and New Guinea were concerned both with mapping land and with identifying and counting those who lived there. People do not always stay in place, however, as colonial authorities envisioned, and patrols seeking to render them legible took different paths, at different times, through the same land. Reports from patrols to the vicinity of the Burnett River, which flows westwards from the Muller Range to the upper Strickland, used many different names when referring to groups of people who lived in that area. By cross-referencing between available reports, and supplementing interpretations with some post-independence information, we reach an improved understanding of the pre-independence distribution of people of different language groups. We direct particular attention to the role of interpreters in shaping the knowledge produced by patrol officers.

Reports of patrols through remote areas of Papua and New Guinea led by officers of the Australian administration must be read with care. We discuss the case of a patrol report from the mid 1960s where the patrol cannot have travelled the route indicated on the accompanying map. By cross-referencing to reports from later patrols, we provide both an improved reading of the report in question and, more generally, an appreciation of motivations that influenced the knowledge patrol officers produced.

Australians may imagine they are emerging into a brave new world, where Covid-19 has created new modes of connection to others, while freeing them from the need to venture to places, and at times, dictated by others. But for many in PNG, and elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific, the impact of Covid-19 may be ultimately experienced as a retreat from connection, and not as a transformation in ways people connect.

This article examines use of a Papua New Guinea (PNG) Facebook group, Fly River Forum, with reference to the COVID‐19 global pandemic. From about mid‐March 2020, when the PNG Government declared a State of Emergency, to early May, members of that forum shared an intense interest in the pandemic and were deeply concerned with its possible implications for the country. The great majority of COVID‐related posts, and associated comments, combined delivery of relevant information with scepticism about some of that information. Most participants did not take either religious tropes or conspiracy theories as primary sources of comfort or explanation. We argue that Fly River Forum played a positive role in the ways that people engaged with what could have emerged as a health disaster. More generally, geographically focused sites such as this provide a valuable barometer of local opinion and deserve close attention by politicians and policymakers in PNG.

An error dating from 1885 in mapping the upper Strickland River, Papua New Guinea, was reinforced and extended by government officer Charles Karius in 1929 when reporting results from a lengthy exploratory patrol. Detailed maps produced by the US Army and the Royal Australian Survey Corps in, respectively, 1942 and 1966 perpetuated these errors. It was not until 1979, with release of a series of 1:100,000 topographic maps, that long-standing errors were finally put to rest. Throughout these years, the contributions of well-informed people tended to be ignored in favour of the opinions of those whose status implied authority.

This paper draws on two case studies concerning Kubo and Febi people of Western Province, Papua New Guinea, to reveal, first, ways in which people present themselves to the state as groups that qualify as legitimate beneficiaries of financial benefits expected to flow from extraction of natural gas on or near their land and, second, simultaneously present themselves to their immediate neighbours in ways intended to either lay claim to particular areas of land or offset possible challenges to their asserted rights to land. To achieve these ends, people strategically employ names to variously connote or denote particular assemblages of people.

'Navigating the Future' draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Kubo people and their neighbours, in a remote area of Papua New Guinea, to explore how worlds are reconfigured as people become increasingly conscious of, and seek to draw into their own lives, wealth and power that had previously lain beyond their horizons. In the context of a major resource extraction project—the Papua New Guinea Liquefied Natural Gas (PNG LNG) Project–taking shape in the mountains to the north, the people in this area are actively reimagining their social world. This book describes changes in practice that result, tracing shifts in the ways people relate to the land, to each other and to outsiders, and the histories of engagement that frame those changes. Inequalities are emerging between individuals in access to paid work, between groups in potential for claiming future royalties, and between generations in access to information. As people at the village of Suabi strive to make themselves visible to the state and to petroleum companies, as legal entities entitled to receive benefits from the PNG LNG Project, they are drawing new boundaries around sets of people and around land and declaring hierarchical relationships between groups that did not exist before. They are struggling to make sense of a bureaucracy that is foreign to them, in a place where the state currently has minimal presence. A primary concern of 'Navigating the Future' is with the processes through which these changes have emerged, as people seek to imagine—and work to bring about—a radically different future for themselves while simultaneously reimagining their own past in ways that validate those endeavours.

Recent accounts of wild-living dogs in New Guinea argue that these animals qualify as an ‘evolutionarily significant unit’ that is distinct from village dogs, have been and remain genetically isolated from village dogs and merit taxonomic recognition at, at least, subspecific level. These accounts have paid little attention to reports concerning village dogs. This paper reviews some of those reports, summarises observations from the interior lowlands of Western Province and concludes that: (1) at the time of European colonisation, wild-living dogs and most, if not all, village dogs of New Guinea comprised a single though heterogeneous gene pool; (2) eventual resolution of the phylogenetic relationships of New Guinean wild-living dogs will apply equally to all or most of the earliest New Guinean village-based dogs; and (3) there remain places where the local village-based population of domestic dogs continues to be dominated by individuals whose genetic inheritance can be traced to precolonisation canid forebears. At this time, there is no firm basis from which to assign a unique Linnaean name to dogs that live as wild animals at high altitudes of New Guinea.

Information on the counting systems of 12 East Strickland and Bosavi languages is collated. In seven cases the body‐part tally system is symmetrical, with cycle lengths varying from 27 to 35. In four cases, the tally system is asymmetrical or truncated and in one case detailed information is not available. Methods of counting beyond one cycle have been described for all but one of the Bosavi languages but not for any of the East Strickland languages. An additional 2‐cycle or 2, 5‐cycle system is indicated for several East Strickland languages but not for any Bosavi language. Comparison with the counting systems of languages beyond the Strickland‐Bosavi region – especially with Ok languages to the northwest and Huli to the northeast – suggests a process in which the terminology of body‐part tally systems is progressively disembedded from bodily commitment such that counting words assume the status of cardinal numbers and, thereby, facilitate expressions of the commensurability of difference.