Four great rivers, one long coast, and one of the most-documented centres of ceremonial art, longhouse architecture, and delta life in the Pacific. A reference on the land, the people, and the everyday materials that shaped both.
Gulf Province occupies the northern shore of the Papuan Gulf, a broad indentation on Papua New Guinea's southern coast. The province is dominated by mountains inland and by wide lowland river deltas along its 500 kilometres of coastline — four major rivers, each carrying silt off the highlands into a slow, tidal, mangrove-lined system that turns the coast into an ecology neither purely marine nor purely terrestrial.
The provincial capital, Kerema, sits on the eastern coast, roughly 300 kilometres by road from Port Moresby via the Hiritano Highway. Kikori, the second district, is the delta interior — the country of the great river of the same name, and the belt from which the western half of the province takes its economic and cultural character.
Two districts: Kerema and Kikori. Twenty-two Local Level Government wards in Ihu alone. Names on a map that stand for a country far larger than its population — 158,197 residents at the 2011 census, on a land area of 34,472 square kilometres — the second least densely inhabited province in Papua New Guinea.
A short guide to the peoples who have lived on this coast for centuries, drawn from the published ethnographic and linguistic record. Community members and researchers are welcome to correct, expand, or add to any entry — see corrections in the legal notice.
Coastal groups east of the Purari delta, around Kerema and the eastern reaches of the province.
Papuan Gulf coast around Orokolo Bay. Subject of F.E. Williams' 1922–39 ethnography.
Purari River delta — one of PNG's great river systems. Communities along the multiple mouths of the river.
Islands and coast west of the Kikori delta; historically distinct from inland Kikorian.
Peoples of the Kikori River basin and its inland reaches.
Communities of the interior watersheds — trade and marriage links running upriver from delta to highlands.
The Papuan Gulf coast is one of the most-documented centres of ceremonial architecture in Melanesia. The long ceremonial houses — eravo among the Elema, and cognate structures under other names along the coast — rose above the delta floodplain on high pile foundations, their front gables reaching heights of ten metres or more, their interiors kept as the treasure houses of the community's masks and sacred objects.
The masks themselves — the tall hevehe boards of the Elema, the shorter kovave, the flat gope and hohao spirit boards — belong to some of the most identifiable art traditions in the Pacific. They enter the ethnographic record chiefly through the writing and photography of F.E. Williams, a government anthropologist in Papua from 1922 to 1939, whose Drama of Orokolo (Oxford, 1940) documented an entire multi-year ceremonial cycle at Orokolo Bay.
The very existence of such an art, in such a place, is itself the point — the delta as workshop, not periphery. Editorial
This site does not interpret ceremony. It notes only what the public record contains: the names, the material forms, the fact that these things existed and were photographed, and that examples of the art are held in the Australian Museum, the South Australian Museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, and other public collections. For meaning, the authoritative source is the living community.
Beside the ceremonial arts stand the everyday crafts of the coast — the boats, the bags, the bark cloths, the fishing gear. Made in the same villages, from materials the delta gives freely: pandanus, sago, coconut fibre, mangrove and softwood, river cane, shell.
Hollowed from a single trunk of light delta hardwood — the everyday transport of the river country. Longer boats carry a small outrigger; shorter ones are punted through the mangrove channels standing up. Each village has its makers.
The floors of the longhouse and every sleeping mat come from strips of pandanus leaf, dried, dyed with natural pigments, and woven in patterns that vary by village. Deep pandanus baskets carry sago and market produce.
Beaten from the inner bark of the paper mulberry and softened by long pounding — the traditional textile of much of the Pacific, and worn on the Gulf coast at ceremony and for skirts and belts. Painted after with earth pigment.
Woven fish traps for the river shallows, cast nets weighted with clay, harpoons for mud crabs at low tide, and the simple hand-line for the estuary. Each family keeps its own; the design has not changed in generations.
The looped string bag of Papua New Guinea more generally, made along the coast too — from bark fibre, sisal, or trade wool. Carries a baby, a load of sago, a market shopping. Sturdy, stretchy, unfussy.
Kina shells, dog-whelk cascades, cassowary quill, cockatoo and bird-of-paradise plume — the language of dress. Worn to gather, to dance, to mark clan. What is worn tells the reader who is present.
A short catalogue of what a delta kitchen turns out — starch from the sago palm, protein from the tide, greens from the bush behind the village. Not a restaurant tradition; a household one. Each village cooks a little differently.
Pounded sago starch, mixed with a little water and salt, spread thin and baked in a hot clay pan or on a leaf over coals. The everyday bread of the delta. Eaten with fish, with coconut cream, with a piece of smoked meat.
Fresh river fish or estuary catch simmered in coconut milk with wild ginger and the salt of the sea. Ladled over sago dumplings. The simplest and best meal on the coast.
Roasted whole on a fire of coconut husks until the shell is black — the meat inside steaming and sweet. A special-day dish, or a market-day treat when the tide brings a big one in.
The green vegetables of the garden — aibika (a hibiscus-family leaf, wilted with coconut cream) and pit-pit (the young flowering stalk of a cane grass, roasted or boiled). Every village grows both.
The larvae of a beetle that lives in fallen sago logs — a prized snack. Roasted on a skewer, they taste of butter. What is a curiosity elsewhere is a household protein here.
Not food, not drink, not exactly ceremonial — the everyday social lubricant. The nut of the areca palm chewed with a leaf of piper and a pinch of lime. The stain on many smiles across Melanesia.
Papua New Guinea has one of the densest music traditions in the world — hundreds of language communities, each with songs, instruments and dance styles of its own. On the Gulf coast, the shape of that music is set by two drums, several bamboo instruments, and the human voice.
The hourglass-shaped hand drum — a hollowed hardwood body with a lizard-skin head, tuned with beeswax. Held under the arm and struck with the palm, it carries the pulse of dance across most of Papua New Guinea. The kundu appears on the national coat of arms.
The slit-drum — a large log with a rectangular slot carved along its length, struck with a wooden mallet. Voice enough to carry news several kilometres through the forest and along the river. Different rhythms name different messages.
End-blown flutes cut from a single joint of bamboo, plain or with finger holes. Solo instruments for the quiet hour, or paired in ceremony. In some coastal traditions the largest flutes are kept out of view of the uninitiated.
Bundles of bamboo tubes stopped at one end, tuned to a village scale. Played in pairs or small ensembles, with the men and women taking answering lines. Older across the Pacific than any national border on it.
Long story-songs, sometimes running through a whole night, sung antiphonally around a central fire. Words carry the myths and the clan history; the pitch carries the emotion. A form the ethnographic record has only partially caught.
Movement patterns of foot and shoulder, painted skin, feather headdress, shell breastplate — the dance is not a performance separable from what is worn, sung and drummed alongside it. To see one part is to see a fraction.
An Allied military route cut across the Owen Stanley Range during the New Guinea campaign of the Second World War, linking Wau in Morobe Province with Bulldog on the Lakekamu River — Gulf Province's northern hinterland. Roughly 220 kilometres of mountain and swamp, opened as a supply road when Kokoda was contested. Today the track is followed only by determined trekkers; the wartime installations are largely reclaimed by forest.
Colonial-era prospecting expeditions worked north from the Gulf coast through the Vailala and Lakekamu drainages toward gold country. Fragments of those routes survive as walking paths; the tourism industry maintains a small trekking product built around them.
The road route from Port Moresby, through Central Province, to Kerema — approximately 300 kilometres, roughly four hours in good conditions. The province's main land connection to the national capital, and the corridor along which most economic traffic to Gulf still moves.
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