Qualla: Great Papuan Plateau

Great Papuan Plateau: Introduction

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The first Seventh-day Adventist missionary to reach the Great Papuan Plateau stayed with the Onabasulu people until they learned his faith forbade the eating of pork. Then he had to leave. It was 1964, and this vast karst plateau in the interior of Papua New Guinea was still adjusting to the fact that outsiders existed at all. Flanked by the Kikori River to the east and the Strickland River to the west, crowned by Mount Sisa at 2,650 meters to the north and the extinct volcano Mount Bosavi at 2,507 meters to the south, the plateau had sheltered its inhabitants so effectively that the first Western patrol did not arrive until 1935, and it did not go well.

Read more: Great Papuan Plateau on Qualla

Great Papuan Plateau: A Land Between Rivers

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Great Papuan Plateau is a karst landscape, its limestone bedrock sculpted by millennia of tropical rainfall into sinkholes, caves, and rugged terrain cloaked in lowland rainforest. The eastern portion alone, east of the Sioa River, covers roughly 525 square miles. A 1966 cens...

Read more: Great Papuan Plateau on Qualla

Great Papuan Plateau: Hides and O'Malley Walk In

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1934 and 1935, Australian colonial patrol officers Jack Hides and Jim O'Malley led the first Western expedition across the plateau, traveling from the Strickland River to the Purari River. They canoed up the Strickland and then the Rentoul River, abandoning their boats about f...

Read more: Great Papuan Plateau on Qualla

Great Papuan Plateau: Planes, Epidemics, and Petroleum

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In March 1936, Ivan Champion and Richard Archbold flew over the northern foothills of Mount Bosavi to plan a future expedition from the Bamu River to the Purari. The Bosavi people, seeing the aircraft and facing the subsequent overland expedition months later, responded by abando...

Read more: Great Papuan Plateau on Qualla

Great Papuan Plateau: The Sorrow of the Lonely

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The missionaries who arrived in 1964 found communities shaped by centuries of isolation and decades of upheaval. The Seventh-day Adventist who settled with the Onabasulu departed when his dietary prohibitions proved incompatible with a culture where pork held deep significance. T...

Read more: Great Papuan Plateau on Qualla