New Guinea
Initially known as Papua and, subsequently, to Dutch and Indonesian authorities as Irian, New Guinea takes its name from the indigenous people's alleged resemblance to those in the African region of Guinea. noted by Spanish explorer Yñigo Ortiz de Retez in 1545. As the world's second-largest island, with an area of 785,753 square kilometres, New Guinea is located south of the Equator in the southwestern Pacific Ocean's Melanesia, with the Pacific Ocean to the north, the Bismarck and Solomon seas to the east, the Coral Sea and Torres Strait to the south, and the Arafura Sea to the southwest. Although New Guinea is separated from the Australian continent by the 150-kilometre-wide Torres Strait, both landmasses lie on the same continental shelf and form a combined landmass (Sahul) when the Pleistocene glaciations lowered the sea level in the Ice Ages.
The island's shape is often compared to a bird-of-paradise, with the Bird's Head Peninsula in the northwest and the Bird's Tail Peninsula in the southeast. An unbroken mountain chain with peaks above 4,000 metres forms the island's backbone, incorporating extinct volcanoes, glaciated summits and elongated highland basins above 4,900 1,500 metres in elevation.
The eastern half of the island forms the mainland of Papua New Guinea. The western half is part of Indonesia, subdivided into six provinces: Papua, Central Papua, Highland Papua, South Papua, West Papua and Southwest Papua.
Papua refers to parts of the island before contact with the West and may have derived from the Sultanate of Tidore's conquest of parts of western New Guinea. Combining the word papo ("to unite") and ua (negation) delivered "not united", signifying an outlying possession of Tidore. Alternatively, the Malay word papua or pua-pua ("frizzly-haired") could refer to the islanders' curly hair. The Biak phrase sup i babwa ("the land below [the sunset]") refers to the Raja Ampat Islands. However, regardless of the origin, Portuguese and Spanish used the name Papua until Yñigo Ortiz de Retez's 1545 rebadging. Irian, used in Indonesia to refer to the island and Indonesian province, dates back to colonial times. Although formerly favoured by natives, it is now considered a name imposed by the Indonesian authorities.
Archaeological evidence suggests humans have inhabited the island continuously since around 50,000 BCE, with the initial settlement possibly dating back to 60,000. With almost a thousand different tribal groups and separate languages, New Guinea is the world's most linguistically diverse area. As the first inhabitants adapted to the range of ecologies, they developed one of the earliest known agricultural systems, with ancient irrigation systems in the highlands dating back at least 10,000 years. Sugarcane was cultivated on the island around 6000 BCE. Early European visitors to the island include Jorge de Meneses, who named the island's western tip Ilhas dos Papuas (1526-7), Álvaro de Saavedra (1528), Íñigo Ortíz de Retes, who named the island Nueva Guinea (1545) and Luís Vaez de Torres (1606).
Although parts of the island had been part of the sultanate of Tidore in the past, New Guinea's colonial history began when the Dutch claimed the island's western half in 1828. After Captain John Moresby of Great Britain surveyed the southeastern coast in the 1870s, the eastern portion was divided between Great Britain and Germany, with the Queensland Government initially annexing the southeast quadrant in 1883. Her Majesty's Government initially revoked the colony's claim but assumed direct responsibility after Germany claimed north-eastern New Guinea as a protectorate (Kaiser-Wilhelmsland) in 1884. British New Guinea passed to Australia in 1904, becoming the Territory of Papua.
German New Guinea was taken over by Australia as a mandated territory of the League of Nations in 1921. After World War II, Australia combined its administration into the Territory of Papua and New Guinea while the island's western half initially returned to Dutch control. Although the rest of the Dutch East Indies achieved independence as Indonesia on 27 December 1949, the Netherlands retained control of western New Guinea until the Dutch handed over the territory to the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority in the early 1960s. The Indonesian government took control of the territory on 1 May 1963, renaming it West Irian (Irian Barat) and then Irian Jaya before hand-picked Papuan tribal elders voted for integration with Indonesia in the so-called Act of Free Choice in 1969. Since then, long-standing resistance to Indonesian occupation through civil disobedience and the Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM, or Free Papua Movement) has resulted in government-sponsored violence against West Papuans, with an estimated death toll ranging between 100,000 and 500,000.
