Mount Hagen Cultural Show

The Mount Hagen Show, held over a weekend in August at Queens Park in the Western Highlands capital, gathers more than eighty sing-sing groups from across Papua New Guinea. Each group arrives having spent days assembling its regalia — bodies painted in ochre, charcoal and clays in clan patterns, headdresses towering with bird-of-paradise and parrot plumes, cassowary-bone nose-pieces, kina-shell pendants, woven aprons and bark-cloth — and dances and chants in a tight block, the lines of plumes moving together, the kundu hand-drums driving the rhythm. The show grew out of agricultural shows of the 1960s, formalised around the country's move to independence as a way of bringing rival clans onto one ground to compete in display rather than in fighting. The bird-of-paradise plumes carry deep significance and are legally protected; the feathers used are heirlooms, passed down and reused rather than freshly taken, and that nuance matters. For the groups the show is both pride and politics — a public statement of who they are in a nation of extraordinary diversity, and a setting in which young people learn the regalia and the dances from their elders. For a visitor it is one of the densest concentrations of living ceremonial culture on earth, staged in the open with the groups happy to be seen up close.