Goroka Show

The Goroka Show, held in the Eastern Highlands over the Independence weekend in September, is the older of Papua New Guinea's two great highland gatherings and draws more than a hundred sing-sing groups. Its character mirrors Mount Hagen's — clans in full regalia of plume, paint, shell and bone, dancing in disciplined blocks to the kundu drums — but Goroka has its own roster of peoples and is famous for figures such as the Asaro 'mudmen', who cover themselves in pale clay and wear heavy moulded clay masks, enacting a story of warriors who once frightened off an enemy by appearing as spirits. The show began in the 1950s under the colonial administration as a way to bring highland groups together peacefully, and it has run as the headline cultural event of the Independence celebrations ever since, marking its seventieth year in 2026. As at Hagen, the gathering is both spectacle and transmission: elders dress the young, the regalia and dances are taught and renewed, and each group's turn on the ground is a public claim to identity within a hugely diverse nation. The same honest tension applies — these are living cultures performed in a managed, visitor-facing setting — and the same protected significance attaches to the bird-of-paradise plumes, which are inherited and reused rather than freshly harvested.