New Guinea is earth's second largest island. It lies just north of Australia, and is divided down the centre between the country of Papua New Guinea on the east and Indonesia's Irian Jaya province on the west.

It is believed that Asian settlers originally inhabited Papua New Guinea over 50,000 years ago. The first European contact in 1526-27 was by the Portuguese explorer Jorge de Meneses, who named the island Ilhas dos Papuas (Island of the Fuzzy Hairs).

The Spaniard Inigo Ortiz de Retes later called it New Guinea because he thought the people similar to those of Guinea in Africa. Further exploration followed, including landings by Bougainville, Cook, Stanley and John Moresby. (Lonely Planet)

PNG is indeed a land shrouded in mystery, a forgotten place, and an exotic and exciting country, rich in history with a unique primitive culture. Papua New Guinea's coffee industry is not based upon large, corporately owned plantations, but on tens of thousands of small, village coffee-gardens. Typically, they range in size from twenty trees to five or six hundred. These family-owned coffee gardens produce between sixty and seventy percent of the country's annual exportable crop.

Our New Guinea coffee comes from Papua New Guinea, where cultivation started in 1937 with seeds imported from Jamaica's Blue Mountain region. It was, however, only in the 1950's that coffee really took off as a significant cash crop, with the development, by rugged pioneers, of estates and plantations throughout the mountainous highland regions of Papua New Guinea.

BACK

NEXT