Papua New Guinea has one of the highest rates of child malnutrition in the world, with studies indicating that one in two children is chronically stunted, a condition from which they can never recover. The reasons are complex. It’s rarely a question of hunger, rather a lack of critical nutrients in the first 1000 days … Continue reading
It’s almost 10 years since I went to PNG for the first time. One of the stories I was investigating on that first trip was what ExxonMobil’s looming, massive, much-hyped PNG LNG (liquified natural gas) project would mean for the people at its highlands source, and for the country. A dozen trips older and wiser, … Continue reading
I was in Tari, in the PNG highlands, just three weeks ago researching a story on the social impacts there of the ExxonMobil PNG LNG. That story is still in production, due out late April, but meanwhile the landscape has changed dramatically and tragically. Here is a short story I filed in the aftermath for … Continue reading
About 10 years ago, when I started writing about PNG and women, I got an encouraging email out of the blue from one Elizabeth Reid. I confess, I had to google her – only one of the most mighty (and modest) feminist wayfinders of the ’70s and beyond. She was Gough’s “supergirl” but has been … Continue reading
My story for Cosmos magazine on the work of research scientists in Papua New Guinea into that diabolical human foe, the malaria parasite. Photos by Mayeta Clark. Link here. Continue reading
This week on ABC Radio National I have a story up on the documentary program Earshot that I’ve long wanted to tell. It’s about how Maria von Trapp – yes, as in How-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-Maria/The Sound of Music – washed up on a PNG island with several of her singing tribe; how her stepdaughter (she was called … Continue reading
(Photograph by Vlad Sokhin) I’ve been travelling and storytelling from the Pacific for almost a decade. My most frequent destination is Papua New Guinea: beguiling, surprising, confronting, endowed with vast wilderness, immense resources, and the most culturally diverse population on the planet. I have travelled extensively in PNG, one of few reporters with a sustained … Continue reading
“TB is the child of poverty – and also its parent and provider”: Bishop Desmond Tutu, who was himself a survivor of childhood tuberculosis. I was recently commissioned by the NGO ChildFund to pull together this report on the impact of the TB epidemic on the children of Papua New Guinea. You can find the … Continue reading
Five years after the alarm was raised on the drug resistant tuberculosis emergency in PNG, the worst fears of experts about its spread are being realised. I go back to Daru, the outbreak front line, for my debut as a radio journalist reporting for the ABC. Find the podcast here. Continue reading
A confronting story from Bougainville, PNG, where I have often reported on the crisis of maternal deaths (second highest in the Asia Pacific after Afghanistan). The news angle here the landmark case around the jailing of a couple for the termination of a pregnancy. But the background context is about the tragedy deaths in childbirth, … Continue reading
