To be honest, I’ve been smirking along when reading this article about scientists who apparently found new species in an undiscovered part of New Guinea. These finds are amazing, but not surprising. If there’s one word I associate with New Guinea, it’s ‘paradise’: for some kind of reason, during the 50s, my dad ended up in Hollandia 1 (now called Jayapura). There are countless stories about this place: from unique and amazing encounters with the natives, flora and fauna, to the (first) attempts of the Indonesians to take New Guinea by force. His favourite site appears to be londoh.com, a site that tells the story of the Dutch that escaped the ‘Nationalization’ of Indonesia, to settle in New Guinea. His name is listed too over there, I see.
But to stick with the subject, it’s good to see that New Guinea is still the ‘undiscovered country’: I bet those animals weren’t designed to be there. And if my dad had been a scientist those days, he’d be the one smirking.
1. In the early Nineties, a historian claimed that the Dutch government planned to use New Guinea as a ‘promised new land’ for all its Dutch citizens ‘displaced’ by the Second World War and the Nationalization. This was (naturally) much disputed by the then newly formed Indonesian Republic.