Sepik River

Oh, really? Okay.

I mean, they're going to Sepik and then around the continent.

They ended up saving them, right? Yeah.

Oh, you're

I was hiking, uh, a, a lot of sections and, like, just staying with villages.

And then to get across the Sepik, uh, River, which is just a huge, uh, mangrove swamp where, where it enters the ocean, it's, it's miles and miles of just complicated, like, channels and, and, and forests.

And yeah, I, I got on a boat with some guys who were bringing, uh, betel nut, this, this forest product from the interior of Papua New Guinea down to the coast, and they took me out to the mouth of the ocean, but we couldn't enter the ocean 'cause, uh, the, the waves were too big.

So then we stayed three days, uh, in this remote village [laughs] with no food or anything.

He founded the Council on New Guinea Affairs, believing that the independence of that territory would have profound consequences for Australia's future strategic interests.

Peter travelled extensively throughout Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, including down the Sepik River in a dugout canoe, and by foot along much of the Indonesia PNG border.

He visited Indonesia over 60 times, being banned from entry on one occasion for reporting on preparations for the invasion of East Timor in 1975.

By example, Peter talked the importance of curiosity, the need to get out and see the world as it is, to report fearlessly, and as an Australian, to evaluate everything in terms of what it meant for Australia.

And so it's just for a few dollars in medical supplies, we're able to bandage his leg and potentially save his leg.

And you start thinking about that and you think about all these 300,000 people that we serve that live on the side of the 700 mile river called the Sepik River on the north coast of Papua New Guinea.

These people have no access to hope and they're one to three days away from the only hospital.

And

Good morning.

We head to PNG where the Sepik River is known as the second Amazon, providing water to one of the world's most pristine freshwater basins.

But environmental campaigners worry that the proposed Freed River copper and gold mine could change that.

If approved and built, the mine stands to be one of Papua New Guinea's biggest.

And that's the calling is for me to also be part of my people and express our way of life and have it and explain it to the world that this is where the conflicts are and this is how we see it.

And it's not just from your perspective.

And you talk about or describe the Sepik River as the mother river, right? What does that actually mean in practical terms for the communities who actually live along that river?

When we look at how other people see rivers, see forests, lakes and oceans, they see it as bits and pieces of things that can be sold and traded online.

[upbeat music] Now, a rare spinach pipefish has been rediscovered in Papua New Guinea after more than four decades since its last sighting.

The fish species, which is endemic to the Ramu Sepik river system, thrives in freshwater streams and slow-moving jungle tributaries.

Finau Fonua spoke to one of the researchers who made the rediscovery, Roger Maike of the New Guinea Binatang Research Centre.

It felt like we were looking for some s- an actual person who was lost for a while.

So it became a bit, um, personal for us.

We were asking everyone, um, going around so.

We, we visited a, a, a major tributary of the, of the Sepik River that's called the Burabura.

We went up all the way- Right into the hinterlands, and then we didn't find anything.