New Guinea



"New Guinea, no? It seems that it's a gateway to... the Southern Hemisphere, a place of extraordinary seasonal cycles... can't believe it's under attack by Chinese forces, wasn't it?"

--Su Ji-Hoon, Terrorized in New Guinea

New Guinea (Tok Pisin: Niugini; Dutch: Nieuw-Guinea; German: Neuguinea; Indonesian: Papua or, historically, Irian) is a large island in Oceania. It is the world's second-largest island (if excluding Australia as an island), after Greenland, covering a land area of 785,753 kilometers (303,381 sq mi), and the largest wholly or partly within the Southern Hemisphere and Oceania.

The eastern half of the island is the major land mass of the independent state of Papua New Guinea. The western half, referred to as Western New Guinea or West Papua or simply Papua has been administered by Indonesia since its annexation in 1962.