Slipping across the silken water of Simpson Harbour in a bananaboat, Andrew Luaina looks toward the ash-billowing cone of Mt Tavurvur, which sits on the south-eastern fringe of Rabaul, Papua New Guinea.

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Mt Tavurvur stands over village life in Matupit, where Okole Tokai, 24, sells scrubfowl eggs he finds buried up at the base of the volcano.

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In Papua New Guinea, kids live with their parents and extended families in coconut-palm-tree huts, built upon the volcanic ash, which has stripped the trees bare.

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Dorothea Bigina, from Kabuni, PNG, had her facial tattoos applied at puberty by a female relative. Tattooing has been a coastal New Guinean custom for thousands of years but has decreased in prevalence since WWII.

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In the village of Kabuni, in the Tufi area of Oro, or Northern Province in PNG, sago is moulded into a loaf-like shape, wrapped in sago leaves, and fired for a minute on a blazing palm-leaf fire.

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Cloaked in smoke and donning animalistic masks, the bare-footed men of the Baining Mountains tango with fire during a time-honoured Papua New Guinean initiation ceremony.

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Wearing traditional dress and using a hand-carved wooden tool, Stordas Bigina, right, chips at the trunk of a sago palm tree.

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