They rank amongst the world’s most sophisticated cultivators of the soil, employing horticultural techniques of their own devising only to be found in the most advanced countries of the West. In this way they provide themselves both with an ample diet and an abundance of leisure. They are notable for their hospitality and good humour and are irrepressibly polygamist. Despite the chill of the night in the highlands in which they live, they wear as little as possible. Bare-breasted Dani women retain the original revelatory grass skirts of the South Seas. Their menfolk, ignoring disapproval from any source, go about their affairs naked except for a penis gourd. This solitary article of apparel, sometimes as much as three feet in length, decorated in various ways, and even dangling a tassel at its tip, serves a utilitarian as well as sartorial purpose, being used to carry items such as small change, a cowrie-shell bracelet too valuable for everyday wear or the inevitable ballpoint pen. It was June 1938 when visitors from the outside world first sighted the Baliem Valley of the Danis from a plane carrying an expedition led by an American explorer, Richard Archbold, in a flight over the vast, unmapped spaces of Dutch New Guinea.
