Papua New Guinea document photos online

When Papua New Guinea hauled down the Australian flag at independence in 1975, the banner rising in its place had been sketched in a school exercise book. A 15-year-old student, Susan Karike, won the 1971 national design competition with the now-iconic black-and-red flag bearing a golden Raggiana bird-of-paradise and the Southern Cross. That same bird-of-paradise became the country's emblem and, decades later, a shifting hologram on the data page of its passport. For a nation that issues documents to citizens speaking more than 800 languages, identity here is woven from shells, birds and the world's oldest independent farms.

• Passport rank In 2025 the Papua New Guinean passport gave visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to roughly 84 destinations, placing it around 54th on the Henley Passport Index.
• Passport security PNG's e-passport, rolled out from 2023, carries a biometric chip and a colour-shifting bird-of-paradise hologram (a DOVID) that animates when the data page is tilted.
• Currency origin The kina is named after a gold-rimmed pearl shell once used as money across the highlands, while its subunit, the toea, takes its name from a smaller shell — a currency literally built on traditional shell wealth.
• Money quirk Papua New Guinea's 1-kina coin is round with a hole punched through its centre, and since 1991 the country has printed its banknotes on durable polymer, retiring the last paper notes after 2014.
• Languages With around 840 living languages, PNG is the most linguistically diverse nation on Earth, accounting for roughly 12% of all the world's languages among only about 10 million people.
• Ancient farming The Kuk Early Agricultural Site, a UNESCO World Heritage location, shows that highlanders independently invented farming — draining swamps to grow taro, banana and yam — as far back as 7,000 to 10,000 years ago.
• Independence PNG became fully independent from Australia on 16 September 1975, adopting the kina as its currency on the same day and keeping it at parity with the Australian dollar until the end of that year.
• National bird The Raggiana bird-of-paradise appears on the flag, the national emblem and the passport — making PNG one of the only countries to put a bird-of-paradise at the heart of its entire identity-document design.