Why Almost Nobody Lives on Indonesia's Largest Island

Indonesia is one of the most unusual countries in the world. Spanning over 17,000 islands, it stretches wider than the continental United States. But this massive archipelago is hiding a glaring secret in plain sight. Despite being home to over 288 million people, almost nobody lives in the country's huge eastern island. So why do less than 2% of Indonesia's population live in western New Guinea, when over 150 million live on Java? I'm Jeff, and this is the incredible, lopsided story of Indonesia. Okay, first things first. To understand why western New Guinea has so few people living in it, we have to understand where western New Guinea physically sits and how it differs from its western siblings. So let's start with the heavy hitters of the country. In the west, you have the Greater Sunda Islands, which form the geographic, economic, and demographic core of Indonesia. And first up is Sumatra, coming in at roughly 473,000 square kilometers. It's a ginormous, elongated island acting as the country's westernmost shield. It features a towering volcanic mountain range known as the Beresan Mountains, running down its western edge, sloping down into swampy lowlands in the east. Then you have Indonesian Borneo, known locally as Kalimantan. While the whole island is shared with Malaysia and Brunei, the Indonesian province portion alone is an enormous 544,000 square kilometers. But unlike Sumatra's volcanic nature, Borneo's landscape is far more ancient, covered in dense rainforests and winding river systems that serve as natural and historic highways. Then, moving just slightly east, there's Sulawesi. This island looks off, kind of like a mangled letter K or a fancy R, dropped into the ocean. It covers about 180,000 square kilometers, with jagged peninsulas and very steep coastal mountains that have isolated local populations for centuries. But all of these islands pale in comparison to the demographic monster that is Java. Physically, Java is relatively minuscule. It covers just 128,000 square kilometers, making it significantly smaller than Sumatra, Kalimantan, or Sulawesi. But despite its modest size, it holds more than 150 million people. In fact, more than half the entire country lives on an island smaller than the state of New York. Imagine that for a second. That would be as if New York state had at least six more New York cities spread all around it. So, if Java is almost literally overflowing with people, one would naturally assume that people would spread out and settle the remaining massive islands. But that's exactly where the map plays a trick on you. And this brings us to the most mysterious, most misunderstood, and most geographically hostile region of Indonesia. All the way at the absolute easternmost edge of Indonesia, over 2,400 kilometers away, lies Western New Guinea. Flying from the western tip of Sumatra at Banda Aceh to the eastern border of Western New Guinea takes longer than flying from Los Angeles to New York City. And making up the western half of the world's second largest island, Western New Guinea is truly a gigantic province. It covers roughly 418,000 square kilometers of land. This makes Indonesia's far eastern province nearly identical in size to the U.S. state of California, and more than three times the size of Java, Indonesia's most populated island. Now, given its size, you might expect a population to match. But almost nobody lives here. And the reason why starts with where this island is physically located on the planet. You see, Western New Guinea isn't just far away. It actually sits on a completely different geologic bedrock than the rest of the country. During the last ice age, when global sea levels were hundreds of feet lower than they are today, the western islands of Sumatra, Java, and Borneo were connected to Asia proper. No ocean separation whatsoever. This means that Western Indonesia shares physical traits with mainland Asia. Things like wildlife and plants are all very similar. But as you move east across Indonesia, the ocean floor suddenly drops into a deep oceanic trench known as the Wallace Line. Named after the British naturalist who first noticed that the animals on neighboring islands were completely unrelated to each other. Once you cross this deep underwater line, everything changes. Because Western New Guinea was never connected to or part of Asia. It's part of Australia. If you ever get a chance to visit the dense jungles of Western New Guinea, you're not going to find Asian tigers or monkeys. But you will find tree kangaroos, cassowary birds, and marsupials. All animals that have more in common with Australia than the rest of Indonesia. But here's where things get weird. Sumatra and Java are volcanic islands. Which led to volcanic soil which is extremely agriculturally productive. This led both islands to being able to support large populations throughout the centuries. But Western New Guinea is a bit volcanic as well. Not quite in the same way. They're on different geologic plates after all. But volcanic nonetheless. And in theory, this should have led Western New Guinea being at least half as agriculturally productive throughout history. Right? Well, as it turns out, Western New Guinea's geological underpinnings didn't just shape the land. It actually rewrote the human history of the island itself. Separating the people here from the rest of the world for tens of thousands of years. 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It's actually two completely divergent timelines separated by thousands of miles of ocean. For thousands of years, the Western islands of Indonesia sat on one of the most lucrative geographic jackpots in human history. Because if you look at the map of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, you'll see the Strait of Malacca between them. This narrow choke point is and always has been the maritime highway connecting the markets of India and the Middle East with China. And if you wanted to move goods across the ancient world by sea, you had to sail right through what we call Western Indonesia. And this is our first hint at why Western Indonesia's population boomed. Because of this specific geography, the Western islands developed incredibly fast. Historically speaking, by the 7th century CE, maritime empires like the Srivijaya and later the Majapahit emerged and dominated the region. They built enormous stone temples, developed some of the earliest global trade networks, and eventually grew extremely wealthy by acting like something of a tollbooth for the ancient world. They traded spices, gold, and silks. And with those traded goods, religion, technology, and culture flowed freely from India, the Middle East, and China, constantly rewriting the societal and cultural makeup of Java and Sumatra. But while emperors and civilizations were fighting for control of the trade routes in the West, something entirely different was happening in the far eastern edge of what would become Indonesia. Because Western New Guinea sat east of those deep oceanic trenches on the Australian plate, it was bypassed by the Asian maritime trade routes. Nobody sent lucrative spice ships to New Guinea because there wasn't really a market for it. But it was far from empty. You see, humans had crossed into New Guinea tens of thousands of years ago, long before the great empires of Java ever existed. And the people who settled here, the ancestors of the modern Papuans, achieved something truly and historically remarkable. Deep in the isolated highlands of the island of New Guinea, they independently invented agriculture. They were cultivating taro and bananas at the exact same time humans in the Middle East were first learning to farm wheat. This is astonishing because, as humans, we tend to iterate and teach our previously learned methods. But the ancient New Guineans were figuring it out all alone, something they would grow quite accustomed to. But here's where the map created a hard ceiling on human expansion. New Guinea, as far as ancient civilizations go, was a literal backwater. It didn't have historically lucrative natural resources to exploit and, therefore, the ancient kingdoms of Southeast Asia would, by and large, ignore it completely. And this geographic isolation would persist for centuries. Even Europeans would take one look at the island and essentially turn their backs on it. When the Dutch arrived in the 1600s, they didn't care about the impenetrable jungles of the east. They cared about cash crops. They established the Dutch East Indies and focused their brutal colonial machine almost entirely on the western and central islands. They wanted control of Java's massive agricultural output and the legendary spice islands in the Maluku, located just west of New Guinea. And so, for centuries, the Dutch heavily colonized western Indonesia, building roads, ports, and plantations. Western New Guinea, however, was treated like the world's largest afterthought. The Dutch only formally claimed the western half of the island in the 19th century, and they didn't do it to build cities. They claimed it simply to create a buffer zone on the map to keep the British and the Germans, who were busy dividing up the eastern half of the island, away from their precious spice islands. In fact, the Dutch barely set foot in the interior. So much so that large parts of the mountainous highlands wouldn't even be mapped by outsiders until the 1930s. But drawing arbitrary lines on a map is the easy part. The real problem comes when the colonial empire finally collapses. Following the devastation of World War II, Indonesia fought a bloody, successful war for independence. By 1949, the Dutch had lost. They agreed to hand over the Dutch East Indies to the newly formed Indonesian government. But they made one massive, controversial exception. Western New Guinea. The Dutch argued that the territory was geographically, ethnically, and culturally distinct from the rest of Indonesia, which was entirely true. Geographically, culturally, and even geologically, this was the case. And so the Dutch kept it as a separate colony called Dutch New Guinea, while the eastern half of the island was slowly being prepared for its own independence by Australia, eventually becoming the sovereign country of Papua New Guinea. Indonesia, however, viewed the map very differently. To the government in Jakarta, the newly independent nation would inherit all the borders of the former Dutch colony, with no exceptions. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, tensions escalated into military skirmishes. Finally, caught in a geopolitical chess match of the Cold War, the United States pressured the Dutch to back down. In 1962, administration of the territory was handed over to the United Nations, and shortly after, to Indonesia. The final nail in the coffin came in 1969, with a deeply controversial United Nations-backed event called the Act of Free Choice. Instead of a popular vote, the Indonesian military hand-selected just over 1,000 Papuan tribal elders, and under extreme coercion, had them vote unanimously to join Indonesia. And so, with a stroke of a pen, Western New Guinea was officially absorbed into a country whose capital was nearly 2,000 miles away, and Indonesia had successfully acquired its largest piece of land. But as the Indonesian government was about to find out, owning a territory on paper is one thing. Actually trying to tame and populate it is something else entirely. Okay, so, Indonesia officially controlled Western New Guinea. Internationally, it was recognized as Indonesia, and now, internally, the country was trying to figure out how to integrate it with their vast island holdings. And there was a certain glee in their new land. After all, they now had a sprawling, sparsely populated territory, roughly the size of California. And in a country of nearly 100 million people in 1961, land was the ultimate premium. But here we are, six decades later, and less than 2% of Indonesians live in Western New Guinea. Why? Well, it all starts with what's underneath the jungle canopy. Let's look back at Java for a moment. The only reason Java can support 150 million people today is because it sits right on a volatile, tectonic subduction zone that constantly blankets the island in hyper-fertile volcanic ash. You can predictably drop a seed in Javanese soil, and a massive rice paddy will erupt out of the ground. But Western New Guinea doesn't have this exact same geographic cocktail. Because it sits on the ancient, incredibly stable crust of the Australian plate, it lacks that same volcanic topsoil that we call andesols. Instead, what you have is primarily soil that is nutrient-poor or nutrient-light. New Guinea's, and especially Western New Guinea's soil, is something else that we call andesols. And unfortunately, you can't simply clear-cut the jungle and plant endless fields of rice like you can in Java, because the dirt itself won't sustain a dense agrarian civilization. In a way, geography caps the human carrying capacity of the land. But let's say you wanted to try anyway. If the soil doesn't stop you, the topography absolutely will, Dominating the interior of Western New Guinea is a sprawling and immense geographic feature known as the Make Mountains. This is the highest island mountain range on the planet, and its peaks routinely soar to nearly 5,000 meters. It's home to Punkak Jaya, the single tallest island peak on Earth. That's formidable, of course, but it gets worse. This isn't a single neat ridgeline that you can just tunnel through or build over. It's a chaotic, shattered labyrinth of razor-sharp limestone ridges and plunging jungle-choked ravines. Even with all our technology and engineering skills today, you can't build a modern highway system across it. The engineering math just doesn't math. The interior is so topographically hostile that hundreds of distinct indigenous tribes live in valleys right next to each other, yet speak completely different languages because the terrain makes crossing over to the next valley practically impossible. So if you can't farm the soil and you can't cross the mountains, your next logical step as a civilization is to settle the coast. Surely a massive archipelagic nation could just build a thriving port city right on the water, right? Well, let's look at the southern coast of Western New Guinea, specifically a place called the Asmat region. Here we see the island's ultimate coastal defense mechanism. There are no gorgeous white sand beaches with luxury resorts here. Instead, it's a vast, impenetrable network of tidal swamps, mudflats, and mangrove forests. It actually ranks as one of the largest continuous wetlands on the planet, which in many ways is great for the planet. But for Indonesia, not so much. You can't build a massive deep water port or lay the concrete foundation for a modern coastal mega city when the ground is shifting mud that floods with every single tide and you're blocked by a literal wall of mangroves. But nature's refusal didn't stop the government from trying to force the issue. And this leads us to the ultimate irony of the map and a human tragedy. By the late 20th century, Java was bursting at the seams. Jakarta by itself was and still is home to over 20 million people. So to relieve the population pressure, the Indonesian government ramped up a massive, heavily subsidized initiative called the Transmigration Program. The goal was simple, take millions of poor Javanese farmers and move them to the empty outer islands, including Western New Guinea. A nice idea in theory, but it failed badly. You see, the government quickly learned a hard lesson. You can't force a farming population onto land that doesn't want to be farmed. And without the rich, nutrient-heavy volcanic andesols of Java, the new agricultural colonies struggled to survive in the weak soil and tough topography. And even worse, instead of creating a thriving frontier, this massive influx of migrants triggered intense, violent friction with the indigenous Papuans, a conflict that still continues to rage to this day. It was a catastrophic lesson that trying to enforce human geography onto a hostile map usually ends in disaster. Today, the Indonesian government has largely accepted what the land allows. If you look at the map of Western New Guinea now, the only reason significant modern infrastructure exists is purely for raw extraction. Deep in the treacherous highlands, engineers have brutally carved the massive Grasberg Mine into a mountaintop. It's one of the largest gold and copper mines on the planet. Roads and pipelines don't exist here to connect people or build communities. They exist solely to rip resources out of the rock and get them to the coast as fast as possible. Once again, for a limited time, you can get a full free month of ad and sponsor-free videos, extra geography articles, and a free digital world map of the Koppen climate classification by going to my site thebite.co and subscribing. Link is in the description below. I hope you enjoyed learning all about Western New Guinea. If you did, be sure to check out this video all about Africa's Skeleton Coast. Thanks for watching. See you next time.