From the time when Luis Vaez Torres first touched the southern shores of Papua and when mythical beings and legendary warriors touched shoulders in the high mountainous interior the story is brought slowly and carefully forward to the near present when the Galkope began their flight to the four corners of PNG in a great diaspora.

The journey includes the exploits of legendary explorer and founder, Alai Bia, and his quest for new lands, the story of Warmil and his spirit-wife, and Sipa, the munificent half-man, half-raptor.

It moves through to the arrival of the first Christian missionaries and the eventual disintegration of the Galkope under the incessant plague of inter-tribal warfare and the bane of the new politics and economic imperatives of an independent Papua New Guinea.

Today over half of the Galkope live outside Simbu. The importance of men’s houses and the sages has diminished to almost nothing. The magnificent valleys and mountains now sit in the aura of a silent sun and the rivers and streams flow over the pebbles of a lost time. Soon there will be no memories at all.

The Flight of Galkope is a last ditch attempt to salvage those memories and render them in a form for the modern age so that those Galkope, no matter where they now live, will be able to understand where they come from and what made them.

It is a well-worn cliché that to understand the present one must understand the past. For the Galkope this may now be possible through Kela Kapkora Sil Bolkin’s meticulously researched and distinctly Papua New Guinean historical account. It is, perhaps, something that other people in Papua New Guinea might consider and reflect upon for their future too.