Baining

The Baining are the indigenous people of the Gazelle Peninsula in eastern New Britain, living mainly in the rugged Baining Mountains, from which they take their name. Likely the peninsula's original inhabitants, they were pushed inland over the centuries by migrating Tolai groups and volcanic activity around Rabaul, and keep to semi-nomadic swidden gardening centred on taro.

Their languages form a small family of their own, among them Mali, Qaqet and Ura, each tied to a separate clan. Baining society is notably egalitarian, and its most famous ceremony is the night fire dance, in which dancers in large bark-cloth masks leap through the embers before the masks are destroyed after one use.

The outside world reached them only in 1700, when William Dampier became the first recorded European to visit New Britain and gave the island its name.