Tania Nugent: I'm in the Sandaun Province of Papua New Guinea, heading to Wutung. It's right on the border with Indonesia. You can see way in the distance there the Indonesian town of Jayapura. That's another 2 hours drive down the coast. In traditional times Melanesian people moved freely across this land. Today you need a passport and a visa.

Tania Nugent: About 50 kilometres west of the township of Vanimo, along one of the best roads in Papua New Guinea, you'll end up at Wutung border post on the cliff top above Wutung Village, home of the traditional owners of this land.

Patrick Muliali, President Wutung Local Government: Wutung Village is the frontier village, or the last village in Papua New Guinea if you're going west, and it's the first village in PNG if you're going east from Indonesia.

Tania Nugent: Village spokesperson Eddy is keen to show me the marker which has put their village on the map, the thing that defines the start to the land border of Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. A location determined in 1881 by the Dutch when they colonised the western part of this island.

Eddy, Wutung villager: It's 141 degrees latitude I think east. So it's a straight line border but the land is traditionally Wutung. Our land stretches 9 kilometres (into) customary land. It stretched 9 kilometres back into Indonesian territory. Our people were not educated, they couldn't understand the language. So this Australia survey team just come and erect something here so they don't know what was happening.

Tania Nugent: They didn't know what this meant?

Eddy: Yes.

Patrick Muliali: I went to university and came back I became very angry with the border, when I found out that this was the border and we still had land on the other side. For every border children, this will be going through his mind, why did we have this straight line border.

Tania Nugent: How would you mark the edge of your land traditionally?

Eddy: Traditionally you go by the rivers, mountain ridges, but today, it's a straight line, so if you are in the bush you don't know whether you're crossing the border or not.

Tania Nugent: Are you allowed to go to the other side?

Eddy: Yes, on daily basis I'll go hunting, fishing, gathering food from the garden. We are allowed to go because we are custom landowners. But hunting with guns and modern weapons, we're not allowed. The thing we can use for hunting across the border is traditional weapons.

Tania Nugent: So do you ever get afraid sometimes that you're crossing to the wrong side of the land?

Eddy: Yes, yes. Definitely. Yes.

Patrick Muliali: It still is confusing because even Indonesians do cross the border and we have this issue about incursion. One way forward is a call for the demarcation of the border, perhaps we go back to the traditional border which does not change.

Tania Nugent: On Tuesdays and Thursdays, locals come by the hundreds to pick up a bargain at the Batas Markets, just over there in the Indonesian side. The border which has caused decades of anguish for the Wutung people has also come to represent opportunity.

Patrick Muliali: Since 1980, all Papua New Guineans can have access to Jayapura, they go, any time they have the money they go to sell the products or to buy things. We have a basic border agreement in place between the two governments.

The Wutung people understand that going to Jayapura is a little bit expensive, because you have to hire one of their vehicles. You go to Jayapura, you sleep in their hotels. So the land owners from Wutung decided to negotiate with the Indonesian government, especially the commerce department of trade, to establish one minute walk from the border to have basic access to rice, cooking oil, roofing iron, nails, electricity for themselves, so the price is cheap.

They get the betelnut, they sell it, they buy the rice and taking back to the house. Isn't that arrangement well planned? Beneficiaries are not only people who are earning wages, anybody who can go back to his land and plant enough betel nut or enough cocoa, can also benefit from this market.

It is a development initiative by the land owners for their own convenience, but now it's becoming the interest of the whole Papua New Guinea and the Sandaun Province.

Instead of looking at in the negative sense, I think border is a positive agent of change in the world. There can be a lot of good things for the border people if we think correctly. If you remove some of the security concerns and start to make business partner with Indonesia. Because for too long, for almost 30 years, honestly speaking from Wutung village, we were frightened of Indonesia, now for yourself you can see we are starting to communicate, mixing around with each other, so, the fear concept is slowly going away and we are trying to go into business context now.