When President Jacques Chirac announced his intention to create a new museum to be called the 'The Musee du Quai Branly', a team of art researchers is assembled to map the national inventory of ethnographic artefacts, historical objects and artworks held in national and regional art galleries and museums all over France and in France's colonies. The best exhibits of 'L'Art Primitif', 'Art Sauvage' and 'Art Exotique' from these collections are to be selected for exhibition in the President's new museum in Paris, which is to be one of the largest museums in the world. When Dr Marie Claire Poulenc, Curator of Pacific Arts, Musee des Arts de La Rochelle, joins this team she finds a forgotten statue of a Papuan woman wearing a grass skirt and carrying a baby in her billum. This is a work of vigorous imagination and high artistic expression: a masterpiece rivalling the finest examples of Western art. Dr Poulenc is instructed to find out all she can about this mysterious statue, to fully document her provenance so that she can be included in the 'Masterpieces of Oceania' exhibit at the opening of the Musee du Quai Branly. Dr Poulenc's quest takes her on a voyage of self-discovery. She cruises down the Sepik River in a motorised canoe and journeys into the wild mountains of Papua New Guinea where she discovers that this statue, the Madonna of the Mountains, can perform miracles."