About this site

Who writes it

PNG History Explained is written by a lawyer admitted to practise law in Papua New Guinea, who also writes PNG Law Explained.

That background shapes what this site does well. Constitutional and legal history — the colonial ordinances, the Papua Act 1905, the Papua and New Guinea Act 1949, the Constitutional Planning Committee, the drafting of the 1975 Constitution, the Bougainville Peace Agreement and the amendments that gave it effect — is covered here more closely than in general accounts, because those documents are primary sources that can be read directly and most summaries skip them.

It also sets limits worth stating. This is not academic history. It is not based on original archival research in Canberra, Berlin or Canberra's microfilm of the German records, and where it depends on published scholarship it says so. For the pre-contact period it reports what archaeologists have published rather than assessing it.

What it is trying to be

One subject at a time, written at length, sourced, and honest about gaps. The test for every page is whether a reader could check it — and whether someone who knows the subject would recognise the account as fair.

The companion sites are PNG Law Explained, on Papua New Guinea law in plain language, and a travel site covering the places themselves. Where history happened somewhere you can still go — Rabaul, Kokoda, the Sepik, Panguna — the sites link across to each other.

Editorial independence

Nothing on this site is sponsored, and no advertiser, institution or political party has any say in what it says. If advertising is ever added, this page and the privacy policy will be updated before it goes live, not after.

A note on names

Place names and the names of peoples change, and the historical sources use forms that are now wrong, offensive, or both. This site uses current names in its own prose, gives the historical form where it is needed to make sense of a document, and does not quietly rewrite quotations.

Corrections and suggestions

Both are welcome, and corrections with a source attached are acted on. Contact · How this site is sourced