Era · 1975–1988
Independence
Sixteen September 1975, the home-grown Constitution, the first Somare governments and the shape of the new state.
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Independence, 16 September 1975
Papua New Guinea is one of the few countries that wrote its own constitution before independence rather than after it, and one of the fewer still that got it from a committee of its own parliamentarians rather than a departing colonial office.
The other eras
PNG history on this site is divided into nine periods.
- to 1526
Before outside contact
Fifty thousand years of settlement, some of the earliest agriculture anywhere, and trade networks that moved goods across the region long before any outsider arrived.
- 1526–1883
First outside contact
Portuguese and Spanish sightings, the naming of the island, whalers and traders, and the labour trade that took Islanders to Queensland.
- 1884–1914
The colonial partition
Germany takes the north, Britain the south. British New Guinea becomes Papua, and in 1906 passes to the new Commonwealth of Australia.
- 1914–1941
The Mandate years
Australian occupation of German New Guinea, the League of Nations mandate, the goldfields, and first contact in the Highlands in the 1930s.
- 1942–1945
The Second World War
Rabaul, Kokoda, Milne Bay, Buna–Gona, Lae and Bougainville. The war that reached further into the country than the administration ever had.
- 1945–1975
Towards independence
Trusteeship, the Papua and New Guinea Act 1949, the House of Assembly, the Constitutional Planning Committee and self-government in 1973.
- 1988–2001
The Bougainville conflict
Panguna, the ten-year conflict, the Sandline affair, the Bougainville Peace Agreement and the road to the 2019 referendum.
- 2001 onwards
Modern Papua New Guinea
Resource booms, LNG, changes of government, the courts, and a country whose institutions are now older than most of its population.