How this site is sourced

The rule

A claim on this site should be checkable. Articles carry numbered notes, and the note gives the document, not a vague gesture at "historians". Where a source is online at a stable address the note links to it. Where it is not — and a great deal of the Papua New Guinea record is not — the note cites it by name and says so, rather than linking to someone else's summary of it and implying that is the source.

What gets used

Legislation and constitutional documents

The strongest material available, and the most neglected. The Constitution, the pre-independence Acts and ordinances, the Australian legislation that governed Papua and New Guinea, and the Bougainville Peace Agreement and its constitutional amendments are all primary documents that say exactly what they say. Papua New Guinea legislation is on PacLII; Australian Acts are on the Federal Register of Legislation.

Court decisions

Supreme and National Court judgments are history as well as law — they record facts found on evidence, which is a higher standard than most historical writing reaches. PacLII holds the PNG series.

Official records and reports

The Final Report of the Constitutional Planning Committee, annual reports to the League of Nations and later the United Nations Trusteeship Council, the National Gazette, and commission of inquiry reports. Much of this is offline or in archives.

Archaeology and published scholarship

For the period before outside contact there is no documentary record at all, and the evidence is archaeological. Dates in this field are published as ranges, get revised, and are sometimes genuinely disputed. This site gives ranges and says when a figure is contested, which is why the early entries on the timeline look less tidy than they do elsewhere.

What does not get used

• Other summary websites. The thin, recycled accounts of PNG history online are the reason this site exists; citing them would defeat the purpose.
• Encyclopaedia entries as authority. Useful for finding your way to a primary source. Not a source themselves.
• Unattributed figures. Casualty counts, population estimates and dates circulate without origin. If the origin cannot be found, the article says the figure is uncertain instead of repeating it with false confidence.

Where the record is weakest

Three places, and it is worth knowing about them before you read anything on this site or any other.

Before 1526 there is no written record, and the archaeological record is patchy, concentrated in a few excavated sites, and still being revised. Confident narratives about this period should be treated with suspicion.

The colonial period is documented almost entirely from the administration's side. The German and Australian records are detailed about what officials did and thought, and close to silent on what the people being administered made of it. Oral history and later anthropology fill some of this in, unevenly.

Casualty and population figures for the Second World War and for the Bougainville conflict vary widely between sources, and the civilian figures in particular are estimates. Where this site gives a number it says whose number it is.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, it should be fixed. If you can point to the document, that is better still. Get in touch — corrections with a source attached are acted on, and the page records when it was last checked.