The history of Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea occupies the eastern half of New Guinea, the world's second-largest island, together with the Bismarck Archipelago, Bougainville and hundreds of smaller islands. People have lived here for about 50,000 years, and in the highlands they invented agriculture independently, draining swamps to grow taro and bananas thousands of years before most of the world farmed. Its mountains, forests and seas divided its peoples into hundreds of small, self-governing communities speaking more than 800 languages, so that no state or empire existed before Germany, Britain and then Australia drew colonial borders in the 1880s. Fought over by Japan and the Allies in the Second World War, it became independent in 1975 as a parliamentary democracy, and since then the war on Bougainville and that island's vote for independence have tested the unity of the nation.

During the last Ice Age, sea levels were so low that New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania formed a single continent, Sahul. Even so, reaching it from Asia required sea crossings, and the people who made them, about 50,000 years ago, were among the earliest modern humans to leave Africa and travel so far east. Their descendants include both Papuans and Aboriginal Australians, whose populations later developed separately. Stone axes on the Huon Peninsula date back about 40,000 years, and sites in the Ivane Valley show that people were living in the cold highlands, 2,000 metres above sea level, almost as early, hunting, gathering pandanus nuts and yams and burning the forest to encourage useful plants. Seafarers reached New Ireland and New Britain by around 40,000 years ago, Bougainville by about 28,000 years ago and remote Manus by 20,000 years ago. Obsidian from New Britain was being traded across the islands more than 20,000 years ago. As the ice melted, the sea rose and cut New Guinea off from Australia by about 8,000 years ago.

At Kuk Swamp, in the Wahgi Valley of the Western Highlands, archaeologists have found one of the clearest records of early agriculture anywhere. People were working the wetland margins as early as 10,000 years ago, and by about 9,000 years ago they were digging channels to drain the swamp and planting on the drier ground. By 6,900 to 6,400 years ago they were cultivating bananas, along with taro, yams and sugar cane, in mounded fields drained by networks of ditches. These were not crops borrowed from elsewhere: New Guinea was one of a handful of places in the world, with the Middle East, China, Mesoamerica and the Andes, where people domesticated plants for themselves in the Neolithic Revolution. Bananas and sugar cane later spread from New Guinea across Asia and beyond. UNESCO listed the Kuk Early Agricultural Site as a World Heritage Site in 2008.

Around 3,300 years ago a new people appeared in the Bismarck Archipelago. They spoke Austronesian languages, whose roots lay in Taiwan and the islands of Southeast Asia, and made a distinctive pottery stamped with intricate patterns, which archaeologists call Lapita. They brought pigs, chickens and dogs, lived in stilt houses on the coasts and were superb sailors. From the Bismarcks, Lapita voyagers sailed east to the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, the first steps of the Polynesian navigation of the Pacific. Austronesian speakers mixed with the older Papuan-speaking peoples, and today the coasts and islands of Papua New Guinea have many Austronesian languages, while the interior and much of the mainland speak the far older and more varied Papuan families.

The arrival of the sweet potato from the Americas, probably through Indonesian trade networks some time in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, transformed the highlands. It grew at higher altitudes than taro, fed more people and many more pigs, and allowed the dense highland populations that outsiders found in the twentieth century.

Before colonial rule, most people lived in small villages or hamlets of a few dozen to a few hundred people, organised by clan and lineage and governing themselves. In much of the highlands, leadership was not inherited: "big men" won influence by their skill in oratory, warfare and above all in exchange, organising great ceremonial gifts of pigs and shells, such as the moka of the Melpa and the tee of the Enga. Elsewhere, especially on some islands, rank was more hereditary. Warfare between neighbouring clans was common, and in some regions headhunting and ritual cannibalism were practised.

Trade tied this fragmented world together. In the Kula ring of the Massim islands, off the eastern tip of the mainland, shell necklaces and armbands circulated in opposite directions around a great circle of islands, cementing lifelong partnerships. On the south coast, the Motu people of the Port Moresby area sailed their large lakatoi canoes west to the Gulf of Papua each year in the hiri voyages, trading clay pots for sago. Ideas and goods moved great distances by such chains, even where individuals rarely travelled far.

Portuguese and Spanish navigators sighted the island in the 1520s. Jorge de Menezes called it the island of the Papuas around 1526, from a Malay term, and in 1545 the Spaniard Yñigo Ortiz de Retez named it Nueva Guinea, thinking its people resembled those of the Guinea coast of Africa. The Netherlands later claimed the western half, which became part of the Dutch East Indies and is now part of Indonesia. The east saw few Europeans until the nineteenth century, when whalers, traders in copra and bêche-de-mer, and the Russian scientist Nikolai Miklukho-Maklai, who lived on the Rai Coast from 1871, arrived. From the 1860s labour recruiters, often by deceit or force in the practice known as blackbirding, took men from the islands to work on plantations in Queensland, Fiji and Samoa. Christianity arrived with Catholic missionaries on Woodlark Island in 1847, and from the 1870s the London Missionary Society, Methodists, Lutherans and Catholics built missions that became the main source of schooling and health care.

In 1884 the colonial powers divided the east. The German Empire claimed the north-east of the mainland and the Bismarck Archipelago as German New Guinea, run until 1899 by a chartered company and then directly by the state, with its capital from 1910 at Rabaul. Germans built copra, cocoa and rubber plantations worked by indentured labourers, sometimes under brutal discipline. Britain, prompted by colonists in Queensland who feared a German neighbour, proclaimed a protectorate over the south-east, annexed as British New Guinea in 1888. In 1902 it was placed under the new Commonwealth of Australia, and in 1906 it became the Territory of Papua.

Under Hubert Murray, its lieutenant-governor from 1908 to 1940, Papua was run on paternalist lines that protected Papuan land from sale but invested little in education or development. At the outbreak of World War I, Australian troops seized German New Guinea, and in 1921 the League of Nations gave it to Australia as a mandate, the Territory of New Guinea. The two territories were administered separately, with English as the official language but Tok Pisin, a creole born on the plantations, spreading as the common language of the north and Hiri Motu in the south.

Gold discoveries at Edie Creek and Bulolo in the 1920s drew prospectors inland, and in the 1930s patrols and miners, including the Leahy brothers in 1933, entered the great valleys of the central highlands. To their surprise, they found about a million people who had had no contact with the outside world, and the first encounters were sometimes violent. Patrol officers, known as kiaps, gradually extended government control, suppressing warfare, appointing village officials and imposing a head tax that pushed men into labour on plantations and mines.

The Pacific War brought fighting on a vast scale. In January 1942 the Empire of Japan took Rabaul, which became its great southern base, and the ship Montevideo Maru, carrying about a thousand Australian prisoners and civilians captured there, was sunk by an American submarine that July. After the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942 turned back a seaborne invasion of Port Moresby, Japanese forces landed near Buna and Gona on the north coast in July and advanced overland along the Kokoda Track across the Owen Stanley Range. Young Australian militiamen and the Papuan Infantry Battalion, later reinforced by veterans of the Second Australian Imperial Force, fought a desperate withdrawal through mud, rain and disease until the Japanese, short of supplies, halted within sight of Port Moresby in September and retreated. At the same time Australian troops defeated a Japanese landing at Milne Bay, the first defeat of a Japanese land operation in the war. The bloody battles at Buna, Gona and Sanananda, fought by Australian and United States forces, ended in January 1943.

The campaign depended on Papuan carriers. From June 1942 the Australian administration conscripted Papuan and New Guinean men as labourers, and thousands carried supplies forward and wounded soldiers back along the track, earning the Australians' gratitude and the wartime nickname "Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels", though they were paid little and many suffered terribly. Fighting continued on the mainland, New Britain and Bougainville until 1945, as part of World War II in the Pacific. Some 200,000 Japanese servicemen died in the New Guinea campaigns, many from starvation and disease, and the number of local people killed by bombing, reprisals, forced labour and hunger is unknown but large. The war also exposed Papua New Guineans to the outside world and brought people from different regions together for the first time.

After the war Australia merged the two territories, and in 1949 the Territory of Papua and New Guinea came into being, with New Guinea a United Nations trust territory. A Legislative Council with three Papua New Guinean members was created in 1951, and village councils spread. Pressure from the United Nations and a World Bank report of 1964 pushed Canberra to develop the economy and prepare for self-rule. The first House of Assembly, with a majority of elected Papua New Guinean members, opened in 1964, and the Pangu Pati, the first political party, campaigned for independence from 1967. The first graduates of the new University of Papua New Guinea followed in 1970.

The Australian Labor leader Gough Whitlam, who became prime minister in December 1972, made rapid independence his policy. After the 1972 elections Michael Somare of Pangu became chief minister, a Constitutional Planning Committee of Papua New Guineans drafted a "home-grown" constitution, and the territory became self-governing on 1 December 1973. Papua New Guinea became independent on 16 September 1975 as a constitutional monarchy within the Commonwealth, with Elizabeth II as queen and Somare as prime minister. Not everyone welcomed it: separatists in Papua and on Bougainville both declared independence of their own in 1975, and Bougainville was brought back with the promise of a provincial government.

Bougainville, culturally closer to the Solomon Islands than to the mainland, was home to the Panguna copper mine, opened by a subsidiary of the Australian company CRA (now Rio Tinto) in 1972, which at its height provided a large share of the country's exports. Landowners complained of environmental destruction and an unfair share of the profits. In 1988 a group led by Francis Ona began sabotaging the mine, which closed in May 1989, and the Bougainville Revolutionary Army declared independence. The national government withdrew and imposed a blockade, the conflict became a civil war among Bougainvilleans as well as against the state, and the human rights abuses on all sides and the effects of the blockade cost an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 lives. In 1997 Prime Minister Julius Chan's secret hiring of mercenaries from the firm Sandline International caused an army revolt and his fall. Peace talks hosted by New Zealand led to a truce in 1997 and a ceasefire in 1998, and the Bougainville Peace Agreement of 2001 promised autonomy, disarmament and a future referendum. In the referendum of November and December 2019, 97.7 percent of voters chose independence. The result is not binding, and it must be ratified by the national parliament. In 2021 the two governments agreed on a target of 2027, but as of 2026 ratification had not happened, and in July 2026 Bougainville's leaders moved their recommended date for independence to 1 September 2030.

On the mainland, the young state kept its democracy, with regular elections and peaceful changes of government, but its politics became notorious for shifting coalitions and votes of no confidence. Mines and, from 2014, liquefied natural gas brought revenue, while the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine, opened in the 1980s, caused severe pollution of the Fly River. Tribal fighting revived in the highlands, made deadlier by firearms, and crime grew in Port Moresby and Lae. A tsunami near Aitape in 1998 killed more than 1,500 people. In 2011 and 2012 rival prime ministers, Somare and Peter O'Neill, each claimed office until elections resolved the crisis. Australia ran an immigration detention centre on Manus Island from 2001 and again from 2012 until the country's Supreme Court found it unconstitutional, and it closed in 2017.

James Marape became prime minister in 2019 and was returned after the 2022 election. In January 2024 a protest by police and public servants over pay deductions turned into riots and looting in Port Moresby and Lae in which about 20 people died, and a state of emergency was declared. In March 2025 parliament amended the constitution to declare Papua New Guinea a Christian country.