Join us online or in person for a seminar with Associate Professor Helen Gardner and Dr Brad Underhill.

Competing visions for Papua New Guinea and Australia

The political separation of the Territory of Papua New Guinea (TPNG) from the Australian nation was neither a foregone conclusion nor a simple process. Competing visions for the future of TPNG could be found both in Canberra and the House of Assembly in Port Moresby throughout the 1960s and up until decolonisation. This paper explores two moments in the decolonisation process; both illuminate Australian and Papua New Guinean perspectives on the form and shape of the political future of TPNG within or beyond the Australian nation.  The first examines the idea, popular in TPNG, that Papua New Guinea become the seventh state of Australia. On closer investigation the Liberal National government concluded that this proposal was an existential threat to the Australian state both economically and racially, despite the first moves to end the White Australia Policy. From 1966 Canberra refused to countenance any alternative to full sovereign nationhood for their territory across the Torres Strait. The second examines Papua Besena, the Papuan movement centred in Port Moresby led by Josephine Abaijah. Supporters rejected the unification of Papua and New Guinea as a single nation on the basis of the distinct histories of the two territories and the differences in the status of their people: Papuans held Australian citizenship; New Guineans were Protected Persons under the United Nations Trusteeship. Papua Besena articulated  geographical and historical arguments over the Papuan people’s right to choose their political future. But the movement was no match for the forces ranged against it: the Australian government, the United Nations, and the young Papua New Guinea nationalists led by Michael Somare, who believed in a single unified nation.

This presentation will consider how these efforts to undermine or direct decolonisation from within the territory, strains both national and imperial historiographies. These visions of Papua New Guinea’s future as either within or somehow associated with the Australian state, grants unexpected perspectives of Australia’s colonial project beyond the continent.

11am, 28th August 2024

Burwood: C2.05.01
Waurn Ponds: IC2.108
Zoom: Click here

Associate Professor Helen Gardner is an historian of the broader Oceania, including Australia and the Pacific Islands through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her interests include colonialism and post-colonialism in the Pacific. She is active in the Pacific History Association and is the external editor of the Journal of Pacific History.

Dr Brad Underhill specialises in Papua New Guinea-Australian history. In August 2021 Brad submitted his PhD thesis, The New Deal on the Ground in Papua New Guinea. It was awarded the Hank Nelson memorial prize for history in 2022 for best history on PNG in the previous two years. This will be published as a book – Preparing a Nation? –  by ANU Press later this year.