Territory of Papua

• 1. The Territory of Papua

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  The Territory of Papua came into existence not through careful planning but through a rumour about a German warship. In November 1882, Allgemeine Zeitung published an article calling for Germany to annex New Guinea. Sir Thomas McIlwraith, the Premier of Queensland, took note and cabled London to urge British action. He received no answer.

  Then, in February 1883, a more alarming story reached him. SMS Carola, a German warship, was reportedly leaving Sydney for the South Seas with annexation as its purpose. McIlwraith did not wait for confirmation. On the 20th of March 1883, he telegraphed Henry Chester, the police magistrate at Thursday Island, with a direct instruction: sail immediately for New Guinea and take formal possession in the Queen's name. Chester made his proclamation at Port Moresby on the 4th of April. London's response was swift and hostile. Lord Derby, the Colonial Secretary, told Queensland plainly that it had no constitutional authority to annex territory on behalf of the Crown.

  The rebuff held only so long. After the Australian colonies pledged financial support, Britain established a formal protectorate over the southeastern coast on the 6th of November 1884. By the 4th of September 1888, the protectorate had become a full annexation, officially named British New Guinea. In 1902, letters patent issued by King Edward VII on the 18th of March transferred authority over British New Guinea to Australia. What followed was a long, contested argument over how to govern a distant territory on the edge of the Pacific.

• 2. Parliament and Prohibition

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  From 1902 to 1906, Papua occupied an unusual legal space. Australia held sovereignty over the territory but had not yet enacted legislation to organise it. Historians have described this gap as an interregnum, with Papua holding a status similar in some ways to an unorganised territory. The existing institutions of British New Guinea simply continued to function.

  The Barton government began drafting legislation in February 1903. A bill appeared by July of that year, with provisions intended to come into force on the 1st of January 1904. Before it could pass, the 1903 federal election intervened. The draft was abandoned and the work began again.

  Temperance advocates seized the opportunity. They pushed for universal prohibition of alcohol across the entire territory, a demand that proved impossible to resolve quickly. It held up legislation for years. When the Papua Act 1905 finally cleared parliament in November 1905, the Deakin government had found a workable middle ground. Alcohol sales to Papuan natives would be prohibited outright. European residents would be subject instead to a local option system for liquor licences.

  The Papua Act 1905 also created the post of lieutenant-governor, appointed by the governor-general of Australia on the advice of the relevant minister. Six government officials made up the executive council that supported the lieutenant-governor. A legislative council also sat. Its membership combined those six "official" executive council members with three "unofficial" members selected by the lieutenant-governor from the territory's white population. On the 1st of September 1906, these provisions came into force and the Territory of Papua formally existed.

• 3. The Goaribari Affair

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  In June 1903, the Australian government appointed Christopher Stansfield Robinson as acting administrator of the territory. By March 1904, he had led an armed expedition to Goaribari Island that would end his career and transform the administration. The expedition sought two missionaries murdered in 1901: James Chalmers and Oliver Fellows Tomkins. Robinson's aim was to recover their remains and punish those responsible. Several Papuans were shot dead during the operation.

  Charles Abel, a missionary working in the region, wrote to the Australian press with a damaging allegation. He claimed that what had taken place was not a policing operation but a massacre. His account reached a wide audience. The Australian government responded by calling a royal commission into the affair.

  The inquiry proved devastating for Robinson personally. He died by suicide as the commission proceeded. A second royal commission was then called in 1906, this time examining broader allegations of administrative misconduct across the territory. Its report was sweeping. It recommended the immediate removal of most senior officials in the colony, including the administrator who had originally requested the inquiry.

  From the wreckage of those two commissions, one lasting appointment emerged. Hubert Murray was named lieutenant-governor and would hold that post until 1940.

• 4. The Pacific Theater

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  The northern half of New Guinea had been under German commercial control since 1884. By 1899, Berlin had assumed direct governmental authority over it, ruling the territory under the name Kaiser-Wilhelmsland. When war broke out in 1914, Australia acted quickly. On the 11th of September 1914, some 2000 volunteers of the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force crossed into German territory. After several skirmishes, the Australians captured Kaiser-Wilhelmsland and occupied it for the remainder of the war. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 transferred the former German colony to Australia, which governed it as the Territory of New Guinea.

  Papua was the least affected region of the island when Japan entered the Pacific war. The near-impassable Owen Stanley Ranges lay between Papua and any overland approach from the north. Most of the area then known as Dutch New Guinea was occupied by Japanese forces. Large parts of the Territory of New Guinea were overrun as well.

  The New Guinea campaign opened in 1942 with Japanese attacks on New Britain and New Ireland, both in the Territory of New Guinea. Rabaul, the territorial capital, was overwhelmed on the 22nd and the 23rd of January and established as a major Japanese base. From there, Japanese forces landed on the mainland and advanced toward Port Moresby and beyond. A seaborne attempt to take Port Moresby was disrupted by American and Australian naval forces at the Battle of the Coral Sea. The Japanese then turned to an overland assault, pushing south along the Kokoda Track through the Owen Stanley Ranges.

  From July 1942, Australian reserve battalions held the Kokoda Track against the Japanese advance. Many of the soldiers were young and had little training. Papuan porters and medical assistants worked alongside them throughout the retreat. In late August, regular troops of the Second Australian Imperial Force arrived from the Mediterranean Theatre and took over the defence.

  In early September 1942, Japanese marines attacked a Royal Australian Air Force base at Milne Bay, near the eastern tip of Papua. The Australian Army drove them back. The Battle of Milne Bay became the first outright defeat of Japanese land forces anywhere in the Pacific theater during the war.

  The 1943-44 campaigns across Papua and New Guinea constituted the single largest series of connected operations the Australian armed forces had ever mounted. United States General Douglas MacArthur commanded the theatre as Supreme Commander. Australian General Thomas Blamey took a direct role in planning, with operations directed from New Guinea Force headquarters in Port Moresby. The Japanese 18th Army, based in New Guinea, continued fighting until the Japanese surrender in 1945.

• 5. The Long Road to Independence

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  The Papua and New Guinea Act 1949 merged the Territory of Papua with the Territory of New Guinea into a single administrative body. Yet for all their shared governance, the two territories retained different legal identities. Papua was a Possession of the Crown. The Territory of New Guinea had first been a League of Nations mandate. After the United Nations was established, it became a trust territory under UN oversight. These distinctions shaped how each territory related to Australian nationality law and to international monitoring bodies. Even for the purposes of Australian nationality, the Act maintained a formal distinction between the two.

  A Legislative Council came into being in 1951, as the Act had provided. A public service, a judicial system, and a framework for local government were established alongside it. Despite sharing a single administration, Papua and New Guinea remained legally separate for more than two decades.

  Australian Minister for External Territories Andrew Peacock oversaw the transition to self-government in 1972. Three years later, on the 15th of September 1975, the Whitlam government completed the handover. The Territory became the Independent State of Papua New Guinea. Papua's long-standing status as a Crown Possession, distinct in law from the United Nations trust territory to its north, was erased at the same moment.