9
1 General Historical Events
1.1 National Background of Papua New Guinea
People first settled New Guinea and Australia about 50,000 years ago when they formed one land mass. The earliest settlers to New Guinea probably came from the eastern
Indonesian islands. They have originated from South-East Asia and crossed land bridges to Indonesia several hundred thousand years ago.
The first New Guineans were hunters and gatherers. They practised an economy similar to that still used by Australian aborigines today.
The first settlers arrived in New Guinea during the glacial period. At that time many of the mountains of New Guinea and other parts of the world were covered with snow and ice.
Grassland areas were also wider and contained many animals, providing important hunting grounds for the early settlers.
World climates grew warmer between 17,000 and 10,000 years ago, causing the melting of ice sheets. As a result sea levels began to rise and the land connection between Australia
and New Guinea gradually came under water. The last link in Torres Strait disappeared about 8000 years ago Office of Information 1980:16.
The settlers of New Guinea belonged to the two broad language groups present today, i.e., the Melanesian subfamily, whose speakers are found mainly in coastal and lowland regions, and the Non-Austronesian
Papuan group who live mainly in the inland and highland areas. One theory of the population’s distribution states that the Non-Austronesian speakers were driven inland by immigrations of Melanesian speakers possibly
5000 years ago.
It is suggested that the early food crops were taro, bananas, sugar cane, yams, and Pueraria which has edible roots. The introduction and adoption of the sweet potato no more than 350 years ago following Spanish
colonization in the Pacific, has made possible profound changes in the supportable numbers of people in the Highlands. A second theory of population distribution infers that the sweet potato is the primary factor in a
chain of events leading to the settling of the Highland area.
The first recorded visitors to Papua New Guinea PNG were the Indonesians in the eighth century A.D. Records show that nearly a thousand slaves from mainland Papua were used as labor in the building of a
temple in Java. The island was also well known to Chinese traders and travelers before Europeans “discovered” it.
Portuguese navigators were the first Europeans to sight and land on the island early in the sixteenth century. A few years later Spanish navigators came; the name of Torres is familiar to all in PNG. Early in the
seventeenth century the Dutch and British also reached the island from their bases in Southeast Asia. The Dutch became the first to annex the territory of the western half in 1828.
The German colony, Kaiser Wilhelmsland, was at first settled by the Neu Guinea Kompagnie under charter from the German government, but in 1889 the German government took over full responsibility for the
colony and maintained it until 1914 when Australian troops occupied the land. In 1920, a mandate for the administration of the Territory was given to Australia by the League of Nations. This part of New Guinea
remained a Mandated Territory until the Japanese invasion in 1942. In 1946, the original German colony became a United Nations Trust Territory, and until 1973 both it and Papua were administered jointly by
Australia Howlett 1967:4.
In 1964, the House of Assembly was formed following recommendations of the United Nations Visiting Mission 1962. Successive elections in 1968 and 1972 increased Papua
New Guinea representation in the House to 90 percent. In 1973, the House of Assembly successfully won self-government from the Australian
Administration. Not all powers were transferred initially. But in the succeeding two years virtually all responsibility for the administration of the territories was transferred to the
House of Assembly.
10 Papua New Guinea won its independence in the political arena. There was no violence,
often predicted by the sceptics, like that which had preceded the birth of many other Third World Nations.
The Nation’s first Governor-General, Sir John Guise…announced to the world that a new nation had been born…at the Independence celebrations as the Australian Flag was
lowered for the last time at sunset on September 15, 1975. Prince Charles represented Queen Elizabeth II, Head of State. He officially opened the
First National Parliament and took part in the Independence celebrations. In May 1977, the people went to the polls for the first time as an independent nation and
elected members of the Second National Parliament. The Right Honourable Michael Somare emerged again as the Prime Minister at the head of a coalition government Office of
Information 1980:44–45.
1.2 Provincial Background of Bougainville-Buka
Kategori