The Way it Was: Australia’s Apartheid in PNG

This is an invaluable reprint of a 2009 article by the esteemed late Pacific academic and commentator Professor Ron Crocombe who spent most of his adult life in the Cook Islands, PNG, Fiji and other Pacific Islands. -- ACW

District Officers or Kiap (Tok Pisin from the German Kapitan)  had immense powers.
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 MANY of Australia’s colonial and post-colonial policies and practices are a major factor in the problems of Papua New Guinea today, and cause some Papua New Guinean leaders to have serious reservations about their Australian counterparts.

Despite being a colony from the 1890s, Australia ensured that Papua did not get its first high school until international pressure led to its opening in 1955. Very few others were built for a long time in a country of similar size and population to New Zealand.