History · Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea: A Thousand Nations

The most linguistically diverse country on Earth — highland societies unknown to the outside world until the 1930s, a colony split between Germany, Britain and Australia, a Pacific War battleground, and a fragile democracy troubled by a secession war on Bougainville

By Worldlore Editorial · 10 September 2026

Highland dancers in elaborate feather headdresses and body paint at a sing-sing festival in Mount Hagen
A sing-sing at Mount Hagen in the highlands. Papua New Guinea has more than 800 living languages — around a tenth of the world's total — among some 10 million people. (gailhampshire / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0)

The most diverse country on Earth

Papua New Guinea occupies the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and hundreds of smaller islands. Its terrain — a spine of high mountains, dense rainforest, wide swamps — kept communities apart for millennia, and the result is extraordinary diversity: over 800 languages, most spoken by a few thousand people, and a society still largely organised around clans and customary land, which covers about 97 per cent of the country. Much of the highland interior, home to a million people, was unknown to the outside world until Australian gold prospectors walked into it in the early 1930s.

A short history

  1. c. 50,000 years ago

    Settlement

    Among the first regions settled by modern humans.

  2. c. 7000 BCE

    Agriculture

    Independent invention of farming at Kuk Swamp.

  3. 1526

    European sighting

    A Portuguese navigator names the island.

  4. 1884

    Partition

    Germany takes the north-east, Britain the south-east.

  5. 1906

    Papua to Australia

    Britain transfers its territory to Australia.

  6. 1914–1921

    Australia takes the north

    German New Guinea is seized, then held under mandate.

  7. 1942–1945

    The New Guinea campaign

    Fierce fighting between Japan and the Allies.

  8. 1975

    Independence

    Papua New Guinea becomes sovereign under Michael Somare.

  9. 1988–1998

    The Bougainville war

    A secessionist conflict over a giant copper mine; around 15,000–20,000 dead.

  10. 2019

    Referendum

    Bougainville votes almost unanimously for independence.

Deep time

People reached New Guinea at least 50,000 years ago, when it was joined by land to Australia. At Kuk Swamp in the highlands, drainage ditches show that agriculture — taro, bananas, yams — was developed independently around 9,000 years ago, one of a handful of places in the world where farming was invented rather than borrowed. The highland valleys supported dense populations of gardeners and pig-keepers, divided into small groups in a state of shifting alliance and warfare, and with no contact with the coast, let alone with Europe.

Tall carved and painted wooden posts inside an Iatmul men's ceremonial house on the Sepik River
Carved posts inside an Iatmul spirit house on the Sepik River. Distinct art traditions — Sepik carving, highland adornment, Gulf shields — developed in near-isolation across the country. (Sanjay ach / Wikimedia Commons)

Three colonisers

European powers ignored New Guinea until the 1880s, when Germany annexed the north-east (Kaiser-Wilhelmsland) for its plantation companies and Britain, pressed by Australia, took the south-east. Britain handed its share, renamed Papua, to the new Commonwealth of Australia in 1906. When war came in 1914, Australian troops quickly took German New Guinea, and Australia governed it under a League of Nations mandate. The two territories — Papua and New Guinea — were run separately by Australia, with plantations, gold mines, missions and a system of indentured labour, while the highlands remained beyond administrative control until the 1930s and, in places, the 1950s.

A narrow muddy footpath climbing through dense jungle over a steep ridge
The Kokoda Track over the Owen Stanley Range. In 1942 Australian troops and Papuan carriers halted a Japanese overland advance on Port Moresby here, in one of the Pacific War's hardest campaigns. (Hugh W. Groser / Wikimedia Commons)

The war, and independence

Japan landed in New Guinea in 1942, and the island became a major theatre: the Kokoda Track campaign, the battles around Buna, Gona and Lae, and the isolation of the great Japanese base at Rabaul. Hundreds of thousands of troops fought in the mountains and jungle, and many Papua New Guineans served as carriers, scouts and soldiers. After the war Australia administered the two territories jointly, expanded schooling and health services, and — under United Nations pressure and a rising local political movement — moved towards decolonisation. Self-government came in 1973 and full independence on 16 September 1975, with Michael Somare as the first prime minister, within the Commonwealth and with the British monarch as head of state.

Bougainville and after

Independent Papua New Guinea has kept its democracy and its free press, but with chronic instability: no prime minister served a full term until the 2000s, votes of no confidence are frequent, and government reach into rural areas is thin. Its gravest crisis was on Bougainville, an island geographically part of the Solomons chain, where anger over the huge Panguna copper mine — its pollution, and the distribution of its revenue — sparked a secessionist rebellion in 1988. The resulting war and blockade lasted a decade and killed an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people. A 2001 peace deal granted autonomy and a future referendum; in 2019 Bougainvilleans voted 98 per cent for independence, and the two governments are negotiating what that will mean.

What Papua New Guinea carries

Papua New Guinea is a single state laid over one of the most fragmented human landscapes anywhere — hundreds of languages, near-universal customary land, and a highland majority that met the outside world within living memory. Holding that together as a functioning democracy is the achievement and the strain of the country's first fifty years. Bougainville's near-certain departure is the sharpest test yet of whether the borders drawn by three colonial powers can hold.

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