The Admiralty Islands lie to the north of New Guinea and are part of Papua New Guinea. The largest island, Manus, possesses a vast deep-water anchorage in Seeadler Harbour, whose position gives it potential not only as an advanced base for the defence of New Guinea and Australia, but a springboard into the Pacific and Southeast Asia.

The strategic potential of the islands for the security of Australia was recognised in 1919 by Admiral John Jellicoe during his tour of the Western Pacific to advise on imperial naval planning for the region. He designated Manus Island as ‘Harbour “A”’, a prospective secret wartime base for a future concentrated Far East Fleet.

Arguably, Manus’ importance had already been appreciated in the Australian government’s drive in 1914 to ensure Australia occupied German New Guinea and the associated islands before the Japanese could seize the opportunity. In 1919 then-prime minister Billy Hughes described these acquisitions as ‘the gateways to our citadel’ and he worked hard to ensure that Australia received a League of Nations mandate to control them.

Despite Australia’s strategic interest, there was never any money in the inter-war years for installing base facilities in the islands. They remained undeveloped until their 1942 occupation by the Japanese, who built an airstrip and installed a small garrison as part of their defensive perimeter in the Southwest Pacific.

The Admiralty Islands were recovered in a five-week campaign between February and April 1944 by American troops supported by US and Australian naval forces. The Americans suffered more than 1,000 casualties, 294 of whom were killed, while the Japanese lost more than 4,000 dead. Work to extend the existing airfield, develop another and build shore installations began immediately, the RAN contributing with a survey of the main anchorage.

By September 1944, Manus Island was the centre of a naval and air base complex manned by 37,000 personnel. Seeadler Harbour had designated anchorages for no less than 262 combatant units. The repair facilities matched those of Pearl Harbor and included a floating dock with a capacity of 100,000 tons, big enough to take the largest aircraft carrier or battleship. Over five months, the US spent US$238 million on the project.

By early 1945, events were moving so quickly that Manus had lost some of its value to the Americans. The axis of the main US Navy campaign against Japan now lay further north, and more northerly anchorages, such as Ulithi Atoll, had been occupied and put in service. The breakneck development of the USN’s floating logistics and repair forces meant the necessary support could be provided from even the most undeveloped island harbours.

However, a new primary user emerged in the British Pacific Fleet (BPF). As envisaged by Jellicoe in 1919, Manus’ positioning made it ideal as an intermediate base between Australia, where the BPF was based, and the approaches to Japan. Although the main RAN squadron operated with the USN rather than the BPF, geography meant that the Australian ships also continued to use Manus as a staging post. British and Australian feelings about Manus were mixed. Some nicknamed it ‘Scapa in technicolour’ after the bleak fleet anchorage in the Orkney Islands north of Scotland. The isolation, heat and humidity—all the more oppressive in un-air-conditioned ships shut down for war—made one British officer also christen it ‘the island of lost souls’.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the USN proposed that Manus be one of nine major fleet bases to be maintained in the Pacific. But the model under which this would operate, with control of the islands largely surrendered to the US, was opposed by the Australian government. Australia had already fired a warning shot in the form of the 1944 ANZAC Pact with New Zealand, which declared that construction and use of military installations did not afford the power concerned any basis for territorial claims or rights of control after a conflict. This had not been well received by the Americans.

Australia’s Minister for External Affairs, H.V. Evatt, tried to take advantage of the American interest in Manus. His initial hope was that the Americans would agree to a security guarantee which could include Australia and New Guinea in return for its use. He also sought not only guaranteed access to the base for Australian units but access to other American bases as well. By March 1946, Evatt was proposing an ‘overall defence arrangement for the region of the Western Pacific’.

Unwilling to commit to anything that resembled a formal alliance, the Americans suggested in reply that they hand over the facilities to Australia on the promise that the latter would maintain them in good order and allow the Americans not only free access but the right to resume full control when required.  This created the prospect for Australia of a significant financial burden without much return.

This was not a period of good relations between the two nations, feeling their way in a complex and uncertain post-war environment. Evatt’s aggressive manner and propensity to cause offence did not help, but in 1946 neither nation was ready to make the political or resource commitments that would have been required to maintain the base.

To be fair to the US, Manus was also a logical victim of intense pressure on the US military to economise in the post-war period. Its positioning gave it utility in relation to Australia, Micronesia and Southeast Asia, but the key American strategic priorities were further north. Bases such as Guam, over which America already had full legal control, were of more use in relation to China, Japan and the USSR, while the Philippines could host facilities closer to mainland Southeast Asia.

As a result, agreement was never reached, and the US completely withdrew from Manus. What US forces did not take with them was stripped out by Chinese commercial contractors. This meant that Australia had to start largely from scratch to develop its own facilities. An Australian base on Manus was formally established in 1950 at Lombrum, initially commissioned as HMAS Seeadler, but soon renamed Tarangau to avoid the German connotations*.

Over the next decade, oil fuel storages, a wharf and radio station were built, and the harbour proved a useful stopping point for RAN units on the way to the Far East Strategic Reserve, as well as the base for the slowly developing Papua New Guinea Division of the RAN.

With independence in 1975, establishment of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force saw the base transferred to PNG control. Despite chronic shortages of money and materiel in the decades since, in 2018 Lombrum Naval Base continues to be key to the PNGDF’s maritime operations.

*‘Seeadler’ means ‘sea eagle’ in German and ‘Tarangau’ is its Tok Pisin equivalent.

Q: Which neighbour is more different to Australia—Indonesia or Papua New Guinea?

A: Impossible to say.

As neighbours forever, Australia, PNG and Indonesia constitute an extraordinary triangle. The contrasts and clashes abound. Each neighbour is so unique, defining degrees of difference is impossible. That impossibility informs much of importance.

For Australia, Indonesia and PNG are the two key regional relationships. Indonesia sets the tone and temperature of what Australia can do in Southeast Asia. PNG is the most important country in the South Pacific for Australia (along with New Zealand), and it frames our thinking about the South Pacific.

Oz defenceniks/diplomats enter the triangle hesitantly. The bulging bilateral baskets dominate. When Australia speaks of Indonesia, it rarely links to PNG. And when Canberra cogitates on PNG—less than it should—it doesn’t travel on to the Indonesian dimension. The two bilateral relationships are so big, it’s tempting not to complicate things further with the triangle.

For vexed Oz policymakers throughout most of the 20th century, a wonderful element of today’s triangle would astonish—all three are democracies. Even sharing such a basic value, though, can be another point of difference; the vibrant, muscular election going on in PNG is proof anew that democracy has many colours.

I’ve been contemplating the triangle because of a marvellous new book by a former Australian diplomat, Bruce Hunt: Australia’s northern shield? PNG and the defence of Australia since 1880.

Hunt offers the best sort of history—digging across familiar ground but turning up lots of new nuggets. The familiar bit is the way Australia’s leaders have consistently seen PNG as a shield (the question mark in the book title is swept away by lots of evidence).

Hunt starts with an 1883 quote from Queensland’s Premier, T.J. McIlwraith: ‘The establishment of a foreign power in the neighbourhood of Australia would be injurious to … Australia’s interests.’ Then a matching sentence from the 2016 Defence White Paper: ‘Australia cannot be secure if our immediate neighbourhood, including PNG, became the source of threat to Australia.’

Across the 130 years between those twin statements, Hunt traces Australia’s PNG obsession. In 1901, Billy Hughes set the northern shield template for PNG, stating: ‘We must take it.’

Hughes’ argument that Australia must have PNG to deny a hostile power a base for invading the continent set a bipartisan template embraced by later leaders as diverse as Evatt and Menzies.

‘Fear of Australia’s Asian neighbours,’ Hunt writes, ‘dominated Australia’s consideration of the value of PNG.’ At the start of the 20th century, the newly minted White Australia wanted PNG for its territory, not its people.

Hunt hits narrative gold with Indonesia’s independence after World War II, as the triangle took shape. He devotes six chapters to ‘the spectre of Indonesia’ haunting the PNG policy of Australia’s Coalition governments in the 1950s and ’60s.

The story is told through the two great differences—over Dutch West New Guinea and Sukarno’s Confrontation. Those two ‘critical episodes’ were ‘considered by the Menzies and Holt Cabinets on over 60 occasions in specific detail or in the context of analysing Australia’s strategic environment. On nearly each occasion ministers linked Indonesian actions to possible threats to PNG’.

In the early stages, the Menzies government was determined Indonesia must never take West New Guinea from the Dutch, and equally resolved to go to war if Indonesia attempted to unsettle PNG by infiltration, subversion or attack.

The Dutch, however, got little backing from the US or Britain; Australia’s determination withered and belligerence softened. One of Cabinet’s key hawks, the Country Party leader, Jack McEwen, saw the broader danger of military conflict with Indonesia over West New Guinea, warning ‘a fracas over this is a fracas with Asia’.

By the time Gough Whitlam’s whirlwind arrived in 1972, Australia was less worried about threats from Suharto’s Indonesia; the new fear was what would become of independent PNG, rushed to birth in 1975.

Australia could no longer own its northern shield. Uncertainties about PNG’S future coloured the terms of the security guarantee. In stepping back from its colonial role, Hunt writes, the Whitlam government didn’t want to make ‘an open-ended commitment to defend an independent PNG’. By 1986, Australia’s Defence Minister, Kim Beazley, told Indonesia’s military chief, Benny Murdani, that Australia would certainly go to war for PNG, ‘but we wouldn’t tell them that!’

Hunt concludes that PNG ‘is no longer seen as a shield or a bulwark to protect Australia from invasion’. Modern defenceniks might demur—old, deep habits die hard. Yet Hunt reflects the reality that if there’s to be any shield, it’ll be based on the triangle—with, not against, Indonesia.

In telling that story, Hunt makes masterful use of the notebooks detailing Cabinet debates, released to the public after 50 years. Cabinet is the black box at Canberra’s heart: facts leak but the secret shroud prevails. Hunt’s account of the triangular defence and security debates, stretching over decades, is proof that Cabinet delivers Australia a flexible whole-of-government system, as able to act swiftly as to chew away at big challenges for years.

The triangle now has a twin. Australia gives Timor-Leste a de facto defence guarantee—we signed that in 1999 and have been acting on it since. A second guarantee to a second country with a land border with Indonesia. Like the PNG triangle, the Timor triangle carries much history as well as plenty of hope.

The 2001 Bougainville Peace Agreement (BPA) marked the formal end to the 1990s Bougainville conflict, even though a truce, and subsequently a ceasefire, had been in place since late 1997. Among other things, the BPA provided for a delayed referendum on Bougainville’s future relationship with Papua New Guinea. Under an agreed formula, the referendum will be held between June 2015 and June 2020.

There are now clear risks, however, that the BPA mightn’t last the distance. This post looks at where things are headed on Bougainville and, in particular, at some difficult choices the Australian Government may need to make in the coming period.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has taken a personal interest in Bougainville, having visited it both in opposition and in government. She’s been careful to avoid commenting on the independence question although there’s no reason to think that the Abbott Government’s approach will be different from that of its predecessors; it will have a strong preference for Bougainville to remain part of Papua New Guinea.

In Canberra the orthodox view remains that an independent Bougainville would complicate Australia’s strategic environment. It could destabilise both Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands, and would inevitably be a weak and possibly internally conflicted state requiring substantial external assistance for an extended period, with this cost being largely borne by Australia.

The counter-argument—that a peaceful separation of Bougainville from the rest of Papua New Guinea would settle once and for all what has been an issue for all of Papua New Guinea’s history as an independent country—is rarely heard.

For all that, Australia’s formal position on Bougainville’s independence is in fact one of neutrality. This position was first set out in March 2000 by then-Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. During the course of negotiations on the Bougainville Peace Agreement, Downer announced that Australia would ‘accept any settlement negotiated by the parties’.

Downer never made any secret of the fact that Australia’s preference was for Bougainville to remain part of Papua New Guinea. Even so, his March 2000 announcement was seen—particularly on Bougainville—as a significant change in Australian government policy because it meant, in theory at least, that Australia was open to any negotiated outcome, including independence. Previously, during the course of the Bougainville crisis from 1988 onwards, Australia’s position had been that Bougainville was an integral part of Papua New Guinea; that position was part of the reason for strong anti-Australian sentiment among pro-independence leaders on Bougainville.

The perception of a significant policy change was reinforced by Downer’s role, later in 2000, in helping to broker the crucial ‘delayed referendum’ provisions of the Bougainville Peace Agreement (BPA). These provide for an independence referendum 10 to 15 years after the election of a Bougainville government (as it subsequently turned out, this means June 2015–June 2020), plus a requirement for the outcome to be ratified by the PNG Parliament. Downer argued that this outcome gave reassurance to both sides: for pro-independence Bougainvilleans a successful referendum, although non-binding, would have irresistible moral force among the international community; for the PNG government, at the same time, sovereignty would ultimately be preserved by giving the PNG Parliament the final say.

The BPA has a strong legal foundation. Its terms were enshrined in law through an amendment to the PNG Constitution (Article XIV). Furthermore, no amendments to that part of the Constitution can be passed unless also approved by a two-thirds majority in the Bougainville legislature. On the timing of the referendum, the language included in Article XIV is unequivocal:

The Referendum shall be held … not earlier than 10 years and, notwithstanding any other provision [emphasis added], not more than 15 years after the election of the first Bougainville Government.

Australia took as a given that PNG governments of any stripe would want Bougainville to remain part of Papua New Guinea—and that they would (and should) take advantage of the delay in the timing of the referendum to convince Bougainvilleans of the benefits of autonomy over independence.

Whatever Papua New Guinea’s efforts over the years since the BPA was signed, most informed observers would now take the view that majority Bougainvillean opinion remains firmly pro-independence, even if differences exist on the question of how ready Bougainville is for independence and therefore on the best timing for this.

Campaigning for the May 2015 elections in Bougainville was conducted explicitly on the grounds that the incoming government (which has a five year term) would be the one to negotiate the exact timing of the referendum. All presidential candidates, including the winner, John Momis, were pro-independence in outlook.

The PNG government hasn’t publicly walked away from the BPA; on the contrary, it continues to assert its commitment to it. The communiques from successive PNG–Australia Ministerial Forums continue to include routine (perhaps by now ritual) affirmations of the PNG government’s ‘ongoing commitment to the full implementation of the Bougainville Peace Agreement’.

It would be prudent at least to contemplate ways in which all this could go wrong. Papua New Guinea’s reaction to the May 2015 budget announcement that an Australian consulate would be established in Buka suggested that Australia had touched a raw nerve in Waigani, and gave a valuable insight into the importance and sensitivity of this issue for the O’Neill government. Certainly, the Port Moresby rumour mill increasingly suggests that Prime Minister O’Neill is giving serious thought as to how Papua New Guinea can preserve its interests in Bougainville in the long term.

Many on Bougainville fear that the PNG government will find a way to prevent the referendum from going ahead at all. So it’s at least possible that Bougainville and Waigani may be on a collision course. In a second post I will look at the implications of any such collision for Australian policy.

While the nation’s attention is on the difficult operation being undertaken by Australian Federal Police officers in the Ukraine, it’s worth reflecting on the other major international missions that our police are performing overseas today.

Those missions usually bubble along without much attention—which is good in a way, but the work deserves more than that.

Karl Claxton and I have recently spent two weeks with such a mission in Papua New Guinea. Around 50 additional AFP officers from the International Deployment Group were deployed here late last year, and they’re now working in front-line policing positions with their counterparts in the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary (RPNGC) as advisors, mentors and planners. Read more

I’m grateful to Peter Jennings and Karl Claxton for providing a superb example of the Phase Zero planning in their proposal for Bougainville. Their nine-point recommendation incorporates many of the features of a good Phase Zero plan, especially its paramount aim of forestalling the subsequent phases of a(nother) military intervention. In return, I’d like to respond to their appeal for ideas to help the process.

As Peter and Karl stress, one reason for attempting such a scheme is to save Australia the expense of another peacekeeping effort: spend now to avoid higher costs and risks later. But Bougainville’s mineral wealth offers an opportunity to save some money in the short term as well, by engaging mining interests creatively to fund at least one of their proposals.

Paradoxically, mineral extraction from the fabulous Panguna copper, gold and silver deposit was the catalyst for Bougainville’s troubles going back to 1989. Recognising this, some utopian voices have advocated excluding the mine from Bougainville’s economic future lest the same problems recur. And as Joanne Wallis and others point out, the Autonomous Bougainville Government has achieved some gains with limited resources that don’t include mining revenues. But a good slice of the funds it does have are from sources such as Australian aid that can’t (and shouldn’t) be guaranteed indefinitely. And we shouldn’t forget the economic benefits that Bougainville enjoyed pre-1989 from only a portion of the mine’s revenues. It’d be a tragedy to deny Bougainvilleans these benefits into the future for want of creative solutions to the old problems. As Dame Carol Kidu has said, it’s possible to learn from the past. Read more