From Port Moresby’s founding early last century — when it was little more than a dozen corrugated iron shacks, a tennis court and McCrann’s tin-shed tavern — to the sprawling city it is today, Papua New Guinea’s capital has always been a place of intrigue and melodrama, its novelistic cast of characters drawn from near and far. Nowadays, the largest city in the Pacific Islands is the setting for a much larger plotline, a new cold war tussle between China and the United States for presence, influence and the favour of a local political elite enjoying its moment in the sun. Australia is paying ever more attention to its former possession, too, as are French energy company executives.
International relations can seem ordered and manicured on the surface, but the reality is much more provisional and blurry. In Papua New Guinea’s case, as in the days of old, much of the story seems to be playing out in bars and restaurants that attract as many fortune-hunters, do-gooders and assorted flotsam as ever.
McCrann’s — a place where the government secretary could most reliably be located “beautifully tight by four o’clock” and a sign warned patrons not to sleep on the billiard table with their spurs on — is long gone. All we know is that it was somewhere “in town,” as the locals call the city’s original site around the fringes of Fairfax Harbour. Fairfax was the first name of the father of navigator John Moresby, who surveyed the area in 1871 and whose memory is also preserved in the name of a challenging “premium” whiskey.
It’s overlooking the harbour, in the stylish Edge by the Sea restaurant, that I begin my tour of this central setting in the Pacific’s great game. Nestled inside one of Moresby’s many gated communities, the Edge is separated by a channel of brackish water from the Royal Papua New Guinea Yacht Club, where I can see expats jogging around inside the fence. A tasty modern Australian-style place, the Edge offers excellent coffee and even more exemplary people-watching. It’s a mostly expat scene, with just a few breakfasting members of the PNG elite — the occasional member of parliament, the head of the revenue service, one or two bankers.
Most people taking breakfast here are the worker bees in the new great game. Most identifiable are the uniformed, barrel-chested Australian police officers gathered together in conversation. Australia has been throwing money at their counterparts in the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary for decades, providing so much training that the force must constitute the best-instructed in the world. Well-equipped too: Canberra has financed everything from jet skis to a swimming pool.
Is all that time and money working? If it were a business, there’s an argument that this police-reform effort should have been closed years ago. Port Moresby remains a city too dangerous for most to navigate on foot, which explains why the joggers are behind the Yacht Club fence. Things became even worse in January when local police downed tools after a computer glitch cut their pay, precipitating a day-long riot in which at least twenty people died and businesses lost hundreds of millions in orgiastic looting.
But creating an effective Papua New Guinean force is not Australia’s sole objective here. The Australian police presence is as much about geopolitical shadowboxing and currying favour with elites to try to ensure that China doesn’t get too much of a foothold. Every time a PNG government minister utters an oracular hint that Chinese policing support is being considered, Australia promises more kit and kaboodle. The Aussie cops are in no hurry to finish their coffees. Why would they be?
In more of a hurry should be the huddle of French-speaking men — Port Moresby’s expat scene is very male — asking the waiting staff to ferry them more espresso. These will likely be men from the French energy company, Total, managing the Papua LNG project that is planned to extract and pipe gas from the riverine swamps of the Purari delta, a place that has attracted speculators ever since the days of the steamship. Estimated to cost US$10 billion, it’s the second in a line of mega-projects touted to reap almost unimaginable fiscal windfalls when it comes on line. Or perhaps that should be if it comes on line. The project has been delayed many times; the final decision on whether it will go ahead is due next year.
While these projects are spruiked as game-changers by PNG leaders, they seldom deliver transformational benefits. As the World Bank commented in a no-nonsense review of its in-country programs over the past fifteen years, “Papua New Guinea has abundant natural resource wealth, but this wealth has not translated into welfare gains for most citizens… [T]hree-quarters of the population live in multidimensional poverty.”
Most of the people at the Edge are ostensibly engaged in trying to turn around that bleak statistic. Close by is the office of a major contractor implementing parts of the Australian aid program, home to advisers who work out of government offices and project managers who oversee construction of schools and develop plans focused on goals like gender, disability and social inclusion.
This is tough work. Because it’s paramount for Australia to maintain good relations with the PNG government, contractors are under unyielding pressure to deliver results and work in an environment where it is made clear they should remain silent about the challenges of doing so.
I know this world well, having worked in it for years on and off as an adviser in various government offices and as a jobbing consultant writing interminably dull technical reports that always had to outline “progress.” The work is good for generating hangdog tales and replete with gallows humour, but it is also unsatisfying and intellectually demanding in its own perverse way.
There’s a quasi-research pretence to all the reporting, but little academic sensibility. Drafts are handed up to junior diplomats who comb through them for anything they deem to be transgressing “sensitivities.” Personal contracts are precarious. A friend of mine has likened the profession to being laden with all the precarity, unequal power dynamics and ennui of a Joseph Conrad novel.
As an example of what a small world it is, I am on at least nodding terms with many of the people at the Edge this morning. The shorthand for people who work in the Pacific is misfits, missionaries and mercenaries but there is only the most partial truth to this. Dropkicks, booze hounds and egomaniacs are there as well, as they are in any profession, but the vast majority are trying their best.
A veteran of the contracting scene is sitting at a nearby table finishing a milky coffee. Ashley (who asks to be pseudonymised because candid observations in this cramped world are not a shrewd career move) is one of the many unsung heroes of the aid program in Papua New Guinea. An unshowy, adroit and empathetic operator, Ashley has been doing this work for years, covering everything from drafting letters to taking minutes to writing speeches about local ownership for government ministers to ventriloquise.
Is the increased geopolitical attention making things more difficult? Many of Ashley’s counterparts are being courted by phalanxes of diplomats offering new programs and new opportunities for travel to Australia, China or the United States (and even less time at their desks). This is doing more harm than good, says Ashley emphatically. “What we have seen is an increase in donor competition to be seen to be doing. That has led, in many cases, to duplication. And this contributes to a drain of an already fragile system.” Despite the years of support thus far, “there is a very little absorptive capacity.”
Incapable of drinking any more coffee, I return to my car aiming to visit some of the sites of the new great game. As I do I’m reminded that Port Moresby is pocked with the imprints of efforts past and the once-important but now largely forgotten people who tried to make them.
Just outside the gates of the complex that houses the Edge is the Hubert Murray stadium, named after the man who ran the territory for Australia for more than thirty years from 1907 until his death in 1940. His name is everywhere in Port Moresby: on a highway named in his honour, on an army barracks and on the international school where diplomats and the elite send their children, although details of his tenure aren’t on any curriculum. His name may be resonant but his record is fading from view.
An Oxford boxing blue and Boer War veteran, Murray took a vow of temperance in his early twenties after besting someone in a brawl in a Sydney street. Upholding the pledge was no mean feat anywhere, but especially in a place like this that was filled with an inordinate number of old soaks. A prodigious writer, he left behind an extensive collection of papers that, in ascending order of readability, consisted of government reports, books and the candid letters that he wrote to his brother Gilbert, who was a founder of the League of Nations.
Murray’s most poignant letters reveal that he was lonely, stuck in a role that he didn’t want to give up because he feared he had nowhere else to go to: a plight shared by at least some of the people at the Edge. His principal sources of anguish were the changing whims and interests of Australian politicians and the attitudes of fellow bureaucrats who bore bitter grudges against him for reasons based entirely on personality differences exacerbated by proximity.
The letters also show how today’s geopolitical moment has its antecedents. Murray began his career fretting about the Germans taking over the territory and died worrying about the Japanese. Japan did indeed invade, only to be repelled by Australians, Americans and Papua New Guineans recruited to the Allies’ cause. The irony that Japan was once an enemy and is now the English-speaking world’s staunchest friend in the Pacific is seldom remarked on.
Just past the stadium is a brown plinth with the bird of paradise atop a spear and drum — the symbols of the Independent State of Papua New Guinea — along with space for two official portraits. Prime minister James Marape is on the left and a picture of whichever dignitary has visited most recently is on the right. It’s a constantly changing picture, for Papua New Guinea’s leader is constantly being courted by world powers. Over the past two years the leaders of India, New Zealand and France have come to pay him a visit. US president Joe Biden was meant to come too, but had to cancel at the last minute because of political ructions back in Washington; his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, came in his stead to sign a defence cooperation treaty. The Chinese foreign minister has visited too.
Australia keeps a close watch. In April, Anthony Albanese came north, hiking part of the Kokoda track with Marape, both to get additional facetime and, as one diplomat told me in this city of sotto voce asides, in the hope that poor phone reception would stop the Chinese from sending Marape WhatsApp messages. Each country’s flattery is designed to convince Papua New Guinea’s politicians to be in “their camp,” but much more benefit accrues to the MPs from artful hedging.
Marape has been prime minister for nearly five years now. He is a Sabbath-observing Seventh Day Adventist whose stated aspiration is to make his country the world’s “richest Black Christian nation.” Australia seems to like him, bestowing on his government at least a billion dollars in soft loans so far, as well as high-blown sobriquets. Pacific and international development minister Pat Conroy went as far as comparing Marape to Nelson Mandela when he proposed a national team to participate in Australia’s NRL, an idea that struck Australia so forcefully that it will foot the entire bill.
How long Marape continues in the top spot is dependent on his ability to command a parliamentary majority. This is easier said than done. Many MPs are inveterate political philanderers, happily allowing themselves to be enticed by economic benefits from one suitor to another.
Having assembled his own majority to oust his predecessor Peter O’Neill, Marape is familiar with the arithmetical ruthlessness of PNG politics. What was done unto others, others are now trying to do unto him. Periodically his opponents convene a “camp” in a Moresby hotel, which serves as both a show of strength and a means to entice MPs away from Marape’s coalition. The opposition camp is known as the Crown Camp, named for a hotel in the centre of the old town in which they assemble to plot and develop policy. Peter O’Neill, still an MP, is a vigorous member.
Marape has his own camp, at the more swish Loloata Island resort; a snap of Marape there with a Chinese embassy staff member in the background was forwarded endlessly around on WhatsApp.
My drop-in at the Crown comes just a few days after the last camp broke up, the campaign to eject Marape having ended in almost tragi-comic circumstances. Efforts to force a vote failed because the speaker of parliament ruled that opposition had failed to ensure the correct number of signatures on the relevant parliamentary motion.
I used to spend time in the Crown twenty years ago when it was the old Crowne Plaza — it was one of the few hotels in Port Moresby to have a reliable internet café — but I haven’t been back for a while. But I hear that it still has excellent food, especially at its Sunday afternoon curry buffet.
The new owners don’t seem to have changed much about the place apart from lopping off the silent “e.” The entrance is still a brilliant-white marble effect, with two vertically erect wooden facemasks standing guard. A staircase leads up to a dimly lit, carpeted bar in which I encountered one pot-bellied Papua New Guinean in a Broncos shirt drinking an early morning eye opener and reading the paper. Restocking the fridge is a distinguished man whose dress shirt and black trousers make him resemble a major-domo at an imperial house. We could all have been from the time of Murray.
While less busy this day than the Edge, what goes on at the Crown is probably more representative of how politics and governance gets done in the PNG capital. The “camps” are worthy of anthropological enquiry, and with the ubiquity of jerky smartphone footage circulated via social media and WhatsApp, one can almost feel transported here, and to Loloata, when they are occurring. The narrative arc is that members who affect not to have seen each other for a long time give each other extravagant greetings while presiding over solemn press conferences heavy on oratory and lighter on details of how to get Papua New Guinea to get out of the hole it is in.
For the country really does seem to be in a hole. On the bar table, a copy of the Post-Courier, one of the country’s two daily newspapers, gives the details in its reliably breezy style: about how foreign exchange issues were affecting fuel supplies which means planes don’t run reliably, about women being accused of sorcery and tortured medievally, about an earthquake in the highlands province of Enga where thousands of people were feared buried alive. For so many of its citizens Papua New Guinea can be a brutally tough place.
The Post-Courier also contained ample signs of how much Papua New Guinea is being courted these days. Many a page is replete with photos of foreign diplomats opening things, launching a hefty document, speaking at a seminar or handing over equipment swaddled in their national flag. Would any of these activities and gifts influence MPs? This statecraft seemed animated by a different, more legal-rational set of logics than the quest for money, power and title that seems to drive the camps.
I head out, drive down the hill to APEC Haus, a beauteous glass-fronted building with a roof sculpted to resemble the billowing sails of a traditional sailing vessel. Now a conference centre and wedding hall, it was built for the 2018 APEC summit, which attracted a rolodex of world leaders including Chinese president Xi Jinping and US vice-president Mike Pence, whose microphone was memorably cut during his remarks.
As is the norm, leaders came bearing announcements. The most eye-catching was an Australia–New Zealand–Japan–US plan to electrify large parts of Papua New Guinea, a clear geopolitical play to balance Chinese inroads into the sector. This “transparent, non-discriminatory, and environmentally responsible” project would “promote fair and open competition, uphold robust standards, meet the genuine needs of the people of Papua New Guinea, and avoid unsustainable debt burdens,” gushed Scott Morrison.
Nearly seven years later power generation is as bad as ever. A soundtrack to the city is the chug-chug of the generator. The reasons why the “partnership” — in reality, four separate initiatives — floundered are multifold, but at least one important and salutary factor is that the PNG government agency responsible for electricity seems curiously uninterested in doing its job. Analysts have found “chronic crisis” and “general dysfunction.”
Back through town I drive, past supply vessels for oil and gas projects in the harbour, past the Yacht Club and past the new American embassy, a towering testament to Washington’s increased interest in the Pacific’s largest nation. Then I low-gear up the vertiginous hill to the Waigani section of the city where most government offices and embassies are located.
I pull into my hotel, the Holiday Inn, for a bite to eat. I’m so nostalgically fond of the place: in my decade or so of going back, little about it has changed. The club sandwich is reliable, the red wine room temperature and the amount of food being piled onto buffet plates stupendous. It tickles me that there is still a dedicated line item for safari suits on the laundry list. I can almost see the ghosts of encounters past.
The first person I run into is James Tanis, former president of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, a region attempting to break loose from Papua New Guinea. Bougainvilleans voted with near unanimity — 97.7 per cent of votes cast — in a 2019 referendum to secede, yet progress on implementing the result has been glacial. The vote itself was non-binding and Papua New Guinea seems in no hurry to progress the issue.
Tanis is in town to try to develop a job description for a “moderator” to unstick the logjam. Also passing through is a delegation from the region’s Constitutional Planning Commission, charged with developing a new charter for the region upon independence.
Bougainvilleans love the Holiday Inn, or the “Bougainville embassy,” in James’s deadpan expression. They’ve been coming here for nearly a quarter of a century now; it was one of the places they were housed in during the years it took to negotiate the 2001 Peace Agreement.
“It offers simplicity that attracts some of us,” he says, listing such additional benefits as its hospitality, its proximity to government offices and shopping, its flexibility on late payments and the easy access to a spot to enjoy a smoke outside. Frequent stayers also like using the hotel’s rewards points program, and no doubt some of them have high-tier status.
James is telling me he’s confident about the overall direction of the secession process when some young Australian diplomats come over to pay him homage. They are wearing the standard young male diplomat tropics outfit in the tropics: long sleeve shirt with achingly tight trousers narrowing off too early before they reach polished R.M. Williams boots. They shake hands with me without interest and turned their bonhomie squarely onto James.
With the average diplomatic posting being two to three years, James would comfortably be on around his fifteenth cycle of envoys getting to know him and most likely reporting his every prognostication back to Canberra. Officially, Australia is even-keeled on the Bougainville question. Its policy is to support whatever the parties decide. Sometimes, though, Australia’s leaders tell a different story. On separate occasions, Anthony Albanese and Richard Marles have made clear that their money is on Papua New Guinea.
The old Inn seems emptier than it has on previous visits. In an unsentimental city, some of its most reliable guests have peeled away. The development crowd and visiting delegations are now more likely to be found at either the Stanley (which announced recently it would be rebranding as the Sheraton) or the Hilton, which was just up the road.
I’d been to the Hilton the night before. It’s another exemplary people-watching location. As I sought to discern the notes of gooseberry in my sauvignon blanc, I’d typed into my iPhone the scene in front of me: three Indonesian soldiers in uniform watching videos on their phones; conclave meetings involving Asian men and Papua New Guineans; some advisers I used to work with looking well-mottled even in the dim lights; and finely suited politicians who I recognised from photos in the Post-Courier sashaying in and out with a retinue of men carrying a large number of phones. While the camps were having a hiatus, politicking was not.
“Oooh, that’s Sam Basil Jr., I wonder who he’s meeting,” one of my companions cooed, neck craning. Basil’s father, Sam Sr., had been a member of parliament and was deputy prime minister when he died in a car crash the day before nominations in 2022. His son won his seat in his stead. When we spotted him, Jr. was walking purposefully to the sort of open-air balcony perfect for semi-public intriguing to get the attention of diplomatic corps, who also constituted most of the people sitting around.
Back at the Inn, I have a burger for lunch and kick myself that I’d forgot to ask them to leave out the egg (in a sign of Australia’s imprint on so much, burgers come with the default Aussie fixings). Then I drive through the rest of Waigani, past another plinth for pictures of leaders outside the Vision City mega-mall and the Stanley-cum-Sheraton, and towards the heart of Papua New Guinea’s government.
The prime minister’s office is at Sir Manusupe Haus, named for a former leading public servant but more colloquially known (because of its shape) as the Pineapple building. During Port Moresby’s riots in January an angry mob tried to break in past the Pineapple’s gates, which seemed to be fastened together with a tiny padlock. The riots roiled Port Moresby yet no one has mentioned them during my visit or seems to have reflected on what they might have intimated about the state of the public realm.
The most striking feature of this part of the city isn’t the buildings but how many people there are, lolling up and down the streets, hawking everything from betel nut to cotton buds at stop lights. According to the country’s National Research Institute, more than 60 per cent of young people are unemployed. This everyday precarity was a contributing factor to the January riots.
At a roundabout proclaiming “Amazing Port Moresby” I turn left and drive past a giant building being constructed by China. This will be the country’s new Supreme Court. Past the nearby parliament, my plan is to pay a visit to the country’s National Museum, refurbished a few years ago under the Papua New Guinea–Australia Partnership, one of those delightfully opaque appellations that hides the fact that Canberra stumps up all, or most certainly the preponderance, of the money.
The museum is a quite amazing collection of statues, bark cloths, canoes, masks, adzes, headdresses with birds of paradise plumes, axes and statues that reached the ceiling. At least some objects in the collection are on loan from Australia’s Papua collection in Canberra, which was collected by Hubert Murray.
I’m driving to the museum more in hope than expectation. On the last few occasions I tried to visit I found it shut. And so it proves to be this time, too. There’s no power, the caretaker tells me. “Maybe the Australians will pay,” he says. He pauses. “Or the Chinese.” “Why not?” I think. These two countries seem to be paying for almost everything else.
I go to the National Library instead. This was another independence gift from Australia, and the brutalist architectural style reflects its mid-1970s completion. The noticeboards are in red felt, the signage old-fashioned and the building’s interior corners are shrouded in demi-darkness. About half the shelves are filled with books, but this is no easy metaphor for decline or atrophy. This is a functioning, quietly thrumming and well-frequented place, albeit a poorly resourced one.
The PNG collection is cloistered off from the main library in a separate room whose most prominent feature is a collection of forty wooden boxes containing handwritten cards cataloguing the capacious collection. The cards themselves are packed together so tightly there’s no room for my fingers to manoeuvre from one entry to the next. When I find a chink of space in “Ab” a card directs me to articles written by Tony Abbott, among them a thundering piece from 1997 titled “Papua New Guinea at the Crossroads.” The “crossroads” is a favoured trope for outsiders writing about PNG; the country always appears to be on a teetering point but never goes past it, muddling through from one crisis to the next.
I call up a book on the Purari area, where one of those new mega projects is planned. A missionary, J.H. Holmes, wrote of the Purari River that “since my early days upon its waters, it has loomed as the highway to rich dividends in the minds of white man.” It might be my colloquy with the old papers, but I felt drawn, more and more, to the conclusion that the patterning between past and present here is tightly stitched.
Also lodged in the 1970s is my last stop-off, the South Pacific Motor Sports Club, which everyone knows by its shorthand, “the Car Club.” The Car Club is a hidden gem, accessible only if you happen to be fortunate enough to know a member. Bedecked in the green-and-yellow logo of SP Lager, filled with happy, mostly Papua New Guinean patrons, the club consists of a series of large wooden tables and the beer comes in a choice of draft glass, jug and “tower,” a large dispenser that looks like it should contain bubble-gum balls. Only the most death-or-glory sorts should consider scaling such a challenge.
I stick to a glass and catch up with old friends who, while they would count as middle class, aren’t finding it easy in a city where costs are on a par with Australia and wages most assuredly are not. Like almost everyone else up here, they are avid students of rugby league. They’re also the sort of people Australia wants to influence. Yet they seemed flat about the idea of a local team. It was already expensive enough to go rugby league matches, and having an NRL team would surely jack the price higher still. And had I heard about the lavish compound? Apparently $100 million had been allocated to build one for the players and their families. Madness, they concluded.
It’s twilight when I drive back to my hotel. Waiting at an intersection I buy a USB cable from a young man with deadened eyes wending his way through the traffic. I nervously roll down my window just enough to hand over my cash. This is a city still far too dangerous to have car windows down as a matter of course. I look at the young man as he moves from car to car, scurrying to the traffic island just a second before the lights change. He would have seen many motorcades swoosh by over the last years, and he had the look of a person still waiting for all the attention to trickle down. •
This week James Marape survived his fifth vote of no-confidence, 75–32, and remains prime minister of Papua New Guinea.
