Philip Fitzpatrick

Fighting for a Voice Philip Fitzpatrick

For most Australians Papua New Guinea is a mysterious place somewhere north of Cape York and roughly between Bali in Indonesia and the resorts in Fiji, Vanuatu and New Caledonia in the South Pacific. As a place it sits at the bottom of their consciousness. Papua New Guineans, on the other hand, know a lot about Australia. Many of their goods and media come from there and the big companies exploiting their resources are often Australian. There are, however, a small band of Australians who worked or served in Papua New Guinea before independence in 1975. For these people it sits permanently and warmly in their memory and consciousness. For them and for many Papua New Guineans it is an enduring mystery why the two nations, so physically close together and with a shared history, don't have a much stronger relationship. That relationship is the focus of this short history. It details the attempts by some of those Australians and Papua New Guineans to broaden and expand the relationship. It is still a work in progress but the story of PNG Attitude and the Crocodile Prize points to what is possible when the right people get together to make things happen.