Defying Predictions: Global Bureaucracy and the Art of not Making Guesses about Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT Papua New Guinea's story of decolonisation has never meshed very well with standard visions of nationalist struggle. Focused exclusively on the coloniser and the colonised, these narratives ignore the role played by post‐war global groups and organisations whose decolonial work has largely been forgotten. In this article, I examine the role of the United Nations Trusteeship Council in pushing Australia and Papua New Guinea towards decolonisation through their bureaucratic demands for particular forms of information flow. Australia responded to these demands for information – in particular demands for target dates for independence – by claiming that the Trust Territory of New Guinea was a space in which it was impossible to make any kind of predictions. Through annual reports and careful stage‐management of UN Trusteeship Council Visiting Missions, Australia presented their own failures of governance to the UN as natural facts of the Territory of New Guinea's geographic and cultural ‘fragmentation’ rather than as a political fact of Australia's own resources and management. This set the stage for the kinds of contemporary discourses of fragmentation and division that are hallmarks of complaints about Papua New Guinea as a failed state.