‘Never a Colony’?: Rethinking the Colonisation of Enga Province, Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This article examines the history of Enga Province, Papua New Guinea, from 1952 to 1975 in order to understand how pre‐colonial governance of the province laid the groundwork for the problems of weak governance that plagued Enga in the independence era. The most appropriate models to understand this issue, the article claims, come not from the comparative study of decolonised states such as those in Africa, but from the European experience of state formation. Drawing on these models, the article makes two arguments. First, that Enga was governed lightly and ineffectively in the colonial period because there was little Australia wanted to extract from Enga. Second, the structural situation remains largely the same today: governance in Enga is weak because there is little incentive for the national government to rule. Using Enga as a synecdoche for Papua New Guinea as a whole, this paper argues that we may best understand governance issues in Papua New Guinea using models and theories that emphasise the historical continuity between the pre‐ and post‐independence governments of the country.