In Julius Chan’s case the big event was the Sandline Affair, the planned but aborted use of external para-military forces to curtail the operations of the Bougainville rebels.

Chan is quite open about his involvement and how the saga developed and it is easy to appreciate his point of view, which he still resolutely maintains was the right way to go.

In that affair and in the other aspects of his several times as prime minister what comes across is his frequent sense of not being completely in control of what was going on in government, particularly when he was being undermined by his colleagues.

What is much more interesting is the man himself. He had a healthy ego, a prerequisite for any politician but that seems to have waned and what we get is an honest self-appraisal.

His father was Chinese, industrious and strict, and his mother was a New Irelander, gentle and laid back. In short, he was one of those people who sat across two cultures, a hapkas [mixed race], looked down upon by Europeans and Chinese and often disliked by Papua New Guineans.

To his credit Chan sat across those cultures very comfortably, taking what he could from both and remaining on good terms with everyone. He also fitted comfortably into European society and took what he could from there too.

He was, and still is, hardworking and honest. That’s a rare thing for anyone in public office in Papua New Guinea today.

As governor of New Ireland he is doing good work. You don’t have to take his word for it, if you go there it’s very apparent.

As he says: “… I have focussed myself very strongly on ensuring free education. I have introduced a whole new range of initiatives so we now have an old age pension and a pension for the disabled in our community.

"We have introduced a series of human, imaginative policies that make life a lot better and fairer for everybody. My role now is to lead the people from their neglected way of life to a more promising future”.

Like Gary Juffa in Oro Province, he inherited a mess when he became governor.

The memoir is also a good potted history of Papua New Guinea since independence. He puts the beginning of Papua New Guinea’s downhill slide fairly in the lap of Bill Skate.

“The general leadership took a different course when Skate took over. Where they should have been concentrating more on the policies of building a nation and reviewing their platforms, they began to concentrate on other areas to build up their personal wealth.

"When money came into play, greed soon followed. The politics of money began to take over and many people contributed to it.”

While he is now happy to concentrate on his home province he still has plenty of ideas about Papua New Guinea’s future. But he’s not optimistic.

One of the things he is passionate about is the reform of resource ownership. He champions an equitable split of the benefits of resource development between the land owners and the national, provincial and local governments.

His rationale is simple. He believes that “… if the money comes to the government in Port Moresby it is misappropriated and corruptly abused anyway. Why not give it to the people?

"More importantly than that, I believe in the economic philosophy that the wealth of the nation must be in the hands of the people. Once the people are well off, they have greater capacity and self-reliance … they do not have to come and beg their government to do things for them."

His son Byron, taking the lead from his father, tried to amend the Mining Act to make this happen but the Bill never got up.

Julius Chan is getting old now, he’ll be 77 in August, and he has become reflective. He remembers the good times when elections, for instance, meant something.

“Organising the elections was a simple process. Everybody was honest in those days; they were fair elections and no one was throwing money around.… The districts were administered very efficiently and professionally by patrol officers.”

It’s a bit like his memory of playing rugby. He was never very big but he was good at it. The reason, he says, was because “the teams in those days were organised to weight – they had more brains at that time – and I was in the seven stone (45 kilogram) team for two years.”

That kind of intelligence seems to be what is missing in Papua New Guinean politics today – not to mention modern day football. The thing that allows Little Men, not Big Men, to make an impression.

Playing the Game is easy to read and very informative. I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in Papua New Guinea, especially its relationship with Australia.

This is an important book.