Dear Garrett, Thank you for your email and willingness to share your interesting story and comments!

They provide an insightful perspective into the customs of the area. I am still in the process of collecting information from people and researchers who have visited Bougainville, and hopefully their comments will help me figuring out whether this makes a good case for my thesis. Should I find solid information, I might arrange a fieldwork in Bougainville, which would be most exciting.

Keith, thanks again for your post on PNG Attitude, it means a lot to me!

My personal experience with Papua New Guineans was that they were generally polite and good humoured, tolerating the mostly good but occasionally inconsiderate behaviours of a very young and inexperienced kiap.

I rarely felt other than quite safe amongst Papua New Guineans, even those who were still living a traditional lifestyle and so were habitually armed to the teeth. I almost never carried weapons although my patrol police did.

Even the notoriously hot tempered and violent Kukukuku people living in the mountains north of Kerema in the Gulf Province treated me with a surprising degree of patience and indulgence. They were very kind to me when I became extremely sick with malaria.

That said, traditional Papua New Guineans were of a rather mercurial temperament and could be stirred up to commit acts of great violence.

Amongst kiaps, it was commonly agreed that most of the violence in PNG could be put down to disputes over land, pigs and women, in that order.

Payback killings were and apparently remain a real problem in PNG. Efforts to terminate tribal fighting invariably revolved around the payment of appropriate compensation to the aggrieved parties.

This could often work but some intractable conflicts did not appear capable of permanent resolution.

It needs to be understood that in traditional PNG societies strangers were regarded with undisguised suspicion.

Until proven otherwise, such people were deemed to be an actual or potential threat, so a wise stranger would go to elaborate efforts to indicate that he or she was of entirely peaceful intent.

It was a very unwise person indeed who knowingly intruded onto someone else's tribal lands without first securing permission to do so.

Proper social etiquette required the securing of such permission and flouting convention could have literally fatal consequences.

The context for this is that land, gardens and domestic animals were essential for both survival and for participation in the various rituals of life associated with things like coming-of-age ceremonies, marriage and death.

Anything that even looked like threatening such things such as stealing food or animals or assaulting young women would provoke a savage response.

On the other hand, known neighbours or trading partners with whom there were well established relationships, and especially relatives, could expect to be received courteously and freely offered hospitality.

There was more or less constant usually low-level conflict within and between traditional PNG societies because, people being people, you could rely upon someone doing the wrong thing. In that sense, Papua New Guineans were and are no different to anyone else.

The current Russo-Ukraine war is merely an example of these same forces at work, albeit on an industrial scale. The Bougainville Civil War was sparked by a complex mix of issues the most obvious of which was the struggle over the Panguna mine.

Bill Brown's eloquent dissertation of this latter issue neatly illustrates how a combination of greed, ignorance, stupidity and callous indifference to the needs and wishes of people dismissed as 'the natives' conspired to create a social time bomb that would inevitably explode.

The consequences of this are still reverberating today.

So, PNG societies were and presumably remain much like all other human societies when it comes to things like the desire for revenge or the offering of hospitality. Both responses are contextual in nature.

In the absence of the effective rule of law, which seems to be evident in many parts of PNG, then people will resort to their traditional behaviours when it comes to revenge. This is desperately sad, but it does not make them less human as a consequence.

As kiaps, we strove long and hard to impose the rule of law in PNG. This included an understanding that the people needed to have confidence that the law would be imposed fairly and impartially, and that criminal conduct would be punished.

This is one of the critical aspects of the implied 'contract' between the people and those who seek to govern them.

In the absence of such a contract, people will naturally resort to the social contract that prevailed in traditional societies, where both open-handed hospitality and revenge killings were part and parcel of everyday life.

Last night on the ABC's 'Nightlife' radio program (hosted by Philip Clark), the travel segment concerned tourism on Bougainville.

A chap who has just been there with a tour operator told of his experiences. It was quite fascinating. They flew into Buka from POM and then drove all the way to Buin on (understandably) dreadful 'roads'.

He even visited Yamamoto's aircraft wreck in the south and walked 6kms into the bush to get to it. He claimed the aircraft is still visible with wings, fuselage etc.

He also attended an 'Upe initiation' which was a most interesting tale.

From the sound of the whole travel story, Bougainville is in hugely bad shape, financially and infrastructure-wise. In passing, he visited Panguna and it's still a big hole in the ground. You can listen back to the whole piece on the ABC website.