Qualla: Buin, Papua New Guinea

Buin, Papua New Guinea: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Masalai, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 18 April 1943, a Mitsubishi G4M bomber - Allied codename "Betty" - was on final approach to the Japanese airbase at Buin when a flight of American P-38 Lightnings climbed out of nowhere and tore it apart. The bomber's passenger was Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy, architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, on a morale tour of forward bases. Decoded radio signals had given the Americans his itinerary; the P-38s had flown up from Guadalcanal to meet him. The Betty came down in the jungle just north of where the town of Buin now stands. A man who had shaped the war he was losing ended up in the canopy of a place most Americans would struggle to find on a map.

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Image: Masalai | CC BY-SA 3.0

Buin, Papua New Guinea: Before Yamamoto

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Masalai, CC BY 3.0. Buin before the war was not even a town, exactly. It was a sea-landing on the south coast, a handful of buildings, and a few Chinese trade stores run by one family that had arrived during the German era and would hold on through five sovereignties. German New Guinea administered ...

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Image: Masalai | CC BY 3.0

Buin, Papua New Guinea: Airbase and Target

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Masalai, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Japanese built two airstrips on southern Bougainville - one at Kahili, one at the site that would later become the postwar Buin. Together with Rabaul to the west, these bases gave Japanese airpower reach down the Solomon chain and threatened the Allied supply line to Australi...

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Image: Masalai | CC BY-SA 3.0

Buin, Papua New Guinea: A Town the Government Built

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Masalai, Public domain. After the war, Australian administrators moved Buin inland to a new site a few miles from the old coastal landing. It grew slowly at first. Then in 1972 the Panguna copper mine opened in the mountains to the north, and for the next seventeen years Bougainville Copper Limited gene...

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Image: Masalai | Public domain

Buin, Papua New Guinea: The Civil War

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE, CC BY-SA 2.0. The wealth from Panguna flowed outward; the environmental damage stayed home. Landowners had been inadequately compensated, their rivers poisoned with tailings, their sacred sites leveled. In 1988 a former mine surveyor named Francis Ona led an uprising that shut the mine down an...

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Image: Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE | CC BY-SA 2.0

Buin, Papua New Guinea: What Remains

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Masalai, CC BY-SA 3.0. Walk through Buin today and the Saturday market is still there. So is the Roman Catholic parish and the United Church, institutions that arrived in the German era and outlasted three empires. Buin High School still teaches students from across Bougainville and Buka. On beaches so...

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Image: Masalai | CC BY-SA 3.0