Qualla: New Hanover Island

New Hanover Island: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1964, during the first election ever held in what was then the Australian-administered Territory of Papua and New Guinea, selected leaders on New Hanover Island declined to fill in their ballots. Instead they wrote on boards: 'We Vote for President Johnson of America.' Men who refused to pay the taxes that followed ended up in jail in Kavieng. Supporters collected about a thousand Australian dollars to mail to Washington to cover Lyndon Johnson's travel expenses to come and take office. The episode became known as the Johnson Cult, and the name stuck even though, as one of the anthropologists who studied it insisted, cult may be exactly the wrong word.

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New Hanover Island: Lavongai First

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The people who have lived on this island for many generations call it Lavongai, or Lovongai. New Hanover was a name laid on the chart by European navigators - a royal-house flourish that said little about the place itself. Lavongai covers about 460 square miles of volcanic land, ...

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New Hanover Island: The Arrival of the Surveyors

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Johnson Cult had an ordinary beginning. Two United States Army surveyors came to Lavongai during what was, for Papua and New Guinea, a relatively uneventful mid-century moment. The surveyors mentioned their president. Lyndon Johnson, the man who had inherited the Kennedy admi...

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New Hanover Island: What Dorothy Billings Saw

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The anthropologist Dorothy Billings lived on Lavongai and studied what happened there through the 1960s and 1970s. She came to reject the framing that had dominated outsider accounts. Cargo cults, by that point, were a category Western anthropology had created to describe Melanes...

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New Hanover Island: Taxes, Jail, and a Thousand Dollars

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The aftermath played out in ways the authorities had not planned for. Men refused to pay their head taxes. Kavieng, the capital of New Ireland Province on the larger island to the south, filled its jail with Lavongai refusers who served short sentences and went home. The thousand...

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New Hanover Island: An Island on Its Own Terms

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Papua New Guinea became independent in 1975, over the objections the Johnson leaders had raised a decade earlier. Lavongai adjusted, as it had adjusted to German missionaries, Australian officers, and Japanese wartime occupation before. The inland forests are still deep. The coas...

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