Time dims even the most vivid memory. Like a well-loved family black-and-white album, the memories of my experiences during an assignment in Bougainville in 1996 are dog-eared, worn and have lost clarity.

After nearly 30 years the timeline has merged with the jumble of other assignments I undertook in the region (the Sandline crisis and an excursion to West Papua to meet the resistance movement over the border). It feels like a monochrome film with the edits all mixed up.

When I visited Bougainville for the first time, the conflict had already been raging for eight years, flaring up and settling down, breaking into factions, cruelty and atrocities, only to flare up again. After Francis Ona, the leader of the Bougainville Republican Army, unilaterally declared independence in May 1990, the Papua New Guinea government imposed a blockade on the island which was enforced using Australian-supplied Iroquois helicopters and Pacific-class patrol boats.

We came across graffiti in abandoned classrooms that showed helicopters firing down on people in the jungle. It was a dirty war with numerous reports of abuses against the Indigenous population and combatants. As one survivor of the crisis told me, “The towns became too dangerous – we just took to the bush and hid.” The blockade meant that everything was in short supply.

Bougainville, a group of islands off Papua New Guinea to the north of Australia, has been variously controlled by Britain, Germany, Japan, Australia and PNG.

It declared independence in 1975 as the Republic of North Solomons, but was absorbed into the newly independent PNG weeks later.

Its close ethnic ties and proximity to........

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