Patrick Nomos | 19/04/2026
The social and personal cost to local women on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea (PNG), and their children born as a result of liaisons with West Papuan refugees in the 1970s and asylum-seekers in recent times is well documented. However, the fate of children born to local women during the deployment to Manus Island of almost one million American troops on their way to the Philippines and 3,000 Japanese troops during World War II is only the subject of unsubstantiated rumours.
Manus Island achieved international notoriety in recent years due to an agreement between the Australian and PNG Governments to process the claims of asylum seekers intercepted at sea. Under this agreement, prospective asylum seekers were detained at the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre (Manus Island RPC) that was established in 2001 as part of Australia’s “Pacific Solution”. Since offshore processing of asylum-seekers’ claims began on 13 August 2012, the Australian Government has sent over 4,000 people to PNG or the island State of Nauru, the other offshore processing location in the “Pacific Solution”. According to the Refugee Council of Australia, by far the largest number of people sent to PNG and Nauru were from Iran while the second-largest group of people are stateless. There were also significant numbers of people from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.
Several of the asylum-seekers detained on Manus and local women started relationships as early as 2015, with some children born shortly after. When the Manus Island RPC was forcibly closed on 31/10/2017, the remaining 690 asylum-seekers were relocated to the main town of Lorengau where many of them formed relationships with local women, either fleeting or long-term, resulting in the birth of at least 40 children by early 2019.
The outlook for these children looks very problematic. Because Manus has a patrilineal society, access to land for food gardens and housing is passed down through the male line. Since the children’s fathers are foreigners, these children will be denied access to land where they can settle. Additionally, many of those fathers that have been returned to their home countries because their asylum claims were not accepted or resettled in other countries such as America, have been unable or unwilling to take their PNG partners and children with them.
Perhaps most worryingly, bureaucratic inaction by the PNG Immigration and Citizenship Service Authority (PNG ICSA) has resulted in ongoing difficulties in obtaining birth certificates for these children. Without a birth certificate the children of refugees or asylum-seekers face the risk of statelessness, as they lack birth certificates to prove they were born and registered in PNG. This could expose them to the denial of a range of social, civil and political rights.
These children’s predicament is not an isolated case. Fifty years ago, a similar situation arose in Australia’s first Manus Island camp, the Salasia Camp near Lorengau, for refugees fleeing the conflict in the Indonesian province of West Papua. In some cases, children of local women and West Papuan refugees who were processed in this camp have waited decades to receive birth certificates and PNG citizenship, despite the PNG ICSA’s claim in The Guardian on 13/12/2018 that since 2014 it has registered and granted citizenship to more than 3,000 children of West Papuan refugees.
Thirty years before the arrival of the West Papuan refugees on Manus Island, World War II precipitated a massive influx of Japanese and American servicemen to the island. The book, “Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific”*, explores the intimate relationships that existed between untold numbers of caucasian and African-American servicemen, and indigenous women during the war in the South Pacific and considers the fate of the estimated 4,000 mixed-race children born as a result of those relationships. These liaisons developed in all of the major American bases of the South Pacific Command, but because the book’s scope doesn’t include PNG, we can only speculate on the various forms of sexual liaisons and intimacies, including rape, and the consequent birth of many children, that occurred on Manus Island from 1942-1945. Given the inflexibly patrilineal society into which these children were born, it’s doubtful that they were well accepted by their respective communities.
*Bennett, J., & Wanhalla, A. (Eds.). (2016). Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific: The Children of Indigenous Women and U.S. Servicemen, World War II. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.