What does Papua New Guinea look like when viewed both from a village marketplace and from a Canberra briefing room?
In A Complicated Inheritance, Sean Jacobs brings together more than a decade of writing on Papua New Guinea shaped not by a single discipline, but by movement across worlds. From living in Port Moresby’s settlements and travelling through remote provinces, to advising at the highest levels of Australian government, Jacobs offers a rare perspective that blends lived experience with strategic analysis.
These essays refuse to stay neatly “in lane”. They examine PNG’s everyday challenges, from its infrastructure to its policing, through to the geopolitical forces now pressing on Australia’s nearest neighbour. Jacobs writes with optimism about PNG’s creativity and resilience, while remaining unsparing on the failures of ownership and delivery that have constrained the country’s potential.
Guided by a distinctly conservative worldview, he argues for economic growth, state order, and local responsibility over fashionable abstractions, even when those views cut against prevailing orthodoxies. The result is neither a love letter nor a lament, but an honest reckoning with a nation shaped by promise and contradiction.
PNG, Jacobs suggests, is not just a country to be studied, but one through which all countries can be better understood.
