Papua New Guinea was seen by men and women alike as a ‘man's country’. Nevertheless there were 670 white women in Papua in 1921, almost 2000 white women in the country in 1933, and over 10 000 white women had lived in the Territory by the eve of Australian withdrawal in 1975. The great majority of women went to the Territory because jobs took their husbands there, although more single women came after the 1950s as teachers, nurses and other government workers. ‘Defined in terms of her relationships with various other people the white woman was overwhelmingly the wife, mother and missus.’ Helen McLeod, the wife of a District Officer between 1948 and 1958 says ‘In colonial administration a wife is married to her husband who is married to his job’. Even so, wives' experiences in the Territory were not a replica of their husbands' experiences. Wives had different concerns—household management, motherhood—and different perspectives. In contrast with their husbands, they were more often partially disinterested bystanders and more likely to work with or at least talk to indigenous women. A number of women also went to Papua New Guinea unaccompanied by husbands, mainly as missionaries, but also as nurses, teachers, clerical and administrative workers.

Helen Callaway notes that women figure not at all in official memoirs, or appear anonymously as ‘my wife’ or ‘the wife of’. Papua New Guinea, too, has its official history, stitched together from government archives and the memoirs and biographies of administrators, male missionaries and planters.