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In search of the South Pacific fugitive who crowned himself king by Sean Williams.

Read by Simon Darwin.

One autumn morning, I boarded a plane from Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, to Bucca, the capital of the autonomous region of Bougainville.

A collection of islands and atolls the size of Puerto Rico.

Bougainville is located 600 miles east of Moresby across the Solomon Sea.

Its southern shore is just three miles from the politically independent Solomon Islands,

and its people share a culture, linguistic links and dark skin tone with their Solomon neighbours.

But thanks mostly to European colonizers, who drew the borders,

Bougainville is the farthest flung province of Papua New Guinea,

whose lighter-toned inhabitants Bougainvillians often call redskins,

betraying a sense of otherness in their own country that partly explains why I am writing about them here.

I say partly, because if not for the islands having fought a bitter, decade-long war against the Australia-backed Papua New Guinea,

which remarkably they won, and demanding Papua New Guinea allow Bougainville's

independence by 27, the story I'm about to tell would likely never have happened.

In October 2023, I booked a trip to Booker to report on these developments, budgeting some

days at the end to interview leaders of the

autonomous Bougainville government, ABG, the formal authority that expects to secure self-rule

for its people. But over the previous months, I had become transfixed instead by the strange

tale of Noah Musinku.

...