Port Moresby's past runs in three layers: Motu-Koita clans who sailed hiri trade voyages for centuries, a colonial port that became Australia's frontline in 1942, and the young nation born on Independence Hill. Three days, all three layers.
The largest Motu village, built on ironwood posts over the harbour and rebuilt from 1946 after Australian troops burned it in 1942. Elders still recount the hiri voyages that carried clay pots west for sago.
A Motuan settlement whose stilt houses still stand over the reef flat, beside the market that has supplied the town since the 1950s. Reef fish, crayfish and betel change hands the way harbour trade always worked here.
A University of PNG research island in Bootless Bay where excavations from the 1970s uncovered a Motuan pottery-making settlement roughly 800-1,200 years old — shell middens, hearths and kiln debris from the hiri trade.
Pari keeps the lakatoi tradition alive: the multi-hulled, crab-claw-sailed trading canoes that ran the hiri to the Gulf each October. Village crews still build one for the Hiri Moale festival every September.
Around 3,800 Commonwealth graves in terraced lawns, plus the Port Moresby Memorial naming hundreds of men with no known grave. Begun as a wartime burial ground in 1942 and maintained since by the CWGC.
The colonial commercial spine: Burns Philp and Steamships trading houses, wharf-side warehouses and interwar shopfronts that survived the 1942 bombing raids, wedged between Paga Hill and the harbour.
The rock above Town was fortified in 1942 with coastal guns, searchlight posts and tunnels cut by Australian engineers to defend the harbour. Concrete emplacements and tunnel mouths remain on the seaward slope.
On 16 September 1975 the Australian flag came down here and Papua New Guinea's went up, with Michael Somare as first prime minister. The ceremonial ground and flag mast sit on the ridge above the government precinct.
The southern trailhead of the 96km Kokoda Trail, where Australian militia marched north in July 1942. Memorial arch, rusting gun barrels and a view straight into the Owen Stanley Range the campaign was fought across.
The road climbing the Laloki gorge to Sogeri was the supply artery to Kokoda, widened under fire in 1942. The falls plunge beside the old alignment, with the hydro station that later powered the capital below.
Territory of Papua and New Guinea headquarters sat on this waterfront shelf: department offices, staff housing and the administrator's compound. Weatherboard-and-louvre buildings from the 1950s still line the road.
A Motu-Koita village facing Taurama, where wartime American and Australian camps once spread along the bay. Families here trace clan land claims across ground now swallowed by the growing capital.