In 1972, however, the Australian colonial administration was at its greatest geographical extent. It was about to hand over powers of internal government to a Papua New Guinea administration. The 1972 event was less severe than 1941 or 1997 by several orders of magnitude, but to public servants in the highlands it was their first experience of repeated frosts at elevations above 1800 metres. The spectacular destruction of sweet potato gardens by frost and the fear of widespread public disorder and tribal fighting as people began to migrate out of the worst affected areas led to a food relief program, managed by expatriate missionaries and administration officers and carried out with assistance from the Australian Army. At the peak of the program, 150,000 people were being fed. A parallel program distributed planting material of English potato and corn seed and collected sweet potato vines from lower altitudes and transported them into frosted areas, to enable the restoration of the food supply as soon as possible.

Following the completion of the food relief program in 1973, Eric Waddell argued in a report to the government (published as Waddell 1989) that the switch in policy from one that supported local coping in late 1971, to direct intervention by providing food in 1972, was brought about by the severity of the frost and widespread drought, the inability of the Australian administration to judge the severity of the situation because of a lack of knowledge of local agricultural systems, and the widespread belief that the local population had no capacity to cope with the situation. Waddell was primarily concerned that the relief effort had undermined longstanding adaptive strategies maintained by local people to deal with the frost hazard.

However, two serving Australian officers who commented on Waddell’s report emphasized that changes in the broader political environment were an important part of the decision to provide food. Between August 1971, when the first frosts occurred, and April 1972, Papua New Guinea’s first fully operative national government had taken office and the formal handover of self-government was due to take place in December 1973. Brian Scoullar, then the Department of Agriculture Rural Development Officer at Laiagam in Enga, argued that it was a Papua New Guinea government and not an Australian colonial administration that was responsible for decision-making in 1972 and that the decisions were based on two questions: how many people would die if nothing was done, and could the new government afford to be seen to be responsible for any deaths of highlanders under the political circumstances in force at the time (the new government was led and dominated by lowlanders and highlanders had accepted the move to self-government with some reluctance). John Wallis, Southern Highlands District Rural Development Officer in 1971, also notes that the ‘crisis was fused politically’ with an emphasis on national unity. Both Scoullar and Wallis believed that without feeding, many deaths would have occurred, mainly of the very young and the very old, and Scoullar saw this as part of the adaptive strategy. Both also commented on the almost complete lack of knowledge of indigenous food production systems, in particular the effect of frost on sweet potato production (published as part of Waddell 1989).

Waddell (1983, 35) later commented on the politicisation of the 1972 event, noting that ‘the new government was concerned to strengthen the very fragile (and artificial) sense of national unity’. The Australian administration and the Christian missions were ‘concerned to assume a strong interventionist role as was their custom, thereby countering possible criticism and suspicion….[T]he new government [saw] the relief program as a vehicle for affirming its leadership and demonstrating the solidarity of all New Guineans’.