Paul Lapun
Sir Paul Lapun (1923 – 26 October 2003) was the first Papua New Guinean to receive a knighthood. Both a supporter of independence for Papua New Guinea (PNG) and of the secessionist movement on Bougainville, Lapun served in the House of Assembly of Papua and New Guinea and in the first National Parliament of Papua New Guinea between 1972 and 1975, when he was Minister for Mines and Energy. He was instrumental in obtaining royalties for the people of Bougainville for the copper mine on their island. Early life and education Paul Lapun was born in Mabis village, Banoni, in what was, at the time, the Buin sub-district of the North Solomons District of the Territory of New Guinea, an Australian-administered United Nations trust territory. In 1936 he joined the Chabai Catholic seminary in northwest Bougainville, from where he was evacuated in 1942 before the Japanese occupation during World War II. He left the seminary in 1948, although he continued to teach there until the 1960s. After leaving the seminary, Lapun established a plantation and a marketing cooperative. Without encouraging it, by the 1960s he had become the focus of an embryonic cargo cult. In 1962 he went to Australia