The northwest monsoon season lasts from December to March and brings sudden rain squalls.

The impact of western culture after Moresby's visit and before World War II was limited to missionaries, ethnographers and traders seeking whales, pearls or gold.

In 1888 William MacGregor visited the island in his role as administrator of the newly proclaimed British New Guinea.

From there mission stations were established in strategic centres in the D'Entrecasteaux and Trobriand Islands and the Louisiade Archipelago.

By that time traders had already created a regular demand for steel tools, cloth, and twist tobacco and the Dobu mission was recruiting natives to work in gold mines and copra plantations.

Intense fighting occurred during 23 October and during the night a successful rescue mission evacuated about 250 Japanese soldiers by submarine to Fergusson Island, where they were taken by cruiser to Rabaul.

They fabricated a 'ghost force' of dummy structures, including a hospital, anti-aircraft guns constructed of logs pointed at the sky, and barricades of jungle vines which looked like barbed wire.

To facilitate this, General Headquarters Operations Instructions No.31, dated 11 March 1943, set out that Goodenough Island, which was garrisoned by an Australian infantry battalion group with attached service groups and two Radar stations, was to be reinforced and prepared as an air force operating base with two landing strips, initially suitable for fighters, but with one being upgraded to handle heavy bombers.

The dominant language, Bwaidoka, was adopted as a lingua franca by the Wesleyan (Methodist) Mission at the turn of the century.

[15] List of villages working clockwise around Goodenough Island starting at Vivigani Airfield on the northeast coastal plain, as shown in Google Earth.

It provides a critical landscape function with a relatively high number of endemic, endangered and vulnerable species.