Dogura sits on a broad tableland that rises abruptly from the Coral Sea coast, sixty metres above the Wedau shoreline in Milne Bay Province. Before it was a cathedral complex, it was a battleground - one of those places where rival clans had settled their disputes by force for generations before any European map-maker had written Papua across its face. In 1891 two Anglican priests, Albert Maclaren and Copland King, walked ashore at Kaieta beach and climbed the plateau. They picked it precisely because of what it had been. Maclaren, already ill when he arrived, was dead by December. King stayed. By Easter 1896, the first converts from the surrounding villages were baptised, and the plateau began a second life. One of the original corner posts of the first bush chapel, cut from living wood, took root where it stood. It is now a Modawa tree, tall and sprawling, and it still grows in the cathedral complex - a piece of the first shelter that refused to stop being a tree.

Bishop Henry Newton proposed a permanent cathedral in 1932. The architect was Leslie Wilkinson, Professor of Architecture at the University of Sydney, whose original design turned out to be too ambitious for the mission's resources and had to be scaled back. The modified plans went to Robert Jones, a lay worker at the mission who was ordained a priest in 1940, and who actually supervised the building. The foundation stone was laid in 1934. There were no roads to the site, no cranes, no trucks. Every stone, every beam, every sack of cement moved from the beach to the top of the plateau on someone's shoulders or back. The Church Times reporter who visited in 1939 titled his story "Pure Gold in New Guinea: Papuan Christians Build a Cathedral." One fact from those five years of construction carries its own quiet weight: no workers lost their lives. In a region where the rainy season turns hillsides to mudslides and malaria killed as casually as it still does, that absence of deaths was itself something of a miracle.

The completed cathedral is 170 feet long and 50 feet wide, 70 feet across the transepts, with twin towers rising 64 feet above the plateau. At the time it was built, nothing else in the Territories of Papua or New Guinea was larger. Its style is Norman-Romanesque - round windows, thick walls, the heavy arches that English parish churches were borrowing from French abbeys nine hundred years earlier. The two towers were named for the twin dedication: Saint Peter and Saint Paul, but also for Maclaren and King, the two priests who had climbed the hill in 1891. Inside, there are no pews. The congregation sits and kneels directly on the floor, in the Melanesian way. At the first consecration, the incense was gum rendered from local trees, the sanctuary lamp oil was pressed from coconuts, and the charcoal for the thurible was burned from mangrove wood. A European cathedral at Dogura was never going to be a European cathedral entirely. The building refuses to be only one thing.

The consecration happened in October 1939. By 1942 the Japanese had landed on the north coast, and Anglican clergy and lay workers were among those they killed. Two died at Gona, in the Sanananda area. A third, Father James Benson, was presumed dead - until 1945, when he walked out of the jungle, having spent three years hiding with villagers and evading patrols. After the war Benson painted a mural at the east end of the cathedral sanctuary, a memorial to those the church now calls the Martyrs of New Guinea. The mural hung there for decades. In 2017 it collapsed, and now lies carefully on the cathedral floor, awaiting the funds to be restored. The cathedral itself is suffering from termite damage. The Australian stained-glass artist Napier Waller painted Dogura cathedral into the uppermost panel of the Martyrs Window at St Peter's, Eastern Hill in Melbourne, where it still glows on sunny afternoons - a cathedral depicted in light, thousands of kilometres from the one that was carried up a plateau by hand.

Ss Peter and Paul remains the seat of the Bishop of Dogura, whose diocese covers all of Milne Bay Province. The current Dean is Faithful Arewa. The cathedral has been the site of small and large events over the decades - the ordination of the first Papuan priests in 1941, the consecration of David Hand as coadjutor bishop in 1950 at the age of thirty-one, the visit of Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey in 1991 for the mission's centenary, when he planted a sapling from the Modawa tree in Popondetta. The Papua New Guinea post office issued a 21 toea stamp of the cathedral that year. The Modawa, the tree that started as a corner post, now has grandchildren growing in other parts of the country. From the air, the cathedral is a pale cross on a green plateau above a curve of blue coast, unmistakable and, for a building made of stone carried by hand, quietly astonishing.