This series consists of material created by the Imperial Government of German New Guinea.

The material was seized by the Australian Government when the Territory was captured during the First World War.

The records of this series were among a large collection of material relating to the former territory of German New Guinea which came into the custody of the then Commonwealth Archives Office in 1963. This material is believed to have been shipped to Australia from Rabaul in 1937 for safekeeping following the volcanic eruption in May of that year.

The collection comprised all the extant material from the four periods of colonial administration:

(1) the New Guinea Company 1885-1899,

(2) German Imperial administration 1899-1914,

(3) British Military Administration 1914-1921, and

(4) Australian Civil Administration of the mandated territory.

There is record of the material having been examined in Canberra in August 1937 by Miss M Jacobs of the Department of History, University of Sydney. The collection was then in the custody of the National Library but was subsequently stored in large wooden crates at the premises of the Government Printer at Kingston. It remained there, more-or-less forgotten, until rediscovered in 1963 during a re-location of the Government Printing Office. It was transferred to the custody of the Commonwealth Archives Office on 20 August 1963 and accessioned as AA1963/83. A handwritten inventory was prepared (in English.)

Various conversion to 'G' series were effected and, in 1991, the remaining records created by the Imperial German administration 1899-1914 were separated and arranged to constitute this series by a visitng archivist from the German State Archives (Bundesarkiv), Dr. Jurgen Real. Note that Dr. Real's arrangement is in accordance with the practice of the Bundesarkiv, and not with the precepts of the Australian CRS system.

The original order is not maintained - the items are not attributed to a particular agency recording and the original item number control is ignored in favour of an imposed simple numerical sequence. The inventory received from Dr. Real in December 1992 displays a number of discrepancies in the numerical sequence. In particular numbers 48, 293, 498, 547, 548 and 934 have not been used. Also several numbers were used twice; these have been differentiated by use of 'A' and 'B' suffixes.

Dr Real's inventory is entirely in German. An English translation was arranged by Australian Archives in 1993 and this version has been entered in the ANGAM2 database.

The records were subsequently microfilmed and, in 1994 and after a sojourn of 57 years in Australia, the original records were returned to Papua New Guinea. They are now held by the National Archives of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby.

Microflilm copies are available for use in this office. The reference copy is G255/4. This series consists of records covering all matters relating to the administration of the German settlements on the mainland of New Guinea (that is, on the North-East Coast), on New Britain and New Ireland.

It complements series G1 (1899-1911) and G2 (1911-1914) which consist of records of the Imperial Government of German New Guinea relating to the external Island Territories (Carolines, Marianas and Marshall Islands) - that is, those territories which were not subsequently administered by the occupying power which succeeded the German government at Rabaul after 1914.

In 2018, the microfilm was digitised and uploaded to National Archives RecordSearch database.