I’m the only foreign journalist based in Papua New Guinea and I admire the sacrifices local journalists make for their jobs.

They work for little money – some of them don’t even get paid sometimes – and with few resources.

All of us who travel around PNG for work are subject to the same risks, although one incident involving two of my journalist friends two weeks ago really shocked me.

It was a violent attack on a highway near Port Moresby that left both men injured.

Those friends are Clifford Faiparik, journalist for The National newspaper, and Jason Wuri, reporter for PNG’s National Broadcasting Corporation.

Faiparik’s editor wouldn’t allow him to be interviewed for this programme, but Wuri was able to speak.

He told me he and Faiparik had gone to a remote district with the area’s local member of parliament.

There they covered two events and were being driven back to Port Moresby by the MP.

“It was a sudden thud and the member was driving and we got hit by something all of a sudden,” Wuri says.

“We didn’t know what it was that hit us. Probably a bottle, a stone, a knife swung at the vehicle and we almost had an accident as well. We stopped so abruptly.

“Everyone was surprised by what happened. We tried to enquire about what happened and came out and looked around.”

Wuri says the district’s chief executive officer – who was travelling with the MP – got out of the car to find out what had hit it.

He asked some young men sitting nearby. Wuri and Faiparik followed.

“We noticed that they were drunk and they started cursing and screaming back at us and things like that and we all of a sudden realised they were going to attack us,” Wuri says.

“They just came so suddenly and so quickly. Maybe they wanted to kill us. They attacked with sticks, stones, bush knives and all of that.

“They came in a big number. There was five of us and there was 30 of them. I didn’t know what was being swung at me, sticks, stones. I thought we gotta run, we gotta run or we die here.”

Wuri was holding his camera tripod, and used it to defend himself as men attacked him with the large machetes people carry in PNG, which are known as “bush knives”.

“I was holding onto a camera stand, my camera stand and I blocked a few of those bush knives that came,” he says.

His hand was cut in the attack.

Wuri, Faiparik and the men they were with all got back to the car, then the MP drove it through a hastily-assembled roadblock and sped towards Port Moresby.

Faiparik was also injured. Someone slashed his elbow with a bush knife.

He said at the time that it wasn’t too bad but Wuri knew his injury was serious – a “deep, deep cut”.

The drive to Port Moresby took an hour, with Wuri in the back of the car bleeding.

“All that time I was just lying down, I was in so much pain,” he says.

Wuri and Faiparik were treated and stabilised. Two days later Wuri had surgery on his hand.

“They installed two wires just to hold the two fractured bones that were caused by the swinging of that bush knife. Parts of the wrist are healing naturally,” he says.

The wounds require dressing every two days and Wuri will miss weeks of work.

He thinks the attack was purely opportunistic, the motive ascribed to most of the violent crime in Papua New Guinea.

“I just try to not think about things like that,” he says. “Try to be more security conscious. Lessons learned.”

Three other journalists I know have been assaulted at work in the 12 months I’ve been based in Papua New Guinea, all of them by police.

But Wuri bristles when I ask whether his country is more dangerous for journalists than many others.

“I don’t think that’s a fair question. I think journalists right around the world are at risk depending on the kind of job and the kind of things we cover,” he says.

“We get to go to into places where I think the risks are there for such things to happen and all of that.”

Despite the risks, Wuri is looking forward to getting back to work. He’s proud of being a journalist, and thinks Papua New Guineans appreciate the work of the media.

“People do value the work that we do, especially those in the rural areas that don’t have access to news and information,” he says.

And as a foreign correspondent looking on, and working here, so do I.

- ABC