In 1958–1959 the Australian Commonwealth Film Unit made a series of documentaries on Papua and New Guinea for ABC Television, for the most part compiled from re-purposed material shot for documentaries that the Unit was producing for the Department of Territories at the time. This article examines ‘transcoding’ and domestic address in the New Look at New Guinea documentary series. It focuses on the modes of civic address deployed in early public service television documentary in the context of civic education about Australia's colonial development of peoples in Papua and New Guinea.