Roars from the Mountain

Front matter

COLONIAL MANAGEMENT OF THE 1951 VOLCANIC DISASTER AT MOUNT LAMINGTON

COLONIAL MANAGEMENT OF THE 1951 VOLCANIC DISASTER AT MOUNT LAMINGTON

R. WALLY JOHNSON

Contents

ESTO BGIQUICS sree wen E AE o A E E SE noe aa ix stof ACONYMS “3. Pepea wuna oau Nee a ete aaah aS gow a Rane xiii PROIOQUE nae a Ae EA a T E EA ot de O tea ey XV Acknowledgements: oreca eridi r t En ERAT ee ener a eae xxi APOUINGEAVNO esnie tad deca eke Bie path Baal Ave aa ALEA XXV

Part 1. Tidal Wave From The West

1. Claiming Land for the British Empire. .. sasssa aaa aaa 3 2. Colonialism on a Shoestring... 0.0.0... eee 27 38. World War and Australian Recovery .. nasasa aaa 51

Part 2. Catastrophic Eruption

4. Victims, Survivors and Evacuations ... sssaaa aeaa 85

PART 3. AFTER THE DISASTER Appendix B: A Postcolonial Time Series... s... naana aaa 343

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 0.1. Volcano distribution in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands sx sess ete ee a ete Oe xv

Figure 0.2. Volcanic features on north-eastern side of the

Owen Statiley Range vu ae OA al saa Rade aera ae Geb xviii Figure 1.3. Shooting at Traitors Bary pet op voces eee ed Hope the 6 Figure 1.4. Portrait photographs of Sir William MacGregor (left)

Figure 2.1. Detail from map of the two territories of New Guinea

Figure 2.3. Detail from geological map of Papua by Evan R. Stanley. . . 35 Figure 2.4. Photograph of Lieutenant Wilfred Beaver during WWI .. . 36

Figure 2.7. Photographs of Sangara missionaries, L. Lashmar (left)

and M. Brenchley (right) .. s7.0q sea ede eres wats Be aetee: 8 47

Figure 3.2. George Silk photograph of Raphael Oimbari and Private Whittington 040% da%5 oto adanale neue ease ats, 57

Figure 3.3. “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels’ and American sailors sharing CIBATCELES e i ane elendl eras 3 e aaea lg bh og eles dia tbls 59

Figure 3.4. Minister Ward and Colonel Conlon at Higaturu

LIRE sans en Sako need kena pa Se owe a Oy. oer peel 61 Figure 3.5. Detail from geological map by Montgomery,

Osbourne and Glaessner 53 160450 «de eau iteswaw ee ox eee 63 Figure 3.7. Higaturu postmarked envelope franked

on: l March 1950r ueira Nesters pula lip Mile hile ballets 5 68 Figure 3.9. Military aerial photograph of the summit

of Mount Lamington in 1947... -)wga ed paw ee kG map eaed 4 75 Figure 3.10. Debris-avalanche hummocks at Galunggung

VOLCANO Javi na e a ee he Se ets BN hd anda 76 Figure 3.11. Sketch by Murphy in 1948 and silhouette

of Mount Lamington s «ap rata udeniieat ele wea eee enol TE Figure 4.2. Photograph of eruption taken by Kevin Woiwod

om LS January TIS ee ode poet ol eb aloe ee alee aud des 96 Figure 4.3. Photograph of eruption possibly taken

Figure 4.4. Sketches by S.H. Yeoman of eruption clouds

Figure 4.5. Photograph of eruption cloud on 21 January

by Captain Jacobson a 2 incurs bit ninco t'c ea nunne 109

Figure 5.3. Devastated area at Higaturu including destroyed jeeps ... 146 Figure 5.5. Requiem mass held by Father Justin on bonnet of jeep . . . 152

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 5.7. Aerial photograph of Lamington from the north on 8 February 1951 vss 8 setae eded hie wisd, eeTGeGG

Figure 5.8. Taylor and Crellin approaching the active crater on bi Pebriaty O91 i525 whe ase Se owe ee ews ee

Figure 5.9a. Headline cuttings representing only a small number of the many articles that were published on the Lamington disaster in different Australian and Port Moresby newspapers. . .

Figure 6.1. Rabaul residents visiting Lamington area in mid-1951.. Figure 6.2. Wairopi and pedestrian bridge over the Kumusi River . . Figure 6.4. Bert Speer photograph of evacuation of Wairopi camp. .

Figure 6.6. Lamington lament words and music in Balob songbooks, t4-uic-rn tend are eiciseate en Oat eaa wishes

Figure 7.1. Taylor and assistant undertaking fieldwork near shooting TAO. wus Pee eek Eae TAE a Ges

Figure 7.9. Fully grown lava dome in Lamington avalanche amphithéatie niere Bid ae he here wae Ode Ra xi

Figure 7.10. Sketch map of summit dome and avalanche amphitheatre sirsie sate lot Stale 't dls ces andar Battie 217

Figure 7.11. Three-part evolution of catastrophic eruption of 21 January 1951 5.2 x etc ati vaasd tes Sa Saad ey, Sree ees 221

Figure 8.1. David Hand and Sydney Elliott-Smith at Saiho hospital. . 231 Figure 8.2. Opening of the Mount Lamington Memorial Cemetery

INA DD 2s. are EAN E EA E ound aloes etal ate Ore ueaneas 242 Figure 8.3. Paul Hasluck speaking at the opening of the memorial

CEMELEEY sess tend hones Niani e e acs hei Ee Slee e Duels Pete oes web 243 Figure 8.4. Tony Taylor being presented with the George Cross... . 245 Figure 9.1. Part of the CSIRO land use map sicicmcea nn sccvee ones 258

Figure 9.3. Wind directions at Port Moresby above and below

Figure 9.7. Drawings of the Sumbiripa myth by Maine Winny and Louise: BASS sats o a eae ace cere el 272 Figure 9.8. Local names for Lamington peaks drawn on old

Figure 9.10. Seismometer and radio link equipment on Lamington WA ita a a iE AER E ENEA E Aaa 280

Figure 10.1. Digital elevation model for the Mount Lamington area. . 291

LIST OF ACRONYMS

ABC Australian Broadcasting Commission ANGAU Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit ANU The Australian National University BMR Bureau of Mineral Resources, Geology and Geophysics CSIRO Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation DASF Department of Agriculture, Stock and Fisheries DDS-NA Department of District Services and Native Affairs GA Geoscience Australia GIS Geographic Information Systems GPS Global Positioning System IAVCEI International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior IMS Information Management System IUGG International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics LMS London Missionary Society MRA Mineral Resources Authority NGRU New Guinea Research Unit PAMBU Pacific Manuscripts Bureau PNG Papua New Guinea PUB Papuan Ultramafic Belt RAAF Royal Australian Air Force RSPAS Research School of Pacific Studies

RVO Rabaul Volcanological Observatory xiii

TPNG UN UPNG US USGS VEI WWI WWII WWSSN

Territory of Papua and New Guinea

United Nations

United States

United States Geological Survey

Volcanic Explosivity Index

World War I

World War II

World-Wide Standardized Seismograph Network

Prologue

Almost 3,000 people, possibly more, were killed in January 1951 by a catastrophic volcanic eruption at Mount Lamington in what is now modern-day Papua New Guinea (Figure 0.1). This tragic event could be regarded as the deadliest natural disaster in Australian history because the Australian Government was the colonial power at the time and had responsibility for the safety of its subjects under trusteeship arrangements (Downs 1980). The Australian administrator of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea in 1951, Colonel J.K. Murray, referred to a ‘scene of disaster unparalleled in Australian history’ (Murray 1968, 21). Such statements do, however, require some clarification and modification.

ye Tuluman Å ° PACIFIC A OCEAN Bismarck

A Bougainville ,⁄* Bagana i cae SQ SOLOMON ISLANDS in

> Solomon

Sea

A — Volcano metres === International boundary 4000

~ River 3000 i 2000 O kilometres 250 1000

© Australian National University CC BY SA 4.0 aop CartoGIS CAP 19-279a KP 0

Figure 0.1. Volcano distribution in Papua New Guinea and the

Solomon Islands

The triangles in this map represent volcanoes that are Known, or believed, to have been in eruption during the Holocene epoch starting at 10,000 years BC. The map has been adapted from those published by Simkin and Siebert (1994, 58) and Siebert, Simkin and Kimberley (2010, 75; see also Johnson 2013, xxiii-iv for further details). Named volcanoes are those referred to in the main text.

XV xvi

First, most of those who perished in the volcanic eruption were local Sangara people, one of a larger group of preliterate Papuans whom the colonists called the ‘Orokaiva’. This means, arguably, that the catastrophe at Lamington was not truly an ‘Australian’ one, and given also that only 35 white people—expatriates from Australia—were killed by the eruption. Second, the volcanic eruption at Mount Lamington was a suddenimpact, geophysical type of natural hazard—a group of phenomena that also includes earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, tropical cyclones, severe storms, coastal surges and flooding. These are in contrast to the sloweronset and longer-lasting natural hazards of widespread, deadly diseases and related pandemics. At least 15,000 Australians are thought to have died from the ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic in 1919 after it was introduced to Australia by soldiers returning from service during World War I in Europe (see, for example, the centennial article by Curson and McCracken 2019).

The term ‘natural disaster’ is still used widely today, but it too requires some clarification. The expression carries the implication that the cause of the disaster, or blame for it, is solely the impact of a natural hazard or, in insurance terms, an ‘Act of God’. However, people affected (if not killed) by disasters may live in highly hazard-vulnerable environments by their own choice and, perhaps, even know and accept that there was some risk of future destructive natural impacts. Orokaiva communities, for example, flourished by developing gardens on the rich volcanic soils of Mount Lamington. How this advantage was balanced against the natural hazard risks identified through their experience and traditional stories about the nearby mountain is an example of community risk-management that is addressed today by many ‘at-risk’ societies elsewhere in the world and at different times of history.

The Lamington eruption of 1951 is well known in volcano science because of the outstanding landmark report published in 1958 by G.A.M. “Tony’ Taylor, a volcanologist employed by BMR, the Australian Government's Bureau of Mineral Resources, Geology and Geophysics (Taylor 1958). BMR Bulletin 38 is an insightful, well-written and informative account that is still referred to in many, more modern, volcanological research papers, and in textbooks dealing with the so-called ‘peléean’ and ‘vulcanian’ types of volcanic eruption seen at Lamington in 1951. Taylor's scientific account is, in contrast, quite stark in dealing with the disaster management aspects of the eruption that, at the time, were both controversial and well publicised. This omission may have been deliberate to concentrate on the volcanology rather than on the conflicts and disputes of the public controversy.

PROLOGUE

‘Relief’ and ‘recovery’ are two of the four traditional sectors of the disaster management spectrum. The two other parts, which are just as (or even more) important, are ‘prevention’ and ‘preparedness—that is, what can be done by communities and authorities to reduce disaster-risk before a natural hazard actually strikes, and what can be done before the effects of the disaster escalate to facilitate rapid and effective evacuation of lives and immediate protection of property. All four of these sectors provide the context for this study. Emphasis is given to the prevention and preparedness aspects of the disaster because the primary purpose of this book is to determine why so many Orokaiva were killed in 1951.

A large part of this study is an examination of the abundant colonial literature extending from 1874 to 1950 and, in particular, the shorter, pre-disaster period from 1906 to 1951 when Australia was the governing colonial power (1951, by coincidence, was the jubilee year of the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia). This concentration on colonial records is not purposefully made to identify colonialism as the sole cause of the disaster and so to assign blame for it, but rather to determine how, and how many, disaster-vulnerability factors came to be created at Mount Lamington before the 1951 eruption. Inevitably, the book is about making historical judgements while recognising that perceptions of the past can shift, depending on the historical distance between an event and one’s own contemporary standpoint.

This book, then, represents a synthesis of selected information from many different sources on the disaster management story of the Mount Lamington eruption of 1951, including peer-reviewed publications, folios in government archives, periodicals, newspapers and magazines, as well as diaries, memoirs and the records of correspondence and of interviews with eyewitnesses and their descendants. A major challenge, therefore, and in common with other attempts at writing compressed histories, has been not so much what to include but rather what to leave out. Much informal or ‘grey-literature’ information is of high quality, but different opinions and judgements had to be compared and assessed, not without some subjectivism where conflicts of fact or interpretation arose. Such are the challenges of memory and historical accuracy. Of archival necessity, this history is also one seen almost entirely through an Australian lens. It includes a few records of the experiences of individual Orokaiva, which are given some emphasis where appropriate, but many of these records were produced by European people anyway as a result of listening to their Papuan informants. Some of the information in this book was used summarily in a single chapter on the Lamington eruption of 1951 in a previous book by the author (Johnson 2013).

xvii

Town Minor eruptive centre Historical eruption (date) Fault _| Younger volcanism Popondetta o Solomon Older volcanism

Sea kilometres _ 30

© Australian National University CC BY SA 4.0 CartoGIS CAP 19-279b_KP

Figure 0.2. Volcanic features on north-eastern side of the Owen Stanley Range

Quaternary volcanic areas and minor eruptive centres are shown here for the north-eastern side of the Owen Stanley Range in eastern Papua. The map is adapted from those of Davies and Smith (1971, fig. 1) and de Saint Ours (1988, fig. 1). The distribution of minor eruptive centres, following de Saint Ours, is largely schematic but is more accurate for Mount Lamington and Mount Victory in Figures 9.2 and 9.5, respectively.

An unexpected consequence of conducting the research for this book has been the intrusion of other volcanoes in the Lamington story, most notably Mount Victory, an active volcano similar in geology to Mount Lamington and only 100 kilometres to the east-south-east of it (see Figures 0.1 and 0.2). Other historically ‘intrusive’ volcanoes include distant Rabaul in East New Britain and Goropu to the south of Mount Victory.

xviii

PROLOGUE

The final chapter of this book deals with the postcolonial period— that is, with events following Papua New Guineas independence on 16 September 1975. This epilogue-like chapter is included, necessarily, because of the attention that Mount Lamington volcano and the Orokaiva people received after 1975 by a range of people, including outside investigators representing different, mainly academic disciplines— from the social sciences to the earth sciences. It includes also those people—both Orokaiva and Australian—not wishing the disaster to be forgotten, notably the friends and family of those who suffered there. Memorialisation and remembrance are, therefore, key aspects of this disaster management story.

xix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people and organisations have contributed to this book. The manuscript was written during tenure of an honorary associate professorship in the Department of Pacific Affairs, College of Asia and the Pacific, at The Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, and I sincerely thank ANU staff for all of their considerable support. Specific ANU people whom I must acknowledge—both alphabetically and with gratitude for their interest during this research—are, first, Papua New Guinea (PNG) aficionados Bryant Allen and Robin Hide, both of whom agreed rather courageously to review the first draft of the manuscript. Chris Ballard, Colin Filer, Ewan Maidment and the late Hank Nelson are also acknowledged for their long-term interest in my work at ANU. Two formal referees, including Brigadier Alan Hodges AM, are thanked for providing reviews of the manuscript that was submitted to ANU Press. The skill of Karina Pelling of CartoGIS Services at ANU in preparing the maps and other line illustrations for final publication is also gratefully acknowledged. Rani Kerin and Emily Tinker are thanked for their professional copyediting of the final manuscript, and the ANU Press Publication Subsidy Committee is thanked for partially offsetting copyediting costs, as is the ANU Department of Pacific Affairs.

Two people who have been almost as obsessive about the 1951 Lamington disaster as I have been are John R. Horne of Dunedoo, New South Wales, and the late Albert Speer of Sydney. Horne’s correspondence with me and others, plus several unpublished reports by him on matters dealing with Mount Lamington, Mount Victory and the history of the Northern District in general, extend back to the 1960s. Albert Speer was a valuable source of information about the 1951 eruption and its aftermath. He introduced me through correspondence and his extensive network of personal contacts to many of the people listed in Appendix A in the Correspondence Files.

xxii

My interest in the Lamington disaster began in the late 1960s when I first joined the Bureau of Mineral Resources, Geology and Geophysics (BMR) as a junior geologist. Volcanologist Tony Taylor supervised the geological fieldwork I undertook, with others, on the young volcanoes in what was then still known as the Territory of Papua and New Guinea. BMR is now called Geoscience Australia, or simply GA, and it still holds the many photographs, now digitised, of Lamington volcano and its 1951 eruption that were used by Taylor in his BMR Bulletin 38. Elizabeth Fredericks, the cataloguing and intellectual property librarian at GA, is thanked most sincerely for her diligence and promptness in supplying copies of the GA photographs used in this book.

GA also holds a copy of a Rabaul Volcanological Observatory (RVO) ‘Information Management System’ (IMS) that was prepared during a technical upgrade of the RVO following the volcanic eruption at Rabaul in 1994. This searchable IMS is owned by the PNG Government through RVO and it contains many digitised papers on Mount Lamington and the 1951 eruption, and indeed on other PNG volcanoes and volcanic eruptions. I gratefully acknowledge the work on the IMS that was completed by the GA library manager, Chris Nelson, and his staff, supported by Shane Nancarrow, and for their ongoing interest in continuing to develop the IMS. Ewan Maidment, former executive officer of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau at ANU, played a vital role in the early development of the IMS.

Colleagues in PNG who have been notably helpful during this research are: Hugh Davies, formerly of the University of Papua New Guinea; Maclaren Hiari of Popondetta; Chris McKee of the Port Moresby Geophysical Observatory; and Jonathan Kuduon, the late Herman Patia and Steve Saunders, all of the RVO, East New Britain Province, together with Ima Itikarai the head of RVO. Hugh Davies, in addition, reviewed a late draft of the manuscript and provided valuable suggestions for improvement.

‘The staff of the National Archives of Papua New Guinea (Port Moresby), the National Library of Australia (Canberra), the National Archives of Australia (Canberra), the Australian War Memorial (Canberra), the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland (Brisbane) and the Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne, are all thanked for their considerable professional assistance in locating research material.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Particular thanks must be extended to the many people who have corresponded with me over many years (see Appendix A). Some of these people were survivors of the 1951 eruption; others came to the Lamington area during the relief and recovery phase; still others came later, both before and after PNG’s independence in 1975. The list of correspondents, some of whom are now dead, includes, in many cases, their relations and friends. These people were all generous in providing information, opinions and views—more than could be expected in responding to a pestering researcher in distant Canberra. I was privileged to experience their generosity and willingness to explore issues for which I required insight if not solutions. There were some differences of opinion between correspondents, family loyalties and rivalries were on display occasionally, and a few people did not remember too well or were tricked by memory.

Every effort has been made to acknowledge the people who took the photographs and produced other illustrations presented in this book and to obtain appropriate permission from them and publishers. This was not possible in a very few cases; I apologise for any omissions and if sources have been identified incorrectly.

xxiii

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wally Johnson is an honorary associate professor in the Department of Pacific Affairs, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University. He worked for many years for the Australian Government's geoscientific agency in Canberra, Geoscience Australia, first as a volcanic geologist and research scientist and later in senior management roles as a division chief. Most of his research career has focused on the volcanology of Papua New Guinea, much of which was undertaken in close association with colleagues at the Rabaul Volcanological Observatory, headquarters of the national volcanological service of Papua New Guinea. Johnson was secretary general of the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior (IAVCEI) from 1991 to 1999. He is an honorary life member of IAVCEI and an honorary fellow of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics IUGG). His previous book with ANU Press was Fire Mountains of the Islands: A History of Volcanic Eruptions and Disaster Management in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands (2013).

Part 1. Tidal Wave From The West

Melanesia has been invaded by a huge tidal wave from the West in the form of colonisation and Christianisation. Like any tidal wave, the West came mercilessly, with all the force and power, toppling over our earth, destroying our treasures, depositing some rich soil, but also leaving behind much rubbish. This Western tidal wave has also set in motion chain reactions within ourselves and a thirst for a better future.

— Bernard Narakobi (1980, 8)

Captain Moresby and the Binandere (1873-74)

A ‘basilisk’, according to Wikipedia, is a legendary reptile mentioned in European bestiaries and reputed to be “King of Serpents’. It is said to have the power to cause death with a single glance. Basilisk was also the name of a British Navy paddlewheel steamer, carrying sails, of 1,031 tons. It was captained by John Moresby and was used to survey the coastline of southeastern New Guinea island, beginning in 1873 and returning to complete a second phase of mapping in 1874 (Moresby 1876). Such a ship’s name might intimidate some English-speakers, but not the Binandere people on the then little-known part of the north-eastern coast who had their own language and life experiences. They may, nevertheless, have been impressed both by the great size of HMS Basilisk and by the strangeness of its white-skinned crew of 178 officers and men who had appeared on their coastline. This ‘first contact’ between the colonising British Empire and the indigenous Binandere, also spelt Binandele, and the many encounters that followed elsewhere, were not in the least peaceful. Further, the invaders had the advantage of rifle power.

| Hercules Bay Traitors Bay

Cape Killerton B

Holnicote Bay eee -` 9@ Trobriand Islands Cape Sud Est A a p

ZB ce 2 5 a a

Normanby l.

A Mountain as Milne Bay in ea Coastline discovered and named puna irate, by Captain Moresby in HMS Basilisk

0 kilometres 125

© Australian National University CC BY SA 4.0 CartoGIS CAP 19-279c_KP

Figure 1.1. Coastal surveys by Captain John Moresby

The coastlines of south-eastern New Guinea surveyed by John Moresby in 1873-74 are shown in this map together with a selection of place names taken from the chart published by Moresby (1876; see also Whittaker et al. 1975, plate 44). The Basilisk survey started in the west on the south coast, near where Captain Moresby gave family names to both the main harbour of Port Moresby and to an inner one, Fairfax Harbour. The name of the Basilisk was given to both a passage through fringing reefs and islands into Fairfax Harbour and to an island on China Strait in the extreme south-east. Headquarters of the Anglican mission at Dogura were later built on Goodenough Bay. The mountain known later as Mount Lamington is 40 kilometres south-west of Cape Killerton but was not recorded by Moresby.

In 1874, Captain Moresby named two bays along the north-eastern coast of south-east New Guinea that border the mainly flat country occupied by the Orokaiva. The first one he called “Dyke Acland, after my revered friend the late Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, [Baronet]’ (Moresby 1876, 272). The second bay, to the north-west, was named Holnicote Bay after an aristocratic estate in Somerset, England, that was once owned by Sir Thomas. Captain Moresby’s naval and English loyalties had come to the fore a few days earlier in the coastal survey to the east when he applied the name ‘Cape Nelson’ to a ‘lofty promontory (269). Two conspicuous and ‘picturesque’ peaks on the promontory, or peninsula, were called ‘Victory and ‘Trafalgar, and the bay to the east of them was named after Lord Collingwood (Figure 1.1). All of these names were proud reminders of the British victory over the Franco-Spanish fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

Moresby did not recognise Mount Victory as an active volcano, or the volcanic nature of either Mount Victory or Mount Trafalgar, but he did say that the mountains ‘descend to the sea in open grassy and wooded slopes, which have all the appearance of English parkland’ (Moresby 1876, 271)—a hint, perhaps, of some homesickness. England and the Empire were in any case predominant. Moresby also gave no indication of any volcanoes existing inland from Dyke Acland Bay.

The French voyager Bruny d'Entrecasteaux had sailed off the same north-eastern coast in 1793. He encountered and named the D’Entrecasteaux Islands but went north to the Trobriand Islands (Figure 1.1) and then north-west, staying well offshore from the mainland (Duyker and Duyker 2001). No detailed coastal mapping was undertaken by d’Entrecasteaux, and two coastal points located and named by him—Cape Sud-East and Riche Island—were later discovered by Captain Moresby to have coordinates that plotted inland. Moresby, however, kept the names of these points as a courtesy to d’Entrecasteaux. This coastline is shown blank on the first published map of Australia by Freycinet in 1811 (Figure 1.2).

Captain Moresby was further up the north-east coast on 8 May 1874 when he encountered the mouth of a large river, which he called rather patriotically ‘the Clyde’, but which a few years later was given its local name of Mambare or Mamba. It is the largest river in this belt of coastal country. The captain here also came across ‘a beautiful bay running up to a sandy beach, fringed with groves of a kind of fir tree, admirably adapted for firewood, of which we were now much in need’ (Moresby 1876, 275). They anchored, ‘rather glad that no villages were at hand’ (275).

Wood collection by crew members of the Basilisk had begun the next morning when ‘a large number of armed natives’ (276) landed from canoes and were seen from the Basilisk stalking three officers on the beach. Moresby and Sub-Lieutenant Shortland immediately took rifles to the shore in a dinghy. The concealed warriors broke cover, an advancing frontline armed with spears followed by a supporting line of men carrying clubs. Moresby ‘fired with a snap-shot at the leading savage’ (276; Figure 1.3). He missed the man but hit his shield, and the noise and effect of the fracas was enough to send the alarmed attackers into retreat. The Basilisk sailed away on the following morning, 10 May, now carrying about 40 tons of the acquired wood. The name ‘Traitors Bay’ was given to this first-contact location by the British voyagers. Equally, however, the Binandere would have been justified in calling this place of attack Woodtheft Bay or even Invasion Bay.

j 14/0" 5 z 5 o 155° j 16ļo° J f mS TER a £ a} k p f al 7 A | Salina et Longing a l'O D Paie de Ja- : — Bougainville Island (diiron os

-NOUVELILE. GUINEE =

Louisiade 3 Archipelago | |

A O

KE SSS oe Figure 1.2. North-eastern part of Freycinet map of New Holland

This is an annotated detail from the ‘General Map of New Holland’, one of 14 charts from the Baudin expedition of 1800-04 (Freycinet 1811). The whole of the coastline of the Australian continent had been mapped by this time, as well as the islands of Torres Strait, the Louisiade Archipelago, Bougainville Island and Solomon Islands, but not the coastline along the north-east coast of south-eastern Papua, which is shown blank. This detail was provided courtesy of the National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Figure 1.3. Shooting at Traitors Bay

The published caption to this illustration reads ‘Attack of Natives, Traitors’ Bay, North-East New Guinea’ (Moresby 1876, between 276 and 277). This digital image was provided courtesy of the National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Moresby’s coastline survey of south-eastern New Guinea was regarded as a success by the British, given that this part of New Guinea’s shoreline had long been neglected because of its dangerous reefs, shoals, currents and strong south-east trade winds. Further, navigating through the numerous islands extending eastwards from the tip of New Guinea had been risky. Ships trading between Australia and China avoided the area even though this entailed a lengthening of the voyages. Moresby’s discovery of China Strait, however, just off the eastern tip of New Guinea, alleviated this necessity. In celebration of his significant discovery, Moresby had raised the Union Jack on 24 April 1873 on Hayter Island—named after the senior lieutenant on the Basilisk—and made a declaration of formal possession by Britain ‘in the name and on behalf of her most gracious Majesty Queen Victoria (Moresby 1876, 208). He ‘discovered’ Milne Bay and named Dinner Island after a meal he had there, which would later become known more famously as Samarai. The coastline mapping by the Basilisk officers, led by Lieutenant L.S. Dawson in 1874, would be used on the British Admiralty’s navigation chart that was first published in 1886 (Dawson and Officers 1886) and reproduced in many subsequent editions.

Moresby was not the first British naval commander to sail in the coastal waters of south-eastern New Guinea. HMS Rattlesnake, under the command of Captain Owen Stanley, accompanied by the Bramble, had sailed westwards along the south coast of the island in 1849. Stanley noted that mountains behind the coast to the north ‘seemed piled one above the other to an enormous height ... [and were] intersected by tremendous gorges’ (quoted in Goodman 2005, 244-45). The mountain axis seemed to follow the coast and appeared like a giant backbone to the island. The mountains eventually, and indeed inevitably, inherited the name ‘Owen Stanley Range’, although Stanley himself was fearful of disembarking from the Rattlesnake and exploring any further because he imagined that ‘the natives are warlike, very numerous, well armed and very treacherous’ (Goodman 2005, 245). This magnificent mountain range can be seen also from the north-east coast, forming on clear days a spectacular backdrop to the mainly flat country occupied by the Papuans. Mount Victoria is a nearby high point in the Owen Stanley Range that reaches over 4,000 metres above sea level. No inland volcanoes were sighted from the Rattlesnake.