Rabaul, Papua New Guinea 2026
We reached Rabaul on February 3 after one sea day, the first of three stops in Papua New Guinea. People have lived in New Guinea for 40 or 50,000 years. New Guinea is the second largest island in the world (not counting continents), but it only became an island about 10,000 years ago when its land connection to Australia disappeared under the Torres Strait. The first Europeans visited New Guinea in the early 16th century and Christian missionaries arrived in the mid-19th century. The western half of the island, now part of Indonesia, was annexed by the Netherlands in 1848 and the eastern half that is now Papua New Guinea was divided in 1884 between Germany in the north and the United Kingdom in the south. By 1906 the British portion had become part of Australia and the Australians gained control of the German portion as well during World War I. Papua New Guinea became an independent nation in 1975.
The population of Papua New Guinea is around 11 or 12 million, of whom about 40% live in small villages in the interior highlands. Many of these villages have their own language so that there are more than 840 languages spoken in this country, some limited to perhaps 100 people in a single isolated village. A pidgin tongue called “Tok Pisin” (meaning “talk pidgin”) is used throughout the country. It was not until the 1930’s that much of the interior highlands were contacted by the outside world and there are still villages in some areas that reportedly haven’t been contacted.
Rabaul actually is not located on the main island of New Guinea. Instead it is on the eastern end of the island of New Britain, the largest island in the Bismarck Archipelago. As you might guess from the name of the archipelago, New Britain was in the German portion of New Guinea before World War I, when the island was called New Pomerania. Rabaul was founded by the Germans in 1910 to be their colonial headquarters and continued as the capital of the Australian mandate over the former German colony until 1941. Rabaul’s urban population today is between 4,000 and 6,000.
Rabaul sits in Simpson Harbor in the middle of a very large and beautiful bay, which is actually the caldera of what appears to have been a very large ancient volcano. Three volcanoes sit on the corners of the bay as it opens into the ocean and Rabaul has been all but destroyed twice by eruptions in 1937 and 1994. The first one killed more than 500 people and the Australians then administering the territory decided to move the capital to a different city, but they had not done so yet when the Japanese occupied the territory in 1941. Evacuation plans were developed during the 1980’s which paid off in 1994 when the same two volcanoes, Tavurvur and Vulcan, erupted again. Only 5 people were killed even though there was less than a day of warning. However the tremendous amount of ash that fell on the city, which absorbed rainfall and became very heavy, destroyed most of the city as about 80% of the buildings collapsed. The capital of the province was moved to Kokopo, about 12 miles further from these volcanoes, and even today the population is only about a third of the 17,000+ who lived in Rabaul just before the eruption.
We spent the day on a small private excursion. Boarding the van in the morning we drove west. Once outside the central city the roads were very bumpy and uneven, mostly dirt (or really mud on this day). In several places gangs of men were repairing roads (and buildings) by hand, and there were few structures to be seen. We were headed for Matupit Island and an indigenous village there where our guide and our driver both lived and grew up. We think these were of the Tolai people, a matrilineal culture who are the dominant indigenous group in this area and who are thought to have migrated here from another island. Matupit was a separate island in fact as well as in name until 1994, when material from the big eruption filled the small gap between Matupit and New Britain islands so that now the road to the island is all land. The jungle has regrown to such an extent that we would not even have noticed the division of the land if our guide, Dora, had not stopped us and pointed it out. Dora was 19 years old and living on Matupit at the time of the 1994 eruption and her stories of that time were quite interesting.
When we reached the village there was time to look around as we waited for other tour groups to arrive for a dance performance. We saw a display of the village’s handicrafts and were treated to some delicious fruit (watermelon, papaya, pineapple). There was an interesting hut made, it appeared, from mats of woven palm fronds with a grass or straw roof. We also noticed a pipe on the end of the roof of a building, apparently directing rainwater into large vats. And we enjoyed some nice flowers growing in the area.
After the other buses arrived we were led to an open field with a wood and palm grandstand and listened to a presentation from a village elder about the village and its people and about the dances we were about to see. Tourism is a vital source of income in this area and there was no doubt that they were used to having visitors like us on a regular basis. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that people don’t actually live here or that the culture on view was not authentic. We saw several dance performances, one a whip dance in which a dancer is repeatedly whipped by others with long canes from some plant, and a couple of dances performed mostly by younger boys who seemed to be in training.
From the village we drove to a beach with a view of the volcanoes across the water. A number of vendors had set out brightly colored cloth and clothing for sale. Some were also selling carvings made of volcanic lava rock.
We walked a little way past the vendors and came to the hot springs. This stream runs into the bay at the foot of the Mt Tavurvur volcano. It is heated by geothermal vents in the mountain and, at least when we were there, was putting off a good amount of steam. We were warned it was too hot to touch safely but we wouldn’t have tried anyway.
We drove next to the old New Guinea Club, established in 1919 as a social club for the European administrators and plantation owners. This was where the small Australian military outpost gathered on January 20, 1942 for the impossible task of defending the area from the overwhelming Japanese air, sea and land forces bearing down on it. Just before setting out to fight the commander radioed to Melbourne “Nos Morituri Te Salutamus” (we who are about to die salute you), a phrase associated (possibly incorrectly) with Roman gladiators entering the arena.
The building was partially rebuilt after being destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II and today serves as a museum, holding a variety of interesting artifacts from Rabaul’s history. The eclectic collection includes everything from tribal masks to parts of a Japanese Zero shot down during the war. The collection was interesting but filled the small museum rather haphazardly, seeming more like an attic than a museum. In front is a ruined Japanese light tank.
Behind the museum is a World War II Japanese bunker. This concrete bunker was the command post for anti-aircraft guns and spotlights in the region. It is called Yamamoto’s Bunker, but it is questionable whether Admiral Yamamoto, the mastermind of Pearl Harbor and the commander of the Japanese fleet in the Pacific, ever stayed in it. He was certainly in Rabaul in 1943 when it was among Japan’s most forward positions, but some think he stayed in another bunker not too far away. In any event, US code breakers intercepted his itinerary for an April 18, 1943, flight from Rabaul to Bougainville and a squadron from Henderson Field on Guadalcanal shot down his plane. This was a major loss for the Japanese. The bunker was dark and had no handrails on the stairs, so it was difficult to safely negotiate the many steps.
Our last visit was to a high ridge above the town of Rabaul, just uphill from the Rabaul Volcano Observatory. The Observatory was opened after the devastating 1937 eruption in the hope that any future eruptions could be detected in time to avoid such loss of life. Today it is responsible for monitoring 37 active and dormant volcanoes in Papua New Guinea. This is the main observatory and there are four supplemental observatories near other volcanoes. We were able to see the Observatory a little way down the hill but were not permitted to enter because this would disrupt its scientific work (there were quite a few visitors when we were there). It was a stunning view from here over the town, the bay and the volcanoes.
We returned to the ship after this last look over the whole area. It had been a very interesting day and really there are still things left here that would be worth seeing. But for now this was it as we sailed away through the bay to the ocean.
BADER JOURNAL 
