Time Traveller
Lae, 1931
Today, Lae is one of Papua New Guinea’s most important industrial centres, but this photo shows the township in its infancy, in the year it was declared a town. Lae airstrip is in the foreground and the nascent port at Voco Point is in the upper right. Interesting, but less obvious, is the railway line between the port and airstrip areas. Aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart was last seen alive in July, 1937, when she took off from Lae, which also saw world air cargo records broken by Guinea Airways and the smaller operators in the heyday of gold developments. This flurry of economic activity was curtailed by World War 2, during which the Japanese developed Lae as a major military base until it was re-taken by Allied forces in September, 1943. Greater detail about the development of Lae can be found in James Sinclair’s coffee-table book Golden Gateway: Lae and the Province
of Morobe.
— JOHN BROOKSBANK