Qualla: Aitape

Aitape: Introduction

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dr. Blofeld, CC BY-SA 2.0. On a map, Aitape is easy to miss - a dot on the north coast of Papua New Guinea, roughly halfway between Wewak and Vanimo, eighteen thousand people living beside a warm blue sea. On the ground, it is one of the most haunted coastlines in the Pacific. Aitape has been hit by three tsunamis in ninety years, occupied by both the German Empire and the Imperial Japanese Army, and watched an Australian intelligence soldier beheaded on its own beach in 1943. It has electricity, a bank, a supermarket, two airstrips, and a hospital. It also has a collective memory that stretches back further than any of them.

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Image: Dr. Blofeld | CC BY-SA 2.0

Aitape: Sails from Afar

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Pepper, CC BY-SA 3.0. Contact between the Aitape region and the outside world is believed to have begun in the fifteenth century, when large Chinese sailing expeditions reached these shores. By the early seventeenth century, Malay fishing fleets were working along the Sepik coast and recruiting local ...

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Image: Tony Pepper | CC BY-SA 3.0

Aitape: A German Prison and a Powerful Radio

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Pepper, CC BY-SA 3.0. Aitape began as a formal settlement when German colonists built a station here in 1905, part of German New Guinea. The Germans found the Siau and Bakla people difficult to govern - the district was officially classed as 'uncontrolled' throughout the German colonial period - but t...

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Image: Tony Pepper | CC BY-SA 3.0

Aitape: The Beach, 24 October 1943

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown photographer, Public domain. When Japan occupied the Territory of New Guinea in 1942, Aitape fell along with the rest of the north coast. The following year, on 24 October 1943, Australian intelligence sergeant Leonard Siffleet was beheaded on the beach by his Japanese captors. A photograph of the moment bef...

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Image: Unknown photographer | Public domain

Aitape: Three Waves in Ninety Years

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Pepper, CC BY-SA 3.0. Long before the war, in 1908, a tsunami struck the coast between Arop and Sissano hard enough to collapse a strip of shoreline into the sea, creating the Sissano Lagoon where villages had stood. A second tsunami hit in 1935. Then, in July 1998, the worst of them: a magnitude 7.0 ...

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Image: Tony Pepper | CC BY-SA 3.0

Aitape: A Town That Keeps Going

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Pepper, CC BY-SA 3.0. For all of that, Aitape is a working town, not a ruin. It has 240-volt power running more or less around the clock, telephones, a courthouse, a police station, a supermarket, and a hospital. Two airstrips serve it: Tadji (TAJ), ten kilometres east, where most flights land, and th...

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Image: Tony Pepper | CC BY-SA 3.0