Qualla: Bulolo

Bulolo: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Junkers aircraft made the trip over and over and over. Each pass brought another component of a 2,000-tonne gold dredge across the Owen Stanley Range and set it down on the Bulolo airstrip, where men waited to haul it into position and bolt it to the rest. Eight dredges were built that way, piece by airborne piece, in the valley of a Papua New Guinea river that had previously been known mostly for leeches and heavy rain. By the time the last dredge stopped running in June 1965, the fleet had turned over 7.4 million cubic meters of gravel. A few of those machines are still there, slumped in the jungle where they were abandoned, green with moss and claimed by vines.

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Bulolo: The Airlifted Fleet

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Bulolo gold fields sat in country so rough that shipping a dredge overland would have cost more than the gold was worth. The solution, in the 1930s, was audacious even by the standards of an audacious industry: dismantle each 2,000-tonne dredge into pieces small enough to fit...

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Bulolo: Pine Trees and Forestry

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When the gold played out, another industry grew up to replace it. Bulolo is now a forestry center, and the hills around it carry extensive plantings of Klinki pine, a local relative of the Norfolk Island pine. The trees grow tall and fast in this wet highland climate, feeding mil...

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Bulolo: The Oldest Fairway in the Country

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Papua New Guinea's oldest golf course is not in Port Moresby or Lae. It is in Bulolo. The nine-hole course first opened in 1947, two years after the war that had rolled through the valley ended, and it has been in play ever since. The miners and mill workers who built it and kept...

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Bulolo: Getting There

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bulolo connects to Lae, Papua New Guinea's second-largest city, by road. Public Motor Vehicles ply the route, running up from the coast into the Wau-Bulolo Valley. Three flights a week from Port Moresby reach Bulolo on PNG Air, a different pattern from nearby Wau, which has only ...

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Bulolo: Beyond Bulolo

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

About 100 kilometers southwest of Bulolo lie the villages of Aseki and Watama, known for a burial tradition that unsettles outside visitors but holds real meaning for the Anga people who practice it. Bodies of the dead are smoked and placed in wood or bamboo cages on mountain rid...

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