Qualla: Kerevat

Kerevat: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The prison has a name in Tok Pisin: Kindam, which means crayfish or shrimp. The Kerevat River runs between it and the national high school, three miles inland from the beach, and prisoners farm the land as part of their sentence. This is the central strange fact of Kerevat - that agriculture, education, and incarceration sit literally side by side on the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain, next to an airfield the Imperial Japanese Navy built in one frantic month in 1943 and never managed to use.

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Kerevat: Rain and Cocoa

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Kerevat sits at the southern edge of Ataliklikun Bay, six miles east of Vunakanau, connected by a coastal road to Rabaul in the northeast. The annual rainfall averages around 2,000 millimeters - a figure that reduces to a sentence: it rains most days, and the air is always thick ...

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Kerevat: The Airfield That Never Flew

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In September 1943 the Japanese began construction of an airstrip at Kerevat, part of the expanding defensive ring around their fortress at Rabaul. The work was rushed, the methods crude - palm trees pushed into trenches, dirt graded by hand. By the time runway was approaching usa...

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Kerevat: The Science Station

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1928, fifteen years before any Japanese engineer looked at a Kerevat map, the Australian colonial Department of Agriculture established an entomological research center here. The scientists - J. L. Froggatt, B. A. O'Connor, Gordon Dun - studied the insects and crops of tropica...

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Kerevat: A School Worth Keeping

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Kerevat National High School is the only national high school in the New Guinea Islands region. For decades it drew students in roughly equal measure from the Islands and from the rest of Papua New Guinea, training teachers, medical orderlies, and artisans, and producing graduate...

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Kerevat: The Prison Farm

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Kerevat Correctional Institution - Kindam - operates on the principle that prisoners learn something by farming the land they are held on. The institution grows rice, maize, peanuts, cocoa, copra, and a rotation of garden crops. Visitors are sometimes surprised by how close the p...

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