Qualla: Samarai

Samarai: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1902 the value of goods exported from Samarai was three times that of Port Moresby. This is not the sentence you expect to read about a place that today is one square kilometre of decaying buildings, population 460, with no airstrip and a single renovated dock. But that is exactly what Samarai was for a long stretch of the twentieth century - the busy, British, malarial, second-largest town in the Territory of Papua, perched on a flyspeck island in the China Strait, where steamers bound between Australia and the Orient stopped for coal, mail, and rum. The town was destroyed by its own side in 1942, rebuilt after the war, and slowly abandoned when the capital moved elsewhere. What remains is one of the more melancholy places in the Pacific - a 29-hectare island that has not quite forgotten what it used to be.

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Samarai: Dinner Island

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1873 the British Captain John Moresby sailed HMS Basilisk into the cluster of islands off the southeastern tip of New Guinea and went ashore for a meal. He named the place Dinner Island on the spot, a casually colonial christening typical of that decade of Pacific mapping. The...

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Samarai: The Malarial Swamp Fills In

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Samarai's original problem was the mangrove swamp that covered most of its interior. It bred mosquitoes the way any tropical swamp breeds mosquitoes, which is to say in uncountable, lethal numbers, and malaria killed residents relentlessly through the 1880s and 1890s. In 1898 the...

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Samarai: Burned to the Waterline

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When the Japanese advance through the Pacific reached New Guinea in 1942, the British colonial authorities made a calculation about Samarai and came to a hard answer. If the town fell into Japanese hands it would give them a ready-made base at the eastern approaches to Milne Bay,...

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Samarai: Sorong to Samarai

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The phrase Sorong to Samarai, sometimes shortened to S2S, travels a long way across a fractured political geography. Sorong sits at the western end of the island of New Guinea, in what is now Indonesia's Southwest Papua province. Samarai sits at the eastern end, in Papua New Guin...

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Samarai: What Is Left

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 2014 census counted 460 people on Samarai. The number has been declining steadily. The island is split administratively into Samarai South and Samarai North wards, both in the Bwanabwana Rural Local Level Government Area, Samarai-Murua District. Two species of bat - the Lesse...

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