This Shell depot lies forgotten and untended in Samarai. I liked the industrial beauty of it.
The old Shell depot Samarai
I was struck at the time by the stylistic similarity to a much more glamorous structure on the far side of the world.
The stairs around the turret of the Mespelbrunn castle in Bavaria.
Well as you can see I’ve lapsed once again with getting my images uploaded. I think the secret is to post every two or three days. I’ve now got three other blogs on the go (family history, books and local history) so they’re keeping me pretty busy.
However I’ve also committed to following the 2013 A to Z Challenge. In 2012 I did this on my Family History Across the Seas blog but this year I’m going to post using this blog, Tropical Territory. My response to the series will be all about places in the Top End of Australia (mainly the NT Top End and sometimes northern WA or central Australia, NT) – a travelogue and photologue of some of Australia’s perhaps less well-known places.
In the meantime I’m going back to posting photos of our recent PNG trip. I’ve still got heaps of NT photos but I for one feel like a change. So join me as we walk down what used to be the main street of Samarai for many years. It could get quite busy with the arrival of cruise ships, freighters and the Catalina flying boats.
When we visited Europe for the first time in the early 1970s, the only people who had any idea where PNG was, were the Greeks, precisely because their ships had come along that route.
As you see the main street now looks rather deserted though in fact there’s still an active community on the island. It’s “just” that many of the services have gone.
The Old Steamships store
Mr Cassmob remembers the day when, as a small boy, he heard voices under their house. On inspection he discovered a couple of women from one of the cruise ships happily searching through his family’s shell collection, blissfully unaware that they were trespassing on his family’s property and garden. They enquired in rather staccato English, as if they were talking to the village idiot, how much the shells cost. He decided to sell them and make a bit of pocket money,but you have to wonder about people, don’t you?!
Burns Philp (BPs) and Steamships Trading Company both had thriving stores on the island and it was from them that our groceries and hardware were shipped, on order, to Alotau. The buildings remain but are essentially unused. The BP store is now being used like a market to see betel nut (buai) and sweet potato.
Although Mr Cassmob worked at these places during his school holidays he was remarkably sanguine about their current state of inactivity.
This poor little blog has been sadly neglected over Christmas etc. When I started it I’d planned to post 365 photos over 2012 with each image as a stand-alone “event”. In the end I posted on 173 days, but uploaded 466 photos, and couldn’t resist adding commentary to most. 3900 viewers read the posts over the course of the year.
Normally I only post photos of the Northern Territory here (and I still have plenty on file to upload in due course), but for a change (for all of us) I’d include some of the photos we took on our recent trip to Papua New Guinea when we mainly visited Alotau and Samarai. After all when we lived in Alotau it was still in the Territory of Papua New Guinea and it is also tropical. Well that’s my justification anyway!
If you want to read more about our experiences on this sentimental return voyage, you can read them on this link to my other blog, Family History Across the Seas.
When growing up on Samarai, Mr Cassmob’s mother used to import hibiscus from all over, including Hawaii. We wondered as we looked at these ones growing in the grounds of the Catholic Church (near where they lived) if they were the horticultural descendants of those imported hibiscus although they’re not all that exotic.
Red Hibiscus at Samarai
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