Memorial to Amelia Earhart Lae PNG

Amelia Earharts last flight from here in July 1937, before she disappeared on route to Howland Island, is commemorated by two concrete rectangle posts holding up a larger concrete cross-bar, like a doorway for hobbits.  Attached to the concrete with aluminum rivets is a brass plague engraved Amelia Earhart. A pattern of rivets indicating that at some point further explanation to the memorial must have been on similar plaques.  Leading to the epitaph are white painted flag stones lost in grass either side of bushes that would have formed a garden either side of a non existent pathway.

The memorial is on flat waste land near the foreshore of Lae Harbour, I can only imagine this must have been the air strip her heavy fuel laden Electra 10E lumbered off from on its way to the next rendezvous at Howland Island some 2000 kilometres away.

Sitting next to the memorial is a Japanese anti-aircraft gun, it to now derelict, no longer with markings describing it past functions. Just a weapon in the tall grass.

Amelia Earharts last flight doesn’t matter here. It’s of no importance to the locals and I guess most of them don’t know who she was and her importance in aviation development and modern western women.  The struggles of Papua New Guinea are much more fundamental than that.