It matters what we call things. A name anchors a story in language, time and context. Across Papua New Guinea (PNG), the imprints of various waves of colonisation are conspicuously evident ad written on its maps. The word ‘Guinea’ was imposed by a Spanish explorer who thought the people resembled those of West Africa. The islands of New Britain and New Ireland mark a brief stint in the British Empire, while the Bismarck Archipelago and Mount Wilhelm reflect these places’ brief past as part of a German protectorate. Underneath these glib titles, the stories of the previous 60,000 years of human habitation in these places—and the names they called them—sit silenced. Now, locals are trying to revive some of them.
In Oro Province, northeast of the massive new Managalas Conservation Area (MCA), one volcano bears a name that feels oddly misplaced. Named after something your nana might serve for afternoon tea, Mount Lamington calls to mind not molten rock but an Australian bakery staple: a jam-and-cream-stuffed, chocolate-sauce-dipped, desiccated-coconut-sprinkled sponge cake square. The cake itself is said to have been improvized by Lord Lamington’s chef in the early 1900s, drawing on his Tahitian wife’s use of coconut. The mountain, however, took its name not from the sweet but from Lord Lamington himself, who served as Queensland’s governor from 1896 to 1901, during the period when PNG was under Australian rule (from 1914 until independence in 1975).
Still, it seems an odd association – a sponge cake and a distant colonial administrator – for an active volcano that in 1951, erupted with devastating force, killing thousands and torching entire towns. Australian volcanologist G.A.M ‘Tony’ Taylor later described the magnitude of the terrifying event thus in a 1958 report:
At 10:40 a.m. on Sunday, 21 January, the volcano produced an explosion of great magnitude. A large mass of ash was projected rapidly into the stratosphere to form a huge expanding mushroom-shaped cloud. The base of the column began to expand laterally as clouds of incandescent ash swept down the slopes of the mountain and laid waste more than 90 square miles of country.
This tremendous release of energy was awe-inspiring and terrifying to the people living on the slopes. Such was the velocity of the enveloping cloud that only those on the extreme edge of the subsequently devastated area were able to escape.
In the distance stands the Anglican Martyrs Memorial School, one of the few structures left standing. Photo courtesy of Fred Kleckham / Papua New Guinea Association of Australia.
Prior to the explosion, neither local communities nor the colonial administration had realised the mountain was a volcano, let alone an active one. Fertile (volcanic) soils and a temperate climate had attracted Sangara farmers to settle the slope, and the colonial Australian administration had established the Higaturu Government outpost station on the mountainside. During the Second World War, colonial officials at the station hanged 22 locals accused of collaborating with Japan – a grim episode that, in the eruption’s aftermath, some interpreted as divine punishment, whether for the Sangara’s resistance to imposed beliefs or for colonial brutality itself.
Seventy years later, calls are growing in Oro to reclaim the mountain’s Indigenous name, Sumbiripa. For provincial governor Gary Juffa, restoring the name is part of restoring dignity: “It’s something I’d like to do to give reflection back to the original people of that area,” he told Radio New Zealand (RNZ) in an interview.
The move mirrors broader shifts towards decolonizing cartography (mapping) PNG and elsewhere. “Place-name decolonization is an attempt to eliminate garbled, derogatory or erroneous names and, by so doing, restore the indigenous cartography of the natives,” wrote University of Lagos lecturer Nna O. Uluocha in a 2015 article. “Cartography…is a powerful tool for conferring uniqueness, legitimacy and a sense of dignity on any society, and the most potent force by which cartography achieves this feat is place-names.”
For Juffa, the act of renaming is inseparable from remembering. The official death toll of around 4,000, he argues, is a bureaucratic fiction – one that counted only government employees and those recorded on colonial registers. “A lot of people who died were not remembered, recorded, or recognized,” he said. Survivors recall entire communities erased from the record. “So one of the projects that I’d like to undertake to give some comfort to survivors, to the families, is that their lost loved ones are remembered.”
“For example, there’s an area where 17 villages were decimated and only one family survived,” he told RNZ. “In those days, the villages were quite large—about 1000 or so people—meaning there were effectively 17,000 people in just that one area.”
For him, recognition means more than numbers.“It would offer a kind of closure to have some idea of exactly how many people passed on,” said Juffa. “And even better, if we can remember who they were and record their names. That might be a little bit challenging, but we have to try.”
So the irony lingers: an active volcano remembered in popular imagination through a sponge cake and a colonial governor’s title, while the names – and lives – of thousands remain unmarked. Calling the mountain Sumbiripa is not simply about correcting a map; it is about restoring memory, dignity and a measure of justice to those who once lived in its shadow.
For more information on this project, please contact William Unsworth (CIFOR-ICRAF): [email protected]
