Roars from the Mountain

Colonial Management of the 1951 Volcanic Disaster at Mount Lamington

R. Wally Johnson

Pacific Series

Frontispiece: Mount Lamington from the north in late 1967

Mount Lamington is shown here 20 kilometres to the south of Popondetta, Northern District, in what was then the Territory of Papua and New Guinea. The photograph was taken by Mr John R. Horne using a telephoto lens, probably at the end of 1967. The lava dome that grew inside the summit crater, or avalanche amphitheatre, of the mountain after the catastrophic explosive eruption of 1951 is seen largely free of vegetation and is still thermally active.

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ISBN (print): 9781760463557

ISBN (online): 9781760463564

WorldCat (print): 1145890837

WorldCat (online): 1145891085

DOI: 10.22459/RM.2020

This title is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

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Cover design and layout by ANU Press.

Cover photograph taken by Qantas pilot, Captain Arthur Jacobsen, at about 10.40 am while flying from Port Moresby to Rabaul on Sunday 21 January 1951 (see also Figure 5.9a(i)). The catastrophic eruption at Mount Lamington has created a large, expanding, mushroom-shaped volcanic cloud, which then collapsed producing destructive, ground-hugging, pyroclastic flows. Captain Jacobsen provided volcanologist Tony Taylor with prints of the photographs he took that morning, and Taylor included three of them in his report of the eruption (Taylor 1958, figs 10–12).

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