There is nothing resembling a welcome centre at the unkempt Amelia Earhart memorial in Lae, Papua New Guinea’s second city and capital of Morobe province. There isn’t even a walkway: visitors must leap over a detritus-filled culvert. When they get there, they will find an anti-aircraft gun and a concrete slab with Earhart’s name written on a bit of tarnished metal. Completing the forsaken scene, a throng of bored youth loiter at the culvert.
This place was once an airfield, from where Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan took off in 1937 for the US Pacific territory of Howland Island. It was the second-last leg of Earhart’s attempt to be the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. The plane and its occupants were never seen again.
For a long time, the derelict memorial was an apt metaphor for how the United States ignored Papua New Guinea. Things started to change when the first Trump administration began showing interest, motivated by concern about Chinese influence. Vice President Mike Pence attended the APEC meeting in Port Moresby in 2018, where the United States committed to investing in a project to boost electrification and refurbish a naval base on Manus Island. In 2019, Donald Trump signed into law a bipartisan initiative called the Global Fragility Act intended to usher in a new approach to conflict prevention.
Interest continued during the Biden years, where PNG was designated as one of five focus places for implementation of the Global Fragility Act, with a concentration on two provinces, Morobe and Hela. The flagship initiative, called the Peace Project, included peacebuilding training, economic empowerment and violence prevention, targeting the very sort of desperate people lingering near the Earhart memorial.
Defence ties increased under Biden: in 2023, the United States and PNG finalised a Defence Cooperation Agreement and a ship-rider agreement, which enables joint maritime patrols. The president himself was meant to visit Port Moresby to witness the signing but cancelled the trip. The administration courted Papua New Guinean leaders assiduously. Prime Minister James Marape visited the Biden White House twice for US–Pacific Islands summits.
Things started to change when the first Trump administration began showing interest, motivated by concern about Chinese influence.
Earhart’s memory was leveraged to help the effort further. The United States committed to supporting a new memorial to Earhart on a university campus in Lae, working with the PNG Tribal Foundation, whose American founder GT Bustin grew up in PNG. The new setting was chosen because the existing location was deemed unsafe. And the new design had pizzazz; a likeness of Earhart’s plane held up by angel wings. A Papua New Guinean artist was commissioned to sculpt. A scholarship was announced. A former NASA astronaut visited Lae as part of a soft power push.
Some of that momentum has slowed with the arrival of Trump mark two, especially when it comes to aid. All USAID programs in PNG have been terminated, including the electrification program. The Peace Project barely started before it was axed. The Global Fragility Act remains on the books – the elaborate ten-year plans for PNG still on the State Department website, yet it is hard to see how much can progress with uncertainties over funding and people to implement the initiatives. PNG’s US$80 million annual exports of coffee, cocoa and vanilla to the United States have been hit with Trump’s “reciprocal” 10 per cent tariff.
In other respects, the United States isn’t going anywhere. Spending on defence projects is growing at a level that dwarfs the amount reduced in aid. The US Defence department is investing US$400 million in a fuel storage facility in Port Moresby as well as refurbishing barracks and running a slew of training programs. Shiprider patrols continue. Diplomats are still energetically out and about. For now, at least, US support on HIV/AIDS remains through a waiver.
These efforts are at an altitude removed from the Earhart memorial, where Barry Koma, Rodger Dunkens and Scott Arrot work. Koma is the self-described chief guardian of the park, having cleared away bush around it in 2010 and stayed ever since. He and his team provide security. Most visitors seem slightly apprehensive when they come here – no small wonder given the mise en scène and the opaque pricing policy (A$40 equivalent for foreigners, free if you are Papua New Guinean). The men report 400 visitors a week, which seems an extraordinary figure. The only person who stands out in their memory is a kindly Australian police officer who donated bags of cement and some safety vests.
The men are avatars for the everyday despair that afflicts many Papua New Guineans. All hail from the Highlands, places marked “undiscovered” on the maps Earhart would have used to fly over to reach Lae from her previous stop in Darwin. Each left school aged ten, surviving on fees obtained from visiting foreigners. The chance that newfound US interest will help them is slim, less so when the memorial moves to its new home.
And what of that memorial? It faces two challenges familiar in PNG: delays and funding. The sculpture is presently in a Port Moresby warehouse. Bustin is seeking funds for a concrete plinth, a launch event in Morobe, and continuing the scholarship. No such funding problems for Earhart back in her homeland, it would seem. President Trump has designated a place for the ill-fated aviatrix in his US$30 million National Garden of American heroes.
Gordon Peake helped set up a program in Morobe province and worked on the Global Fragility Act while at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, DC.
