Recent additions to Little Darwin's earthquakes and volcanoes collection were two items , the above book covering the l937-l943 Rabaul eruptions , and a July 1998 National Library of Australia news magazine with a striking cover photo by Sarah Chinnery, a keen photographer who lived in New Guinea from 1921-l937 and experienced the massive l937 eruption which killed more than 500.
The magazine has an article about her under the title The Remarkable Mrs Chinnery, marking the publication by the library of Madaguna Road:The Papua and New Guinea Diaries of Sarah Chinnery , edited by Kate Fortune.
Irish, in 1918 Sarah met and married in England her Australian law clerk husband who was in the Flying Corps .
Arriving in Australia with her husband in 192O, Mrs Chinnery, who had been interested in photography since she was 14 , and is listed in Australian Women Photographers 1840-1960, contacted artist Ellis Rowan.
Rowan had painted New Guinea and North Queensland flowers , birds and butterflies and passed through Townsville on her trips . In addition, Rowan spent 12 years illustrating books on American fauna by Alice Lounsberry.
Sarah's husband became Government Anthropologist and Director of Native Affairs in New Guinea .
She was out and about in a boat taking photographs during the l937 catastrophic eruptions of two volcanoes which devastated Rabaul .
The Volcano Town book includes some of her photos and under the heading Scoop!, describes how Australian newspapers went to great lengths to try and get the first photos and accounts of the disaster.
A Sydney Daily Telegraph team which inaugurated the first Rabaul-to-Sydney air mail was delayed by a cyclone between Brisbane and Sydney.
The Sydney Morning Herald obtained a collection of photographs which were brought by Guinea Airways pilot Jack Turner to Port Moresby and then Townsville , the plane refueled in mid-air from petrol tins carried in the cabin .
The photographs then went on by air aboard an aircraft piloted by prominent aviator P.G. Taylor, which escaped the cyclone.
Thus the SMH was able to publish the scoop pix on June 7,1937, 24 hours before the Daily Telegraph .
During WWll, when Rabaul was occupied by the Japanese , it is said the Allies bombed the dormant volcanoes in the hope they would erupt.
