As the township of Lae, in Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea is a relatively new entity, the history of the Lae environs is much older.
Archaeology Humans have been in New Guinea for as long as 60,000 years, according to archaeological evidence, although this is under debate.
Recent archaeological research suggests that 50,000 years ago, people may have occupied sites in the highlands at altitudes of up to 2,000 metres, rather than being restricted to warmer coastal areas.
European contact
In 1793, Antoine Bruni d'Entrecasteaux sailed up the "tail" of New Guinea into the Gulf he named Houn de Kermadec.
In 1856, Italian Catholic priests arrived at Mandok Island, Siassi before being forced to leave by disease.
Between 1871 and 1880, Russian anthropologist Nicholai Miklukho-Maklai made a number of expeditions to New Guinea, spending several years living among native tribes, and described their way of life in a comprehensive treatise.
In 1874, John Moresby on sails along Huon Gulf and names Parsee Point (Salamaua), the Markham, Rawlinson Ranges, and explores around the Markham mouth.
The history of Lae township, according to Lucas (1972) can be classified into four periods; the mission phase (1886–1920), the gold phase (1926 until World War II), the timber and agricultural phase (until 1965) and the industrial boom from 1965 with the opening of the Highlands Highway.
1800s
German traders The first Germans were probably from the Dutch East India Company: during Abel Tasman's first voyage.
Until the 1871 unification, Germany had not concentrated on the development of a navy, and this essentially had precluded German participation in earlier imperialist scrambles for remote colonial territory – the so-called "place in the sun". (p.21)
Many Germans in the late 19th century viewed colonial acquisitions as a true indication of having achieved nationhood. Public opinion eventually arrived at an understanding that prestigious African and Pacific colonies went hand-in-hand with dreams of a High Seas Fleet. Both aspirations would become reality, nurtured by a press replete with Kolonialfreunde [supporters of colonial acquisitions] and by a myriad of geographical associations and colonial societies. Bismarck and many deputies in the Reichstag had no interest in colonial conquests merely to acquire square miles of territory.
In the late 1870s and early 1880s, an active minority in Germany consisting of Kolonialverein of 1882 and the Society for German Colonization (Gesellschaft für Deutsche Kolonisation) tried to persuade Chancellor Bismarck to embark on a colonial policy with no success.
Eventually Bismarck organised the acquisition of much of what would become the German colonial empire.
On 23 June 1884, Bismarck told the Reichstag that annexations would now proceed but by grants of charters to private companies.
Hanseatic League merchant houses were the first to establish footholds: Johann Cesar Godeffroy & Sohn of Hamburg, headquartered at Samoa from 1857, operated a South Seas network of trading stations especially dominating the copra trade and carrying German immigrants to various South Pacific settlements with Godeffroy and Son estimated to control as much as 70 per cent of the commerce of the South Seas.
Hernsheim and Robertson, established a German community on , in Blanche Bay (the north-east coast of New Britain) from which it traded in New Britain, the Caroline, and the Marshall Islands.
The German effort included the first commercial endeavours in the 1850s and 1860s in West Africa, East Africa, the Samoan Islands and the unexplored north-east quarter of New Guinea with adjacent islands later Kaiser-Wilhelmsland and the Bismarck Archipelago. German traders and merchants began to establish themselves in the African Cameroon delta and the mainland coast across from Zanzibar. The West and East Africa firms at Apia and the settlements of Finschhafen, Simpsonhafen and the islands Neu-Pommern and Neu-Mecklenburg, trading companies newly fortified with credit began expansion into coastal landholding.
As Bismarck was converted to the colonial idea by 1884, he favoured "chartered company" land management rather than a colonial government setup due to financial considerations. He reluctantly acquiesced to pleas for help to deal with revolts and armed hostilities by often powerful rulers whose lucrative slavery activities seemed at risk. German native military forces initially engaged in dozens of punitive expeditions to apprehend and punish freedom fighters, at times with British assistance.
By the end of 1875, one German trader reported: "German trade and German ships are encountered everywhere, almost at the exclusion of any other nation".
German New Guinea Company
The German New Guinea Company () was founded in 1884 at Berlin by Adolph von Hansemann and a syndicate of German bankers for the purpose of colonising and exploiting resources on Neu Guinea (German New Guinea), where German interest grew after British Queensland's annexation of part of eastern New Guinea.
Between 1879–1882, ornithologist and explorer Dr Otto Finsch was secretly tasked by German Chancellor Count Otto von Bismarck to expeditiously select land for plantation development on the north-east coast of New Guinea and establish trading posts. On his return to Germany, Otto Finsch joined a small, informal group interested in German colonial expansion into the South Seas led by the banker, Adolph von Hansemann. Finsch encouraged them to pursue the founding of a colony on the north-east coast of New Guinea and the New Britain Archipelago even providing them with an estimate of the costs of such a venture.
While the western half of New Guinea had been administered by the Netherlands since 1828, the eastern half was not annexed by any European power until the 1880s. In 1883, fearful of growing foreign influence, particularly the influence of Germany, the British colony of Queensland annexed the south-eastern part of New Guinea, against the wishes of the British government.
This initiated German interest in the remaining third of the island and on 3 November 1884, under the auspices of the Deutsche Neuguinea-Compagnie (New Guinea Company), the German flag was flown over Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, the Bismarck Archipelago and the German Solomon Islands.
On 17 May 1885, the German Emperor granted an Imperial charter to the newly founded Neuguinea-Kompanie (New Guinea Company) for this annexation, which was further extended to the Solomon Islands on 13 November 1886.
For the first fifteen years the colony was administered under imperial charters by a private company, in the manner of the old British and Dutch East India Company, but with far less success. When the Imperial Government took over the running of the colony in 1899, its overriding objective was rapid economic development, based on a German-controlled plantation economy.
To expand the highly profitable plantations, the Germans needed more native workers. The government sent military expeditions to take direct control of more areas 1899 to 1914. The government enforced new laws that required the tribes to furnish four weeks of labour per person annually and payment of a poll tax in cash, thereby forcing reluctant natives into the work force. The planters protested and the government responded by sending troops.
Kaiser-Wilhelmsland
German New Guinea () was the first part of the German colonial empire. The mainland portion, Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, was formed from the northeastern part of New Guinea. The islands to the east of Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, on annexation, were renamed the Bismarck Archipelago (formerly the New Britannia Archipelago) and the two largest islands renamed Neu-Pommern ("New Pomerania", today's New Britain) and Neu-Mecklenburg ("New Mecklenburg, now New Ireland).
The economic life of German New Guinea's small population of European and Asian settlers, as well as that of its Melanesian population, relied heavily on the export of copra and the import of goods and services.
Lutheran and Catholic missionaries
By the mid-1880s, German church authorities had devised a definite program for missionary work in New Guinea and assigned it to the Rhenish Mission, under the direction of Friedrich Fabri (1824–91), a Lutheran. The missionaries faced extraordinary difficulties: repeated sickness from the unhealthy climate; psychological and sometimes violent tensions and fights between the colonial administration and the natives. The natives rejected European customs and norms of social behaviour; few embraced Christianity. In 1921, the Rhenish Mission territory was handed over to the United Evangelical Lutheran Church of Australia.
The mission society provided clergy and religious education for Lutheran settlements in Missouri, Iowa and Ohio, Australia, and anywhere else "free thinking" Lutherans had settled.
On 12 July 1886, a German missionary, Johann Flierl, a pioneer missionary for the Southern Australian Lutheran Synod and the Neuendettelsau Mission Society, sailed to Simbang in Finschhafen, Kaiser-Wilhelmsland and arrived at Lae shortly after.
Flierl sailed from the Cooper Creek mission in South Australia towards German New Guinea stopping at Queensland to establish the Cape Bedford Mission and Elim Mission.
At the time, two groups of Germans inhabited Kaiser-Wilhelmsland. The largest group were the entrepreneurs, plantation owners, officials of the German New Guinea Company, and government functionaires living in Finschhafen and Madang, and at plantations along the coast. They viewed groups they encountered, differently than did the evangelical Lutherans at Finschhafen, Sattelberg, and the filial mission statements along the coast.
Following a dispute with the German New Guinea Company, Pastor Gottfried Schmutterer from the Neuendettelsau Mission Society was forced to relocate his original mission camp in July 1912 and was offered a location on the banks of the Bumbu known as Ampo. The Ampo Lutheran Church was built in 1937 and later used as a WW2 field hospital and remains the oldest building in Lae. Several Lutheran churches, schools and headquarter buildings now occupy the surrounds.
In the 1920s, the Lutheran Church had a significant impact on the Butibum and Malahang communities and garnered a great deal of loyalty to the faith. By way of example, in 1971, the Roman Catholic mission decided to erect a church in the Bumbu settlement to serve the Sepik community there. The Butibum people generally regarded this move as sacrilege because they believed their lands, on which the new church stands, are hallowed by the Lutheran faith.
1900s
In the first years of the 20th century, shipping lines had established scheduled services with refrigerated holds and agricultural products from the colonies, exotic fruits and spices, were sold to the public in Germany proper. Geologists and cartographers explored what were the unmarked regions on European maps, identifying mountains and rivers, and demarcating boundaries. Hermann Detzner and one Captain Nugent, R.A., had charge of a joint project to demarcate the British and German frontiers of Cameroon, which was published in 1913.
Travelers and newspaper reporters brought back stories of black and brown natives serving German managers and settlers. There were also suspicions and reports of colonial malfeasance, corruption and brutality in some protectorates, and Lutheran and Roman Catholic missionaries dispatched disturbing reports to their mission headquarters in Germany.
In 1900, the Neuendettelsau Mission Society imported cattle from Australia to the mission stations at Malahang and Finschhafen however Tick fever caused many losses. Eventually the Malahang mission sold cattle to locals for $70 per head.1965 Cattle, Coffee, and Land Among the Wain, Issue 8 of New Guinea Research Unit Bulletin accessed 31 January 2014