Laurabada For The

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From Our Own Correspondent

Port Moresby, May 20.

THE Papuan Administration vessel Laurabada, after 26 years’ service has been decommissioned.

She made her last voyage late in 1950 and took a terrific pounding off Samarai.

She limped back to Port Moresby with battered bows and many wounds which

set experienced seamen shaking their leads over the ship’s future. A close scrutiny revealed rotten timbers and bolts 10 more than a thread of rust.

So Laurabada was condemned and her passing from the lists of sea-going ships vas marked by a decommissioning cere nony on May 12, with the Administrator, Jolonel Murray, in attendance, and also .he Commander of the HMAS Shoal laven, Commander R. I. Peek, whose ves sel was in Port Moresby on a goodwill voyage.

A lot of Island history has flowed past the bows of this ship. She was used extensively by the late Sir Hubert Murray on his voyages as Lieutenant-Governor of Papua, usually with Mr. Leonard Murray (Sir Hubert’s nephew) as captain and navigator; and, with Mr. Ivan Champion in charge, it made a daring run into Jap anese territory after the fall of Rabaul in 1942 to pick up survivors who had got through to Jacquinot Bay. Then she did duty as a naval ship and finally returned

to the ways of peace as the official vessel of the present Administrator.

So far no announcement has been made regarding a replacement for the old craft.

Mr. E. J. Hallslrom, of Sydney, has in vited Count Nils Gyldenstolpe, of Sweden, to accompany him on a hunting and collecting expedition on the central highlands of New Guinea. The count will gather material for the Swedish State Museum.

Laurabada —a photograph taken in 1980.