Port Moresby
— — a harbour town under the dry-side hills.
Not only on a wall.
“Papua New Guinea's capital wraps around a deep natural harbour on the Gulf of Papua, in the rain shadow of the Owen Stanley Range. The hills behind town brown off in the dry season; the sea stays warm. Stilt houses of Hanuabada reach out over the water, the old colonial bones of Town sit on the headland, and the Kokoda Track climbs north into cloud forest within an hour of the airport. from the studio
Port Moresby, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Port Moresby is the capital and largest city of Papua New Guinea, on the south coast of the island of New Guinea facing the Coral Sea. It sits inside the National Capital District at about 9.4° south, with a metropolitan population of roughly 400,000. The city occupies a series of low hills around Fairfax Harbour and Walter Bay, with the suburbs of Town, Konedobu, Boroko, and Waigani strung along the coastal road. Captain John Moresby of HMS Basilisk charted the harbour in 1873 and named it for his father, the British admiral Sir Fairfax Moresby.
The city sits in the rain shadow of the Owen Stanley Range, which rises to 4,072 metres at Mount Victoria thirty kilometres inland. That shadow makes Port Moresby unusually dry for a lowland tropical capital: roughly 1,000 millimetres of rain a year, falling almost entirely between December and April. May through October is the dry season, with southeast trade winds, blue skies, and grass hills that brown off to the colour of weathered hide. Daytime temperatures hold between 28 and 32°C year-round; evenings drop to a breezy 23°C.
International flights land at Jacksons International Airport (POM), about eleven kilometres northeast of Town. The Papua New Guinea National Museum and Art Gallery at Waigani holds the deepest single collection of Sepik and Highlands material in the country. Hanuabada, the traditional Motu stilt village along the foreshore, predates the colonial town. The Bomana War Cemetery, fourteen kilometres north, holds 3,824 Commonwealth war dead from the Kokoda campaign of 1942. The Kokoda Track itself starts at Ower's Corner, about an hour by road. Local advice on neighbourhoods and movement is essential.