[NEW GUINEA; GOLD; AVIATION] Guinea Airways Limited : save time by flying to the goldfields.

Port Moresby, Papua to Wau, Bulolo, Bulwa, Lae, or Salamaua, Mandated Territory of New Guinea. At head of title: Travel with Guinea Airways for speed, comfort, reliability! [Adelaide?] : Guinea Airways Limited, [c.1936]. Single sheet, 300 x 360 mm, folding to 300 x 120 mm; the recto divided into three panels of text that includes a brief history of the airline, an advertisement for tourist flights, a summary of major routes, and booking information, plus a photographic illustration of one of the company’s Lockheed Electra aircraft; the verso with a large colour map showing the airline’s numerous routes illustrated by two photographic cartouches; original folds, very well preserved. Note: approximate date ascertained from an internal reference to recent flight operations in the period April-August, 1936.

An extremely scarce and desirable item of printed ephemera that evokes a lost ‘golden age’ of travel in New Guinea.

Guinea Airways Limited was the first commercial aviation company to operate in New Guinea, the impetus for its creation having emanated from the discovery of gold and the consequent need to service the goldfields. Originally formed in 1927 under the name of the mining syndicate Guinea Gold, with a DH37 biplane called ‘Old Faithful’, Guinea Airways Limited was registered on 4 November, 1927. Over the next decade the company actually became the world’s leading freight operator, its small fleet of aircraft transporting an average of 16 tonnes per day. By the mid 1930s it had branched into tourism, offering scenic flights ‘passing above what is probably the most majestic scenery to be found anywhere in the world’, as the brochure offered here boasts. In 1937 Guinea Airways even commenced a weekly service between Adelaide and Darwin, and for a short time operated from Adelaide to Sydney. Guinea Airways became Airlines of South Australia Pty Ltd in 1959.

We have not previously handled an example of this Guinea Airways brochure, and we have not been able to trace another example in Australian public collections.