Kerevat sits at the southern edge of Ataliklikun Bay, six miles east of Vunakanau, connected by a coastal road to Rabaul in the northeast. The annual rainfall averages around 2,000 millimeters - a figure that reduces to a sentence: it rains most days, and the air is always thick with the smell of wet earth and cocoa fermenting in sheds. Australians began cultivating this land for cocoa in May 1930, joining it to a growing constellation of plantations on the Gazelle Peninsula. Today the Cocoa and Coconut Research Institute keeps its headquarters here, and cocoa remains the region's defining crop. Drive the roads in harvest season and the smell does not leave you.

In September 1943 the Japanese began construction of an airstrip at Kerevat, part of the expanding defensive ring around their fortress at Rabaul. The work was rushed, the methods crude - palm trees pushed into trenches, dirt graded by hand. By the time runway was approaching usable, the strategic picture had already shifted. Allied bombers had begun pulverizing every airfield in the Rabaul Airfield Complex. Starting in 1944, Allied aircraft neutralized Kerevat's strip before it had hosted a single operational sortie. When the war ended, the field was simply abandoned to the jungle. The entomologists and agricultural scientists returned to the work they had been doing before - work Kerevat had been established for in the first place.

In 1928, fifteen years before any Japanese engineer looked at a Kerevat map, the Australian colonial Department of Agriculture established an entomological research center here. The scientists - J. L. Froggatt, B. A. O'Connor, Gordon Dun - studied the insects and crops of tropical Melanesia. After the war, the station expanded dramatically. By the 1960s, Kerevat's nurseries were producing tens of thousands of teak seedlings in a single year, along with stocks of Terminalia and eucalyptus species. Today the National Agricultural Research Institute maintains a regional center here that holds 105 field collections of sweet potato, 60 of banana, 10 of taro - one of four such repositories in the country. The Lowlands Agricultural Experiment Station, over a twenty-year period from 1980 to 1992, evaluated 20 seedling durian trees, eventually releasing eight selected clones to small farmers. The varieties are catalog-coded: NKDZ5, NKDZ7, NKDZ8, and so on. The point is simple. In a country where most farming is smallholder subsistence work, the clone numbers matter.

Kerevat National High School is the only national high school in the New Guinea Islands region. For decades it drew students in roughly equal measure from the Islands and from the rest of Papua New Guinea, training teachers, medical orderlies, and artisans, and producing graduates who went on to hold senior roles in government. Then in 2011 the school had to close temporarily - the administration cited fights, rumors of cult activity, and crumbling facilities. In 2012 Prime Minister Peter O'Neill publicly declared that closure was not an option; he directed an inquiry into the administration, particularly regarding five years of questionable spending. AusAID and the PNG government together contributed 3 million kina toward refurbishment. The school reopened and continues to serve. Stories about island schools often end in decline; this one did not.

Kerevat Correctional Institution - Kindam - operates on the principle that prisoners learn something by farming the land they are held on. The institution grows rice, maize, peanuts, cocoa, copra, and a rotation of garden crops. Visitors are sometimes surprised by how close the prison sits to the high school and the research institute - a geography that says something about how Kerevat has come to understand its purpose. This is a place organized around the question of what grows here, and what the people of New Britain can do with what grows. The war was a loud, violent interruption. The agricultural work that came before it and after it is the quieter through-line.