The Field Geologist Who Chose New Guinea Over Cambridge

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Samso, a cream labradoodle in an Akubra and a red checkered flannel shirt, sits in a wooden dugout canoe on a broad brown river through rainforest, writing in a field notebook, with misty mountains behind. Caption: Samso on the river with his field notebook. Samso illustration

Sam Carey, eight years on the rivers of Papua and New Guinea, 1934 to 1942

Late in 1933, a 22-year-old Sydney geology graduate named Sam Carey was out in the Werris Creek country of northern New South Wales collecting rocks. He planned to take them to Cambridge, where he meant to do his doctorate.

Then a man called G.A.V. Stanley came down from New Guinea looking for geologists for a company called Oil Search. Carey told the story 66 years later, in a 2000 interview with Pat Quilty for the Australian Academy of Science. Stanley said to him, "Come down to our office and look at our maps." Carey went. "I went down and looked at all the maps ... and I was converted. I came home that night to tell my mother I was going to New Guinea."

He never did go to Cambridge. He spent the next eight years in the rivers and swamps of New Guinea and Papua, and the work he did there changed the way the geology of that island was understood.

I like this story because it is how a lot of careers really start. Someone shows you a map at the right moment, and the plan you had for yourself quietly goes away.

SYDNEY, 1929 TO 1934

The plan was Cambridge

An aerial view of the wide brown Purari River winding through dense rainforest in Papua New Guinea, with hills in the distance. Caption: The Purari River in the Gulf Province of Papua New Guinea, photographed in 2011. Carey reported on the Puri Anticline in this country in 1940. Photograph by Hitchster, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Carey was born at Campbelltown, New South Wales, on 1 November 1911. He went to the University of Sydney in 1929 and studied geology. Professor Edgeworth David, who had retired in 1924, became a major influence on him. In his words, by the end of first year "I had no doubt about it: I was going to be a geologist, a rock-hopper."

He took first class honours in 1933 alongside his friend Alan Voisey and finished a Master of Science in 1934. The obituary memoir written by Pat Quilty and Max Banks in 2003 says he had applied for a scholarship to go to Cambridge, missed out that year, and was told he had an excellent chance the next.

Oil Search needed someone with experience in stratigraphy and structural geology. In our geological jargon, stratigraphy is working out the order in which layers of rock were laid down, and structural geology is working out how those layers have since been folded and broken. Both Carey and Voisey were interviewed. Voisey did not want to go to New Guinea. Carey did, and the memoir says he talked Stanley into paying him £300 more than the £250 first offered, on the strength of his master's work.

Two weeks later he sailed on the SS Montoro for Boram, just east of Wewak on the north coast of New Guinea.

THE SEPIK DISTRICT, NEW GUINEA, 1934 TO 1936

Mapping on foot, with no base maps

Carey spent his first two years in the Sepik district, where the work was done on foot, and then two years in the Gulf region of Papua, where it could be done by boat.

Writing about it in 1990, he put it simply. "No base maps." "To go to a place a hundred kilometres away, I walked."

The memoir says he was the only European in a field party of about thirty New Guinean men. It lists his jobs as "field leader, surveyor, doctor, diplomat, trader, recorder of detail, and maintenance man for the equipment." The men who carried the gear, cut the tracks, paddled the canoes and found the food are not named in any of the accounts I read. They did a great deal of the work.

Because there were no maps, he had to survey as he went, with a theodolite, a measuring staff and a plane table. In the humidity, fungus grew on the fine cross-hairs inside his theodolite. Quilty and Banks record that he replaced them with spider web. His men collected spiders, and he chose the one that spun the best single thread. He made his survey staffs from bamboo because bamboo floats. Each night he plotted the day's work by the light of a Tilley lamp.

The memoir also notes that in the first two years there was no radio, and mail was usually two months old by the time it reached him.

Samso Access. The rest of the work is research.

SENU RIVER, SOUTH OF THE TORRICELLI MOUNTAINS, 20 SEPTEMBER 1935

An earthquake at the survey station

Shortly before noon on 20 September 1935, Carey was surveying on the Senu River when what the memoir calls the most violent earthquake recorded in Papua New Guinea up to then struck. Peter Baillie, who wrote a detailed paper on Carey's New Guinea years in 2021, gives its magnitude as 7.9.

Carey wrote it up that same year in The Australian Geographer. "I fell on my knees and supported myself against a stout bamboo thicket and concentrated my attention on hanging on and watching the falling timber." Then, "Waves developed on the river and broke on the shore like surf. The traverse station I had just vacated was buried under a crumbling cliff."

He recorded what the ground had done, including the frequency of the shaking and its effects. The memoir says he was very close to the epicentre, and that the quake sent the seismograph at Riverview Observatory in Sydney, 3,500 km away, off the page.

THE GULF OF PAPUA, 1936 TO 1942

Rivers, canoes and the first air photographs

In the Gulf country the rivers were the roads. Carey said in 2000 that his New Guinea work "was entirely in the rivers", mapping along the streams "which were the only place you could get good outcrops." Outcrop is what we call rock that is exposed at the surface where you can see it, instead of being hidden under soil and forest.

The parties travelled in motor dugout canoes, light paddle canoes and a 19-ton yawl called the Orion. Baillie describes the canoes being used in pairs, one carrying the plane table and the other acting as the surveyor's marker.

In our geological jargon

Oil geologists of that time were mostly looking for anticlines. An anticline is a fold in the rock layers shaped like an arch, or an upside-down bowl. Oil and gas are lighter than water, so they rise through porous, permeable rock until something stops them. The top of an arch, sealed by a layer of tight rock above it, is a natural place for them to collect. Mapping the folds was the first step to choosing where to drill.

From 1937 the Australasian Petroleum Company began flying over the country. Carey flew as an observer, sometimes in the co-pilot's seat. In 1938 the first big aerial photography survey started, though Baillie notes that rain and cloud allowed an average of only 18 minutes of useful flying a day. That year the Oil Search permits were pooled with those of two other companies under the Australasian Petroleum Company, and Carey moved across to it. Rickwood, writing in 1990, called the advances that came from those first air photographs "probably the greatest single step ever made in understanding the geology of Papua New Guinea."

Carey helped map the Maimai Dome, inland from Aitape, in 1935 and 1936, and in 1940 he reported on the large Puri Anticline in the Purari country. In 1938 he took six months' leave in Sydney and wrote up his doctoral thesis, "Tectonic Evolution of New Guinea and Melanesia." The University of Sydney awarded him a Doctor of Science for it. The memoir and the Academy give the year as 1939. Carey himself remembered hearing the news in 1938. The thesis then had to follow one of its examiners, H.A. Brouwer, around the world by sea before it could be marked.

Coffee with Samso, the long conversations.

A long dugout canoe on the Purari River, with its outboard motor tilted up, a man standing with a pole and two people seated at the bow, in front of tall rainforest. Caption: A dugout canoe on the Purari River in 2011. Carey's field parties travelled in motor dugouts much like this one. Photograph by Hitchster, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

PAPUA, 1942, AND THE YEARS AFTER

The war, and where the oil was found

The Second World War ended the work. The Australasian Petroleum Company's first deep test well, at Kariava on the Vailala River, had to stop on 10 January 1942 because of the Japanese advance. Drilling resumed in 1946, and the well was abandoned in 1948 with only small shows of gas.

Carey enlisted in mid-1942 and joined Z Special Unit, the group that worked behind enemy lines. His summary in 2000 was, "I was no hero." In 1944 he became Government Geologist of Tasmania, and in 1946 he became the first Professor of Geology at the University of Tasmania. He is best known now for his big ideas about moving continents. Baillie writes that many of them developed and matured in his New Guinea fieldwork.

A black and white photograph of Sam Carey in New Guinea in 1942, standing outdoors in a short-sleeved shirt, shorts and long socks. Caption: Sam Carey in New Guinea, 1942. Photograph via the Australian Academy of Science. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Baillie writes that the Oil Search and Australasian Petroleum Company geologists were "looking in the wrong place". Their search was aimed almost entirely at young rocks. Most of the oil and gas later found in the Papuan Basin comes from much older Jurassic and Cretaceous layers, below the younger rocks they were mapping. Carey remembered it a little differently in 2000, as the same beds producing oil further up in the highlands. Baillie still credits their work with paving the way for Papua New Guinea's oil and gas industry. Oil Search itself, incorporated in Port Moresby in 1929, received its first production revenue in 1992, 63 years after it was formed.

The memoir puts the long-term value of those years in one line. "His few papers on the area are regarded as landmark works, but most of his work was recorded in company reports."

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LOOKING BACK

A choice made in a day

Quilty and Banks wrote that Carey "had made a choice between field and laboratory based studies and field work won." I think that is true. It is also true that the choice was made in a day, in front of some maps, because a recruiter happened to come to Sydney that year.

Most of us in this industry can name a moment like that, such as a job offer that arrived before the one we were waiting for, or a trip into country we would never have chosen.

Carey went on to be one of Australia's best-known geologists. His thinking about how the Earth's crust moves drew on the folds and faults he mapped along the rivers of New Guinea. Not all of it held up. His later case for an expanding Earth has not convinced most of his profession.

Was there a map in your life that changed the plan?

A note on the sources

Carey's recollections are from his 2000 interview with Pat Quilty for the Australian Academy of Science, Conversations with Australian Scientists, given about 66 years after the events, and from his 1990 reminiscence "Fifty years of oil search" as quoted by Baillie. The life facts are from Patrick Quilty and Maxwell Banks, Samuel Warren Carey 1911 to 2002, Historical Records of Australian Science (2003). The fieldwork detail, the 1935 earthquake account and the exploration history are from Peter Baillie, "S. Warren Carey: New Guinea oil explorer (1934 to 1942)", Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania 155(2), 55 to 68 (2021), which quotes Carey's field reports. Where the sources give different years, both are given above.

The Words According To Samso is about sharing the experiences of decades in my journey. These are stories and news I have heard, brought back to life in 2026. Many of them have been told before, and The Words According To Samso is now bringing them back to readers, to share with those interested in 2026 and with future generations. No tickers, no research, no opinions on what anyone should own. samso.com.au