Adventure Kokoda Blog

The Sydney Morning Herald.

May 25-31, 1998

Torrential Rain, mud slides and a 10-day trek – unorthodox methods for building self-esteem, but it worked for a group of troubled teenagers. Judy Adamson reports:

The rain is pouring onto the darkened jungle in heavy sheets.  It’s three hours into a 10-day walk on the Kokoda Track and already Elizabeth, of the 10 disadvantaged teenagers involved, is exhausted and quietly weeping as she sits huddled in her rain jacket.

It seems like and experiment in torture, but to Vietnam veteran and Kokoda adventurer Charlie Lynn, it was the best motivational tool he could think of for the group.

Lynn, who is also a member of the NSW Upper House, regularly takes business executives on the track to build team thinking and individual self-esteem – both of which were sorely needed by the 15- to 18 year olds, many of whom have come from broken homes, been sexually abused or have had to deal with the death of one or both parents.

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WE ARE indeed a strange collection of life’s assorted gathered here so far from home, checking our packs, checking out each other. Among us are the media’s most unfit, a professional fisherman, a surgeon-cum-ardent bushwalker, a marathon runner and a 70-year-old war veteran. We are on a pilgrimage for which, it turns out, we are largely unprepared

The Owen Stanley Ranges loom before us and it seems unfathomable as we bask in the sunlight at Ower’s Corner that we are about to tackle them. New gaiters, new boots, and a newfound sense of adventure. They won’t be enough – but we don’t know that yet. Nor do we really know just how tough “the bloody track” will be.

Our reasons for being there are many: some of us have been lured by the historical significance on this the 50th anniversary of the Kokoda campaign, others by the challenge of a “walk” (ha!) regarded as one of the most difficult in the world, and I and one other are retracing the awful steps taken by our fathers before we were born. Les Cook, of Garran, a veteran of the bitter battle, is there because, he says, he could not pass up the chance to come back and see it one more time.

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The Bulletin with Newsweek
May 1992

Leeches. Malaria. Blisters. Tinea.  Treacherous creek crossings on narrow logs in the dark … writer Helen Pitt and photographer Valerie Martin (both 163cm and 59kg), with 18 other Australians, retrace the Kokoda Track nearly 50 years after the World War 11 battles.

IT IS bloody hard.  That is why it is called the ‘bloody track”.  In World War 11, you were regarded as a bloody hero if you crossed the Kokoda Track.  Now, if you do it by choice, you are seen as a bloody fool.

It is tough.  Look at a cross-section of the Track and you will understand why swearing is the only way to describe the trek involved.  You cannot judge the Track by distance (less than 100 kilometres); that fails to take into account its harshness.  The highest point is 2000 metres, as high as Mt Kosciusko.  Imagine climbing the stairs of the tallest skyscraper, then coming down a muddy embankment in the rain and fording a raging white-water stream.  Do that for seven days on end, sometimes nine hours a day.  Then you get a hint of what it is like.

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Personal Battles along the Kokoda Trail

Geo Magazine

May – June 1997

OVERCOME by emotion Dr John de Courcy halts mid-sentence.  Lying almost flat, his head propped against the thatched wall of a smoke-filled hut in the remote ranges of Papua New Guinea, he tries to describe those who have influenced his life.  After a short pause, he continues without inhibition and his audience listens with empathy.  It’s the kind of exchange that only a collective experience – bordering on near hell – is likely to deliver.

“Growing up during the depression, my father had a very difficult childhood, though he never admitted it,” said the 36 year-old paediatrician, referred to by his 22 fellow trekkers as Dr John reveals a profound admiration for his father and the sacrifices made in order to give his children the best possible chance in life.

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Article published in The Australian on 24 April 1996

WHAT do you get when you combine the historic Kokoda Track with a bunch of celebrities?  The answer, judging from Nine’s A Current Affair, is a disaster, of significant proportions, with the odd triumph thrown in.

When the bedraggled trekkers gratefully finish the 100km nine-day trek in Papua New Guinea they have, between them, battled enough injuries – mental and physical – to keep a flying doctor in business for a month.

On the Kokoda an exhausted Angry Anderson becomes a mere pussy cat – reduced to tears in the consoling arms of former army major Charlie Lynn, who led the team’s Kokoda assault.

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