Youth Insearch was established by a remarkable couple, Ron and Judith Barr. Over the years more than 30,000 troubled teenagers have passed through their programs and put their lives back on course. Many have achieved outstanding success within their families, their communities and their professions. Heath Ducker’s story, which includes his struggle on Kokoda, is the story of Youth Insearch.

Heath is a remarkable young man who threw off the shackles of an almost Dickensian childhood and is now on his way to professional and personal success.

One of 10 children with many different fathers, Heath lived in abject poverty in a run down house. At the age of 12, he was sexually abused by his best friend’s father.

The Sydney-based ‘Youth Insearch’ organisation became his saviour. It brought him into contact with other young people, some of whom had managed to overcome extraordinary deprivation. Their stories inspired the young Heath Ducker to work to overcome the handicaps of his own difficult background.

He seized on education as his ticket out of the cycle of deprivation. Unable to study in the chaos and noise of a crowded house, he retreated to the rooftops to study.

He became the youngest person ever to be appointed as a Youth Insearch leader and has become a significant role model for troubled youth.

Heath joined a leadership program I organised for Youth Insearch in 1998 – unfortunately he tore a muscle in his chest and we had to leave him in Menari.  ‘I stood on the track and wathched the rest of the team trudge up the side of the next mountain’ he wrote.  ‘It was a moment of excruciating disappointment. My first response was to run after them, but on the edge of the village I realised that I could easily jeopardise other team member’s safety, as well as my own if my health deteriorated on the track . . . I turned slowly and walked back to our sad, exhausted, injured little posse’. Heath returned and successfully completed the trek in 2003.  ‘For me, Kokoda has always been about the ability of the human spirit to overcome adversity.  No one will live a life without setbacks, but we need not let them defeat us.  The key is our attitude – whether we lose faith or get back on our feet and have another crack at it.  I’ve come to believe that life is strikingly simiar to a hike through the New Guinea Highlands.  Every experience is a mountain with a peak to climb, a descent to safely navigate and a lesson or two to learn en route.  The aim is to reach the other side a better person than you were when you ste out.’

‘I promised myself that one day I would return and complete the trek’.He did. 

In 2003 I invited him to join us in a leadership role.  He wrote: ‘Kododa has always been about the ability of the human spirit to overcome adversity.  Now one will live a life without setbacks, but we need not let them defear us. The key is our attitude – whether we lose faith or get back on our feet and have another crack at it.  In fact, I’ve come to believe that that life is strikingly similar to a hike through the New Guinean Highlands.  Every experience is a mountain with a peak to climb, a descent to safely navigate and a lesson or two to learn en route.  The aim is to reach the other side a better person than you were when you set out.’

Heath has since been invited to advise the Prime Minister about youth affairs and has formulated his own strong ideas about welfare delivery.

Now, at 25 years old and as a result of extraordinary courage and resilience, Heath Ducker is a lawyer with a passionate commitment to improving the lot of underprivileged kids. He lobbies politicians on their behalf, gives his weekends over to voluntary work at camps for teenagers in trouble and he leads treks for young people along the notorious Kokoda Trail with Adventure Kokoda. 

In May this year the Prime Minister of Australia, The Hon Kevin Rudd MP, presented him with ADC’s Leadership Award 2008, presented to only 26 people from across Australia.

When Heath appeared on ABC television’s Australian Story in 2006, he provided inspiration for thousands of viewers. His life story has continued to inspire as one of the most frequently viewed episodes on the ABC TV website.

‘When I think back to my first year at Youth Insearch’, he wrote, ‘to my leadership training and the slow, steady process of coming to terms with my childhood, my family background and my sexual abuse, I am reminded of a poem by Robert Browning:
‘You cant heal others until you have healed yourself,’ his mentor, Ron Barr would remind Heath.  ‘Later I also realised that wisdom doesn’t arise out of an experience spontaneously.  There needs to be a desire to learn from it – and that desire really can’t arise until we’ve begun to come to terms with our problems.

‘In retrospect, it feels to me as though my own healing was accomplished in an instant, but it wasn’t, of course.  It was an ongoing process, and people along the way kept me moving forward.  I remember feeling, around the time of that first leadership camp, that I’d developed a more enduring inner peace and sense of self-worth and purpose than even weeks before’. . .

     I walked a mile with Pleasure,
     She chatted all the way,
     But left me none the wiser,
     For all she had to say.
     I walked a while with Sorrow,
     And ne’er a word said she,
     But, oh, the things I learned from her
     When Sorrow walked with me.

‘A Room at the Top’ by Heath Ducker and Samantha Trenoweth is published by Random House Australia

See his interview with Mel and Koshie at:

http://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/b/sunrise/29198/heath-duckers-room-at-the-top

Every Anzac Day it’s the same.  Churns up your stomach.  Makes you remember.  Releases the monster of memory to reek havoc with your sanity until you can chain it up again in some dark corner of the mind.

A young bloke gave the address at Dee Why this morning.  Some local dignitary.  Seems they get younger every year.  Has never been to war by the look of him.   Not that I’d wish trhat on any one, but it had riled mea a bit.  His words had flowed articulately with the right amount of solemnity, but they seemed so devoid of …. feeling.

Well, what did I expect?  Unless you were there, how could anyone ever relate to what we experienced?  But his workds had droned on and on.  Droning, droning until I could hear the plane engines growing louder and louder, droppoing bombs into dense jungle along the Kokoda Track while we tensed and waited for the earth to shudder.  Then clenching our teeth while the air vibrated with cracking sounds as the Japandes fired at us through the trees.

Mind you, it wasn’t just the Japanese we had to contend with.  Other enemies came in disguise like the bloody mosquitos that nearly drove us mad when they descended at dusk and dawn with poisonous injections of malaria.  I’ve seen men shiver uncontrollably, some even hallucinate, and we’d bee pretty dedicated aobut taking our anti-malarial medication, but even that didn’t give us full protection.

Then there was the mud.  Mud, sucking at our boots trying to wrench them from our feet.  Thick slimy slippery muc.  We slept in it, fought in it and some died in it.  Stinking mud.  And it never dried out.  Never stopped raining long enough for that.  Most of us developed ulcers from cuts that got infected.  The place was seething with fungal infections that ate away at our flesh.  Some of the blokes could put a finger through the top of their foot and it’d come out the bottom.  Sickening sights of the tropics that will never leave me.

After the service, my mates were talking about going back up there in July for the 50^th Anniversary, Australia Remembers.  Said they were going by ship and were going to be flown into the airstrip at the village of Kokoda for the unveiling of memorial.  Of course, there’s no way they’d be walking the Track now.  It’s too gruelling and they’re too old.

Sometimes I wonder if Australia does remember.  I never heard much about the 50^th Anniversary of the New Guinea campaigns in 1992.  Most people don’t even realise it was the Australians in New Guinea who were the first to repel the Japanese during World War 11 and that it all happened on their own doorstep – where we were fighting to maintain Australia’s freedom!

I know I sound bitter.  I’m not.  I’m just disappointed there has been so little in school books for the kids to learn about their own country’s history.  Perhaps, one day, that might change.

The haze over the sea has cleared and I’m starting to feel the bite of the sun.  Not that I need any more sunspots burned off.  The specialist says a lot of the damage was done by the time I was twenty-five.  Makes sense, expecially when I think of how exposed we were in the high altitude on the Kokoda Track and how, after the clouds had been burned away by mid-morning, the sun would beat down without mercy, drying us out from the inside and weakening men who were already fatigued and starving.  When it beat down into the kunai grass that stood as tall as a man, prickling  and scratching at him, enveloping him until he wanted to scream.

Lying there, ever ready for battle, water bottle empty and no chance of further water supplies because it was too far from any creek.  Lying in wait like a snake, staring at the sun.  Listening for the enemy.  Then hearing their boots scraping through the long grass and the sound of their laboured breaths as they crept closer.  And then dodging bullets, and dragging our wounded mates as the Japanese over-ran us, six to one.  But both sides were weakened because of the difficulty of getting supplies through.  No side took prisoners and the hostile environment of the Owen Stanleys took no side.

But one thing none of us could have foreseen was the behaviour of our own wharfies!  Here we were earning five bob a day and being shot at while they were safe and sound back home, striking and whingeing for more pay while we were sometimes nearly starving.  What a comparison when the Yanks arrived.  They were really looked after!  We heard later that they had ice cream and steak back at their bases.  We couldn’t believe it.

I couldn’t believe being home again either.  After Kokoda, some of us were sent down to fight in the Gona/Buna campaign, and then, at last, we were shipped home.  I remember sitting for weeks on end, totally exhausted and finding it difficult to relate to those around me.  I’d wake up in the night in a dreadful sweat and it would take some time before I realised that I was in my own bed.  The curtains had become close impenetrable jungle and the bedclothes appeared as twisted tree roots and slithering snakes.

There were many times when my wife’s worried expressions caused me some anguish, but I was simply unable to discuss me feelings with her.  Other men I spoke to around that time had said the same thing.  We just felt civvies wouldn’t understand.  But after that, on Anzac Day each year, we stopped discussing it amongst ourselves and all we wanted to remember were the lighter moments and outrageous antics of the larrikins in our battalion.  We felt safe then, hiding behind the laughter.

The kids have been at me for a while now, to write all this down.  They reckon when blokes like me die, there’ll be no one around to tell the story.  And what about the grand children, they ask.  They mean well, I suppose.  They seemed happy when I sold the house and moved down here into a unit about a year after their mum died.  They said a smaller place and no maintenance was just the thing.  You’ll probably want to join the Senior Citizens Club, and just think of all the outings you’ll be able to go on.  Besides, the sea air will do you good, Dad.

You can see my place from here.  Over there, at the end of Oaks Avenue.  And not a bad view along the beach, you know.  I might sit out on my balcony to have lunch today.  It’s going on for twelve now, so I’d better be getting back.

I suppose there might be something in what they say about writing down my war experiences.  Perhaps after lunch.  Yes.  After lunch.

I wonder how I should begin?

Beverley Partridge 1995

Article by Beverley Partridge who trekked with Charlie Lynn in 1995

Why would a mother of two and physically unfit choose to walk The Kokoda Trail? Well, it all began on 31st August 2005 when my daughter was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia at the age of 17 months old. I was devastated, I blamed myself as I suffered with depression throughout my pregnancy and after she was born my depression didn’t improve.

I honestly feel now that there is always a positive in a negative situation and my daughter and I now have a bond that we never had before. This feeling of always looking on the bright side and finding a positive was reinforced in me when I was walking The Kokoda Trail.

I decided to fundraise for The Children’s Hospital at Westmead, as they are helping save my daughter’s life, but I didn’t know how or where or when. Shortly after being discharged from hospital I was watching Getaway, they were doing a story on The Kokoda Trail by the end of it I knew how I was going to fundraise!

On the 7th August 2006 I flew out to Port Moresby and the next day I was on a bus to Ower’s Corner and my adventure was about to begin. I was very nervous because I suddenly thought I wasn’t fit enough, what if my children needed me, what if Hannah relapses, there were a lot of what if’s running around my head. I wasn’t going quit before I even started and the children world wide needed me to finish, as all the money I was raising was going to the Medical and Research Centre at Westmead.

I proudly can say that I finished the track but it wasn’t without many a tear shed and with the support of my trekking group, my fabulous trek leader John Nalder and my personal carrier, Joseph, who all had kind words of encouragement or just walking with me.

The Kokoda Trail has a magic of it’s own to share with you. The history of it is amazing, sad, and happy all the emotions rolled in together. The track is also very beautiful in many ways, the people who live along it so full of love, the incredible wildlife (especially the butterflies), and the fauna. We take so much for granted and we don’t appreciate what and who are in our lives.

The Kokoda Trail means so much to me, it pushed my comfort zone boundaries further each day and I know that I am strong enough physically and mentally to survive what life throws at me.

I could write so much but yet it is so hard to find the words to express how the track has had such an impact on my life, it is an experience that I will cherish dearly. But if I didn’t have the support from family, friends, Charlie Lynn, John Nalder and my fellow trekkers it would not have happened and I am very grateful to all.

I hope my story reinforces to everybody what Kokoda means to them and we tell all our friends about our brave soldiers and fuzzy wuzzy angels who gave up their lives so we can enjoy what we have now.
Thank you for reading.
Renee