REF : ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE FOR THE KOKODA TRACK SPORTS DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM

I wish to thank you, your lovely wife and the Adventure Kokoda Management for financially supporting the Kokoda Track Sports Development Program within this year, 2009.

I had acknowledged your contribution to this very special project in various appropriate forums and have informed the boys and people along the Kokoda Track about your support.

In relation to the outcome of the Program, preparations are now underway by four (4) Local Rugby League Clubs in Queensland who are keen to engage few boys from the Kokoda Track to play in the local Queensland Rugby League Competition next year, 2010. Hopefully, the various Rugby Club offers (Work, Match payments, Accommodation) for the boys should be made available towards the end of January and I will make the announcements in the middle or towards the end of February, 2010.

Also the Gold Coast Titans Junior Development Team Management are keen to recruit school boys from the Kokoda Track area next year to be part of the Gold Coast Titans Junior Development Team under Football Scholarships. We will announce this program shortly.

Since you have pioneered in supporting this program, I trust you will continue to support this program.

I look forward to continue working with you in this very special Project in the New Year. Also I take this opportunity to wish you, your wife and your family a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, 2010

Yours sincerely,

Jame Enage
Chairman

PO Box 545
Boroko NCD 1 11
Papua New Guinea
P: (+675) 323 6165
F: (+675) 323 6020
E.:kokodatrackauthority@global.net.pg

Last year Adventure Kokoda was the only trekking company to pay our trek fees in full and in advance.  This year we were the only trekking company to respond to a call from the PNG Kokoda Track Authority to help sponsor a team of local rugby league players to train with the Gold Coast Titan Juniors on the Gold Coast. 

Following is a brief update on our philanthropic programs in PNG in 2009:

Kokoda Bursary Program – Port Moresby Grammar SchoolOur Adventure Kokoda partnership with the Port Moresby Grammar School continues to grow with the support of our trekkers. 

 This year we sponsored two students, Margaret Aitsi and Alfreda Nakue on the Kokoda Mateship Trek organised by two Federal MPs, Jason Clare and Scott Morrison.  Margaret and Alfreda graduated in December and were hosted by Adventure Kokoda for a 3-week trip to Sydney where they met up with their fellow trekkers in Bankstown and Cronulla.

We were delighted to receive the following email from Mr Don Daniels MBE, Chairman and Founder of the Port Moresby Grammar School on 10 October 2009:

Good morning Mr Lynn,

Years ago, we first met in the dining room of the Parliament of New South Wales when you invited Dame Carol Kidu and myself to a dinner.    The occasion then was about assisting Papua New Guinea students, especially those from villages along the Kokoda track.

Little did I know then, how much Port Moresby Grammar School is now in your debt for the support you have given the school.

Among other things, this support consists of:

1. four Adventure Kokoda bursaries
2. your kindness in sponsoring Margaret Aitsi and Alfreda Nakue on the trip of a lifetime to Australia
3. over 2500 books received for the library and classrooms
4. a plethora of stationery supplies
5. medical equipment and supplies
6. a wide variety of sports gear
7. K3500 in cash for special needs aspects in the school

Exposure of our students to wonderful ordinary Australians who come to PNG …. and reciprocally for Aussies to see and bond with Papua New Guineans within the school environment.

On behalf of the Board of Directors of the School, please accept our sincere and grateful thanks for that you have done and we hope this special bond between POM Grammar and Kokoda will continue and strengthen.

Sincerely,

DONALD DANIELS  MBE
Chairman and Founder
Port Moresby Grammar School

Kokoda Sports Development Program

Adventure Kokoda was proud to be the only trekking company to respond to a call to sponsor a Kokoda Trail Sports Development Program on the Gold Coast during the period 22 – 28 November 2009. 

The program comprised 17 rugby league players from villages along the Kokoda Trail and four officials.  The program was hosted by the Gold Coast Titans Junior Development Management Team and involved a number of training sessions with the Titans juniors.

A couple of league clubs in the local Queensland Rugby League were most impressed with the skills of the Kokoda players and have commenced negotiations to recruit some of the boys for next season.

Warren Bartlett of Sogeri Enterprises PNG joined Adventure Kokoda in sponsoring the Kokoda players. 

Kokoda Village School Support Program

Our sponsorship for the Kokoda Sports Development Program complements our ‘Yumi Helpim Pikinini’ Program where each of our trek groups is allocated a village to support with education, health and sporting supplies.  Under this program our trekkers are invited to bring items from a list we prepare to meet the needs of local villagers along the trail.  This year we have delivered 120 backpack loads of education, health and sporting supplies.  These are well received by the students who always respond with a special sing-sing for our groups.

In addition to this Adventure Kokoda provides ongoing support to Tessie Soi’s Friends Foundation and the Buk Bilong Pikinini and Kaikai Bilong Pikinini Programs established by Anne-Sophie Hermann, wife of the Australian High Commissioner to PNG, Mr Chris Moraitis.

These programs would not be possible without the active support of trekkers who choose to trek with Adventure Kokoda.  Their generosity is making a major difference to the lives of our Koiari and Orokaiva friends along the Kokoda Trail.

It was evident that the Kokoda Trail had been ignored by successive Australian Governments since the end of the Pacific War in 1945.

In 1992 I wrote a paper calling for the PNG Government to recognise the benefit of developing Kokoda as an adventure destination:

‘In the short term PNG should focus its tourist development on its natural assets – the country and its people. And it should develop policies to cater for the niche adventure market.

‘The Kokoda Trail is an ideal model. The trail has a special aura because of its significance in the war. The rugged beauty of the Owen Stanley Range and the nature and disposition of the villagers along the trail are unique attractions to the adventure tourist.

‘Tourism along the trail will create social and economic benefits for the villagers. Local guides will be employed, food will be procured, accommodation will be used, and artefacts will be purchased.

‘The 50th anniversary of the campaign across the Owen Stanley Range is a unique opportunity to refocus international attention to the challenge, the rigours, and the people of the Kokoda Trail. It provides an opportunity for the government of PNG to establish a model for adventure tourism which would otherwise take many years to establish’.

In 1994 I submitted a paper calling on our Federal government to seek to proclaim the Kokoda Trail as a National Memorial Park:

‘Any plan that is developed should consider the fact that PNG does not have a welfare system and the Koiari and Orokaiva people who live along the track operate a subsistence economy. They are also the custodians of the land on which the battles that saved Australia were fought.

‘If we develop our long term plan around providing a regular source of income for them we can be assured that they will protect and honour the battlesite we restore, the educational memorials we build and the village museums we assist with.

‘The objective of the master plan should therefore be to develop a self-sustaining eco-adventure trekking industry for the Koiari and Orokaiva people who live along the Kokoda Trail.’

It was difficult to progress the idea as the responsibility for such a plan did not fit neatly into a single Ministerial portfolio. I was advised by the Minister for Veterans Affairs that the government did not have a master plan for the development of the Kokoda track. With the concurrence of the Minister I volunteered to develop one.

I enlisted the support of Kelvin Templeton of Templeton-Galt who later engaged Dr Stephen Wearing of the University of Technology Sydney and Mr Paul Chatterton of the World Wide Fund for Nature in PNG to conduct workshops in Sydney, Port Moresby, Efogi village and Kokoda.

In 2003 my company, Adventure Kokoda Pty Limited, funded the establishment of the Kokoda Track Foundation to raise funds for the strategic plan and to develop shorter term educational, health and sporting initiatives for the Koiari and Orokaiva people along the track.

We then engaged Colonel David Knaggs of Davendish Consulting to facilitate workshops and write the plan.

I am indebted to the Directors of the Foundation, namely Kelvin Templeton, Yahoo Serious, Peter Thomas, Patrick Lindsay, Paul Croll, Genevieve Nelson, Dr Michael Cooper, Andrew Schauble, Brett Kirk, Gillian Marks, Sue Hoopman and Tony Stewart who were generous with their time and expertise. We were ably supported by our Secretary, Natalie Shymko; our Treasurer, Tiffany Couch; our Solicitor, David Frecker and our Auditor, John Flynn who provided their services in an honorary capacity.

I am also indebted to the Chief Executive Officer of the PNG Kokoda Track Authority, Mr. Warren Bartlett and his Board Members; representatives of the PNG National Government, Central and Oro Provincial Governments; Koiari and Kokoda Local Level Government authorities; and the clan leaders, landowners and other stakeholders along the track who hosted and participated in our workshops in PNG.

I wish to thank the RSL and Services Clubs Association, the Victorian Branch of the RSL, Johnson and Johnson, Templeton-Galt, WWF, the University of Technology Sydney and Adventure Kokoda for their corporate support. I also wish to thank the numerous individual donors who have ensured that village students will now have a better chance of obtaining a proper education and that villagers along the track will benefit from some of the medical supplies and sporting equipment we have delivered to them.

This is the first step in the process of having the Kokoda Trail proclaimed as a National Memorial Park and achieving a World Heritage Listing. I commend it to the Australian and PNG governments and urge them to use it as a reference document in the development of Kokoda and other significant Pacific War battlesite as the basis of a sustainable eco-tourism industry for PNG.

You can view the Strategic Plan we developed at http://www.kokodatreks.com/docs/StrategicPlanfortheKokodaTrailwithAttachments_000.pdf

Lest we forget,

Charlie Lynn

The Overseas Memorials Search website allows viewers to access details and photographs of over 110 official and privately constructed overseas memorials honouring Australian service.

Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, Alan Griffin said the website would make planning a visit to an overseas memorial easier for Australians.

New resource for overseas memorials

“Australians have served in locations throughout the world – not only protecting our nation, but helping to protect our neighbours and allies,” Mr Griffin said.

“Official memorials have been established by the Australian Government or the Commonwealth in many of these locations, and local communities have also erected special memorials and monuments.

“I encourage all Australians to consider visiting an overseas memorial as part of future travel plans, or as part of research into our wartime history.”

He said the new database provided travellers with details about memorials on the Kokoda Track, a memorial plinth at Subic Bay in the Philippines and a memorial stone in Elands River in South Africa.

“The database will continue to grow as more data is collected, and I invite people with information about the location or details of overseas memorials to contact my Department,” Mr Griffin said.

“The stories behind each memorial are unique and provide a powerful reminder of the courage of Australians who served and died overseas.”

He said an example of one tribute to Australian soldiers was in the Danish town of Stadil, where locals had built a wooden cross to commemorate the crew of the Lancaster bomber EE138, which was shot down by a Luftwaffe night fighter in 1943.

The crew of eight men, four of whom were Australian, managed to steer the Lancaster away from the village before it crashed, but died for their efforts.

The new website was available at http://memorials.dva.gov.au

Interest in making the pilgrimage might be tapering off, but that gives us an opportunity to understand Kokoda in more complex ways, writes Professor Hank Nelson

On 18 November this year the paralympian and winner of the New York wheelchair marathon, Kurt Fearnley, completed ten days of crawling and sliding over the ninety-six kilometres of the Kokoda Track. Previously, the Track had been walked by Michael Milton, one-legged skier and cyclist; by ex-Cronulla rioters, to show them what it really meant to be Australian; and by grandmothers, school children, politicians and football teams and company executives who were on bonding exercises, taking an extreme test of physical endurance, trying to gain insight into the experiences of the troops who had faced the Japanese on the Track in 1942, responding to wild and varied mountain tropics or encountering carriers and villagers. In 2008 some 6000 trekkers passed the Isurava Monument, read the words inscribed on the grey stone blocks – Courage, Endurance, Mateship, Sacrifice – and, in many cases, paused at the rock where Bruce Kingsbury won a VC.

Just eight years ago, in 2000, fewer than a hundred tourists walked the Track. By 2005 nearly 2400 were taking the trek, now called a pilgrimage, and that number had doubled by 2007. From 2004 through to 2007 Australian publishers released books on Kokoda adding up to over 3000 pages. Peter Brune’s A Bastard of a Place (2003), Peter FitzSimons’s Kokoda (2004) and Paul Ham’s Kokoda (2004), were all big books and big sellers. Numerous journalists walked the Track and recorded their impressions; Kokoda was in documentaries and one feature film (Kokoda, 2006, directed by Alister Grieson) and on breakfast television. It seemed Australians had decided that Kokoda was for them the most significant event of the second world war, a place where Australians demonstrated those virtues that Australians want to believe they possess and the virtues that they hope others recognise in them. Just a few years before, when prime ministers Paul Keating and then John Howard visited Hellfire Pass and the public recognition of Sir Edward (“Weary”) Dunlop was at its height, it had looked like Changi, the Thai-Burma Railway and all the horror and defiance of the odds in the prisoner of war experience was going to dominate Australian popular memory of the war.

Australia has committed $16 million to securing a world heritage listing for the Track and providing services and economic opportunities for those living in the area. It has worked hard to gain the support of the government of Papua New Guinea to ensure effective administration and protection of the Track. But there is a chance that Australian enthusiasm for the Kokoda pilgrimage – and perhaps for the elevation of the Kokoda campaign in Australian history – has passed its peak. In 2009, the number of trekkers has dropped to just over 4000, well short of the expected figure of 7000 or 8000. There were real fears about the impact of 16,000 boots and tons of crap and toilet paper on pristine streams, rainforests and Koiari villagers’ homelands.

The recent decline in trekker numbers may be related to the deaths in 2009 of three Australian men and one woman on the Track. The men were aged fifty-five, thirty-eight and twenty-six; the woman, thirty-six: explanations about age, lack of fitness and previous signs of frailty were not obvious in most cases. The crash of a Twin Otter aircraft as it circled Kokoda, the death of all thirteen on board and the long and difficult recovery of the bodies was another reminder of the hazards of travelling in mountainous country, ill-served by administrative and technical safeguards. The high costs of trekking, the claims that the profits went to Australian companies who avoided paying Papua New Guinean taxes and the perception that locals could only participate as “bag carriers” may also have deterred well-intentioned pilgrims. A trekking package including flights from Sydney to Port Moresby might be advertised at around $4500, and for the young and adventurous that price covers many alternatives.

In July this year the first commemorative medal was handed out to surviving Fuzzy-Wuzzy Angels, another late and nominal recognition of their wartime services. But the inaugural Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel Day on 3 November passed in Port Moresby with no ceremonies. The culture and tourism minister, Charles Abel, explained that no money had been allocated for the occasion, but he hoped some would be found for next year. There was a small ceremony in Sydney.

Kokoda as a second world war battle will remain important in the histories of both Australia and Papua New Guinea. It seems likely that Australians will continue to give it greater importance because it is easily presented as the battle in which the Japanese ground forces came within sight of Port Moresby; because it was fought almost exclusively by Australian troops; because the AIF and the militia fought side by side; because the terrain and the performance of some men have given it an epic quality; and because it binds Australians and Papua New Guineans in a relationship that was new and admirable and requires no reference to colonial control and its associations.

If there is a slight tailing off in Australia’s increased interest in Kokoda as a battle, it will be because it has been burdened with exaggeration. Kokoda did not save Australia from invasion, or even Port Moresby from capture. The limited numbers, firepower and fitness of a Japanese force that had struggled across the Owen Stanley Ranges was not going to take Port Moresby unaided, as both the Australian and the Japanese commanders knew before the Japanese began their retreat in September 1942. Kokoda was not as important as Gaudalcanal in determining the direction of the war in the south and south-west Pacific; Guadalcanal involved more ships, aircraft and ground troops and consumed Japanese units from the three services that would otherwise have been used in Papua.

Amid the heightened interest in Kokoda, and more broadly in the war in Papua and New Guinea, one advance in the scholarly and popular flow of information has largely passed without notice: there is now much more readily available material in English about the Japanese forces. Of the popular histories directed at Australian readers, Paul Ham worked hard to find Japanese documents and record the reminiscences of Japanese ex-servicemen, but other less well-know publications have added most to accessible knowledge of the enemy. These include Steven Bullard’s translation of sections of the Japanese official history, Japanese Army Operations in the South Pacific Area: New Britain and Papua Campaigns, 1942–43 (2007), several books written jointly by Japanese and Australian authors, including From a Hostile Shore: Australia and Japan at War in New Guinea (2004), edited by Steven Bullard and Tamura Keiko, and unexpected books such as Charles Happell’s The Bone Man of Kokoda (2008).

The “Bone Man” is Kokichi Nishimura, who fought on Guam, at Salamuau in New Guinea, and on the Kokoda Track as a private in the 144th Regiment. One of the few men to be evacuated by ship at night from the Papuan coast, he spent several months in Lae before sailing for Rabaul and then Japan. He survived the sinking of his transport by American submarines and was posted to Burma at the end of 1943. He endured battle and another hazardous journey across seas then dominated by the Americans and was in a military hospital suffering from malaria when the war ended. But that war of brief early victories and pitiless defeats and suffering is covered by Happell in less than half the book. The rest of the book is about Nishimura’s success in civilian life and then his dedication to finding the remains of his Japanese comrades on Kokoda, bringing them back to Japan, and searching for their relatives. Nishimura has also invested much time and money in what have been largely fruitless attempts to repay those Papua New Guineans across whose lands he had fought. He might be exceptional in his obsessions, but through him Happell, an experienced journalist, provides some insights into and many hints at the beliefs of Japanese of Nishimura’s generation about the obligations of the soldier in battle and to dead comrades.

Several of the publications increasing awareness of the Japanese in the war owe direct or indirect debts to the Australia–Japan Research Project. Jointly sponsored by the Australian War Memorial and the Japanese embassy in Canberra, the project aims to provide material for researchers. One of its most recent online publications looks at the Japanese midget submarine attack in Sydney Harbour. With its rich range of comment and references, it provides evidence of the contrasting perceptions of the event then and now in Japan and Australia. The project is currently in recess and it is hoped that the Australian War Memorial resurrects it or a similar project.

Japanese survivors of the war have also published memoirs that intersect with Australian studies of Kokoda. In The Pacific War in Papua New Guinea: Memories and Realities (2006), which I edited with Yukio Toyoda, Hiromitsu Iwamoto surveyed some 471 books written by Japanese who fought in New Guinea. He found that those Japanese veterans who made broad judgments on the war emphasised the suffering and called for no repeat of such a terrible event; those few who expressed an opinion on responsibility for the war argued that war was forced upon Japan and that admissions of war guilt are an insult to the thousands of Japanese who died in the war. The 10 per cent of authors who wrote on Papua New Guineans said that most welcomed the Japanese and willingly cooperated with them. And when Japanese write on battles a surprising number are concerned with the air war – surprising given the few aircrew relative to ground forces and the fact that the Japanese army and naval air forces were effectively out of the war in New Guinea from early 1944. If there is a dominant popular Japanese image of the war in the area between Port Moresby and Buna it is not of troops slogging, ankle deep, crossing ridge after ridge in the Owen Stanleys and fighting a largely unseen and desperate enemy, but of Zero pilots high above the Owen Stanleys often displaying superior skill and flying superior aircraft. But apart from writings by the fighter pilot Saburo Sakai (Samurai!, with Martin Caidin and Fred Saito, first published in English in 1957), most of the many Japanese books on the war on Australian territory are both inaccessible and unknown to Australians.

One of the most recent and comprehensive attempts to present the Japanese experience to Australian readers is Craig Collie and Hajime Marutani’s The Path of Infinite Sorrow: The Japanese on the Kokoda Track (2009). Collie, a television producer, and Hajime, who worked as a translator on the Australia–Japan Research Project, came together on a two-hour documentary, Beyond Kokoda, by the Australian filmmakers Stig Schnell and Shaun Gibbons, which was first shown on the History Channel in 2008. Several of the Japanese ex-servicemen who spoke so movingly in the documentary are primary sources for The Path of Infinite Sorrow. Collie and Marutani have made good use of Allied Translator and Interpreter Section documents held in the Australian War Memorial. ATIS – the receivers, translators and commentators on documents collected from the Japanese – became a valuable source of intelligence from late September 1942 when the Australians began to advance. From the bodies of the dead and wounded and from prisoners and abandoned camps, the Australians collected diaries, letters and miscellaneous bits of paper – even a list of prices for officers and men visiting the comfort women in Rabaul. ATIS also provided translations of interviews with prisoners, many of whom spoke with a candour that surprised their interrogators. What was of immediate interest to military tacticians is now of value to scholars with a more leisurely timetable.

Other strengths of Collie and Marutani’s work are the accounts of the formation and training of Japanese units and the way individual soldiers are followed through recruitment to battle. The final weeks of the Japanese army in Papua are presented in all their horror, with cannibalism, the killing of the wounded and the sense of relief, guilt, nobility and desperate self-interest of those selected for, or able to secure their own, escape. The Japanese losses in Papua were appalling – over 12,000 died – and the Japanese official history quotes a battalion commander who said that the 41st Regiment lost over 2000. When it reassembled in Rabaul in 1943 there were only 200 survivors. But, as Collie and Marutani show, the survivors of Kokoda and Buna still had over two more years of war to endure. Of those whose fortunes have been traced in the book and were still alive in August 1945, one was in southern China, one had been in Burma and then transferred to Japan, one had been in Korea and then returned to Hiroshima (but by luck was not there on the day the city was incinerated) and some had died in the fighting in the Philippines. A pilot who had flown off the Buna airstrip ended the war escorting kamikaze pilots on their sacrificial missions.

One of the last scenes in The Path of Infinite Sorrow is of an elderly Japanese man who had fought as a private on Kokoda making a return visit to Papua New Guinea in 2005. He had with him 250 pairs of small straw sandals he had made. He cast some into the Kumusi River north of Kokoda and asked that others be left on the Track. He recalled that at the end of the Kokoda campaign many of the men were barefooted and he hoped to show the spirits of his comrades that he remembered them and that he brought them comfort. As with the story of Nishimura, this alerts us to other intensely felt ways of recalling a war and comrades in war.

The prose of Collie and Marutani makes for easy reading, although some of the battles are difficult to follow. And the ready clichés that might be acceptable in a quick newspaper article are out of place in a book. Just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, Australia is said to be “not on Japan’s radar,” and when the Japanese do launch their assault the Americans are found to be “asleep at the wheel.” These are not only clichés but also distractions in a book on war. Also, there are too many minor errors of fact. The authors refer to Japan’s “two colonies, Korea and Formosa” after the first world war, which omits the German Micronesian colonies held by Japan under mandate from the League of Nations. It was the bases in Micronesia that placed Japanese forces close to Rabaul and allowed the Japanese to be in Rabaul before they had reached the south of the Malay Peninsula, let alone before the fall of Singapore. Collie and Marutani describe the region around Rabaul as being “made up of mountains and deep valleys, covered with dense jungle.” The “plains flooded” and there was much boggy marshland, they write. But Rabaul was the centre for the most concentrated area of roads and plantations in New Guinea; the volcanic soil was porous and there was often a scarcity of surface water.

The authors also claim that “two large anti-aircraft guns” were found damaged near Lakunai airfield. The two guns were found at Praed Point and they were intended for use against raiding ships, not aircraft. The Australians are said to have set up their defences of Rabaul “where the German troops landed in World War I.” But it was the Australians who landed and the Germans who were the defenders. At several points there are claims that the Australians had “automatic rifles.” The Australians carried .303 Lee-Enfield bolt action repeating rifles, which was not an automatic. When writing about the Papuan Infantry Battalion the writers assert that “in many cases, the Papuans had been pressed into joining the military by an authoritarian administration.” Papuans were conscripted to work as labourers; the soldiers were volunteers. On the Kokoda Track: “The Gap had been named by Allied HQ in Melbourne in the belief it was a narrow pass…” In fact “The Gap” had been named on published maps for forty years. The number of errors diminishes the value of the book, and the publishers, having failed to ensure adequate checking, should share responsibility.

The years of heightened interest in Kokoda had their slow beginning in 1992 when Paul Keating kissed the ground at Kokoda and, while not denigrating the legacy of Gallipoli, called for increased recognition of the battle where Australians fought “not in defence of the old world, but the new world. Their world.” In strange and largely uncommented bipartisanship, the boosting of Kokoda continued and increased under John Howard.

Now, during an apparent pause in enthusiasm for Kokoda, could be the time to separate Kokoda from the recent exaggerations that have been attached to it. These have magnified the importance of the Kokoda at the expense of Coral Sea, Midway, Milne Bay and Guadacanal. The age of the troops who fought the first battles has been understated, the numbers of casualties overstated and the extent of the Track and of the “Kokoda battles” have been extended from the Owers’ Corner at the southern end of the Track to Buna and the coast in the north. Australians could admit that some tactics were at fault, some Australian commanders did not perform well and some units were ill-trained, which showed up in battle. Australians could concede that most of the aircraft that gradually won dominance in the air over the Owen Stanleys were American and that the greater battle being fought by the Americans on Guadalcanal diverted Japanese men and resources from Papua. All that can be granted, and Kokoda remain significant. Now, too, is the time to exploit the information becoming available and locate Kokoda, not in Australian history alone, but in Australian, Japanese, Papua New Guinean and American history. •

Hank Nelson is Professor Emeritus of Pacific and Asian History at the Australian National University. Much of his writing has been on the histories of Australia, Papua New Guinea and the second world war.

SIX days into walking Kokoda Olivia Pratley had had enough.

Physically she was being worked harder than ever before.

Mentally and emotionally, she was struggling being away from her beloved family in a foreign country amidst some of the most remote – and technologically isolated – terrain on earth.

“I was really questioning why I was there. I was physically stuffed and crying almost every day,” she said.

“Then on day seven John, our guide, came up to me and handed me Clarrie Meredith’s dog tags.

“We’d met Clarrie (a WWII vet) before we flew out from Sydney and John said to me he had promised to give the tags to someone on the walk who was trying hard, but wasn’t quite doing their best.

“He told me he wanted me to make the top of the next ridge without stopping once and I did. When I got to the top I handed the tags back to John.”

It instilled the confidence Olivia needed to complete the gruelling 120km journey and made her re-evaluate exactly why she was doing the walk.

The 17-year-old Melville High student had been chosen to participate in the trek as part of a Clubs NSW initiative.

Young people between the ages of 16 and 22 are given the opportunity to walk in the footsteps of the many brave souls who fought and perished along the track during the Second World War.

Olivia, whose great grandfather and great uncle both served along Kokoda, said before she left that she expected the experience to be life changing.

Upon returning home she was certain it had.

“John had a saying. You don’t go to Gallipoli for a swim and you don’t go to Kokoda for a walk, there’s far more to it than that,” she said.

“It wasn’t until I got home I realised this is a major achievement. I never thought by age 17 I’d be completing the Kokoda track.”

After touching down in Port Moresby, Olivia and the 21 other trekkers were driven to a small regional airport before flying in to Kokoda.

They had originally intended to bus in following the tragic plane accident which claimed the lives of several Australians earlier this year, but civil unrest in the area meant they had to fly in instead.

Upon landing at Kokoda airfield the group was met by around 250 Papuans, all clamouring for a position as a porter or guide on the trek.

Tour company Adventure Kokoda employs about 250 Papuans as guides and porters on a rotating roster.

The first day of the trek would prove the easiest, with a short walk across flat, open terrain to a small village just out of Kokoda where the group spent its first night.

“Really the first day was about getting used to the humidity and acclimatising,” Olivia said.

Day two was the start of the gruelling climbs Kokoda is best known for, which do not abate until the trekkers complete their journey at Ower’s Corner 10 days later.

Every morning began with a Cooee call at 5.30am and trekkers were required to be on the road no later than 7.30am.

“Each day we’d have two trek leaders who would basically eat last and make sure everyone was up and ready,” Olivia said.

“Part of your job was motivating people to keep going, while at the same time each day you’re pushing your boundaries further and further.

“I challenged myself to a level I’d never before reached.”

A stop at the Isurava Pillars memorial midway through the track was a particularly poignant moment for Olivia.

The four pillars, in a clearing overlooking a magnificent forested valley, symbolise the values of courage, mateship, endurance and sacrifice.

Each of the trekkers was asked to stand beside the pillar they felt best embodied them.

“I stood next to courage, because it takes courage to start anything,” Olivia said.

There are not the words in Koiari to ask about Kokoda’s spirit. That is an Australian construct, and a reasonably modern one: the sort that made Paul Keating bend down and kiss the earth at Kokoda in 1992, that wrote the word ”mateship” on the memorial built there a decade later, and sends almost 6000 Australians down the track each year.

After six days on the track I sit in front of one of the last Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels, Ovuru Ndiki, and attempt to ask the question anyway; to understand why it is everyone but the Australians must be paid to walk what was, 100 years ago, a simple mail route. Why four years ago we started doing it in such numbers, at such cost, to such risk.

”It’s something to remark on what happened,” Ndiki tries to explain the idea of spirituality, 105 years closing in around his eyes and emptying his mouth of teeth. ”There is some of us left behind. Walking the track, you can pick up pieces of that.”

In the past decade, the number of people picking up those pieces has increased 74 times. It is now Papua New Guinea’s most popular land-based attraction – a band of wealth in the jungle, worth as much as $50 million a year, supported entirely by Australians.

Sports teams come here to bond. Kevin Rudd and Joe Hockey made it one of the first legs of 2007’s Sunrise election. Bags at the airport must now be X-rayed for souvenired grenades. Where two years ago there were five trekking companies, now there are 30. ”If you can get yourself a business card, you can take people up the track,” says John Nalder, who guides me through the 133 kilometres. ”It’s really exploded since 2005.”

At night, you can hear the sound of sobbing coming from tents. The track is, without question, the most difficult thing I have done. The climbs are ceaseless and painfully steep. At one point, doubled over with food poisoning that will last six days, I black out from vomiting.

”Amazing” is the most common description of the trek. Then gruelling. In 10 days, I lose 13 kilograms. ”Everything is a search for something, a search for identity, for who they are,” Nalder says. ”Australians have had a cringe about who they are, and that’s changing. I do get people who want to brandish the flag, but it’s a love thing, it’s a patriotic thing. It’s not the redneck, white supremacist one.”

The track itself is almost an extension of Australia. It was, until 1975, part of an Australian territory. Even now, villagers along the track wear jerseys from the National Rugby League. There is a discarded Vegemite jar on the climb out of Isurava and dull triplets of ”Aussies” and ”Ois” ring through the Owen Stanley Ranges.

Many more Japanese soldiers died here than the 625 Australians killed. But Japanese almost never walk Kokoda. Those that come are usually flown in and out by helicopter. They are there not to experience some national myth but to farewell ancestors. Of the two Japanese memorials on the track, one has had the muzzle of its gun set into the ground – a mark of submission lobbied for by the RSL. The other has been destroyed by trekkers.

”We get so much exposure to American culture that’s so strong and so steeped in history. Perhaps we’re trying to get on to some of that,” says Andrew Skehan, a 30-year-old history teacher who won a 2GB competition to walk the track. ”The new national curriculum – Australian history is the first thing on there. Perhaps Australia’s push towards a place on the international stage makes us see we have to define ourselves so we can say we stand for something.” For the most part, however, trekkers struggle to explain why they have come; what made them spend up to $6000 on a journey through heat, mud and steep climbs, with heavy packs and sickness. For those without relatives who fought in the 1942 campaign, there is vague mention of achievement. A walk that would buy them a beer back home, with something about national history on the side.

But the words of Nathaniel Ryan, a 17-year-old preparing to join either the police or the army, are more common: ”Mate, I’m just concentrating on where to put my feet.”

The place of Kokoda in Australia’s psyche is a vestige of Keating’s cosmopolitan prime ministership. This was his region. In 1995, wearing a hornbill headdress, he was inducted as an Orokaivan chief in Kokoda. But it was only after a decade of John Howard’s narrowed patriotism that Australians started walking the track in any great numbers – and the story of Australians defending Australia really set in. A book from Peter FitzSimons helped, too.

Three years before Keating’s chiefly induction, he and his entourage flew three RAAF Caribou transport planes to the Kokoda airstrip. It is a cleared piece of jungle, below the razorback country where the fighting took place, with a palm oil plantation on one side and grassland on the other.

At the expense of Gallipoli, he described this earth as the essence of Australia’s nationhood. Standing a day’s walk from that spot, on the hillside where the monument Keating wanted was finally built, two girls start crying. My trek leader cries also. A 17-year-old youth announces he will join the army.

”There can be no deeper spiritual basis for the meaning of the Australian nation than the blood that was spilled on this very knoll, this very plateau, in defence of Australia,” Keating said here the year that youth was born. ”This was the place where I believe the depth and soul of the Australian nation was confirmed … The lesson of this place is that those young men believed in Australia and we need to give Australians – all Australians, particularly young Australians – an Australia to believe in.”

By 2004, as Howard began in earnest his flag-pole assault on Australia’s ”values neutral” schools, the Kokoda walking had already begun. Records, which only start in 2001, show 76 trekkers in a year. By 2005, that number had grown to 2374 and has continued to almost double each year since.

That there are both a 96-kilometre tourist track and the 133-kilometre wartime version says a lot about what Kokoda has become. ”I was moved, more so than I expected to be,” says Bec Walsh, a 21-year-old medical science student, part-way down the track. ”It’s hard not to be affected.” Walsh is there as part of an RSL program to educate young leaders. It is the same program that was used, more or less, for the national rehabilitation of Ali Ammar after he desecrated the Australian flag in the Cronulla Riots reprisals. ClubsNSW also fund a group.

”I don’t know if I feel more Australian,” says Clair Edwards, who was chosen to walk the track because her grandfather fought there. ”But I feel more deeply in touch with my heritage. I have this deep attachment, it’s not just knowledge; now, it’s emotional. I know my country on a more personal level.”

The people walking the track have changed in the past two or so years. There are fewer trophy trekkers, fewer people walking simply to say they did it. They are now more likely to be middle-aged than young adventurers – men with to-do lists, who carry pictures of fathers who fought on the track. But while their fathers had an average age of 18 when they fought here, these men have an average age of 50. ”My dad told the larrikin story, the fun stories,” says Martin Stuart, a 48-year-old engineer whose father was in the 39th Battalion. ”But I’m here to find out the rest, to piece it together.”

A day earlier, a trekker in Mr Stuart’s group died after less than two hours on the track. Four others have died in the past 12 months.

They are joined by the 13 who died on a Twin Otter flying to Kokoda to begin the trek in August. The deaths are, in some ways, understandable – the trekkers are older, there are more of them, unscrupulous providers are walking without satellite phones or medical supplies – but the effects on the market are unknown. Some suggest the deaths make the myth more real, that memorials to modern dead have been seen up and down the track for years.

”It’s not helpful,” the chief executive of the Kokoda Track Authority, Rod Hillman, says. ”It’s difficult to move forward until we find the cause of death. The newspaper here is reporting [the most recent death] as an aneurysm. That could happen watching TV. But the growth’s been quite exponential. I think it’s unlikely to get that growth again.”

Erik Jensen trekked with the Kokoda Youth Challenge – a leadership program for young people developed by Adventure Kokoda and supported by the RSL Services Clubs Associaition and Clubs NSW.  Eriks’s trek was led by John Nalder and Jo Roberts of Adventure Kokoda.

THE scene of bloody killing more than 60 years ago, the Kokoda Trail has again become a world news scene because of death.

Four Australians have died while walking the 96 kilometre track so far this year.

At the same time, hundred more have made the journey and done it safely.

Days after the latest fatality occurred, a retired Sydney man, Don Vale, achieved a remarkable feat, completing the walk in nine days at the age of 83!
However the recent deaths have whipped up a storm of comment and criticism in the Australian media, with some suggesting it is a deathtrap and that tour operators are at least partly to blame.

That is, honestly, a lot of beat-up claptrap!

Anyone with half an ounce of sense knows that the Kokoda Trail is a tough assignment. The difficulties of making the walk are well known to every Australian as well as Papua New Guineans because they’ve seen the black and white footage showing the terrible mud and rain and the tortuous climbs up and down mountain trails and clambering over log bridges and wading through mountain streams.

It is not a picnic walk in the Fitzroy Gardens of Melbourne and anybody who signs up for a Kokoda tour knows that.

The major problem stems from individuals not taking sufficient note of the differences in walking 96 kilometres in the Blue Mountains in cool, temperate conditions and the same distance in hot, sweaty tropical weather with mountain altitudes to also cope with. That, combined with precious little time to acclimatise with a night in an air-conditioned Moresby hotel before taking on the flight to Kokoda and then straight onto the trail.

People have died when left paddling in the waters of the Great Barrier Reef, with their cruise boat disappearing in the distance. Quite a few Aussies and others have perished in snow disasters in the tourism mountains of New Zealand. A state government minister disappeared on a mountain walk in Victoria recently, by himself and without great precautions, causing a huge hue and cry.

People who sign up for excitement or adventure holidays should expect tour operators to provide them with reasonable care and safety precautions. But the ultimate responsibility falls on the individual to be honest and astute about their own health.

KEVIN Rudd’s done it. So have Joe Hockey and Ron Barassi. They’re among thousands of Australians who walked the Kokoda Track and lived to tell the tale.

The arduous journey has become an increasingly popular pilgrimage for many Australians. In 2001, only 76 people retraced the steps of our troops in World War II. Now, close to 6000 Australians do the trek each year.

Why do they do it? The main reason is a confluence of patriotism and clever marketing.

Its only six years since NSW MP Charlie Lynn set up the Kokoda Track Foundation, but the to help local communities that live locals who live along the mountainous 130km track shut it down regularly due to various concerns about the hordes that now invade it. Last May, the track was closed after villagers alleged they weren’t being properly paid.

A bad odour now pervades too many aspects of this modern pilgrimage. This year we’ve seen the pull of Kokoda cause one disaster after another.

In April, two young Australian trekkers collapsed and died. In August, 13 people were killed when their plane crashed. Last month Paul Bradfield, 38, died on the trek and this week Phillip Brunskill, 55, lost his life.

Shirley Seal, 60, was on the same trek and had to be flown out with her adult son after her blood pressure shot up and nausea set in.

She’s far from alone. Every year dozens of trekkers have to be evacuated from the jungle by helicopter.

The doomed tour that included Brunskill and Seal was run by Charlie Lynn’s company, Adventure Kokoda, which sells what can only be described as an extreme form of endurance.

Lynn himself boasts of having completed the trek almost 60 times in the past two decades – not bad for a man in his 60s.

After Brunskill’s death, Lynn declared the victim obviously wasn’t fit enough to make the journey. What an insult to the intelligence of a man who can no longer defend himself.

Brunskill had been training intensively for 10 months and was given a health clearance by Lynn’s own company.

Nor does Lynn help his case when he refers to the initial part of the Kokoda Track as the “death zone”.

Not that he’s being inaccurate. Lynn and other operators are literally leading people into a fatality zone.

Prof Kevin Norton from the University of South Australia specialises in exercise physiology and says trekking Kokoda is among the toughest physical feats a person can attempt. He also points out that the death rate on Kokoda is 10 times higher than you’d expect and that emergency evacuations are high.

It is little wonder that insurance companies are reportedly considering designating the Kokoda Track a prescribed zone.

Lest we forget … our soldiers fought in the jungles along the Kokoda Track to ensure our freedom, not out of some misguided and manufactured patriotic fervour.

We might better honour our forebears by showing more respect for contemporary human life – and putting the Kokoda tour operators under the microscope.

During the last week two trekkers died on the Kokoda Trail, a couple more were evacuated by helicopter and fourteen went down with food poisoning.  Yesterday a campsite that took years to build at Ofi Creek was burned to the ground over an argument between two landowners.

Land disputes now block the wartime trail over the ‘golden staircase’ and Iorabaiwa Ridge – the closest the Japanese army got to Port Moresby in 1942.

The Kokoda Trail, which held so much potential as a model for sustainable eco-tourism in Papua New Guinea is beginning to choke on its own success.

For 50 years after the end of the war in the Pacific the track lay dormant and reverted to its original purpose of providing a link between villages.  Battlesites were slowly reclaimed by the jungle and new tracks were cut as easier pathways were discovered.  The bodies of diggers missing in action were covered in layers of leaves and mulch by Mother Nature. Their rifles, grenades and bayonets were left to rust in peace. 

Former Prime Minister, Paul Keating jolted our consciousness of the Kokoda campaign when he kissed the ground on the Kokoda plateau on the 50^th anniversary of the Kokoda campaign.  Inquisitive Australian trekkers began to prise open the jungle shielding the forgotten battlefields in search of the meaning of Kokoda.

Up till then Gallipoli was our most significant meeting place. 

But Kokoda is different.  According to one commentator, ‘at Gallipoli we fought for Britain and lost – at Kokoda we fought for Australia and won!’

The Federal Government has been slow to embrace the significance of military history to a generation that has been denied information by the custodians of education curricula from the academic left.  Fortunately these ideological censors have since been circumvented by the information revolution.  Young and old Australians can now do their own research in their quest to know more about our military history. 

Kokoda is an important bridge in the knowledge gap between what we don’t know and what we should have been taught.  It is also one of the few opportunities where people can walk in the footsteps of the brave and experience the conditions under which our veterans fought and died. 

The recent deaths and the number of evacuations are testimony to the hazardous nature of the trek across the remote, jungle clad mountains of the Owen Stanley Ranges.  Empty weapon pits surrounding overgrown defensive positions are haunting reminders of the epic struggle for survival between young men in the prime of their lives.  A shrill chorus from unseen ‘6 o’clock crickets’ pierces the stillness of the jungle each night.  It is almost as if they are sounding their ‘last post’ as a tribute to the memory of young Australian, Japanese and New Guinea men sent to do the bidding of their political masters.

A recent proposal to mine part of the track in the vicinity of the Maguli Range created a storm of protest.  The Federal Government was prompted into action and immediately plucked a figure of $15.9 million out of the air to assist Papua New Guinea to have the Owen Stanley Ranges placed on the World Heritage List.  A noble but misguided over-reaction in a land of a thousand cultures with customary land ownership.

Since then a veritable army of ‘experts’ have consumed most of the budget allocation through conferences, committees and consultants.  Pioneering trekking companies have been treated with some disdain because they are regarded as profiteers with conflicts of interest.  Never mind the relationships and trust many have established with villagers over almost two decades.

They seem oblivious to the fact that villagers along the track are earning more money than ever before through campsite fees, donations and wages.  They are blissfully unaware of the environmental and cultural damage they are causing by focusing on  ‘feel-good’ projects along the track. 

A partnership with the PNG Department of Community development to trial their Community Learning Development Centre concept has considerable merit but has been ignored to date. The concept involves the development of trust between clans, investment in community health and education, and the exploration of ways to add value to partnerships.  A PNG concept for PNG citizens might not sit well with our bureaucrats in the Department of Environment but it should be given a shot and the Minister, Dame Carol Kidu, should at least be consulted.

The Kokoda Trail is now a honey-pot attracting clans from distance villagers trying to cash in on the trekking industry.  Pristine jungle is being cleared for campsites, toilets are being sited on waterways and disputes are becoming the order of the day. 

We need to rethink our strategy and focus on the development of the abundance of human capital in PNG.  They are masters of their environment and would be willing partners in the protection of our military heritage in the lost battlefields of the Pacific War.

Article published in www.ThePunch.com.au – 8 August 2009