Strange Notations From a Laborious Life

 The name echoes through the pages of Australian history in the second half of the twentieth century like a bell sounding in the mist, a sentinel of courage, a byword for gallantry.

 Like most Australians under a certain age I can’t remember when I first heard the word. It’s always been there.

 The little village in Papua New Guinea which gives it’s name to a jungle track running from it’s outskirts, over the Owen Stanley Range for 100km, almost to the gates of Port Moresby, is as much a part of the metaphysical landscape of Australia as Ned Kelly’s helmet or the Eureka flag.

 Kokoda!

 Where Australians stood toe to toe with the invader, in the mud and the slush,  met him in battle and overcoming the odds turned him back and eventually destroyed him.

 Kokoda!

 Where Australians performed feats of gallantry so grand it was if they had stepped from the pages of the Illiad.

 Kokoda!

 Where a nation under siege played it’s last hand and triumphed and a thousand mothers wailed as the light in their lives disappeared forever, lost on the bloody track.

 I had always known of the Kokoda Trail. Years of  watching Anzac Day marches and listening to old tales of Australian derring do meant a lad growing up could scarcely miss the obvious importance of the place. It was seemingly a symbol, spoken of in hushed and reverent tones and held in the sort of regard usually reserved for the campaign at Gallipoli.

 I needed to know more.

 So when I was very young I bought a book called, “Blood and Iron, the Battle for Kokoda, 1942”, by Lex McCauley.

 It was the book of an academic researcher, far too literary for me to completely understand but for the first time Kokoda became real and the men who fought over the Owen Stanley Range in 1942 became flesh and blood and the place names, Iorabaiwa, Isurava, Templeton’s Crossing, Brigade Hill and Kokoda itself became part of my vocabulary and men such as Bruce Kingsbury VC, Charlie McCallum DCM, Butch and Stan Bissett and “Lefty” Langridge became larger than life heroes, greater than any sportsman could ever be. 

 Of course as I have gotten older and read more books the course of the campaign has become apparent and it wasn’t the men of the Kokoda Track who stopped the Japanese but the US Navy at the Battle of the Coral Sea and another two Australian Brigades at Milne Bay who inflicted the first Japanese defeat of WW2 in a battle as largely forgotten as Kokoda is remembered, and sent the Emperor’s army careering backwards, a position from which they never recovered.

 After that the Australians on the Kokoda Track counter attacked and began the long fight back to the little village on the north side of the range, an advance which culminated in the destruction of the Japanese garrison in Papua on the north coast in January 1943. 

 No matter. The feats of arms of the men of the Kokoda Trail were, and still are, breathtaking to read about.

 From Bruce Kingsbury, Bren gun slung from the hip, slicing his way through a company of Japanese soldiers before being shot dead to Charlie McCallum, the Gippsland timber worker holding the entire Japanese army at bay single handedly at Isurava, Bren gun in one hand, Tommy gun in the other. Feats that, if portrayed in a movie would be laughed at for being outrageous and impossible and glorification of war at it’s worst. But it happened and these brave men and their mates who didn’t make it back should be remembered always.

 I am humbled to have grown up in a nation which could produce such men.

 And so in May 1998 I found myself on the bloody track, hiking through the deep gorges and climbing the precipitous cliffs of the Owen Stanley Range with my brother and sister, every step a tribute to my countrymen who had given their all so many years ago.

 I was nearly 28, a very similar age to many of the Australians who had fought in New Guinea and very fit. I had trained hard to be in shape with plenty of cycling and, as the trip approached ramped up my hiking and as a result completed the trek with relative ease. An experience not to be forgotten.

 In 1998 relatively few Australians made the trip, fewer than five hundred a year and it was a novelty to tell my friends I had been to Papua New Guinea to walk the Kokoda Trail.

 Nowadays over two thousand people a year make the trip and in some ways it seems to be a right of passage, an achievement that proves that they can take it, that when the chips are down they may just have the back bone to see it through. Cutting through the shallowness of everyday life in modern Australia, those who now complete the track see it as a validation of themselves and their existence. At the very least they experienced a small part of what some great Australians did many years ago. And good luck to them.

 Walking the Kokoda Trail is now a big industry in Papua new Guinea, a country where such an industry is sorely needed and the popularity of the trek is such that it is very well known by the younger generation of current Australians.

 So, it was with some trepidation I listened to my sixteen year old step-daughter as she explained to me she would like to do the trek and she fingered me to do it with her!

 I showed her the photos of my trip so many years ago and maps and cross sections of the track and she is still keen so very warily I have agreed to make a second crossing sometime in 2014.

 With a bit of luck her school work or boys or something similar will get in the way but realistically, she is not that sort of girl and if she says she wants to do something she generally does it.

 So, can I make the crossing as easily as I did in 1998? I think I can but it will take some determination to do the requisite training but I am sure I am capable.

 The walk itself is no matter to me, it’s the plane trip over the mountains before or after that scares me! Ah well. We have to take risks every now and again.Sometimes those risks aren’t as bad as what our mind believes them to be.

 And so, all things being equal I will be walking the Kokoda Trail sometime in 2014. Anyone reading who feels the urge to partake in this quasi-religious, all-Australian experience are welcome to tie themselves to the bandwagon.

 Kokoda 2014 is GO!