In 2007 I decided to take on the challenge of the Kokoda Trail in Papua New Guinea, a one hundred kilometre trek across the Owen Stanley Mountain Ranges, as a mark of respect to the thousands of Australian soldiers who fought there in World War Two. Back a while, a movie was made about the campaign, you can see the official movie trailer here if you're interested but you're better off reading the book Kokoda by Australian author Peter Fitzsimons.
The brutal jungle warfare raged for months in hellish conditions after the Australians marched up the trail to meet the Japanese invaders with the initial contact occurring at the village of Kokoda. From there, they fought a slow "fighting retreat" over months and against overwhelming odds - the Japanese having landed ten men to every one Australian soldier - with a "last stand" being mounted at a place called Imita Ridge within sight of Port Moresby, the target of the Japanese forces.
The Australians rallied and slowly began to gain back ground pushing the Japanese back one hundred kilometres through the jungle to Kokoda and beyond and eventually managed to push them off Papua New Guinea completely. Over 10,000 Japanese soldiers (of the 30,000+ that landed) were killed as were 625 Australian's. Many thousands were taken ill with things like dysentery, malaria, malnutrition and exposure - conditions for both sides were brutal, let alone the fact a battle was being fought at the same time.
Why?
The Japanese wanted to invade Australia and needed a naval base and airfields within striking distance of Australia which is what they needed Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, for. After bombing Darwin on mainland Australia over 300 times (more ordinance than was dropped on Pearl Harbor) which didn't work they decided to land on the north side of Papua New Guinea and use a jungle path to cross the Owen Stanley's and take Port Moresby. It's not much of a path, most of it looks no different to the jungle.
Anyway, those fuckers were beaten back and suffered great losses for their trouble.
For me, the trek was hard, six brutal days up mountains, the highest of 2,490 meters (8,170 feet), and down the other side...no flat parts. There were creek and river crossings (no bridges) and at a few points I was trudging up and down creeks (in the water) - the trail isn't a marked pathway at all. I was slogging through mud up to my mid-thigh, through deep and tangled jungle and all in extremely hot and humid conditions. It was brutal...but no one was shooting at me, throwing hand grenades or lobbing mortars so I endured well. It wasn't easy though and I lost my appetite struggling to eat much at all...I lost 8 kilograms of weight on the trail.
The trail is sparsely populated with just a few little villages along the way. The next few photos show some of them. Each night we'd stay in the jungle and sometimes we'd stay under an open sided hut cooking on fires and sleeping on the ground. We had to carry our own food (and everything else) so our packs were heavy. As I said, I lost my appetite and ate rice mostly, but we hunted for a boar and ate like kings one night which helped sustain me.
Prior to beginning the trek I visited the Australian War Grave outside Port Moresby.
There, many of the Australians are buried, the ones they could find. Most of the Japanese were never recovered so lay where they fell reclaimed by the jungle although one Japanese fellow (an ex-soldier on the Kokoda Campaign) dedicated his life to finding some of his unit and was quite successful. There's a book called The Bone Man of Kokoda by Charles Happell which tells that story - well worth a read.
The trek was something special, not just because the hardship I endured and the effort I needed to put in and the reward from completing it - it was incredibly challenging - but because I got to walk in the footsteps of Australian soldiers, most between the ages of eighteen and thirty, who placed their lives on the line and did extraordinary things in the defense of Australia.
I have hundreds of images from my trek but the most treasured of things is the trek itself, the steps I took, difficult though they were, and the fact that I'm one of only a handful of Australians to have walked in the footsteps of those who sacrificed everything for my country.
In case you're wondering, the inscriptions on those massive granite blocks above at the Australian War Memorial at Isurava say:
Courage. Endurance. Mateship. Sacrifice
Those four words sum up perfectly the men who fought this brutal and deadly campaign...on both sides...and they deserve remembering - Shame on those who do not.
Design and create your ideal life, tomorrow isn't promised - galenkp
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Image(s) in this post are my own