The Kokoda Track

The Kokoda Track is ninety-six kilometres of foot-path across the Owen Stanley Range, from Owers' Corner above Port Moresby to the village of Kokoda on its plateau on the northern side, and it is walked as a pilgrimage: between July and November of 1942, Japanese troops who had landed at Gona and Buna pushed south along it towards Port Moresby, and Australian militia and then regulars — the 39th Battalion, the 2/14th, the 2/16th — fought them back over the pass at Mount Bellamy, at twenty-one hundred and ninety metres, in mud and cloud, ridge by ridge: Kokoda itself, Isurava, where the four days of August were the turning, Brigade Hill and Mission Ridge, Ioribaiwa, the furthest south the Japanese reached, in sight of the sea, and Imita Ridge, the last line. The Australians retook Kokoda on the second of November. Six hundred and twenty-five of them died on the Track, and many more Japanese, and thousands went down with malaria and dysentery; the Papuan carriers who brought the wounded down the ridges on stretchers, the ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels’ of the soldiers' poem, are remembered on it with the same honour. The memorial at Isurava, four black granite pillars raised in 2002 that read Courage, Endurance, Mateship, Sacrifice, looks down the Eora valley; the villages of Alola, Efogi, Kagi, Menari, Nauro have kept the Track open since, and their people carry the packs and cook the meals of the walkers.

The traveller comes with a licensed operator — the Kokoda Track Authority permit, the porters, the medical kit — flies into Port Moresby, and walks it in eight to ten days, most from Owers' Corner northward, so that the last day comes down onto the Kokoda plateau, though the reverse has its own logic; the days are six to ten hours of climbing and descending on roots and mud, across creeks on log bridges, through the moss forest of the pass and the gardens of the villages, sleeping in tents or village huts, with a wash in a river at dusk; the memorials are visited on the way — Brigade Hill, Isurava with its dawn light through the pillars, the Kokoda plateau with the museum and the airstrip of 1942 — and the guides tell what happened where the traveller is standing. From Kokoda the small plane returns to Moresby in twenty-five minutes, over the ground that took nine days to cross.

The Guide's honesty: this is a hard walk — hotter, wetter, steeper and muddier than its distance suggests, and walkers have died on it of heart and heat; the traveller trains for months, walks with an operator whose porters are paid and insured, and does not race; Port Moresby at either end asks the ordinary caution of a difficult city, and the traveller moves there with the operator's transport; the Track passes through villages that own the land, and the fees, the courtesies and the Sunday quiet are theirs to set; and the Guide holds this page as memory in dignity, as it holds Betio and the ridges above Honiara — for the Australians and the Papuans who held these ridges, and for the Japanese boys who died on them far from home, all of whom the moss and the rain now cover alike — and for the moment on the last morning when the trees open and the plateau of Kokoda lies below in the sun.