Tracking histories on Kokoda

During the Second World War two million Australian, American and Japanese soldiers descended and fought violently in Papua New Guinea - with the entire population of two million Papua New Guineans caught up in the conflict.

Nicknamed by the Australians as ‘fuzzy wuzzy angels,’ many locals helped to save the lives of Australians and Americans captured or fighting there.

The Kokoda Track has become a place of pilgrimage for Australians - an iconic battleground of the Second World War. Yet after the war - perhaps because it was too close to home - Australians tended to forget about its effect on Papua New Guineans.

Now, with the support of the Australian and Papua New Guinean Governments, one Australian has embarked on a mission to help Papua New Guineans record their own memories of the event.

Historian Dr Jonathan Ritchie, Senior Research Fellow within the Alfred Deakin Research Institute, has been leading an oral history project that has seen more than 70 Papua New Guineans recently interviewed about their own, or their ancestors,’ war-time experience around the Kokoda trail.

The project enabled Dr Ritchie to work alongside Papua New Guinean historian, Professor John Waiko, and Dr Andrew Moutu, the Director of PNG's National Museum and Art Gallery, and a team of talented and enthusiastic Papua New Guineans.

The material they collected will be used to develop an oral history repository in the National Museum in Port Moresby.

The pilot study is funded through the Kokoda Initiative, a partnership between the governments of Papua New Guinea and Australia to sustainably manage the Owen Stanley Ranges, Brown River Catchment and Kokoda Track Region.

“This project has been about capacity building,” Dr Ritchie explained.

“There are a lot of people with experience in oral history in PNG. It has been a matter of facilitating the endeavour so that, we hope, the project can be expanded to cover a much larger area of New Guinea.”

“All of PNG was affected by the war. Some parts were occupied by the Japanese briefly, others for the entire war, and large parts were home to tens of thousands of allied soldiers from 1942 to 1945.”

The interviews were conducted in nine different locations along the Kokoda Track, beginning in the north coast, where the Japanese first landed in July 1942, and then south along the Owen Stanley Ranges. The team visited remote villages - one at an altitude of 5000 feet and only accessible by foot or air.

Despite the 72 year time-lag, five interviewees remembered the event.

“These were events that people don’t forget,” said Dr Ritchie.

“One person was a medical orderly during the war, who witnessed some terrible things, including the aftermath of the Japanese occupation of the Northern District. Sadly, he died a month before the interviews, but he asked his daughter to pass on his written memories to the team.

“Another, now an eighty-nine-year-old man living in a village accessible only by small boat, helped to hide an Anglican minister in the jungle for many months.

“There was a strong sense of sadness about these recollections and a reminder that war is terrible. Yet, in every interview we recorded there was great fondness for the association they had with Australians, even though many felt that they had been abandoned during the post-war years.”

Dr Ritchie, who himself grew up in PNG, said that “Papua New Guineans don’t have a national narrative in the same way that we do, with stories of the Anzacs or the bush, for instance.”

“They need some good news stories that demonstrate that they were just as important and brave during the war as the Australians were - and the friendship they shared with the Australians is a fantastic good news story,” he said.

With the 75^th anniversary of the outbreak of the war in the Pacific due in 2017, Dr Ritchie is hoping that the interviews will be used during a major exhibition at the PNG National Museum.

He is also working on plans that will allow Australians to hear the stories.

“There is a saying in some parts of PNG that fuzzy wuzzy means ‘friend who walks with you.’ It is not too late for Australia to acknowledge that along with the Papua New Guineans at Kokoda who supported us, so did thousands of others across the country,” he said.