Australia Under Threat: The Kokoda Trail.
Australia has only once been in danger of invasion in the era of European settlement. In 1942, during World War II, the armies of Japan came very close to invading northern Australia. The Japanese airforce bombed Darwin, the capital city of the Northern Territory, in February 1942. The Australian protectorate of Papua New Guinea, just to the north of our nation, had already been invaded by Japanese troops in 1941. It was widely believed that Australia itself was the next target of Japan.
The Kokoda Trail stretches for almost 200 kilometers between the New Guinea capital city, Port Moresby, on the southern coast of Papua New Guinea, and the towns of Papua New Guinea's northern coast. The rough trail cuts through the towering Owen Stanley Range the sloping mountains of which are so steep in places that it requires mountaineering skill to scale them safely. Dense jungle covers the slopes. Vines as thick ropes hang down from giant trees. The upper slopes are often hidden in mists and, when it rains, water and mud run down the mountainsides in torrents,.
The village of Kokoda lies along the trail, approximately halfway between Buna on the north coast and Port Moresby on the south coast. Kokada was the only place in the ranges where supplies could be dropped from the air on to a flat plateau. .
It was along the Kokoda Trail, in the forbidding ranges, that Australia troops would fight a battle against the Japanese troops to save Australia from any new invasion attempt. The Kokoda Trail was significant because it was the only place where troops could cut across Papua New Guinea from the north to the south coasts. It was believed that the Japanese intended to capture Port Moresby as a base from which to launch an invasion of Australia. .
The conditions of the Kokoda Trail were horrendous. An Australian war correspondent reporting on the conditions wrote of troops who had been fighting without any let-up for a week:.
