Since the early 1990s Kokoda, in Papua New Guinea’s Oro Province, has become a site of intense national feeling for many Australians. Thousands travel to Oro each year to complete the 96km track that runs from Kokoda Station to Port Moresby, in an act of remembrance of the conflict waged there in 1942 between Australian and Japanese forces. More than 45 years after the end of Australian colonial administration of PNG, the Kokoda Track is one of the few spaces when ordinary Papua New Guineans and Australians have much to do with one another.

In this episode, we go to Kokoda to find out what the trekking industry means to local people who live or work along the Track. What we see is that the benefits and recognition that the tourism industry offers are uneven. For some, the industry has become an important source of employment and cash income. For others, the industry has not delivered on its promises, and many local people bemoan the brief and fleeting interactions they have with the trekkers who ‘come and go’.

If Kokoda is, as former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating suggested in 1992, a place that epitomises the relationship between Papua New Guineans and Australians, this episode asks: What would it mean to reckon honestly with the complex, and sometimes difficult histories of that relationship?

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.