Cutting across the Owen Stanley Range of Papua New Guinea, the Kokoda Track is a narrow footpath roughly ninety-six kilometers long that links the village of Kokoda on the northern side of the mountains with Owers’ Corner, not far from Port Moresby, on the southern side. It climbs and descends through some of the most demanding terrain imaginable: steep ridges, deep river valleys, thick rainforest, and a climate that swings between suffocating humidity and cold mountain rain. For many people beyond PNG’s borders the name Kokoda is bound up with a wartime campaign of 1942. But the track is far older than that campaign, and its meaning today reaches well beyond it.
The Path Before the War
Long before it became famous, the route now known as the Kokoda Track was a network of local trails used by the peoples living along it. The mountain communities of the region moved between villages, gardens, and neighbors along these paths, and colonial administrators and gold prospectors later used them to cross between the coast and the interior. The track was, in other words, a piece of ordinary infrastructure for the people who lived there, connecting settlements in country where roads were impossible to build.
Understanding this matters, because the villages and clans along the track are not a backdrop to its history. They are its permanent residents, and their ancestors used and maintained these paths for generations. Any honest account of Kokoda has to begin with the people whose home it is.
The 1942 Campaign
During the Second World War, the track became the setting for a grueling campaign as Japanese and Australian forces fought along its length in appalling conditions. Soldiers on both sides struggled up and down the ridges carrying heavy loads, soaked by rain, short of food, and weakened by tropical disease as much as by combat. The fighting was close, confused, and exhausting, waged in terrain where a few men holding a ridge could halt a much larger force, and where simply moving supplies forward was a monumental task.
For Australia the campaign became a defining national memory, and it is often described there as a moment when the country’s own security felt directly at stake. That framing is powerful, but it can also overshadow the experience of Papua New Guineans, who were drawn into a war that was not of their making and who paid a heavy price in labor, disruption, and loss.
The Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels
Among the most enduring images of the campaign are the Papua New Guinean carriers and stretcher-bearers who moved supplies forward and carried wounded soldiers back across the mountains. Australian troops gave them the affectionate nickname the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels, and stories of their endurance and gentleness toward the wounded became part of the campaign’s legend. These carriers hauled crushing loads over the same brutal terrain that exhausted fit young soldiers, often under duress and far from their homes.
The sentimental image, however, deserves to be looked at squarely. Many carriers were recruited under compulsion rather than choice, their labor was essential to the war effort, and their contribution was long undervalued in official recognition and compensation. Remembering Kokoda well means honoring these men not as charming helpers but as people who bore real hardship and whose descendants still live along the track today.
The Track as a Trekking Destination
In recent decades the Kokoda Track has become one of the best known trekking routes in the Pacific, drawing walkers, many of them from Australia, who come to test themselves physically and to connect with the wartime history. The typical crossing takes several days of hard walking, with early starts, long climbs, river crossings, and nights spent in simple camps or village guesthouses. It is genuinely strenuous, and travelers are advised to prepare seriously, because the combination of steep ground, heat, and humidity is punishing for the unfit.
Trekking has brought a flow of income into a rugged region with few other economic opportunities. Local people work as guides, porters, cooks, and guesthouse operators, and trekking fees are intended to support the communities and the maintenance of the route. For villages far from towns and roads, this income can be significant, funding school fees and small improvements.
Benefits, Tensions, and Stewardship
Yet tourism along the track brings challenges as well as benefits. Income can be uneven, with some communities and individuals gaining far more than others, and disputes over how fees are shared have arisen. The physical trail requires constant upkeep in a wet, landslide-prone environment, and heavy foot traffic in the busy season places pressure on fragile sections. There are also periodic debates about development pressures in the wider region, including proposals affecting land and forest near the track, which raise questions about how to balance economic opportunity against the preservation of the route and its surroundings.
Managing all of this well requires cooperation between Papua New Guinean authorities, the landowning communities, and the visitors who come to walk. The people who live along the Kokoda Track are its true custodians, and sustainable stewardship depends on their interests coming first.
What the Track Asks of Those Who Walk It
To walk the Kokoda Track is to move through several layers of meaning at once. It is a physical challenge that rewards preparation and humility. It is a place of wartime memory that deserves to be approached with respect for everyone who suffered there, soldiers and carriers alike. And it is a living landscape, home to communities with their own present-day hopes and struggles, not a monument frozen in 1942. Visitors who keep all of this in mind, who listen to local guides, support local livelihoods, and remember the Papua New Guineans whose story is too often reduced to a nickname, come away with something richer than a personal endurance test. They come away having genuinely encountered a place, and the people who make it what it is.