For thirteen weeks in 1942, the track that became known as the Kokoda Trail earned its infamy. A battle was fought along its muddy entrails that would change the course of a war and place a little village in Papua firmly within the chronicles of history.
But what about Kokoda after 1945? What about its people, both Papuan and European, recovering from war and trying to rebuild a district?
Following the life of Soc, the youngest son of Captain Bert Kienzle (The Architect of Kokoda), this book tells some of that story. It captures a remarkable period in history, when the world sought to take a people from the Stone Age to the Space Age in the span of a single lifetime.
Soc’s early years were divided between boarding school in Sydney and his home near Kokoda. Steeped in its culture and surrounded by its history, he lived through the end of the colonial era and the birth of the nation of Papua New Guinea.
Like his father before him, Soc held a deep affection for and understanding of the Papuan people. Throughout his life, he remained conscious that the Kokoda Campaign - and indeed his own life there - represented only a blink of the eye in the passage of time for these Melanesian people.
Through Soc’s remarkable story, a lesser-known Kokoda emerges – one shaped not only by war, but by family, change, resilience and the people who called it home.