Kokoda (3 page)
Parallel Ridges: Isurava and Abuari
It was an infantryman’s Calvary, where the pain of effort, the biting sweat, the hunger, the cheerless, shivering nights were made dim by exhaustion’s merciful drug… Surely no war was ever fought under worse conditions than these. Surely no war has ever demanded more of a man in fortitude. Even Gallipoli or Crete or the desert.
Osmar White,
Green Armour
The ancient Japanese culture, once built of wood, bamboo, paper, straw and silk, is today a civilisation built of iron and steel, of factories and machines. Yet even today Japan’s strength rests more on its ancient culture than on the civilisation of the 20th Century
From
The Secret of Japanese Strength
1
Not only to develop the resources of the Territory, but also to preserve the Papuans and to raise them eventually to the highest civilization of which they are capable. Not to make the brown man white—but to make him a better brown man than he was before.
The stated goal of Sir Hubert Murray, Australia’s Administrator of
Papua New Guinea from 1908 to 1940
2
The mid-1920s… There is a special kind of drone teachers assume when they are giving a lesson about something they don’t particularly care about, and know that their students care for even less. So it was on this hot afternoon at Warrandyte High School in the old mining town some twenty miles northeast of Melbourne, as ol’ Mr Hallett was pointing out to his students just one more bit of the map of the world that was coloured in red because it was another part of the British Empire, on which the sun never set.
‘And here, boys and girls,’ he was saying, ‘are the territories of New Guinea and Papua, which as you can see, are squarely in the tropics. The “Papua” part in the territories of New Guinea and Papua came from Jorge de Meneses, a Portuguese seafarer who arrived in 1526 and is thought to have been the first European to discover it. He gave the land the name “Papua” after the Malay word which means “fuzzy-haired man”. It wasn’t until 1884 that the Germans and British established colonies on the northeast and southeast sections respectively of the island. In 1906, Australia took over control of the British colony and in 1914, when the Great War started, it also occupied the German areas. In 1920 the League of Nations formally decreed that it should be a territory of Australia. There are no fewer than eight hundred tribes in the territories of New Guinea and Papua, and one-third of the world’s languages are spoken there. All in an area of no more than 500 000 square miles. Its average rainfall, in some places, incredibly, rises to as high as 150 inches!’
Stan Bisset, all of twelve years old, listened and paid attention as best he could, because he was generally a conscientious kind of student, but it tested even him. New Guinea was a place that sort of brooded at the top of the map of Australia, but it wasn’t somewhere that quickened his interest the way, say, London, or New York or Paris did. New Guinea was just a bit of a blob that might be geographically close to Australia, but that was about it.
Anyway, already Stan’s thoughts were turning to that afternoon after school when he would get back to the family farm by the Yarra River and, with his beloved older brother Butch, go fishing, or play cricket or football. Or maybe they’d go after rabbits, using their uncle’s shotgun, or have a competition to see which of them could shoot out the flame of a candle at a distance of 25 yards. One of their favourite games was to take it in turns to pretend being Ned Kelly, setting up ambushes in the nearby forest. But they’d be hard put to match the most fun they ever had, which was when, with a couple of boys from the Howden family, they’d wagged school and used some old gelignite and fuse wire they’d found in one of the abandoned mines to blow it up… but anyway. Whatever they did, that night after dinner Stan and Butch would likely sing everything from chorus-line songs to favourite hymns in front of the fire with their two older brothers, younger sister and parents.
On Sundays the whole family would walk together to the local church—where his mother was the pianist and his father the leading tenor in the choir—to worship before returning for the boys’ favourite Sunday roast with all the trimmings that their mother and sister cooked up for them.
Life was simple and good for the young Stan, rather in the image of Australia itself. He and Butch were young blokes just about to get into their stride, growing up in a young nation just about to get into
its
stride…
Every now and then when Stan and Butch were taken into Melbourne by their parents, they passed by the Melbourne suburb of Malvern’s small hospital—and it was in this establishment that, a decade-and-a-half earlier, one Damien Parer had been born.
3
He was the tenth child of the fiercely Roman Catholic couple John and Teresa Parer, of King Island in Bass Strait. After her confinement, Teresa returned with her tiny and precious bundle to the island where her husband ran the only hotel, and life for Damien began. It was not an easy existence. While the family life was warm, and the immersion into heavy Catholicism lifted and nourished Damien’s spirit rather than weighed him down, the fact was that his father was a compulsive gambler. This was another way of saying he was frequently absent from home and lost a lot of money that the family could ill-afford. Damien was by nature a notably happy, confident and up-beat sort of fellow, but as money dwindled and his mother wept, as his father tried one ‘fail-safe’ gambling scheme after another to restore the family fortunes, which did in fact fail anyway, there were many things which tried his natural spirit. Always, Damien’s devotion to Catholicism and the strength he drew from praying saw him through and, somehow, the combination of it all bred enormous courage in him, together with an ability to withstand great hardship.
There was just something about Footscray football team that thrilled young Joe Dawson to the core. Most weekends when ‘the Bulldogs’ played ‘at home’, young Joe would scrape together the sixpence necessary to get into the Western Oval to watch them take on the likes of Carlton, Collingwood, St Kilda or South Melbourne. He knew in his tribal bones that none of those other teams were as good as Footscray, had the
soul
of Footscray, the
spirit
of Footscray. The mere sight of their famous red, white and blue colours made young Joe shiver with pleasure every time he saw them run onto the field. There could be no finer thing than one day, maybe, to wear their jersey. Who better to represent?
Sometimes the crowd would roar ‘Up There Cazaly!’ if anyone leaped particularly high to take a mark—a catch-cry that had taken off several years before, when St Kilda’s Roy Cazaly would leap fair to the heavens, a cry which had such a nice feel about it that it had not dissipated since his retirement.
Joe called out his support, maybe a little shyly at first, but then with greater gusto as the game went on. He was a quiet kid, but spirited in his own way. With his father’s menswear store on Nicholson Street going pretty well, the family of seven lacked for not too much. Joe was a fairly bright student at school, and the future seemed pretty fair, even if he wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do.
Over in the Japanese city of Kochi on the spectacularly beautiful island of Shikoku, the young lads growing up didn’t wonder what they’d do, they pretty much knew. They knew that at least for a certain part of their lives they would be going into the military. And they were already getting a headstart in preparing for it. In their schools the basic military skills of marching, firing rifles and hand-to-hand combat were taught as a matter of course, just as they were taught what they were learning to fight for. Every school day began with a collective prayer to the Emperor, the national anthem and a ceremonial raising of the Japanese flag. Directly and innately, these lads were made to understand that Japan had a destiny to be militarily strong and to use that strength for the greater glory of the nation. Their
duty
was to be worthy of helping fulfil that goal.
Japan, which only seventy-odd years before had emerged from near total isolation from the West, was indeed at a notable point in its history, poised between two worlds, each struggling for supremacy. While Europe had been torn apart by the Great War, Japan had remained essentially uninvolved, apart from the odd task for the Allies—like escorting Australian troopships on their way to Gallipoli across the Indian Ocean in early 1915. One result was that Japan’s economy had received an enormous surge as its manufacturing industries provided the things that Europe no longer could.
The tension in the times though was twofold. For despite its growth, Japan remained dependent on importing natural resources such as rubber, iron ore and, most notably, oil. And the more the economy grew and the population expanded, the more this need grew, including the most urgent requirement for food. This caused a great struggle between those in Japan who advocated—in the grandest of samurai traditions—ruthlessly using their superior military force to invade and subjugate resource-rich neighbouring countries like China, and the more moderate, modern forces, who maintained that normal forms of simple trade would give Japan the resources it needed. The cause of the moderates was weakened when many countries of the West imposed heavy tariffs on manufactured Japanese goods, limiting Japan’s capacity to pay for the raw materials. And the moderate cause was further weakened with the gruelling effects of the Great Depression when the Japanese people ceased to trust normal market operations to secure the country’s future prosperity.
This battle in the highest realms of Japanese Government between the moderates and the militarists—all of it under the sometime nervous gaze of the Emperor himself—would dominate Japanese political life for two decades.
There is no doubt that the militarists had the structural advantage in the struggle. First, the need for resources grew more urgent with every year, underlining the need for drastic measures. And secondly, it was always going to be easy to assert military control over a people with strong militaristic traditions, a people who had been ruled for centuries by shoguns (the Emperor’s top military commanders) and samurai warriors. There was practically a cultural imperative for the Japanese population at this time to automatically obey high military authority, no matter in which direction it steered them.
It was in such circumstances that, effectively, the military remained almost a force unto itself, answerable neither to the
Diet
(parliament) or the government.
4
A particularity of the Japanese Constitution since 1900, strengthened by subsequent amendments, was that the government minister controlling the navy and the army had to be a serving officer, thus effectively eliminating traditional civilian control of the military. In fact, given that the resignation of the Minister for the Navy or Army could bring down a government— and frequently did so—they clearly had exceptional power. But what the military could not do was bring down the Emperor because, as affirmed by this same constitution, he was a divine power—a direct descendant of
Amaterasu,
known to Westerners as the Sun Goddess, the almighty being who created Japan.
On all but one of the above, the passage of time changed both the subjects and the circumstances in which they could be found.
By the early 1930s, Stan Bisset had blossomed into a scholarship winner at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music on the strength of his extraordinary bass-baritone singing voice, and was also turning into a very fine cricket and rugby player on the strength of his great athletic gifts. Butch Bisset, meanwhile, after heading off to Western Australia with one of his older brothers to work on their uncle’s sheep station—before also having a stint cutting sleepers for the railway line they were building over that way—had returned as a very tough man with the capacity to ride horses, shoot and swim all day long, and carry on into the night when he was in town. Butch soon joined Stan in Melbourne’s famous Powerhouse Club, where he played rugby in the front row—right at the ‘coalface’ of the action—with Stan pushing directly behind him in the second row.
At this time, too, another young Australian was finding his feet. His early ambition to become a Catholic priest had given way at his Bathurst boarding school to a passion for photography. Now, as an apprentice to a noted Collins Street photographer in Melbourne, Damien Parer began experimenting with moving pictures. As a matter of fact, by this time he had already shot his first tiny ‘film’, a ten-minute roughly put together sequence of shots of his and brother Adrian’s Catholic hiking club going on a long trek through the forest. Sure, it was rough, but somehow it had something. Somehow Damien just
had it
, could splice together the right footage taken from the right angles, with just the right perspective, and was able to not only evoke time and place, but give a real impression of just what it was like. He was even then working his way towards what would become practically his first commandment of documentary making: ‘We shall find most of our gold in the hidden detail of expression of our men by watching carefully, noting expression and gestures and shooting circumspectly at the dead right moment.’