Up the Kokoda Trail!

From SUSAN YOUNG, in Port Moresby It’s the Kokoda Trail —officially.

PNG Lands Minister Albert Maori Kiki has put an end to the lobbying, if not the controversy, by deciding against Track and for Trail.

Mr Kiki told me he had plumped for Trail because it was clear to him that that was what the local people wanted. Actually, he said, both Track and Trail were foreign names which meant nothing to Papua New Guineans. However, the people living along the famous route said that they had now come to know it as the Kokoda Trail.

“In other words,” said Mr Kiki, “they were telling us that they wanted it to be called Trail, and I go along with them.”

The PNG Place Names Committee, faced with the unenviable task of choosing between the rival, and hotly-contested names, first settled on Trail last August.

I gather that the committee was convinced that the route had been known as the Kokoda Track before the war, and by all those fighting on it during the war; but that nevertheless it was decided to call it the Trail because that is how it has been most widely known in recent times.

At any rate, that is how it was gazetted in October last year. But, because a good deal of interest and argument was expected, the normal period of one month for objections to place names was extended to three months.

It seems that at the end of that time, having received a number of submissions and objections, a majority of Place Names Committee members felt moved to change their minds and recommend to the minister that the route should be called the Kokoda Track after all.

Mr Kiki rejected their revised opinion. But if the route was known as the Track for so long, by so many, how come that it ever got changed to Trail?

The credit (or responsibility, depending on your point of view) for this is claimed by Mr Geoff Reading, now press secretary to the New South Wales Premier, but in 1942 a war correspondent for the Sydney Daily Mirror and Truth group of papers, stationed in Port Moresby.

Writing in the NSW Leagues Club Journal a couple of years ago, Mr Reading said that none of the reporters knew precisely what to call “the track over the mountains”. This uncertainty necessitated “long-winded” descriptions which were “a bloody nuisance” to write and despatch. (Wartime photo above, right, shows Aussies and Fuzzies having a breather on the Trail).

So one day, in the interests of economy of words and cash when cabling stories, Mr Reading wrote Kokoda Trail —trail being an American term which appealed to him—“and went back to a game of poker and didn’t give it another thought”.

But down south, space-conscious sub-editors received it well and according to Mr Reading Kokoda Trail appeared as a headline for the first time in the Sydney Daily Mirror the next day.

Mr Reading says that other papers quickly followed suit and the name Kokoda Trail stuck.

In Sydney in April, Mr Reading claimed no great act of creation on his part in calling it trail. When told Mr Kiki had opted for trail he remarked, “that’s terrific”.