The Kokoda Trail is a remote jungle track in the old Australian Territory of Papua where Aussie Diggers and Fuzzy Wuzzy angels battled against Japanese invaders to save Australia in 1942. The Kokoda Trail campaign, fought out over six months and two days on a narrow front in appalling conditions has become an honoured part of our Australian heritage.

But there is much more to the Kokoda Trail than this. Historian and adventurer Stuart Hawthorne looks back 130 years over the Trail’s captivating past. He traces the explorers, gold seekers, missionaries and colonial officials who pushed this tiny footpad across unbelievably harsh country to set out a fascinating account of the fortunes of this 96.4 kilometre track. Did you know a surveyor set out the route of the first Kokoda Trail before Kokoda even existed? Or why it’s the Kokoda Trail, not Track? Or who gave the Trail’s ‘Golden Staircase’ its name?

Thirty years in the making, The Kokoda Trail: A History provides the first complete account of this sinuous little footpad that holds such an esteemed position in the Australian psyche. This book reveals for the first time there is another, larger, history of the Kokoda Trail which is every bit as compelling and intriguing as the grim war years of 1942.

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​ISBN 9781921920202. 300 pages, with index, 84 black & white photos, 13 chapter maps. First published by Central Queensland University Press 2003 (ISBN 1876780304). This edition published by Boolarong Press 2011.  230mm x  160mm.