Charlie Lynn, the man who single handedly put the military history of the Kokoda Trail on the map, says something ain’t cooking in that kitchen.
The former Australian Army major is worried that unless the Department of Veterans Affairs gets to run the show there may soon be little show left.
Trekking, and anything else related to the place where in 1942 young Australians made the ultimate sacrifice to stop the Japanese march towards our country, is currently under the Department of Climate Change.
Ostensibly this is the case to ensure protecting the environment along the 130km Kokoda Trail is the number one priority for the Canberra bureaucracy.
“Rubbish,’’ says Charlie Lynn, who is a long time resident of Camden and Campbelltown.
“We’ve taken 7000 people across, I’ve not seen one tree cut, because they locals are already environmentalists – they see this pristine environment, so they are not going to damage it in any way.
“Even a global report confirmed this in 1996, that there was no environmental threat to the Kokoda Trail.
“Give the [PNG] locals an income and that automatically protects the environment.
“But if the locals can’t earn an income from trekking, they might want to do it through forestry, or gold mining.’’
When Charlie Lynn started thinking about a Kokoda Trail trek of some kind it wasn’t because he was looking for a new way to earn a few bob.
In the 1980s he organized the Westfield Sydney to Melbourne ultramarathon, which attracted the best competitors from around the world.
With the race coming to the end of its natural life, it was time for the former soldier to try something new.
He knew his military history, so in 1992 he organized and led a group of trekkers across the Kokoda Trail to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Kokoda campaign in World War II.
But he quickly realized that hardly anybody gave two hoots about the Kokoda Trail.
“Nobody would want to know about it at the time,’’ he recalls.
“I went to Canberra, briefed Coalition ministers, and there was zero interest in New Guinea.
“In the early 1990s, PNG was regarded as a failed state; law and order was out of control, you just didn’t go over there.
“It was bad – when I went there, Port Moresby was under curfew every night, 6pm till 6 in the morning.
“That was the environment at the time, nobody was interested in PNG.’’
Except the media, apparently.
It started with a cover story of the 50th anniversary trek in the Bulletin, a great Australian magazine that is no longer with us but that was very popular in 1992.
Interest in the military history of Kokoda really took off four years later when Lynn took a bunch of celebrities on a trek in 1996, and it was filmed and shown by Channel 9’s A Current Affair.
“At the time it was the biggest rating ACA program of all time,’’ he says proudly.
It created enough interest to propel his trekking company, Adventure Kokoda to the top of the pops.
By the time he retired, Charlie Lynn led 101 expeditions across the Kokoda Trail.
In 2015 he was inducted as an Officer of the Logohu by the PNG Government in their New Years’ Honours List for service to the bilateral relations between Papua New Guinea and Australia and especially in the development of the Kokoda Trail and its honoured place in the history of both nations over the past 25 years.
In 2018 he was inducted as a Member of the Order of Australia for his services to the NSW Parliament, where he served for 20 years as a Liberal Party member of the Upper House.
We asked Lynn why he started the Kokoda treks in the first place, and this was his response:
“It is said that at Gallipoli we fought for Britain and lost. At Kokoda we fought for Australia and won. Australians needed to know more about Kokoda and that is why I did it.
“Iat Kokoda, it was the first time in our military history our regular forces and our militia had fought side by side on Australian territory in defence of Australia,’’ he says.
“The only way you can understand Kokoda is to trek it, and when you’re halfway across you think, how can anybody live here, let alone fight here.
“To me it’s a pilgrimage, where you get an appreciation of the human spirit overcoming adversity.
“Everything about it was good; it was purely young Australians fighting the Advancing Japanese forces; there were no Americans, no British.
“But the young untrained Aussies knew they were all that stood between the enemy and their families back home in Australia.
“And they were told, you gotta hold the line.’’
Charlie Lynn may be 80 years old, and retired from the trekking business – the younger members of his family look after it – but he’s up for one more battle.
“The Australian Government has to transfer responsibility for the Kokoda Trail from the Department of Climate Change to the Department of Veterans Affairs,’’ he says.
“Veterans Affairs have responsibility for Gallipoli, it’s stupid they don’t for Kokoda.’’
So far, he has been banging his head up against a brick wall.
But this old soldier’s not giving up just yet, so don’t think that’s the last you’ll hear Mr Kokoda, Charlie Lynn.