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Historical analyses of flooding have predominately focused on riverine disasters. Despite causing isolated destruction or contributing to large-scale flood events, creek systems in urban environments largely remain unstudied. The 2022-23 Australian floods re-emphasise the need for analysing these disasters within increasingly built environments. Since colonisation, various governments in Queensland have exercised principles of control and capitalisation over the environment. Records of floods in the Eagle Farm, Serpentine and Nudgee areas of Brisbane identify the Kedron Brook creek system as their common cause. Nineteenth-century land reclamation, the construction of the Schulz Canal in 1928 and the militarised Eagle Farm Aerodrome in 1942 each accelerated the process of disrupting the Serpentine floodplain. Mitigatory measures proposed by the Brisbane City Council in the early 1960s as part of an unsuccessful rejuvenation and real estate development project called the Serpentine Scheme were eventually achieved in 1980-81 with the construction of the Kedron Brook Floodway by the Commonwealth of Australia as part of the Brisbane Airport Redevelopment. However, amid an urbanising Brisbane and despite ongoing investment into their mitigation, floods in this region have continued into the twenty-first century. This article argues that government-led urbanisation, driven by capitalist interests and underscored by technocratic techniques, have proceeded with limited consideration to the environment, particularly regarding flooding and mitigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the Australian War Memorial, as a public educational institution, stimulates visitor engagement with Kokoda's history and legacy through dialogic relationships, reflection on the limits of representing Kokoda and accessibility integrated within the exhibit's design. However, these opportunities are limited, as depictions of the Pacific War in adjacent gallery spaces risk perpetuating wartime stereotypes and reinforcing restrictive narratives. By applying recent museological scholarship, I first argue that for museums to inform and educate visitors about war successfully, representations of military history through the arrangement of exhibit spaces and galleries must create discursive spaces that stimulate critical historical inquiry. After outlining the historical, political and social developments at work in memorialising narratives of the Kokoda campaign within the Anzac framework, the article then draws upon auto-ethnographic research and public records to analyse how this memorialisation process influenced the design of the exhibit and the 1942 gallery. In the fourth section, I discuss whether the exhibit's arrangement of space and multimedia features enable critical engagement with the histories of Kokoda. I conclude that, despite the restrictive framing of the 1942 gallery, the Kokoda exhibit successfully enables visitors' engagement with critical historical reflection through dialogical relationships, explanation of the limitations in representing the battle and respectful narrative construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kokoda Track, which spans Papua New Guinea's Oro and Central Provinces, has become a site of profound Australian national feeling. Each year, thousands of Australian trekkers travel to Papua New Guinea to "do" the 96‐km hiking trail, in remembrance of the battle waged along it during the Second World War. For Oro Province people, meanwhile, Kokoda—denoting both the track and the place where the track commences—is also a site of intense feeling, albeit in ways that are both less mythologized and less amenable to mythologization. Attending to these divergent affective experiences highlights affect as a domain of postcolonial encounter. Affect works to reproduce colonial relations and animate ongoing regimes of territorialization. It does so while deflecting Australians' attention away from the very colonial contexts within which affect is implicated. At the same time, uneven geographies of affect index complexities of Papua New Guinean feeling that exceed those sanctioned within the confines of the trekking industry itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global interest in the memory of war in recent decades has brought challenges in managing and conserving extra-territorial war heritage: that is, sites of memory that have a greater significance for people outside the sovereign territory in which the sites physically reside. This article considers this issue in relation to the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea, a site of central importance in the Australian national memory of war. The successful conservation of the Track throws new light on the practice of heritage diplomacy. Working mostly outside the more commonly explored arena of global heritage governance, the Australian and New Guinean governments employed bilateral diplomacy to manage domestic stakeholder expectations, and thereby identified a convergence of interests and mutual gain by linking heritage protection with local development needs. They have also encouraged the construction of a narrative of the events of World War II that in some respects might be described as shared. Thus, heritage diplomacy is underpinned by a transnational consensus about the heritage’s significance, at least at the government level, which arguably divests the Kokoda Track of its exclusively ‘extra-territorial’ quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the significance of battlefield tourism as prime locations for war commemoration and commercial boost of the tourism. Topics include rise in number of Australian tourists visiting Australian military war sites, survey of Australian trekkers, and mythology associated with Kokoda Track, Owen Stanley Range in Papua New Guinea.

The process of listing a World Heritage Area in developing countries is often much more complex than in the West. Often all stakeholders are not taken into consideration. This paper presents a case study of Kokoda and the Owen Stanley Ranges, currently a tentative World Heritage site, to show the complexities in stakeholder collaboration and attribution in the process of World Heritage designation. Six key stakeholders were identified in the study. Upon examination of four attributes of stakeholders: power; legitimacy; urgency; and proximity, it was found that all stakeholders in this case study have a high legitimacy in the listing process however only the local community holds high levels of power, urgency and proximity. Additionally it was found that several stakeholders, like the private sector, have too many weak relationships with other stakeholders, resulting in a lack of communication. These findings present the first step in understanding how it might be possible to improve the listing process of World Heritage Sites in developing countries through effective stakeholder collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the release of Damien Parer's Kokoda Frontline in 1942, there have been several high quality documentary films and many popular and scholarly histories on the battles on the Kokoda Track, but until Alister Grierson's Kokoda of 2006 there was no feature film. Initially well received by an Australian public, Kokoda raises several important questions for historians. Makers of films on historical events properly draw on contemporary images: they are evocative of a time and place, guides to all that detail of dress, manners and possessions that take a crew so long to get right and that the pedantic delight in criticising, and they provide templates for shot composition. But the images in films are not subjected to the same scrutiny that historians apply to written sources. In Grierson's Kokoda, images are drawn from somewhere on the Track and relocated and, in one case, taken from another battle and another place. Film critics were concerned with placing Kokoda within the history of war films and evaluating it against other war films. When film critics considered whether Kokoda was 'real' or 'convincing', they were judging whether the behaviour of soldiers in battle moved and engaged an audience. Almost no film critics considered the film's accuracy as history, and it does repeat many popular errors about the Kokoda battles. Finally, it is interesting to consider what has been omitted and whether this has been the inevitable consequence of reducing an event spread over 100 kilometres of Track and several months to 92 minutes of film time, and whether the choices have diminished the end product as film or as history. More historians need to make themselves familiar with film and engage more readily in the public evaluation of those films claimed to be based on 'true' stories and illuminating what have come to be accepted as determining events in national histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the power relations in and between local villages and outside tourism operators on the Kokoda Track, Papua New Guinea (PNG). The analysis of power focuses on the contingencies of agency in the interactional order allowing greater participatory approaches to sustainable tourism. The notion of power applied in this case study is derived from Michel Foucault's concept of power relations. It is argued that local power and ensuing interactions are neither a zero sum gain or over-determined structurally, but a symbiotic process. By applying Foucault's concepts to the preparation of the Ecotrekking Strategy developed by the villages on the Kokoda Track, we illustrate how power is exercised through dominance, negotiation, rationalities and resistance, all of which are interwoven into day-to-day social interactions between tourism operators and local villages. The paper concludes with a discussion on the implications of this analysis for sustainable tourism development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the debate between the use of the terms "track" or "trail" in officially referring to the Australian War Memorial's commemoration of the Kokoda path in the Owen Stanley Ranges area in Papua New Guinea during World War II. The article examines the use of by soldiers and war correspondents in diaries and dispatches from the 1942 campaign, the use of the term following the war, and the decision of the Australian Battles Nomenclature Committee officially calling the area the Kokoda Trail. The article examines the publicity associated with the debate during the remembrances of the campaign during 1992 and the "Australia Remembers" celebrations during 1994 and 1995.

The article discusses the regional economic and cultural significance of the Kokoda Trail in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The Australian mining company Frontier Resources was denied a renewal license for its mineral exploration in an area of PNG known as the Kodu Deposit, close to the Kokoda Trail. The Australian government was believed to have played a role in the decision due to the cultural and economic significance of the Kokoda Trail to Australians. According to the author the decision to deny the license renewal may have hurt the economic interests of the people of PNG and may have been the result, in part, of Australia's colonial attitude towards PNG. The author notes that the debate that ensued raises questions about whether the Australian government or PNG owns the Kokoda trail.

From late 1942, Australians knew that the Japanese had shipped women to Rabaul, where they worked in brothels catering for Japanese troops. Japanese captured on the Kokoda Track and elsewhere described the brothels, and New Guineans and who had been in Rabaul talked about them. Australian military and civilian prisoners saw the brothels, and a few of those Australians observed them over a long period. Japanese who served in Rabaul have left reminiscences about the brothels, and one Korean woman has testified that she worked in Rabaul. As result, there is scattered material on perhaps 3,000 comfort women in an Australian Territory, but when Australian reporters and commentators need to give the comfort women an Australian relevance, these women are never mentioned. Their experiences are not used to provide evidence on the recurring debates about whether the comfort women were coerced or free and whether they were recruited, shipped and employed by private contractors rather than the Japanese military or government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Papua New Guinea has had great difficulty distilling the complex experiences of World War II into national history, but at the same time Australians have elevated and celebrated the significance of Kokoda. The 1942 battles on the Kokoda Track have been the subject of major Australian books and a feature film, and the numbers of trekkers on the Track have increased sharply. But in Papua New Guinea, Kokoda has been narrowing to an association with the Koiari and the Kokoda Orokaiva landowners. In Papua New Guinea, where the nation needs a sense of values and experiences in common, Kokoda is neither well known nor 'national'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From this issue, 'Pacific Currents' replaces the 'Current Developments in the Pacific' and 'Political Chronicles' sections in the Journal. While we will continue to welcome submissions on contemporary issues in the Pacific Islands -- on elections and political developments, for instance, or economic and demographic trends -- we will seek to encourage the publication of material that is more wide-ranging and reflective, that tackles a topical issue from a longer perspective, that makes a contribution to a larger debate of contemporary significance, freed from the need to be 'up-to-date'. The section's 'archival' intention will now be complemented by more interpretive essays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks to the realm of foreign policy in order to see what of relevance to Australia's republican question might now be brewing there. Taking its cue from some recent shifts in the terms of party political debate—where Keating's reassertion of the theme of 'imperial betrayal' on the Kokoda trail appears to have struck a responsive chord in an international context where greater economic stringency is threatened—the paper suggests that a form of 'pretend republican' politics may now be emerging. The purpose of the ensuing argument is to foreclose some of the possible routes through which this regressive form of populist nationalism might otherwise develop. It argues, first, that the general history of postwar Australian foreign policy is something quite different to the mythic story of a loyal ally, so impeding the access the access of pretend republicans to a useable past. Second, the paper argues that the sustained efforts by recent Labor governments to 'enmesh' the Australian economy in Asia, far from being an index of post-colonial maturity, have provided fertile ground for the regeneration of a variety of modes of argument and thought that are properly described as colonial in form. In that sense, some old imperial traditions are made stronger by the movement towards a 'pretend republican' discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses some cases of relapse linked to Plasmodium vivax malaria detected in two male Australian blood donors following their trip to the Kokoda Trail in Papua New Guinea. A 63-year old donor reportedly received primaquine for malaria treatment. It is said that such cases raise safety concerns on the testing method used by the Australian Red Cross National Blood Service, considering the possibility that late diagnosis could lead to transfusion of blood components with potential infections.

The article focuses on Kokoda pilot study which investigates the role of Papua New Guinea (PNG) in Second World War. Topics include the war's pervasive and profound influence on Papua New Guinean communities, a small number of locations in the vicinity of the Kokoda Trail and funds for study was provided by through the Kokoda Initiative, a partnership between the governments of Papua New Guinea and Australia.