HALLOWED GROUND
Amazingly, until 2006, a dramatisation of the Kokoda campaign had never been immortalised on film. That was until a gung-ho band of filmmakers and actors took on one of Australia’s most iconic wartime moments in the most inventive of ways.
When you think of the very Australian essence of mateship, there are few examples that measure up to the loyalty and sacrifice of soldiers at war. Yet, while several Australian war stories have been captured on film, it’s almost unbelievable that a dramatisation of WW2’s Kokoda campaign took more than 60 years to be immortalised on the big screen.
Synonymous with Australia’s identity, the story of Kokoda is grand, hallowed ground. Where some first feature makers may have shied away from such subject matter, not so a gung-ho collective of Australian Film Television and Radio School graduates of 2004 who in just two years brought Kokoda to Australian screens.
“It goes to the heart of the bond of mateship that’s almost impossible to define. That’s why I wanted to make the movie. That has to be the essence of the Kokoda experience.”
The challenge says director Alister Grierson - whose spit fire commentary on Kokoda history seems more akin to an academic than a brazenly confident director wearing bulbous fly-eyed sunglasses - was how to capture the essence of Kokoda from such a broad palette of experiences and historical accounts.
“What is the Kokoda story? There’s a thousand ways you could do it. And where does it finish?” Grierson says. “I think if you were Mr Spielberg you’d say ‘Let’s do this sweeping thing, open with 10,000 Japanese soldiers swarming the beaches’. We couldn’t do that. Part of the challenge for us was to find a narrative structure that would point towards the greater epic whole in a metaphorical sense.”
The team settled on a fictionalised story about a band of ten inexperienced Australian soldiers stranded behind enemy lines deep in the jungle of the Kokoda track after a Japanese attack cuts them off from their supply lines and all communications. Over the next three days, the men endure mortal wounds, malaria, dysentery and internal conflict. Surfacing from the jungle fatigued from lack of food and sleep the men bravely battle on regardless to join their fellow soldiers in The Battle of Isurava.
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| The cast of Kokoda |
It was that deep seated sense of loyalty and sacrifice in the soldiers that overpowered their unimaginable hardship that inspired so much passion for the story.
“It’s got to go to the heart of the bond of mateship that’s almost impossible to define,” says Grierson. “That’s why I wanted to make the movie. For me, it’s that moment when they go ‘We’re going back’. They didn’t have to. I thought ‘That has to be the essence of the Kokoda experience’.”
Grierson needed actors who not only shared some of their character’s traits but could step up to the rigors of a tight, grueling 26 day shoot. The resulting cast, formed over just six weeks was a mixture of exciting new talent and established faces led by Jack Finsterer (Strange Fits of Passion) and Travis McMahon (Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries) and including Tom Budge (Candy), Ewan Leslie (Dead Europe) Angus Sampson (Spirited) and veterans William McInnes (Look Both Ways) and Shane Bourne (MDA).
