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85 pages

English

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‘To walk the Kokoda Track is to undertake two journeys. The first starts at Owers’ Corner and undulates through 96 kilometres of primary jungle over the Owen Stanley Range until you reach the village of Kokoda on the other side. This journey is ordinarily taken in the company of others and with a backpack, which you may hire a porter to carry for you if you wish. The second journey began the moment you were born. It brings to the track baggage of a different kind. This you must carry yourself, and the journey you must make alone.’

So begins JFK Miller’s account of his ten-day jungle trek along Papua New Guinea’s Kokoda Track. The journey was effectively two journeys. The external journey was the physical ten-day trek over the track. The internal journey was the emotional aspect, including what Miller brought to the experience — the mental illness of depression — and what he gained from it.

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Personal Memoirs

Biography

Autobiography

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Publié par	Hybrid Publishers
Date de parution	01 août 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781922768070
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

PILGRIM
A JOURNEY ALONG A TRACK
JFK Miller was born in Brisbane in 1968 . He is the author of Trickle-down Censorship: An Outsider s Account of Working Inside China s Censorship Regime (2016) and the founder of Whyiwrite.net , a collection of author interviews inspired by George Orwell s 1946 essay of the same name and The Paris Review s Writers at Work series (1953-present).
Pilgrim: A Journey Along a Track is his second book.
Also by JFK Miller
Trickle-down Censorship: An Outsider s Account of Working Inside China s Censorship Regime

Published by Hybrid Publishers
Melbourne Victoria Australia
JFK Miller 2022
This publication is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests and enquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to the Publisher, Hybrid Publishers, PO Box 52, Ormond, VIC Australia 3204.
www.hybridpublishers.com.au
First published 2022

ISBN: 781922768063 (p)
9781922768070 (e)
Cover design: Kan SeakHong ( www.monomark.studio/ )
The world as got me snouted jist a treat; Crool Forchin s dirty left as smote me soul; An all them joys o life I eld so sweet Is up the pole. Fer, as the poit sez, me eart as got The pip wiv yearnin fer - I dunno wot.
C.J. Dennis, The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke 1
1

You might ask why I or anyone else kept going. You keep going because you have to, and because if you stop, you stop nowhere, but if you keep going you might get somewhere.
Private Barney Findlay, Kokoda digger 1
To walk the Kokoda Track is to undertake two journeys. The first starts at Owers Corner and undulates through 96 kilometres of primary jungle over the Owen Stanley Range until you reach the village of Kokoda on the other side. This journey is ordinarily taken in the company of others and with a backpack, which you may hire a porter to carry for you if you wish. The second journey began the moment you were born. It brings to the track baggage of a different kind. This you must carry yourself, and the journey you must make alone.
I decided to walk the Kokoda Track at a time in my life when I was entirely lost. No one in their right mind would go looking for direction or answers in a jungle, but I was not in a right mind. I was listless and bored and numb to life, being in the throes of an especially bleak patch in a major depression.
Perhaps I knew instinctively, what I now know through trial and error in trying to beat this thing, that inertia is the constant enemy of the depressive, and that if you are to have any hope of alleviating this pointless mental illness then the first thing you must do is move . Meds and therapy will help, but you can t optimise them unless you move. If you want even a temporary respite from this horrible, hopeless existence, you must move. When your every thought is conspiring against you, when your will has been depleted so that you do not want to go on, you must, somehow, go on. And to go on means to move. It is not a matter of desire but of necessity. To stop is to die a little more, to let the boulder we put our shoulder to each day roll back down the hill and crush us. To move is to survive. There is no way around it. If you want to live, you must move .
Moving served another purpose: it provided an excuse to escape. From what exactly, I m not sure. From Brisbane, certainly. I d had enough of its choking provincialism. But I was fleeing from things other than my hometown. From life, perhaps. Perhaps even from myself. I was not hoping to find myself . Rather, I was hoping to lose myself. I was 33, had recently emerged from an eight-year relationship which I d singlehandedly destroyed through infidelity and indecision (I was engaged and in love, just not with the same person), and had tossed in a cushy, well-paid job as an in-house lawyer in a fit of pique. It is said that we hold down jobs, but in truth that job held me down. It anchored me and once I d unmoored myself, I was hopelessly adrift and seized with the impossible feeling that my life was not going to plan despite the fact I had no plan.
Then there was my head. Psychiatrists have examined it for over twenty years like a car mechanic assessing a faulty engine. Each psychiatrist (I ve had five) has offered a fresh diagnosis or a variation on a theme: unipolar depression, bipolar disorder, soft bipolar, rapid-cycling bipolar, major depressive disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and borderline personality disorder. It all reduces to the same thing: I am not right up top. I say this with no shame or pride, though there was a time when, oddly, I revelled in the diagnosis of a mental illness. It is upon this unstable platform that all one s troubles, self-inflicted or otherwise, are delicately balanced. This was the baggage I brought with me to Kokoda.
I walked the track twenty years ago, in 2002. My first attempt to write a book about it shortly thereafter was a complete disaster. It was factually accurate but emotionally dishonest, and the writing was abysmal. I was trying to be the kind of writer I am not. The universal rejection of this cringeworthy effort by the Australian publishing industry was a mercy killing, though it didn t feel like it at the time. Looking back now, I didn t have the maturity or perspective to appreciate the experience. Kokoda was something I had to shelve and allow to gather dust before taking it down again and appreciating it afresh.
Kokoda was a fortunate impulse. I don t know how the idea of doing Kokoda got into my head. Like Gallipoli, Kokoda is so ingrained into our national consciousness that most Australians know of it if not about it. But once the idea caught on, I simply couldn t budge it. It became a fixation. Something I wanted to do became something I had to do. Some ideas are well planned but never executed. Others are executed without any plans at all. Kokoda was one of those. Back then I was in one of two states: paralysed by indecision or impulsive in making decisions. Fortunately, Kokoda was the latter to which I didn t give much thought. I knew the Kokoda Track was in Papua New Guinea, but to me it was just the name of a place with the exotic allure of being somewhere in a jungle. I booked my trip with little appreciation of what I was getting myself in to. I did not know where this pilgrimage would take me, as I did not yet realise I was even on a pilgrimage. That path was yet to be illuminated for me.
I found a trek operator online. There were only a handful in 2002. These days, around 5,000 Australians walk the track each year, but in 2002 it was less than 400. He was ex-army and ex-police, and his photo showed him beribboned with the customary fruit salad of military and police honours. The paintbrush moustache offered extra reassurance that he was a safe pair of hands. On the track, some of us nicknamed him The Captain , though we never had the nerve to call him that to his face. He d been taking people over the track since the mid 80s and had walked it over 50 times. The cost was cheap: less than 2,000 dollars for a ten-day hike. Some trek operators take longer, some shorter; the Captain seemed nicely positioned in the middle. The $2,000 included a porter, a Papuan who would carry my backpack over the track for me. I d be hiking with a group of around fifteen, the Captain said.
The waiver he asked me to sign confirmed this would be no pleasure trip. He also needed a letter from my doctor certifying my fitness to walk the track. I wasn t overly perturbed. I was in modest shape, no athlete but no couch potato either. I am six feet and was then about 90 kilograms. I had cottoned on early to the benefits of daily exercise to improve my mental state and was running ten kilometres a day. The track was less than 100 kilometres; ten days at ten kilometres a day. How hard could it be?
The Captain looked like he was in his early fifties and slightly potbellied. If he had walked the track 50 times, I figured I could manage it once. Besides, we d have good walking conditions, he said. We would walk the track in September at the end of the dry season before it closed to trekkers until the following April. During the wet season there are parts of the track even the sure-footed Papuans find challenging.
I knew only the basics of the Kokoda campaign. We had fought - and beaten - the Japanese there during World War II. Today, they are our friends and allies, the Japanese . But to a generation of Australians, like my grandparents who lived through the war, they would always be the Japs or the Nips . I was otherwise sketchy on the details.
Walking Kokoda was to change all that. The track is a path to knowledge above all else. I knew some things though. I d heard of the legendary Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels, the Papuans who endeared themselves to generations of Australians by carrying our injured diggers over the track during the campaign.
I did not come to Kokoda as an unworldly novice but as someone who was reasonably well travelled. I d been travelling since my early twenties and had visited around 30 countries, mostly in Europe and Asia, and a smattering of the Middle East, but no more than the average Australian satisfying our national wanderlust. But these were urban adventures not jungle ones, and I had never ventured far from the comfortable, safe surrounds of a city.
I had been to Gallipoli too. Any Australian who has been there will tell you the birthplace of the Anzac legend is a soul-stirring place, but I can t say I gave it the attention it deserves. I was recovering from a bout of Sultan s Revenge , which I d acquired in Istanbul a few nights earlier, and was nursing a tender stomach and feeling ginger. I was only at Anzac Cove for a matter of hours. The track would offer something entirely different: a ten-day immersion course in the Kokoda campaign.
Our party w