Beyond Kokoda I: Kapurakambo Welcome?

Communities across Papua New Guinea’s Oro Province were profoundly affected by the Second World War, and the fighting between Australia, American, and Japanese forces that was waged on their lands. In the years since, the Kokoda Track has become a focal point for many Australian tourists looking to commemorate the war. But there are many other communities across PNG whose wartime experiences don’t attract that same kind of attention or recognition.
In this episode we travel to one of these lesser-known places, a small village called Kapurakambo in PNG’s Oro Province. The community there describes the impacts of the war on their place, and the kinds of tenuous relationships that have followed in the years since. They also recall the remarkable tale of their ancestor, James Mamogoba, who established Kapurakambo as a coffee plantation back before the war started, in the midst of the colonial period. The relationships that he was able to forge with Australians and other outsiders, as one of the only Papuan plantation owners at that time, are held up in contrast to the absence of relationships with outsiders that his descendants describe today.
This episode asks: How is it that recognition flows to some places and people and not others, and what are the effects of this? What would it mean to look beyond Kokoda? Indeed, what would it mean to recognise the war itself as just one chapter in a long, complex history of encounter that also includes Australian colonialism? And what kinds of ethical relationships might that kind of recognition of shared history yield today?

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