The PR Blog

My Great-Uncle Walked the Bulldog Track: Kokoda’s Forgotten Cousin

Family stories often sound small until history catches up with them.

For years, I knew only that my great-uncle had walked out of Wau in early 1942 ahead of the Japanese advance. It was spoken of simply as a hard journey through the jungle -  one of those half-remembered wartime tales passed quietly through families.

But the more I researched, the more I realised he had traversed one of the harshest tracks of the Second World War.

The rough trail he followed south through the mountains would soon become a vital Allied lifeline, hacked, blasted, and dragged into existence by Australian engineers and Papuan labourers working in some of the most unforgiving country on Earth.

It was called the Bulldog Track. By 1943, it was destined to become a lifeline for the Allies. 

They say wisdom often arrives wearing old boots, sipping strong coffee, and wielding a spanner. Well, maybe they don't and I just made that up.

But my Uncle Pete was that kind of man.

A bewhiskered, big-hearted farmer who skydived despite chronic illness, helped us teenagers fix clapped-out cars, and somehow made life’s hardest truths sound like plain old common sense.

Yesterday of all days....his birthday...I remember a story he told that now rings louder than ever, in an age when governments dodge responsibility by hiring 'experts' and hiding behind consultants.

A lesson in responsibility from a man who never needed a whiteboard consultant.

I wonder how many people realise that Australia’s concept of a minimum wage began with the landmark Harvester Judgment of 1907, a case that forever changed industrial relations in the country?

Fewer still might know that the man at the heart of that case was also behind one of the most significant agricultural inventions to come out of Australia; the combine harvester.

Alongside the stump jump plough, the combine harvester was one of two inventions I learned about from a young age as being quintessentially Australian.

Yet the origins of this groundbreaking machine, now used by the thousands worldwide, are largely forgotten.

Here is the story of the machine that revolutionised farming around the world,  and the forgotten legal legacy it left in its wake. 

The Harvester Decision of 1907 is often hailed as a landmark moment; not just in Australia, but globally; for establishing the principle that a fair wage should be based on the needs of a worker and their family, not simply on market forces.

If you grew up in Australia, chances are you’ve heard the name Henry Lawson. Maybe it was in a dusty old classroom, or maybe someone quoted The Drover’s Wife around a camp fire.

But Lawson isn’t just some long-dead poet tucked away in schoolbooks.....he’s the voice of the bush, the battler, the bloke trudging through drought and dust with a swag on his back and a story in his heart.

There’s something timeless about a billy boiling over a campfire, smoke curling into a pink sky, the tin crackling, the smell of eucalyptus and damp earth. Henry Lawson didn’t just write about that scene...he lived it. And in While the Billy Boils and Joe Wilson and His Mates, he brought it to life so vividly, it’s as if you’re there beside him and waiting for your cuppa.

On the moonlit night of May 16, 1943, a squadron of young RAF pilots flew into the jaws of Nazi Germany on a mission so audacious it bordered on madness.

Armed with a revolutionary "bouncing bomb" and led by the unflinching Wing Commander Guy Gibson, the men of 617 Squadron, soon to be immortalised as the Dam Busters, took to the skies in lumbering Lancasters, tasked with shattering the great dams of the Ruhr Valley and crippling the industrial engine of Hitler’s war machine.

What followed was a feat of precision flying, raw courage, and tragic sacrifice - etched forever into the history books of wartime legend.