The partial remains of fifteen Australian soldiers have been uncovered deep into Papua New Guinea's Kokoda track- the scene of several battles during World War Two. The graves were first discovered in 2018 but, due to COVID-related delays, the army's unrecovered war casualties team couldn't access the site until now.
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00:00 It's a pretty extraordinary discovery.
00:03 Now this site, Templeton's Crossing, is really deep into the Kokoda Trail.
00:07 If you're walking from the Port Moresby side, it's usually about six or seven days into
00:11 that walk.
00:12 Now, it was the scene of many battles, and in the 1940s at the tail end of the war, there
00:17 were 65 soldiers who were temporarily buried there.
00:20 They were moved to the main Bermana War Cemetery at Port Moresby.
00:25 But in 2018, so just five years ago, a landowner was down at the site, and this is in full
00:30 view of the Kokoda Trail there.
00:33 He was terracing at the site, and he went, "I've discovered something here," and he alerted
00:37 track authorities that he felt that he'd discovered human remains there.
00:41 So it turns out that the job that was done in the 1940s, moving these 65 bodies of Australian
00:46 soldiers, wasn't done completely.
00:48 So after these delays, the Army's unrecovered war casualties team have finally been able
00:53 to go to this very remote site and carried out this archaeological dig to move the human
00:58 remains of about 15 soldiers they found after digging into the 65 graves to move them to
01:04 the Bermana War Cemetery.
01:06 And in doing so, they've uncovered all sorts of other things as well, as well, you know,
01:09 artefacts and that kind of thing.
01:11 Here's Professor Mark Oxenham, who was part of that team.
01:14 A lot of the soldiers, when they were originally buried, they weren't coffined.
01:19 There wasn't coffins available up on the track.
01:22 So they were typically shrouded, either, you know, using their blankets or brain sheets,
01:28 and then placed into the grave.
01:32 So we have the remnants of that occurring.
01:35 And then odd personal items that they may have carried, you know, they would have excavated
01:40 things like a spoon in the pocket of one of the diggers, pocket knives, part of a bayonet,
01:51 and a cigarette ring that one of the soldiers had.
01:55 So there's a range of objects.
01:56 This sort of massive recovery effort has taken place in that very remote part of the Kokoda
02:00 Trail now is the identification phase.
02:04 So they do roughly know, you know, because there were records about the temporary graves
02:09 and where they were moved to Bermana.
02:10 So they've got a good starting point as to try and identify which remains belong to which
02:15 soldiers that are buried there at Bermana War Cemetery.
02:18 But they'll need to go out throughout some other kind of forensic testing.
02:21 Here's Andrew Burnie from the unrecovered war casualties team.
02:25 We know there are missing soldiers up there as well.
02:28 And we rely entirely on the good people along the Kokoda Track and the PNG authorities to
02:34 support us in doing our work, which is doing what we think is the right thing to do, which
02:39 is bringing those soldiers to an appropriate burial, interment and where required ceremonial
02:44 activity.
02:47 Because finding, recovering and identifying these soldiers is important to us.
02:51 It has been a long time, but there isn't an end date on the task that we do.
02:56 So honestly, a pretty extraordinary discovery and something that again, so many people were
03:01 surprised that this grave site was just in full view of the Kokoda Trail and undiscovered
03:05 for 80 years or so.
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