'Kokoda': lost and found on the trail: to Australians of a certain age, and even to some younger, the 'Kokoda trail' has acquired the sheen of legendary significance.(WAR AND MEMORY)(Critical essay)(Cover story)

IT is one of those place names that evokes not just a period--1942 and World War Two--or a location, but resonates also with a sense of threat to Australia's insular safety, and to its plain insularity. The other associated echo is that of 'the fuzzy-wuzzy angels', a characterization that now takes the breath away with its paternalism and reeks of political incorrectness. Not then, though: back then and for years after, Australian soldiers spoke of the New Guinea natives who saved their skins with both affection and gratitude, in the decades before p.c. was invented, and when the Japanese threat to Australian shores was real.

For his feature debut, Alister Grierson claims his film, Kokoda, is 'based on a true story inspired by the Australian fighting spirit'. In spite of the bells his name might ring, he has not made a documentary but a genre film which will invite comparisons that may not all be in its favour. As early as 1934 (and no doubt there are many similar films before that), John Ford made The Lost Patrol, in which unseen Arabs decimate a British patrol lost in a middle-eastern desert in World War One. Ealing's semi-documentary, Nine Men (1943), found the eponymous group, cut off from the battalion, defending themselves against the Italians in a Libyan desert fort. Leslie Norman's version of the stage-play The Long and the Short and the Tall (1960) dramatizes the tensions among a British patrol which captures a Japanese prisoner in the Malayan jungle in World War Two. And in 1998, in Terence Malick's masterly The Thin Red Line, a US military platoon must take a hill held by the Japanese on Guadalcanal in Samoa. As well, there are echoes of one kind or other in such Australian films as The Odd Angry Shot (Tom Jeffrey, 1979), Attack …