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The Kokoda Track, Papua New Guinea International Journal of Heritage Studies ISSN: 1352-7258 (Print) 1470-3610 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjhs20 The diplomacy of extra-territorial heritage: the Kokoda Track, Papua New Guinea Joan Beaumont To cite this article: Joan Beaumont (2016) The diplomacy of extra-territorial heritage: the Kokoda Track, Papua New Guinea, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 22:5, 355-367, DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2016.1153496 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2016.1153496 Published online: 17 Mar 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 178 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjhs20 Download by: [Australian National University] Date: 12 January 2017, At: 15:04 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES, 2016 VOL. 22, NO. 5, 355–367 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2016.1153496 The diplomacy of extra-territorial heritage: the Kokoda Track, Papua New Guinea Joan Beaumont Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY The global interest in the memory of war in recent decades has brought Received 30 December 2015 challenges in managing and conserving extra-territorial war heritage: that Accepted 6 February 2016 is, sites of memory that have a greater significance for people outside the KEYWORDS sovereign territory in which the sites physically reside. This article considers Extra-territorial heritage; this issue in relation to the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea, a site of Kokoda Track; war central importance in the Australian national memory of war. The successful commemoration; conservation of the Track throws new light on the practice of heritage transnational memory; diplomacy. Working mostly outside the more commonly explored arena of development aid global heritage governance, the Australian and New Guinean governments employed bilateral diplomacy to manage domestic stakeholder expectations, and thereby identified a convergence of interests and mutual gain by linking heritage protection with local development needs. They have also encouraged the construction of a narrative of the events of World War II that in some respects might be described as shared. Thus, heritage diplomacy is underpinned by a transnational consensus about the heritage’s significance, at least at the government level, which arguably divests the Kokoda Track of its exclusively ‘extra-territorial’ quality. The explosion of war memory across the globe during the past three decades has generated a seemingly insatiable fascination with the material heritage of the two world wars: their battlefields, memorials and cemeteries. These lieux de mémoire, to use Pierre Nora’s now classic term, are the destinations of ‘pilgrimages’ undertaken by veterans, their families and descendants. Such sites also provide the stage on which politicians perform the increasingly common phenomenon of ‘memorial diplomacy’: that is, carefully choreographed public ceremonies [held] on the anniversaries of historic occasions at selected sites of memory, long established or of recent invention, typically on the margins of international summits or intergov- ernmental forums. (Graves 2014, 170) The material heritage of such sites poses intriguing problems of definition and management. In a symbolic and political sense they are transnational, but their control is almost always national. Their value as heritage is also asymmetrical, in that their significance is rarely equal within different national narratives of war; it may, in fact, be greater for peoples outside the sovereign territory in which the heritage sites reside. In these circumstances the heritage is ‘extra-territorial’, and those who value it most, and feel an emotional ‘ownership’ of it, have none of the controls and means of protection nor- mally afforded by national legislation and political processes. Hence, the conservation of the heritage CONTACT Joan Beaumont [email protected] © 2016 Joan Beaumont. Published with license by Taylor & Francis. 356 J. BEAUMONT depends on two factors: intergovernmental diplomacy and the construction of some elements of shared memory of the past between the host country and the external ‘owners’. This conclusion might seem axiomatic, since heritage is known to have long played a role in inter- national relations. However, this article argues that, within the context of extra-territorial heritage, heritage diplomacy performs a somewhat different role to that commonly analysed in the scholarship of heritage studies. In this case, heritage diplomacy is not so much the projection of soft power, par- ticularly by the West, in an effort to promote a country’s diplomatic goals, be they neo-colonial, self-in- terested or more genuinely altruistic (Kersel and Luke 2015; Kindle 2778/9741). Nor is the diplomacy of extra-territorial heritage necessarily a function of that network of international institutions and conventions established in the post-1945 world with UNESCO at its heart. This ‘arena of governance’ (Winter 2015, 998) provides a space for multilateral collaboration – and, inevitably, contestation – within the framework of a shared commitment to promoting scientific excellence, capacity building and the reified and deeply entrenched principle of the common heritage of mankind (Winter 2015, 999; Luke and Kersel 2013, Kindle 294/4636; Kersel and Luke 2015, 2797/9741). In contrast, this article argues that, in the case of an important extra-territorial site from World War II, the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea,1 heritage diplomacy has been almost entirely a bilateral response to the pragmatic problems of heritage management – problems that arose particularly at the local level where the competing interests of Australian and Papua New Guinean stakeholders inter- sected. This heritage diplomacy has been successful, firstly, because it has identified a convergence of interests and mutual gain by linking heritage conservation and development aid; and secondly, because both governments have encouraged the construction of a shared narrative of the past events that created the heritage resources in question. Thus, heritage diplomacy has been increasingly underpinned by a transnational consensus about the heritage’s significance which arguably divests it of its exclusively ‘extra-territorial’ quality. Most interestingly, while this multidimensional negotiation has recently been positioned within the wider framework of global heritage management, it is not dependent upon it. Indeed the protection of the Kokoda Track has been managed largely outside this arena of governance. The Kokoda Track and Australian commemoration Extra-territorial war heritage is a particularly important issue for Australia since almost all of its major military deployments since federation in 1901 have been in other countries. Hence key battle- fields are located overseas, as are the graves of the battle dead of the two world wars. In accordance with the post-World War I practice of the Imperial (later Commonwealth) War Graves Commission (IWGC) Australian war dead of the two world wars were buried overseas, rather than being repatriated. Moreover, since the memory of war, in the form of the so-called Anzac legend, has played central role in the national political culture since 1915 (Beaumont 2014; Holbrook 2014), overseas sites of war memory are invested with a political and emotional significance for Australians that is arguably greater than for many other peoples. In the Australian hierarchy of overseas sites of memory the Kokoda Track ranks second only to Gallipoli (Stephens and Peter 1981, 56). This track (or more accurately tracks) stretches some 96 km over the rugged Owen Stanley Range, from Owers’ Corner in Central Province, 50 km east of Port Moresby, to the village of Kokoda in Oro Province. This was the forbidding terrain on which Australian infantry battled Japanese forces from July to November 1942. The Japanese had landed unopposed on the north coast of Papua in July, and then advanced towards Port Moresby on the southern coast. Had they captured this strategic town, they would have controlled the sea lines of communication to Australia and dominated the northern parts of the continent. Hence, the halting of the Japanese advance and their subsequent retreat, though due in part to the US-led battle for nearby Guadalcanal, has been enshrined in Australian popular memory as the battle that ‘saved Australia’ (James 2009, 3). ‘Kokoda’ has also become coded for not just the fighting on the Kokoda Track but for the battles in early 1943 on the beaches of northern Papua, Buna, Gona and Sanananda. In total, some 12,000 Japanese, 2165 Australians, 671 Americans and an unknown number of local villagers, carriers and INTERnatiONAL JOURNAL OF HERitagE STUDIEs 357 soldiers died in these 6 months: for Australians, these are the statistics of a major battle in World War II (Nelson 1997, 154). Australian interest in commemorating the Kokoda Track dated from World War II itself. In 1943 Australian war graves units began to search for bodies which were later interred in an IWGC cemetery at Bomana, north–east of Port Moresby. Private memorialisation also began in 1943 with the instal- lation by one of the units who fought on the Track, the 7th Australian Infantry Brigade, of a cairn at Sogeri, near the Port Moresby end of the Track. Then, when the war ended, some
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