Moama Bowling Club sales and marketing manager George Santos with Layne Trevena (left) and Cora Wilson, two of the students heading to the Kokoda Trail.
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Conquering the Kokoda Trail next week is now a very personal journey — almost pilgrimage — for St Joseph’s College’s Cora Wilson and Layne Trevena.
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The Year 11 students, sponsored by Moama Bowling Club to make the trip, have been matched with two young northern Victorians who never got to come home from their time in Papua New Guinea.
Cora will represent Private Bruce McDonald from Gunbower and Layne will make the memory of Koondrook’s Private Thomas Doolan a key responsibility of his visit.
Pvt McDonald died on Christmas Day 1942 and today is buried at Bomana war cemetery near Port Moresby.
He had been working as a farm labourer when he enlisted at age 31, having already served 12 months in the reserves.
Like many from northern Victoria, he joined the 2/14th Battalion and went on to serve in the Middle East before returning to Australia and being deployed to PNG.
“Sadly, like many who served there, it was not the bullets of the Japanese that would take Pvt McDonald’s life,” Cora said.
“He was sent to the Northern Beaches campaign and on December 14 was hospitalised with scrub typhus, to which he succumbed on December 25, 1942.
“Even worse, this illness, scrub typhus, was often a painful death, and Pvt McDonald was just 21 when he died, only a few years older than me and a long way from the peaceful banks of the Murray.”
In his will, Pvt McDonald left all his belongings to his parents, John and Annie, who were still living in Gunbower.
Pvt Doolan, also in the 2/14, barely lasted two weeks once he arrived in PNG in 1942.
After enlisting as a 25-year-old, the unmarried labourer also saw service in the Middle East before his battalion was urgently recalled to Australia with the Japanese so close.
Koondrook’s Private Thomas Doolan.
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“Pvt Doolan landed at Port Moresby on August 12 and was dead on August 30 — it’s an incredibly tragic tale and was for so many of those young soldiers,” Layne said.
“He is buried in the Bomana war cemetery, like too many young men.
“Pvt Doolan was initially reported missing in action on August 30, but shortly after it was confirmed he had been killed in the bitter fighting at this spot high in the Owen Stanley Ranges, which we will be visiting next week.
“And like so many others, he was one of the men lost in this battle who had his body recovered at a later date.
‘’Originally buried at Kokoda war cemetery, his body was reinterred at Bomana with most of the Australian casualties — he was only 27 when he fell.”
Cora and Layne both feel “this personal connection will make our time on the Kokoda and in Papua New Guinea all the more meaningful and important”.
The St Joseph’s students are two of the five recipients of the inaugural Colin Sinclair Scholarships, and each of them has been given a gravesite to visit at Bomona.
Those visits are seen as an integral part of the scholarship program, as they will make the trip a “uniquely personal journey for each of the local students going in the inaugural year of the scholarship”.
Last year, a similar tour visited the grave of Rochester’s Colin Sinclair, the man for whom the local scholarship program has been named.
Pictures of the gravesite were delivered to Colin’s family, who still live in Rochester today.
Private Bruce McDonald from Gunbower.
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