As the captain announced our descent, I shifted my attention out the window and down to the ocean below. It was changing. From a deep blue to turquoise, and then, with the first signs of reef, clusters of lush green with rings of white and vivid aqua. We were crossing the Coral Sea. A body of water to the north of Australia. I could make out the coastal townships and as our plane flew us closer, I looked further up the rivers and deltas, across the farmlands and forests. Small villages dotted the landscape. A handful of smoke-stacks from settlements in the foothills reached into the sky. Eventually, my eyes anxiously fastened on the towering, jungle highlands of Papua New Guinea.

To me, this was the last frontier and at its closest border, sits only 150km north of the Australian coast. A place where time has shaped life unlike anywhere else. A land that is so close, yet so exotically distant. Centuries of tradition and evolution have combined to create a living museum. But at this stage something I had only read in books or seen in photographs and film. I try not to hold too many expectations when traveling to new places, so when preconceived visions started flooding in I shifted my thoughts and imagined what my grandfather may have felt on a similar flight path 75 years earlier. Like many men of his generation, going to war wasn’t about patriotism or heroics, it was simply for the adventure. To escape ordinary life and set out with your mates to experience new cultures and see new lands. For the first few weeks of his campaign, as he and his squadron established their camp around a makeshift airstrip in Port Moresby, it was just that.

Fred Thies tried to join the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) in the late 1930s, well before the war broke out in the Pacific. At this time,  Australia, and the world were labouring through the Great Depression. Everyday life was tough and mundane. To his anguish, he was turned down on his first attempt, on the basis that he was too short. However, his mind was already made up. He wanted to experience the greater world and joining the armed forces was his only ticket. He bravely decided to have his body physically stretched to meet the minimum height required for service. The procedure didn’t give him the mandatory measurements outlined by the Air force and so his window to see the world was closing. It wasn’t until war broke out in the Pacific a couple of years later that his luck suddenly changed. Japanese troops were quickly securing new territories in the region and moving closer to Australian soil. Fred was successfully enlisted on September 22nd, 1941 and after six months of rigorous training, he was on his way to Papua New Guinea with the No. 6 Squadron.