The two men walking Kokoda hold our future

PRIME ministers Anthony Albanese of Australia and James Marape of PNG have taken a few days to themselves in the jungles of the Kokoda Track between Central and Northern.
The fresh oxygen-laden air and the break from office should do both men good as will the physical exercise.
They do this to commemorate the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) Day.
April 25, 1915 was the day in infamy when soldiers from the British dominions landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey with the objective to capture Constantinople (now Istanbul), the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
It was a disastrous and one of the costliest operations in the annals of modern military history, but the bravery and courage of the men under fire gave birth to the legend. Today, ANZAC Day is celebrated on April 25 each year to commemorate not only those who fought and fell in Gallipoli but all who have served and have fallen in all the wars Australia and New Zealand served in.
Australians and New Zealanders have fought and died or got out assisted by Papua New Guinea during the World War II along the path the two leaders are walking now. There will not be much of that war for the leaders to observe now. Nature, which observed the original carnage, will have hidden the ghastly aspects in overgrowth but the memory is retained of those timeless black and white images the leaders will have seen in museums or in history books dedicated to that conflict.
These they can share and, if the going is now tough, they can imagine the hardship upon those who once walked here wounded, hungry or labouring under massive weights with little food and water. And after this walk, the two friends can take an attitude, mimicking the nature that has refreshed the war wounds, of building a new future upon the foundations of the past.
They have a special thing going, Albanese and Marape.
Marape invited Albanese to address the PNG Parliament and his friend returned the favor.
When they accepted each other’s invitations and when they spoke in Waigani and Canberra, each touched on the past, on the part of the history that they are now setting out together to relive.
The past is filled with nostalgia and hard sacrifices, of camaraderie and heroic feats, of black angels in tapa cloth walking blind white men on walking sticks out of battle fields. These are enduring images that unite and bind both nations, but the images date from a time many years before both prime ministers were born.
Albanese was born near Sydney, New South Wales, on March 2, 1963. Eight years later on April 24, 1971, James Marape was born.
Aged 61 and 52, both can have little recollection of the machinations then churning in the time of their youth, in Australia and PNG, for the former colony to gain self-government and Independence.
It is to the future that these friends, now walking an ancient track, must direct their attention and their energy and resources.
It is to the future that these friends must turn their conversation to as they walk to Isurava and journey back to Port Moresby and Canberra. They will have realised by now that while the past educates, it does not change the destiny of men. That, men must do themselves.
For Australia and PNG that destiny, of whatever hue or color, is stoutly in the hands of the two prime ministers walking the Kokoda Track, creating another milestone record in the process.
To them alone is that unique power, mandated by the 26.01 million people of Australia and some 10 million people of PNG, to make decisions affecting their livelihood.