KEY POINTS:
A perilously steep "staircase" up which desperate Australian troops climbed to confront Japanese troops advancing through Papua New Guinea has been rediscovered after decades of being lost to the jungle.
Australian diggers trudged up the muddy metre-wide trail of man-made steps, nicknamed the Golden Staircase, to fight along Imita Ridge, where they were ordered to repel the Japanese or die fighting.
An Australian MP and amateur historian, Charlie Lynn, claims he and villagers have found remains of the stairway with the aid of global positioning satellite technology, World War II survey maps and local knowledge. The staircase's 2000 wooden steps have long since rotted away but Lynn, an MP in the New South Wales Parliament, said the route it took was still visible, marked in places by the presence of large weapons pits.
"This was the place that they were told to fight to the last man," Lynn said.
"It was considered to be the final obstacle to the Japanese objective of capturing Port Moresby. So it was a very, very important feature."
The Kokoda Track is a 96km-long jungle trail which winds its way through the razorback mountains and steamy rainforests of the Owen Stanley Range in Papua New Guinea.
In 1942 Australian troops were deployed to halt 6000 advancing Japanese soldiers who intended to take the capital, Port Moresby, threatening Australia with invasion.
The Australians were poorly trained militia troops.
Months of fighting along the treacherous jungle trail was marked by hand-to-hand combat, terrifying ambushes, malaria and even cannibalism, as Japanese soldiers ran out of food and ate the flesh of dead Australians.
In what was described by one historian as "a knife fight out of the stone age", the Australians eventually repelled the Japanese and drove them out of New Guinea.
The track has become popular with Australian hikers and even corporate incentive groups but in places it has diverged from its original route, hence the Golden Staircase being lost in the rainforest for so long.
It lay at the southernmost end of the track, with Imita Ridge the vital last bastion of defence. It was one of many steep mountainsides the Australians had to climb as the fighting surged backwards and forwards along the Kokoda Track. They managed to haul artillery up the stairway by hand, with the guns deployed on Imita Ridge to bombard the Japanese.
"When the first troops reached the Golden Stairs, rain had washed away the steps leaving a skeletal crossbeam - a small log - suspended above a pool of mud," the historian Paul Ham writes in Kokoda.
"The logs tended to snap under the percussive footfall of hundreds of heavily burdened soldiers. Rain made the ascent exceedingly difficult."
