When Rochester Secondary College student Eden Beaumont starts walking the Kokoda Trail next month, he won’t just be following in the footsteps of Australian legend — he will be part of it.

Because Eden is the great-nephew of Edward “Weary” Dunlop, a giant of the Australian military pantheon.

Lieutenant Colonel Dunlop started World War II in the Middle East, served in Tobruk and Greece and then, while en route to Australia, was diverted to Java to join an ill-fated attempt to boost defences there against the Japanese.

In 1942, along with all the other Australians, he was captured at Bandung, where he was responsible for the hospital.

Trying to run the medical care of Australian prisoners-of-war in Japanese camps, he was imprisoned in a number of locations, including Changi in Singapore, before being put in charge of Australian troops forced into slave labour on the Burma-Thailand railway.

There, his dedication, compassion and courage in a world where there was never enough food, where beatings and brutality were daily occurrences and where the demands on weakened troops were inhumane, made him a hero to those for whom he cared and later for the nation.

He restored morale in those terrible prison camps and jungle hospitals and, by defying his captors, gave hope to the sick and eased the anguish of the dying.

His work, and the work of others alongside him, was one of the reasons Australian survival rates at the hands of the Japanese were the highest in the war.

“As well as Weary, both my uncle and my grandfather on my father’s side worked for the Australian Defence Forces as aeronautical engineers, my uncle helping create fighter planes,” Eden said.

“On my mother’s side, Gavin Kotnik, another uncle, was the youngest soldier to work on the restoration of Hellfire Pass in Burma.

“I will be honoured to follow in their footsteps.”

Now as a Colin Sinclair Scholarship holder, sponsored by the Freemasons Foundation Victoria, Eden has also completed the Duke of Edinburgh bronze award, been a recipient of the ADF future innovators award and has often represented his school and community as a wreath layer during Anzac Day services.

Colin Sinclair was a Rochester resident who fought and died on the Kokoda Trail and whose memory has been enshrined in the scholarship, set up by State Member for Murray Plains Peter Walsh.

Mr Walsh said the scholarships, five of which have this year been awarded to Year 11 students in his electorate, offered “an exciting and humbling opportunity for these young people to immerse themselves in what is one of the great Australian stories of the modern era”.

He said when the students returned from Kokoda, they agreed to become ambassadors for the next 12 months, talking about their trip and experiences for RSLs, schools, service groups and sponsors, as well as helping out with major events such as Anzac Day and Remembrance Day.

“We took our first group to Kokoda last year and this year I will be making the trip again, and we have already found the 10 days we spend in Papua New Guinea has had a profound and positive impact on those who went,” he said.

Living on a farm outside Corop, Eden has an active outdoors lifestyle and has always been a nature lover.

He is “positive this experience would teach me much more than any class could”.

“I want to learn about Australia’s amazing history and get a glimpse of how it would have been, now more than 80 years ago, for the soldiers who fought their way along the trail,” he said.

“Although I think I’m a resourceful and intelligent person, I’ve always been a bit shy, and I think this experience could help me overcome that and teach me very valuable life lessons about mateship and what it is to be a part of a group.

“I have certainly learnt the importance of the Kokoda and the battles which took place there so many years ago and where hundreds of young men, many of them not much older than me, would die, with thousands more wounded or struck down by disease.

“This was a sacrifice which helped cement Australia’s values of courage, endurance and mateship and I will be honoured to walk the Kokoda, not only out of respect for the thousands of Australians who fought there, but also for the experience of trying to understand what they may have gone through.”

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Saturday, 17th May 2025

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