Qualla: Black Cat Track

Black Cat Track: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Before he was a movie star, Errol Flynn hiked the Black Cat Track and spent his nights lying awake, listening to the jungle. A crawling sound in the dark might be a snake, he wrote, or a cassowary, or a wild boar, and he had seen Central Africa but nothing like the jungle of New Guinea. That was the early 1930s, when the trail was still mostly used by prospectors chasing rumors of gold at Wau, three to four days of leech-infested climbing from the coast at Salamaua. The jungle has not grown gentler. A later guidebook would describe the route as suitable only for masochists and Israeli paratroopers.

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Black Cat Track: Gold and Leeches

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The track was born of greed. In the 1920s the highlands around Wau yielded gold, and the easiest way in was the path from Salamaua on the Huon Gulf, climbing steeply south into ridges that tumbled over one another without pause. Prospectors loaded packs, paid local carriers, and ...

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Black Cat Track: The Japanese Advance

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 8 March 1942, the Japanese took Salamaua. Their plan for Port Moresby had already failed at sea in the Battle of the Coral Sea, and it would fail again over the Owen Stanley Range along the Kokoda Track. The Black Cat offered a third route. If Japanese forces could push up fro...

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Black Cat Track: The Pimple

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The battle for The Pimple went on for three weeks, each day rolling into the next with the same weather and the same dead. Attacks on 7 May and 9 May met the same result. Then the Japanese came forward, surrounding the foremost Australian company and closing in. Relief did not ar...

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Black Cat Track: Rascals and Porters

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After the war the trail sank back into the jungle, and by the twenty-first century it had acquired a second life as a trekking route for hikers who wanted something harder than Kokoda. Porters from villages along the route carried packs and cooked rice over the same slopes their ...

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Black Cat Track: What the Jungle Keeps

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From the air, the Black Cat is invisible. The ridges rise out of the Huon Gulf and fold into the highlands around Wau in a dense green that reveals nothing of the gold shafts, the war graves, the rusted mortar rounds, the trekking camps, or the porters who still walk up and down ...

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