Strength Between Us:
documentary

Fifty years after Papua New Guinea's independence, a 1,200-kilometre march retraced through jungle and mountain becomes the thread connecting two nations whose defence forces were born from the same war - and who have just bound themselves together by treaty.

Broadcast in prime time on national television in Papua New Guinea.

In 1975, 16 soldiers walked from Moem Barracks in Wewak to Port Moresby carrying letters of hope and goodwill to Papua New Guinea's founding leaders - a patrol conceived by Australian Lieutenant Colonel Michael Jeffery to convince Chief Minister Michael Somare that the new nation needed a defence force of its own. In 2025, the PNGDF retraces that march as Exercise Antap Long Ol. 

Strength Between Us uses that journey as its spine, tracing the Australia–PNG defence partnership from the Papuan Infantry Battalion at Kokoda, through independence and the Defence Cooperation Program, to the signing of the Pukpuk Treaty. 

Told through the people who carry it - Grand Chief Ted Diro, PNG's founding commander, and his son Siale, now Defence Advisor to Australia; Colonel Boniface Aruma, the first PNGDF officer to serve as deputy commander of an Australian combat brigade, alongside Brigadier Ben McLennan, his Duntroon classmate from 1998; Wing Commander Nancy Wii, PNG's first female commercial pilot and first woman to command the Air Transport Wing - the film moves from the reopened Lombrum Naval Base on Manus Island to the first Talisman Sabre component ever staged outside Australia, from disaster relief in Enga Province to a rugby match in Port Moresby. 

Its argument is that the partnership's real infrastructure is not bases or patrol boats but relationships built over decades: shared training, shared faith, shared purpose. Fifty years on, the soldiers still walk the track.