For him, Australian came of age later, at Kokoda, often called Australia’s Thermopylae, when a small group of young soldiers resisted the advance of Japanese army divisions that seemed set to take Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea and threaten the Australian continent. Keating believed that the fighting at Kokoda represented the real birth pains of an independent Australia, not some colonial appendage of Britain created to serve imperial purposes in the Far East.