Nicholas Anderson will be in Bathurst tonight signing copies of his first book To Kokoda

The book signing will take place at his mother’s cafe Country Coffee in George Street between 6pm and 7.30pm and all are invited to attend.

A former Bathurst boy, Nicholas is an historian with the Australian Army History Unit, and holds degrees in arts and law from the University of Canberra.

The 32-year-old has been with the History Unit for the past five years.

In 2012, some 70 years after the Kokoda campaign, he accompanied three recipients of the Chief of Army’s ‘I’m an Australian Soldier’ scholarship to Papua New Guinea as an historical guide. 

The group visited the beachheads on the north coast and then trekked the Kokoda Trail, commemorating Anzac Day at a dawn service at Isurava.

He only learned he had been chosen to make the challenging trek two months beforehand, giving him hardly any time to train and prepare.

“It was a bit of a shock, but I was by far the youngest,” he said.

Nicholas said making the trek changed the way he thought about Kokoda. He said when you look at a map of the Papua New Guinea highlands, you get a two dimensional picture.

“When you are there you can see how sheer those mountains are and when you are slogging along the trail, you get a much greater appreciation for what our Diggers went through,” he said.

It was this experience which led him to write To Kokoda. Nicholas said he had been working on his book for the past two years. 

He said the book was the Australian Army’s record of the Kokoda Campaign and was part of the Australian Army Campaign Series. 

Nicholas said he wanted to write a book for some time and tried to make it as accessible as possible. He wanted it to be possible for people without extensive knowledge of the campaign to be able to pick it up and enjoy it.

“I tried to strike a happy medium,” he said.

“I deliberately wrote in a narrative style, so that even though the book is detailed, it has a story element to it. There are also plenty of quotes from soldiers on the trail.”

Nicholas said he believed the Kokoda campaign captured the imagination of Australia because it was a good story.

“It reads like a movie script,” he said.

He added that it was also significant that, for the first time, the Australian public was shown film footage of what the Diggers were going through.