On a mission: Damien Parer (Matt Le Nevez) films Australian troops as they advance through the muck.
In the opening of his nine-minute wartime documentary, Kokoda Front Line, cameraman Damien Parer faced the lens of his camera to deliver a stern prologue, a weary recount of how he returned home to Australia and realised no one was talking about the war. It was his mission to change that.
''There was at the time an apathy in Australia,'' says Matt Le Nevez, who stars as the eponymous cameraman in the ABC telemovie Parer's War.
''We'd been at war for over two years. The Australians had been sacrificing a lot back home, but the war was so far away. Damien felt obligated to try to shake Australia's understanding of war.''
With the impending Anzac centenary, it is perhaps ironic that many of the images we use to celebrate the legend were taken by those we know so little about.
In that sense, the timing of the biopic, which tracks Parer both at home and abroad during World War II, is spot-on, and for producer Andrew Wiseman, it provides a timely reminder of just how war-ravaged the contemporary globe is.
''Damien might have made the case that people were oblivious to what was happening in war zones,'' Wiseman says, ''but I don't think people today are oblivious. I think they've been desensitised because of the sheer amount of war imagery that we are exposed to. I hope it provokes the audience to think about how they deal with images of war.''
Parer broke significant ground as a war cameraman, Wiseman says. Because a lot of early war footage was of re-enactments staged the day after a campaign, something Parer took part in but was dissatisfied with, he became fixated on the notion of getting in front of the advancing troops and seeing into their eyes, despite it putting him in no-man's land.
Papua New Guinea, where much of the film takes place, became his site of innovation. He was the first to capture images of the wounded and focus on the natives, while playing around with the earliest conventions of cinema verite.
Director Alister Grierson (Sanctum) meshed these principles into the film, shooting a number of scenes point-of-view, as if from Parer's camera, which helps tease out the fragility of the atmosphere.
The production itself traipsed all across Queensland to ensure that the atmosphere was accurate. The muddy terrain of Tamborine Mountain proved a more-than-adequate double for the jungle of New Guinea, with crew ankle-deep in muck and often rooted to the spot for shoots. When it was time to move, they would haul each other in and out of the mud as if in a conga line.
Le Nevez fell over at one point and landed on his face in the mud, brushing himself off to say: ''Take this and multiply it by 10, and that's Kokoda.''
He would know. After hearing he had been chosen for the role, he decided to walk the notorious track, giving producer Wiseman heart palpitations.
For Le Nevez, however, it was a necessity, embarking on the expedition mere weeks before filming began.
''It's incredibly dense,'' he says, ''straight up and down, for six days.
''To be able to put a place and picture to the research I'd done, and on top of that just spend six days on the track with a native culture that is still living the same way they did hundreds of years ago by the sun and the river, was incredibly humbling.''
For Le Nevez, the struggle between Parer the man and Parer the cameraman presented a figure of clashing halves. He was a devout Catholic, praying every night, but was forced to question God's grand plan each day as his comrades fell.
And as photographers were often some of the only ones to come home from war, it allowed Le Nevez to explore the preliminary stages of post-traumatic stress disorder.
''So many men would come back from war with night terrors,'' he says, ''and they'd all go down to the local RSL, drink like fishes, and come home and not be able to talk to their wives. There was this real division of communication.''
Parer's War, ABC1, Sunday, 8.30pm.