The Australian 21st Brigade under Brigadier Arnold Potts had just fought a savage defensive battle at Isurava, between 26 and 31 August. Both sides were spent. The Japanese 144th Infantry Regiment, which had led the attack, was pulled into reserve and the fresh 41st Infantry Regiment under Colonel Kiyomi Yazawa was ordered forward to pursue the retreating Australians and destroy them. The Australian battalions - the 2/14th, 2/16th, and the militia 39th - were depleted, short on rations, and carrying their wounded south along a track that climbed and dropped through some of the most punishing terrain on Earth. Behind them lay Eora Village. Below Eora Village, the track dropped to a creek crossing called Templeton's Crossing, named for Captain Sam Templeton, a Papuan Infantry Battalion officer who had been killed during the fighting at Kokoda earlier in the campaign. Here the Australians chose to stand long enough to get their wounded out.

The action was not one battle but a sequence of them - a method the Australians would later teach in their staff colleges as a model of fighting withdrawal. One battalion held a blocking position while another moved back through a reserve line; at the appointed hour, the forward battalion broke contact and passed through the reserve, which then became the blocking force. The 2/16th Battalion drew most of the rearguard work. Between Alola and Eora Village, from 31 August to 2 September, they held a series of delaying positions, breaking contact at precisely designated times - 2 am, 6 am - and falling back to the next ridge. Japanese artillery ranged on them. Two Japanese companies attempted flanking moves that had to be checked. The 2/14th Battalion leapfrogged south to the next blocking line. The 39th Battalion, which had been holding Eora Village, was ordered to Kagi further south.

At a point on the track called Dump 1 - the first creek crossing south of Templeton's - the 2/14th occupied high ground on 3 September. The 2/16th, pressed hard, withdrew through them at 4 pm and the 2/14th retired toward Myola, a dry lake bed that served as the brigade's main supply dump. Almost immediately after the 2/14th left, Japanese troops contacted the 2/16th again and began threatening to isolate them. The battalion broke contact and moved toward Myola, where Potts - facing the impossibility of holding the supply dump with what he had left - ordered Myola abandoned, its stores destroyed, and the force moved south toward Efogi where the 2/27th Battalion was coming up to join them. Japanese troops who took Myola found most of the food deliberately spoiled. The dry lake had been the Australian lifeline; now it could not feed the Japanese either.

The numbers tell only part of the story. Forty-three Japanese soldiers killed, 58 wounded, from a force of about 1,300. Twenty-one Australians killed, 54 wounded, from about 710 - with a single 3-inch mortar as their entire indirect fire support against four Japanese artillery pieces and an engineer platoon. What the numbers do not capture is the condition of the men: malaria, dysentery, boots rotted through, uniforms soaked for days. Papuan carriers moved the wounded back down ridge after ridge, some of them dying on the track themselves. The 41st Infantry Regiment under Yazawa came under sharp criticism from its sister regiment the 144th and from Major General Horii for slow pursuit. The 144th was brought back to lead, catching up with the Australians at Mission Ridge where the campaign's next disaster would unfold. Potts would be relieved after Mission Ridge, replaced by Brigadier Selwyn Porter - a decision most historians now consider unjust given the fighting withdrawal he had conducted.

After the war, according to journalist Barclay Crawford, the local villagers kept the exact location of the battle secret "out of respect for the dead." For decades the ground was not marked on maps. In 2010, former Australian commando and trek leader Brian Freeman announced he had located the battlefield - a patch of rainforest above Eora Creek where weapon pits and old ration tins still lay among the roots. The 39th, 2/14th, and 2/16th Infantry Battalions received the battle honour "Eora Creek-Templeton's Crossing I" after the war. A second battle fought in the same ground in late October 1942, during the Australian counter-advance north, earned a separate honour for different units. Two battles in one place, six weeks apart, fought in opposite directions. The ground remembered both.