The raid on Pearl Harbour failed to catch the US carrier force which was still at sea. It also failed to destroy the oil storage facilities that would have crippled any ability to send a pursuing force. The Japanese strategists knew that the obvious place for an American fight back to be based was Australia. It rapidly consumed the Dutch East Indies and the island of New Britain which was part of the PNG mandated territory awarded to Australia by the League of Nations.
On 10th December, 1941 the tactics conceived by Yamamato and Nagano were again proved correct when Japanese aircraft sank the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse off the coast of Malaya. At the same time Guam was captured from the Americans.
In Darwin various plans were triggered in a somewhat state of mild panic. An evacuation plan had been drawn up by Edgar Harrison, Permanent OIC of Air Raid precautions. The plan, as a first priority, was to evacuate all women and children followed by other non-essential civilians. Darwin at the time had a population of 6,000. It had no sewerage system and relied on sea transport for its supplies of just about everything. There was no rail link and no paved road surface connecting south. Sea transport was the sole means of supply of bulk material. Air transport was virtually non-existent for these purposes. Preparations were made on the basis of the town being cut off from supply rather than being invaded.
At the outbreak of WW2 Darwin had nearly 100 years of chequered history. It was first mapped by Lieut. John Stokes, a friend of Charles Darwin, who named the place in his honour. Europeans began settling in 1869 and objected to the name of a man who inferred that we were all descended from monkeys so it was changed to Palmerston, a former British prime minister. In the 1850’s an overland and undersea cable was laid from London to Java. Competition arose between the Australian colonies to have the cable extended to Australia and South Australia was the winner.
At that time the Northern Territory was part of South Australia. In 1862 John McDouall Stuart made the north/south crossing from Adelaide. The next step was to connect Java to Palmerston then on to Adelaide. 36,000 poles later the line was finished and Australia was connected to the world. Gold was discovered at Pine Creek and hundreds of Chinese workers who had been brought to work on the telegraph line left for the diggings. At one time the Chinese at Pine Creek outnumbered Europeans by 15 to 1. The telegraph attracted more settlers and station owners from the South and Queensland. They expanded their holdings by setting up in the Northern Territory. Pearling became an established industry and at the outbreak of WW1, the English company Vestey built a giant meat works at Darwin. The port became a major distribution centre for meat and minerals.
Film circ 1946
In the 1890’s, the general belief was that white men could not do hard manual work in the tropics. 3,000 Chinese indentured workers were brought in to construct a railway from Darwin to Pine Creek. At the time there were only 400 Europeans in the entire top end. During the wet season the Chinese workers went gold digging. The successful ones set up businesses and remained there for evermore. Many Japanese pearl divers and lugger crews arrived followed then by Greeks and Italians. Darwin was a very multi-cultural place dominated by non-Europeans and especially non-British people.
In 1910 the public debt of the Northern Territory was at 4 million pounds and became a strain on the South Australian budget. In 1911 ownership passed to the Commonwealth. The rationale was that unless development proceeded and the population increased another nation might step in and fill the gap. It was a national defence measure that drove the transfer. On 18th March, 1911 the Governor General reinstated the name Darwin. The territory was ruled by an Administrator appointed by the Minister for Territories. It was administered as a colony of Canberra the local population having no elected representative. Alice Springs wanted their own separate administrator. Instead they were given a “District Officer”. In 1930 Darwin briefly had a town council. It was a failure and control reverted to the Administrator. The locals resented the fact that they had two taxing authorities but no parliamentary representative, a situation which did not change until 1947.
Raising the flag in Darwin on 2 January 1911 when the Commonwealth formally took over the Northern Territory.
The administrator at the time of the Japanese raid was Aubrey Abbott, appointed by the Menzies government in March, 1937. Abbott had a distinguished career in WW1. In 1925 he was an active member of the Country Party and was elected to parliament for the seat of Gwydir. In 1928 he became minister for Home Affairs then lost the seat in the 1929 elections. With the onset of the depression he became an organiser for The New Guard, a far right wing para-military group. This role ended in 1931 when he was re-elected to parliament and remained there until his appointment as Administrator. In this role he was addressed as “His Honour”.
Abbott was a very unpopular appointment. He had no rapport with those under him, held the common working class people in contempt, was an incompetent administrator and attempted to curry favour with the pastoralists and landowners. The findings of the Lowe Royal Commission held shortly after the Japanese raid found him to be the one most responsible for the chaos and disorganisation that followed. He was highly self-opinionated and was inflicted with the common civil servant complaint of inertia.
In addition to the administrator there were three other forces present with independent authority; the army, navy and the air force. As well as that there was another powerful force at work; the militant left-wing North Australia Workers Union (NAWU) which controlled the workforce and owned the only newspaper in the town. Four months after his arrival, Abbott organised a group of civil servants as strike-breakers to intervene in an industrial dispute on the wharves. He lost and became the permanent enemy of the unions.
AERIAL PHOTO OF DARWIN c1930s - photo Jill Kinang
When WW2 broke out the citizens of Darwin could see that they were a potential front line but the war was so far away that they did not believe there was ever a likelihood of being directly involved. The Red Cross attempted to arouse public awareness by arranging lectures in first-aid, home nursing, air raid precautions etc but barely anybody turned up and they were discontinued.
In June, 1940, the Government Secretary appointed the Chief Surveyor, Arthur Miller, as Chief Air Raid Warden. Miller set about trying to raise a volunteer civil defence force to construct air raid shelters. In August he abandoned the plan due to a lack of volunteers. The only project achieved was at the workman’s camp at the RAAF aerodrome. In 1941 when Japan appeared to be likely to enter the war on the axis side Abbott asked Miller to revive the ARP organisation. He did so with more success. A formal agenda was drawn up, the three military services worked in conjunction with the ARP and Miller took on the job as Permanent Officer-in-charge of the ARP as a full time occupation. By September however apathy took over and 10 days before Japan declared war a well advertised meeting was called but only two people turned up.
On 3rd October, 1941 John Curtin replaced Bob Menzies as Prime Minister. His minister for Labour and National Service was Eddie Ward, a firebrand long standing supporter of the union movement. Ward tried to talk the unions into a more co-operative frame of mind to no avail. Militancy reigned supreme regardless of the risks of the war and strikes continued all over the country. In Darwin the situation was far worse than elsewhere to the point where the troops and the community at large regarded the wharfies as saboteurs. Darwin was a disunited town in every respect. It had a mixed population, was cut off from the rest of the country, had no elected government and the Administrator was held in mutual contempt by all sides.
When the Philippines fell a number of American ships made their way to Darwin thus increasing further the strains on the local economy and facilities. On 5th December Edgar Harrison handed a plan for evacuation to the Darwin Defence Coordination Committee comprised of the three service heads and the Administrator. The plan was accepted. Three days later Japan entered the war. Abbott did nothing to execute the evacuation plan.
On 11th December an air raid siren was accidentally set off resulting in a mild panic. The following day the four senior air raid wardens demanded that Abbott exercise his powers to declare a State of Emergency and commence the evacuation orders. Abbott refused stating that such a declaration would be bad for morale and cause panic. Curtin then stepped in and made the order to evacuate.
Part 1
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