Australia: News and Views

The fact that Darwin was bombed not once but many times appears to be a little known fact to Australian’s never mind the rest of the world. Fortunately Baz Luhrmann’s new movie Australia is raising the curtain on this little known moment of Australian history.

The movie Australia features the first raid on Darwin by the Japanese which happened on 19 February 1942 around 9am.  More bombs were dropped in that raid than were on Pearl Harbour.  Around 600 people were killed or injured out of a population which was only around 2000 at the time.  Raids continued into 1943 with over 60 raids on Darwin and 30 raids on other northern Australia targets.

Australian authorities quietly decided that Darwin was indefensible - in fact most of northern and western Australia was considered forfeit and the last line of defence would have been 5000km further south near Brisbane. The reality is that the Japanese force which had rolled down the Malaysian peninsular, living off the land, would have found the Australian outback desert as impossible to cross as most other people had.

One of the consequences of the abandonment of Darwin was that the government suppressed the extent of damage and causalities from the air raids in Darwin.

Today there is little left of 1940’s Darwin: except for the original wharf which features in the movie. Little Bowen in Queensland stands in for Darwin for most of the Australia movie scenes set in 1940’s Darwin . What parts of Darwin which survived the wartime bombardment were destroyed during the 1972 Cyclone Tracey which flattened the town.

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