Transcript
KATHRYN SPURLING: The Australian Government, which was Prime Minister Robert Menzies at the time, there were ships coming out of that area, they could have evacuated people, but to do that was an admission of guilt as far as I am concerned, because it was a mission that should never have been sent. The same fate comes to the other bird forces that were sent up to Timor and Malaysia. I think it was just a huge mistake and nobody took responsibility and so consequently all the files were hidden. So a lot of these families had no idea what happened to their sons, husbands, and fathers.
DON WISEMAN: They [the records] were hidden essentially because of government embarrassment.
KS: Oh as far as I am concerned that is exactly what it was. It was very poor judgement on our military's behalf, on the higher authorities within the military and the Australian Government. They completely underestimated what the Japanese were capable of and they didn't act quickly enough because to do that would have been admitting defeat. So these families, it was many years, until the war finished that they realised the men were still missing and they did find the officers were in Japan and the nursing sisters were up in Japan as well, as POWs.
DW: They got separated?
KS: yeah they did, the officers and the nurses, who were obviously officers too, they were put on a different ship which left later, and it was successful in getting to Japan. Unfortunately the main contingent went on the Montevideo Maru - 1053, which is Australia's worst maritime disaster and people just don't know about this.
DW: By a long way too.
KS: Absolutely. You know I mean our worst maritime disaster other than that was the HMAS Sydney sinking, [645 sailors died in 1941 in the Indian Ocean]. But it was the fact that the government just tried to cover it all up, and left these poor families without any resolution as to what went on and what happened to their men. And their files were hidden. Australia was the only country that did not accept POW cards issued straight after the war finished. The Japanese Government finally came up with these POW cards, naming everybody, as far as they were concerned, who was a listed POW. Every other country took their cards, except Australia.
DW: Why?
KS: Well you would have to ask a lot of dead politicians about that one. But it is why it was so hidden and this is why the Montevideo Maru Society worked so hard to even have it recognised. And there wasn't a public apology until about 2010. They didn't get their memorial until about the same time.
DW: Now another seven years on from that is there growing recognition of what happened and the need to properly commemorate this loss of life.
KS: No and I can't understand this. This is part of this cultural cringe that we have in this country. There was great federal government observation of the fall of Singapore - why wasn't there a public acknowledgement of the fall of Rabaul. Rabaul was actually part of Australia. It was a mandated territory. There was not a murmur. I even wrote an article for the Fairfax Media and it never got published, but saying "Why don't we recognise the 23rd January. It was our first major military fall in World War Two" but we couldn't blame the British, you see, we had to blame Australia and I think that might have been where the cultural cringe came from. I mean it was the same with Gallipoli. We recognise because the British made a mess of it, but our first military unit disappeared off Rabaul, which was our submarine, AE1, our first Australian submarine, disappeared - and it had a couple of New Zealanders on board, I might add - it disappeared off Rabaul on the 14th September 1914. It's never been found and there has never been proof whether this was self-administered, diving when it shouldn't have, or whether it hit a reef. There was no trace and that is why I wrote the book The Mystery of AE1. Again Rabaul is involved, but for some reason we seem to have ignored it.
DW: Your latest book Abandoned and Sacrificed; The Tragedy of the Montevideo Maru, just released and you are hoping, I guess, that this is going to wake a few people up.
KS: Well I have had a lot of comments from relatives' families. The legacy of war doesn't finish with the end of the war, it goes on for generations and the fact that I have had emails from families to say "look you have uncovered stuff we didn't know about. Nobody's told us this stuff before." It's really, really bad that we have this sort of blinkered view as to what we recognise. And it is a case that we don't seem to recognise our failures when they are our failures. If they are somebody else's failures then we can blame them, and point the finger and say, what a mess they made. But this was purely an Australian mistake and they deserve better, people in Rabaul deserve better, and all those young 17-year-olds sent up to be abandoned and sacrificed, deserve better.
