Senator Dodson: We must never forget those who died so, and those many heroes who bravely rescued survivors

What a shame that COVID and a passing cyclone brought about the cancellation of the ceremony to mark the 80th anniversary of the Japanese air attack on Broome. We are all presently fixed on the horrors being inflicted on the people of Ukraine, but let’s not forget the scores of victims — so many of them innocent women and children — who died right here on the morning of 3 March 1942. We can be thankful that the raids by the Japanese Zero fighters were directed at military assets — the 15 flying boats parked in Roebuck Bay and seven aircraft at the airfield (all of them destroyed). Most of the European women and children from Broome had been moved south after the bombing of Darwin a fortnight earlier, and 300 or so Aboriginal women and children had been taken to Beagle Bay mission. But the lack of military preparedness for any attack on Broome was starkly obvious, and the appearance of a huge Japanese reconnaissance plane the afternoon before the raids does not seem to have raised any official concerns. Not that the few military personnel stationed at Broome could have mustered any adequate defences. The Broome airfield, the closest to Java and able to receive the waves of Dutch citizens fleeing the Japanese invasion of Netherlands East Indies, may have been designated an Advanced Operational Base, but it was hopelessly unprotected. It had a telegraph station, but no trained operators, and there were no radar or functioning anti-aircraft installations. Those dozens of Dutch civilians, men women and children, who sat crammed in the flotilla of flying boats anchored in Roebuck Bay that fateful morning, no doubt thought they had escaped the worst as they waited to take off to safe havens down south. The carnage unleashed as cannons and machine gun bullets rained down upon them was horrific. The Federal Government, maybe ashamed about the lack of preparedness, or maybe wanting to calm a jittery population, played down the disaster in an official release: “Rumours to the effect that loss of life in the Broome raid yesterday were very heavy is (sic) utterly untrue.” It’s a continuing tragedy that most Australians still don’t know what happened here 80 years ago. We who live here must never forget those who died so awfully, and those many heroes who bravely rescued survivors and retrieved the bodies of the dead.