Damien Parer's propaganda masterpiece.

URBAN AUSTRALIANS first saw Damien Parer in that never-to-be-forgotten year of fear, 1942, the year that changed our view of the world forever, and should have changed it more. Fearful 1942 followed fast on ominous December 8 (on our, and Japan's, side of the dateline) 1941, when the Japanese Imperial Navy crippled the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, achieving an annihilating surprise, or so it seemed at the time. In stupefying succession the Japanese took Hong Kung and invaded Malaya, Burma and the Philippines. The proud new British battleship Prince of Wales and veteran battle cruiser Repulse were sunk in under an hour by Japanese bombers flying from Japanese-occupied Saigon. On February 15, 1942, the British general Arthur Percival surrendered Singapore with its 110,000 defenders, among them 15,000 Australians, to General Tomoyuki Yamashita--the worst disaster ever suffered by British (or Australian) arms. Four days later Darwin was heavily bombed, the first-ever raid on an Australian city.

Sydney, with barely a million people then, buzzed with backyard rumours. Days later, alerted by playground gossip, I watched two AIF divisions, volunteers for overseas service, urgently recalled home from the impending victory of El Alamein and still in desert khaki, file off the grey-camouflaged British liners Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth moored side by side in Sydney Harbour--this, we later learnt, was over the strenuous objections of Winston Churchill, who wanted to throw them into the doomed defence of Rangoon. On May 6, the Americans surrendered the underground fortress of Corregidor near Manila. Their former commander, General Douglas MacArthur, had flown out to Australia days earlier announcing, "I shall return." With what? we wondered.

Three weeks later, Japanese submarines lobbed a few shells into Sydney's eastern seaside suburbs, causing trivial damage but enormous panic, and then launched two midget submarines--"floating coffins", naval historians call them--to sneak into Sydney Harbour. One grounded; the other's single torpedo, aimed at the heavy cruiser USS Chicago, exploded under an old harbour ferry, HMAS Kuttabul, killing nineteen sailors. The admiral commanding the Port of Sydney ordered a detail of Australian naval ratings to fire a salute over the remains of the Japanese submariners and delivered a short speech honouring brave enemies, a generous action in a savage war that is remembered in Japan to this day. Aged fourteen, I joined our school cadet corps, practised with a Lee-Enfield .303 rifle and a First World War Lewis gun and dug slit trenches in our school playground.

Coming ever closer, the Japanese raced through the Dutch East Indies and landed on the north and east of New Guinea, an island that somehow belonged to Australia for no reason we could fathom--we weren't exactly short of jungles and coral reefs of our own. It was startlingly clear to everyone in Australia that the British empire, in which we had considered ourselves among the colonisers, not the colonised, was a military house of cards, and we must now fend for ourselves. But the war, we thought, was still far away, an exciting picture show put on for the impressionable schoolboy I then was, and a lot more interesting than Maths, Latin or French irregular verbs.

Until September 1942. A gang of schoolmates had pooled our treys (threepences) each for the Saturday matinee at our local Hoyts, which offered a newsreel, a generic Mickey Mouse cartoon, a sleazy B picture and a wholesome feature film. As usual we squabbled over who sat where. First we saw the cartoon, then the Cinesound Review, "The Voice of Australia", with its endearing ear-twitching kangaroo, a cousin of MGM's roaring lion, leaping out of frame.

This newsreel was like nothing we had ever seen before. No gun flashes, no crashing bombs. Intrigued, our chiyacking fell silent. The title Kokoda Front Line! came up, with a short explanation: "Damien Parer [a name new to us] ace war correspondent, in four weeks took his cameras to the far corners of New Guinea, securing many amazing pictures ... He is an experienced and reliable observer."

Still no bang-bang. Instead, we see what looks like a suburban lounge room with books and a vase of flowers. A serious young man seated on a stool gazes squarely at the camera. He is in uniform, and at first we think he might be some sort of official spokesman. He uses a quiet, measured tone, remote from the spurious excitement of most war commentaries, then and now. He speaks unobtrusive but unmistakable Australian. To our ears he is one of us, delivering the most eloquent to-camera speech in our history: