Reporting the Papuan campaign. (Film).(Papuan battles of 1942-43)

IN COMMEMORATING the Papuan battles of 1942-43, there is a stark choice. We can settle for a sentimental legend about the Kokoda Track where everyone is a hero and noble Australian soldiers aided by loyal Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels turn back a vicious enemy, or we can explore the troth that three great war correspondents on the Kokoda Track tried to tell us back in 1942. They would insist that there were authentic Australian heroes on the Track but there were also men who ran away.

Above all, they would argue that Kokoda is not the whole story. There is Milne Bay, there is Gona, Buna and Sanananda. That is why I shall not be just telling the story of Damien Parer, Chester Wilmot and Osmar

White but also of the still photographer George Silk, who covered the Gona-Buna battles. We have also discovered that there was a fourth reporter on the Kokoda Track in 1942. He was the first to broadcast the conclusions inherent in Damien Parer's film Kokoda Front Line and White and Wilmot's despatches. But more about this mysterious fourth man later.

Thanks to Sally White, Osmar White's daughter, we have just found out there would never have been any reporting in New Guinea in 1942 if it hadn't been for Osmar White himself. Early in 1942 he led a virtual strike against the censorship when all the correspondents, including White himself and George Johnston, simply left Port Moresby. Here is part of White's report written for Army Public Relations:

 
   In my belief the present oppressive censorship is the illogical outcome of 
   many months of official bungling and confusion. Censorship officers in the 
   field are tired of trying to make sense out of an insane censorship 
   literature ... every time a new problem arises, it seems that a new 
   instruction is promulgated to solve it. Individual interpretations of these 
   instructions are almost as varied as the instructions themselves. 
   [Consequently] when I first arrived in Moresby no reference could be made 
   to it as an operational base for attacks in New Britain. But within a week 
   of my arrival Moresby was referred to as an operational base by the 
   Minister for Air. Reference to spotting stations and observation centres in 
   New Britain was forbidden yet a reference to them was published on the 
   mainland and in a broadcast. At least one spotting station was [then] 
   promptly bombed by the Japanese. [Finally] the military censor at Port 
   Moresby [became] so confused and agitated by the censorship anomalies that 
   he refused to pass any message unless he had been present at the interviews 
   in which the information had been obtained. 

There was a great deal more in a similar vein. Much of this confusion came about as a result of General MacArthur's attempt to control the flow of news on his arrival in Australia after his escape from the Philippines. Nevertheless White's report, all twenty pages of it, was well received and Errol Knox, Head of Army Public Relations, promised a new system would be set up that would "overcome many of the correspondents' difficulties". Still no one was going to abandon the convenient catch-all that nothing should be published that would cause the public to lose confidence in its leaders; and, as we will see, censorship remained a problem. But White had succeeded in creating circumstances in which his own, Wilmot's and Parer's great reporting became possible.

So what sort of men were Parer, White and Wilmot? And how did they go about finding their stories?