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Yes, Mike that is a part of our history that is fading from memory.
My mother is still alive and she lived in Townsville during those years. Cairns, Townsville and Mossman had Japanese air raids as well as Broome and Katherine, but not at the same scale as Darwin. She recently gave me a poster she had as a child: "All the ships of the British navy" where she had pencilled crosses over all those that sank, until the British stopped releasing their names. My father recalls hearing the guns firing at the midget submarines in Sydney Harbour and one day watching the artillery engage a submarine that had surfaced out from the Heads. He even saw a few shells drop short into Bondi.
A few years ago I met one of the first detachment to be sent to New Guinea onto Kokoda. His rifle had a white stripe painted down the side, as it was one of a batch of unserviceable weapons intended for destruction but reissued to a battalion that was not expected to survive anyway.
Slightly digressing, I have my grandfather's WW1 diary, photo album and camera. The photo of a football field sized crater, presumably from an underground mine detonation, still makes a chilling impression.
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