ABSTRACT
While the defenders and survivors of Rabaul were struggling to salvage at least their lives from the ordeal they had gone through, across on the mainland of New Guinea at Port Moresby, the General Officer Commanding 8th Military District was fighting a battle of his own. Powerless to render any assistance in Rabaul and deprived of virtually any useful intelligence from the area, he found himself struggling not against the Japanese, but against his own politicians in Canberra. And his chief protagonist was the Administrator of Papua, nephew of one of Australia’s most distinguished colonial administrators but himself a man hide-bound by convention, enmeshed in red-tape and, as a judicial inquiry would later find, ‘utterly unwilling to assume the responsibilities which devolved upon him’.
