Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband) Share this | Hansard source

The House is remembering the 70th anniversary of the sinking of the Montevideo Maru, the Japanese vessel that, 70 years ago on 1 July, was carrying over 1,000 Australian prisoners of war and civilians and was sunk off the Philippines by an American submarine, the USS Sturgeon. It was, and remains, the worst maritime disaster in Australia's history. It had sailed from Rabaul, on 22 June 1942. It carried 845 Australian prisoners of war and 208 interned Australian civilians, all headed for internment on Hainan Island in China—as well, of course, as its Japanese crew.

One of the Australian civilians who died in that tragedy was Henry Fulton, who is the uncle of one of my constituents, Elizabeth Fulton-Thurston, who has worked very hard with the committee to ensure that the sinking of the Montevideo Maru was appropriately remembered, and they have been able to secure, as we now know, and as we witnessed only a few weeks ago, a beautiful sculpture erected at the Australian War Memorial, which was unveiled on 2 July.

Every one of the men who died in the sinking of this ship had their own personal story, but there is a great family story associated with Henry Fulton and his death on that ship.

Henry was one of four brothers who had been brought up in very tough circumstances. His father died when they were all very young and they were brought up by their mother in the eastern suburbs in Sydney, in Waverley in my electorate. All of them except Henry were very keen and successful sportsmen with a great love of cricket. Henry had polio as a child and he was the only one of the four brothers who did not serve in the Australian defence forces in the Second World War.

Ted Fulton, the oldest of the four, had one of the most remarkable and colourful histories of any Australian serviceman. He went off with the 6th Division to Palestine, having joined the Army as soon as war was declared. He served with the 6th Division in the triumphant campaign against the Italians in North Africa and the victories in Bardia and Tobruk. Then he served with the Australian and British forces in what turned out to be the military debacle in Greece and Crete, and was very fortunate ultimately to escape from Crete back to his unit in Palestine. Ted had been an early pioneer in New Guinea, which of course was administered by Australia as a League of Nations mandate after the First World War. He first went up there in the early 1920s to work for Carpenters, the trading company. He had a variety of jobs with Carpenters and then he worked for the Australian administration, and subsequently had great success as a gold prospector and gold miner on the Sepik River. When he joined up, he was a mature man—he was 35 years of age, born in 1904. Ted Fulton left a substantial business behind in New Guinea.

His brother Henry, who suffered from polio, was seven years younger than Ted, and Ted always kept an eye out for him. Ted brought him up to Rabaul in 1937 for a job with Burns Philp. He took him under his wing. His other brother Jack served with the Australian Army and was interned in Changi, and worked on the Burma Railway—and worked near to death, as with all the other prisoners. Remarkably, he survived and wrote a diary of his time in Changi, which is now in the Australian War Memorial. The fourth brother, Frank Fulton, served in the Air Force.

So there were four brothers, three of whom served in very dangerous circumstances for the Australian armed forces. Henry did not but he was the one who did not come home. He was the civilian by reason of his polio and he was the one who was taken with the other prisoners of war on the Montevideo Maru and was lost at sea. Ted Fulton subsequently returned to New Guinea and established a plantation there. He has written a remarkable book, which I commend to honourable members, called No Turning Back. His daughter Elizabeth edited that book and contributed to it.

Rabaul had not been fortified in the years before the Second World War, not least because it was a condition of Australia's administering the former German colony that it remain unmilitarised. A force of about 1,400 men was dispatched to Rabaul in April 1941, called Lark Force, but it was utterly inadequate to repel any likely Japanese attack. It was part of the 22nd Battalion and was under the command of Lieutenant Colonel John Scanlan. It remains puzzling why a clearly inadequate force was left in Rabaul as some kind of sacrifice.

There was considerable bitterness at the time and subsequently about the decisions made in Canberra that resulted not only in the Lark Force remaining in Rabaul when it was clearly inadequate to repel any Japanese attack but also in refusing to consent to male civilians such as Henry Fulton being evacuated.

Thousands of Australians lost their lives, some in the fighting and a number were executed by the Japanese—160 of them in one single massacre at the Tol and Waitavalo plantations. Those who had not been killed or died of other causes were interned and then lost at sea on the Montevideo Maru. Presumably, the decision was taken to leave the troops there as some kind of defiant sacrifice but it does seem, and seemed at the time, to be a particularly pointless decision.

The Montevideo Maru took just 11 minutes to sink after it had been torpedoed. The Australian soldiers sang Auld lang syne as the ship went down. There was no effort made to recover the survivors. The Japanese navy took the view that they could not remain in that vicinity with an enemy submarine nearby. At the time, the sinking was not reported in Australia, as there was very heavy censorship, and it was not until 1945 that Henry Fulton's family learnt what had happened to him.

He had written two letters, of which I propose to read a portion, to his family not long before the prisoners were taken off in the Montevideo Maru. On 9 January 1942, he wrote to his sister Mary—and this was before the Japanese had landed, which occurred on 23 January—and he said:

I suppose you have heard over the wireless about our visits from the Jap bombers. So far they have not done much damage with the exception of the natives killed at the native hospital last Sunday. There have not been any European casualties. I have sent you the Rabaul Times of today by this airmail and hope that it reaches you safely. You will be able to read a full report of the doings in it and then you might pass it on to Flip—

that is his brother Frank—

There is no cause to be worried about this business. No doubt they will be pretty frequent from now on but we all have our slit trenches and are pretty well protected and so far they have not attacked the town area, so please Diddy do not worry unnecessarily about it.

That was putting a very brave face on a pretty difficult situation.

Later, on 11 February 1942, he wrote to his brother Frank a letter that was presumably written under Japanese instruction and was delivered as part of a mail drop by the Japanese over Port Moresby. Hank Nelson described it as 'a strange act of chivalry in a very brutal war'. This was his final letter and he said:

Dear Frank,

Just a line to let you know that I am safe and well and am still in Rabaul and I hope that you and Mary have not been worrying about me. I am in good health and eating well and sleep well at night. I hope that this will find you in good health and that Chris and the children are all free from sickness. Assure Mary that I am quite all right andoften think of you all, also Jack and Ted. Love to all old scout and hope it will not be long before I am seeing you all again. Cheers for the time Flip, your fond brother, Henry.

The family marked Henry's all-too-short life with a plaque that rests on his parents' grave at Waverley Cemetery and that overlooks Bronte Beach, where the Fulton boys spent much of their time when they were young lads growing up in the eastern suburbs. It is a shocking tragedy and it is one that, until very recently, too little attention was paid to, no doubt because it was the result of friendly fire and there was a degree of embarrassment that this, the worst maritime disaster in our history, or the largest single loss of Australian lives in one incident in the Second World War, was the consequence of an American torpedo.

But those Australians who died on the Montevideo Maru died serving their country as bravely as any soldier, sailor, airman or serviceman or woman who lost his or her life in that war. It is good, albeit somewhat late, that the Montevideo Maru is remembered. I am very pleased to be able to remember and recall the remarkable lives of four young men—the Fulton boys: Ted, Frank, Henry and Jack—who in different theatres served their country so selflessly in the Second World War. They were a remarkable generation who saw service as their duty and sought no thanks, no honorifics, no rewards for it. They simply recognised that it was something that they had to do. To them service was second nature. We will not see their like again. Lest we forget.

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