In February 1942, following their stunning success in capturing Malaya and Singapore, Japanese forces continued to push south through the Netherlands East Indies and Portuguese and Dutch Timor. The bombing of Darwin on 19 February was designed to hamper any Allied counter-attack on the Japanese invasion of Timor. It was launched from the same aircraft carriers responsible for the attack on Pearl Harbor. The destruction of the RAAF base (along with nine out of the ten US Kittyhawk fighters stationed there) ensured that these aims were achieved. Fears that the attack was the prelude to an invasion led to panic among sections of the military and civilians in Darwin, and large numbers of people fled the city to head south. Government control over the region north of Birdum was handed to the military commandant on 23 February and remained that way until the end of the war.

Beside the jungle-clad Adelaide River, 80 miles south-east of Darwin, is a beautiful formal garden, with smooth, level lawns overhung by scarlet poinciana blooms and the brilliant yellow of the drooping cascara.

Here are buried the men and women of the last war who died in the Timor Sea and Northern Australia.

As you pass through the big monumental gateway, there is an open green space running up to a semi-circular shrine with a bronze cross. On either side of this space are row upon row of clean white gravestones – nearly 400 of them – with the name and rank of the dead, and a message from the bereaved. Most of these stones are engraved with a cross. Some have the Star of David, a few the Crescent of Islam. Some have no symbol at all […]

But this home of the dead is as quiet as some deserted garden in a fairy tale, a place where no man comes.