Valiant for Truth by Brune Peter;McDonald Neil;

Author:Brune, Peter;McDonald, Neil;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New South Wales Press

14

THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS

Wilmot was completing ‘And Our Troops Were Forced to Withdraw’ and the report for General Rowell when Damien Parer got back to Port Moresby. The last Wilmot and White had seen of the cameraman was when they had left him on the Kokoda Track at Templeton’s Crossing, standing in the rain clutching his Newman camera in one hand, and his tins of exposed film in the other. Damien had just been told that George Fenton or Charley Maddern had arranged to have 1500 feet of film dropped to him so he decided to stay to cover the withdrawal. Somewhat apologetically, he had asked Wilmot and White if they could let him have a pair of socks, a spare shirt and some quinine.

Parer had been in a far worse state than he had revealed to his companions. He had come down with an attack of dysentery. Concerned that his condition would stop him filming, Parer had inserted a tube into his anus and ran it down his trouser leg into a bottle pushed into his sock.1

It was after he had parted from Wilmot and White that Damien had taken some of his most famous shots of the Papuan bearers carrying stretchers up the mud paths and across the streams. Throughout his filming, Parer’s sequences reflected the concerns of his friends about the terrain, the foliage and the problems of supply. At Myola, even though he was short of film stock, Parer had photographed as many of the drops as possible as the planes came in at different heights. In addition, he shot close-ups of the packages after they’d landed. At that stage no one had any idea of the correct height for making those kinds of supply drops. When he had advanced with the 2/14th and 2/16th Battalions he had left the track and taken shots to show how the khaki uniforms stood out against the green of the jungle. Parer found a powerful climax for his film when he filmed the relief of the 39th Battalion by the newly arrived 2/27th at Menari. Included is a powerful shot of Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Honner urging his men to forget they might have been let down by the 53rd Battalion on the right flank, and to ‘remember we are all Australians’.2 These ‘ragged bloody heroes’ seemed to Parer ‘like a roll call on Anzac’.3

Almost as soon as he arrived at Moresby, the cameraman was hearing rumours that General Rowell was going to be relieved. Osmar White heard the story from Basil Morris and White told the author that he was certain Wilmot and Rowell were also aware of the speculation. Almost certainly this is why Parer decided to return to Australia with his film. He was so anxious to get away that he left some of the original dope sheets (shot lists) in Moresby. Rowell too may have had a hand in Parer’s decision. The general was becoming increasingly concerned about wildly inaccurate reports about the campaign in the

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