Remembering our war heroes

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Tags: awards and prizes, journalism and communication, military, summer-2010

Bill Park receives the School of Journalism and Communication's Distinguished Alumnus for 2010 award from Associate Professor Eric Louw

Up to 90,000 Australian Diggers who helped win World War II are now missing in cyberspace, due to errors in the government-sponsored World War II Nominal Roll.

The online database established by the former Federal Government in 2002 has more holes than Swiss cheese, according to University of Queensland Master of Journalism graduate Bill Park.

“It is not a reliable source of information about many soldiers of WWII from Queensland,” Mr Park said.

“The situation in other states is apparently much the same.”

Mr Park completed three years’ work researching his thesis which examined the World War II Nominal Roll and its reliability. It has since been been published by a German firm.

Mr Park was also named as the School of Journalism and Communication’s Distinguished Alumnus for 2010.

But Mr Park’s not giving up because he has a personal interest in the research: he turned 90 this year and served as a lieutenant in New Guinea in the Army in World War II.

Now he and his Digger mates want to make sure the roll is accurate and up-to-date.

There are many omissions, errors and inconsistencies in the entries on the roll, he said, mostly among the so-called “Choco Soldiers”. Yet it was many of these soldiers who helped defeat the Japanese advance along the Kokoda Track, and at Salamaua, Milne Bay and Bougainville.

Mr Park said that since the launch of the roll in November 2002, successive governments had become aware of deficiencies in the listings but had shown a lack of enthusiasm to remedy them.

“Yet over the same time frame they have spent millions of dollars on Remembrance campaigns involving phrases such as ‘Lest we forget’ and ‘We will remember them’ and more millions each year on recruiting campaigns.

“How can we remember them, if we can’t find out about them?”

Mr Park gave a free public lecture on his research at St Lucia earlier this year.

By John Cokley

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