Tiwi Islanders, Japanese pilots, 1942

A Moving Story of Australian-Japanese kindness during WWII. Phillip Hoy, former MSC confrere, relays an event that took place at the time of the bombing of Darwin.

One of the bombers limped to Bathurst Island and then crashed. A Tiwi man was sent to fetch the survivors and he told them to walk in a straight line. Apparently, he only had one bullet and he thought it would be a way to shoot all of them if necessary. When they were taken to the community the Tiwi women saw they were frightened youths.

The hero of the episode, Mathias Ulungara

The women gave their babies to the Japanese to hold. All of a sudden, the Japanese realised that they were not going to be killed and eaten as they had thought. Phillip says he was there as a priest in 1990 when one of those men came back to say thank you. In broken English he heard ‘You let us hold your babies’.

A couple of weeks ago the grandson turned up thanking the descendants for their kindness 80 years earlier. The first photo below is of the grandson with the great grand-daughters of Matthias. Behind the three of them is a statue of Matthias. The second photo is a promo of an upcoming film of this experience.