Of S. Pacific

Picture Record

Battlegrounds

Back in Sydney in July was

Sydney freelance photographer

Bruce Adams, after a three months photographic tour through the old battlegrounds of the South Pacific, during which he took 4,500 pictures in colour and black and white.

He is now faced with the task of selecting 400 of the best, as the basis for a new book. Battleground South Pacific, to be published by A, H. and A, W. Reed early next year. The publication of the book will coincide with the 25th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War.

Text of the book is by Bob Howlett, formerly of Fiji, and now a Sydney travel promotions man, who fought with the Fijians in the Solo mons and is author of the official World War II history of the Fiji battalion.

But the biggest task has been the photography, because Battleground South Pacific will mainly be a pic torial book. During his three months Adams trekked through Papua-New Guinea, including outlying islands, the British Solomons (including some more out-of-the-way places) and the Gilbert and Ellice Islands.

Among his shots are one of the wreckage of the aircraft in which Admiral Yamamoto was shot down in Bougainville in 1944, the Austra lian guns which were knocked out by the Japanese prior to the invasion of Rabaul, the only Japanese Betty bomber still left standing on its wheels anywhere in the South Pacific (this was at Ballalei, BSIP), the fixed British guns of Betio, Tarawa, brought in by the Japanese, not from Singapore (which is a commonly held belief), but from Japan where they were used by the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War.

He also uncovered a number of “furphies”, the details of which he will relate in his book.

Adams interviewed and photo graphed 13 surviving Coastwatchers native and European still living in the Islands.

“That trip was the hardest photo graphic job I’ve ever done,” says Adams, “I couldn’t have done it at all without the extraordinary co operation I got everywhere. It was local knowledge that counted.”