Rudd’s poignant stop at the Bomana War Cemetery in Port Moresby
By TIM LESTER National Nine News Political correspondent
KEVIN Rudd’s visit to Bomana War Cemetery was personal - not that we had any idea it was going to be personal, nor even that personal moments were possible for a prime minister on such occasions.
Rudd arrived in presidential style.
Screaming police sirens cut a path for his convoy through the Papuan countryside north of Port Moresby. The fuss drew hundreds of curious locals to the cemetery’s perimeter fence.
As Rudd walked to Bomana’s giant cross to lay a wreath for the 3376 Australians buried here, his entourage flanked him.
They moved with him too as he walked along the carefully trimmed rows of headstones, Australia’s defence force commander in Papua New Guinea, Col. Luke Foster and the prime minister chatting in hushed tones.
At one stage Rudd separated briefly from the group to stand alone. He appeared to reflect on a single tombstone.
I am still not sure whose grave drew his attention. At the time, it seemed less important to check than to stay back and respect that for a moment at least, he appeared to want some space.
The clue would come later when Rudd visited the Memorial to the Missing, a stone rotunda overlooking this, the largest of Australia’s foreign war cemeteries.
In the visitors’ book, he wrote: “For all the fallen, we honour them for their service to Australia, and to honour the personal memory of Lt. George Parkinson.”
He signed it, Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister. The name George Parkinson meant nothing to me when I first read it, though it appears in Robert Macklin’s Kevin Rudd, the Biography.
The 25-year-old lieutenant was killed in action in August 1943, fighting the Japanese at Bona, on the New Guinea coast.
The girlfriend he left behind in Australia would later marry and have children. One of them was Kevin Rudd.
When Rudd’s mother died in 2004, love letters Lt. Parkinson had written her in the three years before he died - and she had kept for more than 60 years - emerged.
Kevin Rudd had reasons quite apart from prime ministerial respect and duty, to pause and reflect in Bomana.
Perhaps the link with his mother explains some of his passion for preserving PNG’s infamous Kokoda Track - the 96 kilometres along which Australian troops famously turned back Japan’s World War Two advance.
Rudd seems to have won Prime Minister Somare’s backing for a heritage listing that would likely scuttle a giant Australian gold and copper mine proposed in the area.
It’s essential politics for any prime minister to been seen protecting the Anzac legend, but it is likely politics alone does not explain all that’s driving Kevin Rudd on this issue.
George Parkinson could never have guessed that one day an Australian prime minister would pause in the midst of thousands of war-dead to reflect on him and his girlfriend.
Nor could he have known that his memory might be at play as an Australian government sought to protect some of the battlefields on which he and his mates fought.
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