About the author


Bob Wurth is a Brisbane writer. He was a foreign correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Asia in the 1980s, and worked on assignment in Japan.
He transferred from Asia to the ABC in Queensland in 1985 as news editor, became state radio manager and finally ABC state manager for radio and television.
Wurth left the ABC in 1999 to write full-time. His book Justice in the Philippines was published by ABC Books in 1985. He was a contributor to Dorothy Horsfield’s Paul Lyneham, a Memoir. His latest book Saving Australia also is being made into a major television documentary in conjunction with Freshwater Productions of Queensland and ScreenWest, Western Australia.




About the book

Japanese and Australian perspectives in new history

Saving Australia is a new history written from both Japanese and Australian perspectives, often using new source material. It was the culmination of five years’ detailed research in Australia and Japan.

While on one of his trips to Japan the author Bob Wurth discovered the writings in Japanese of Tatsuo Kawai, the first Japanese ambassador to Australia, including Kawai’s accounts of his meetings and friendship with Australian wartime leader John Curtin in 1941. Documented was an agreement between the two aimed at maintaining the peace between Japan and Australia. According to Kawai, Curtin while still Leader of the Opposition, agreed to support Japan’s mining and export of iron ore from Yampi Sound in Curtin’s home state of Western Australia in exchange for Japan ‘guaranteeing Australia’s safety’. Kawai became an unlikely friend of Curtin, the socialist. He had come to Australia as a strident advocate of Japanese expansionism and friend of extremists.

Wurth, a former foreign correspondent in Asia, also discovered in Japan, Kawai’s classic coastal retreat at Manazuru in the Kanagawa prefecture. In the house the author found 42 dusty photograph albums – the life story of Kawai in pictures, including his time in China, Nazi Germany and later in Australia during 1941 and 1942. Among the photographs were snaps sent by Elsie Curtin to the Kawai family.

Kawai was placed under house arrest in Melbourne at the outbreak of war, yet he and his staff were still able to gather military intelligence about Australia and transmit it back to Japan by using a collaborator. Curtin, who became Prime Minister in October 1941, had grown close to Kawai. The diplomat had dined with John and Elsie Curtin in their home at Cottesloe in Perth in July 1941. According to one of Kawai’s friends in Australia, the two men often ‘bared their hearts to one another’ and admired the other’s openness and frankness.

Saving Australia reveals how Kawai, on departing for Japan on an exchange ship in August 1942, said he had failed in his mission:

I came to Australia in high hope of creating better understanding, even though war clouds were already gathering in the Pacific. I realised there were vital matters in dispute, but always hoped that our two countries would find some way of preserving peace. The outbreak of war was the greatest blow I have received in my life. Those Australians who know how I struggled to avert war in the Pacific will understand when I say my spirit has been broken. The gods decreed that Japan and Australia should go to war, and it is a case of kill or be killed, but there is no bitterness in my heart toward Australia.

Kawai was ostracised back in Japan when he called on Japanese not to hate the Australians. Towards the end of the war he secretly worked for peace with liberal Shigeru Yoshida, later prime minister. Immediately after the war Kawai, considered a pacifist by some, was promoted to high office, including vice foreign minister.

But then Kawai the enigma emerges. He harboured at his little house at Manazuru one of Japan’s worst wanted war criminals. Colonel Masanobu Tsuji was the operational planner for the capture of Singapore. He was responsible for giving the order to slaughter tens of thousands of civilians and also led the murder of American prisoners during the Bataan death march. He was never punished for his crimes.

Saving Australia too is a story of love. Also living in Kawai’s house while Tsuji was there was a young American woman of Japanese descent who Kawai recruited as a teenager in 1939. She came out from California to study at a special school Kawai had established in Tokyo. Tamaye Tsutsumida - 30 years Kawai’s junior – became his private secretary and hostess in Australia in 1941-42 and had to choose whether to return to her family in the US or go to Japan with Kawai. She chose Japan and tragically died there. Saving Australia unravels their relationship, which became clearer with the discovery of Kawai’s poetry about the young American:

Tatsuo Kawai devoted his life to Japan-Australia trade and friendship and lived to see his son, Masumi Kawai, as managing director of Mitsui Australia, develop vast iron ore mines in Western Australia. Kawai returned to visit Elsie, Curtin’s widow, in 1959, saying:

John Curtin was one of my best friends. I have not forgotten your country and I have never forgotten John Curtin. This has been my first chance to come back. I am making a special flight from Melbourne to Perth to see Mrs Elsie Curtin who was very good to me. Her husband was a wonderful man.

Copyright © Bob Wurth, 2006. Saving Australia is published by Lothian Books. See www.lothian.com.au


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Japan received Australian wartime secrets through Melbourne.
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