Details of the WWll episode in which HMAS Patricia Cam was sunk by a Japanese floatplane off Arnhem Land , a passenger taken away and later beheaded at Dobo in the Aru Islands , were given in a talk by Mike Owen in Darwin this week .
Owen is the Darwin based co-founder of Past Masters' International , a diverse group of specialists and members of the public, intent on unravelling the mysteries of Australia's past .
A wooden auxiliary vessel operated by the Navy out of Darwin , with two officers and a crew of 17 sailors, it ran supplies to small communities and coastwatchers. In January 1943 , it picked up passengers, including Reverend Leonard Kentish , head of Methodist Overseas Missions , intending to sail to Elcho Island .
It was attacked and bombed by a Japanese floatplane , which landed , took Kentish prisoner , and flew off with him to Dobo , where he was questioned , severely beaten , starved and eventually executed. He was said to have been the only Australian prisoner of war taken in mainland Australian waters.
Some survivors drifted in a lifeboat, others clung to debris-the remains of one found nine years later in a cave on Valencia Island , 320kms from the sinking . Aborigines found some survivors, supplies were dropped by the RAAF before HMAS Kuru arrived .
For years , Mrs Kentish , living in Brisbane , not knowing what had happened to her husband , wrote to newspapers desperately seeking information from anybody who may know something . By luck , Alfred Wilson , reading the Melbourne Age , in 1946 , had been an intelligence officer on Horn Island , at the tip of Cape York , and had been transferred to General Douglas MacArthur's top secret intelligence group , Central Bureau . Using a contact in Tokyo , he was able to find out what happened to Reverend Kentish .
For years , Mrs Kentish , living in Brisbane , not knowing what had happened to her husband , wrote to newspapers desperately seeking information from anybody who may know something . By luck , Alfred Wilson , reading the Melbourne Age , in 1946 , had been an intelligence officer on Horn Island , at the tip of Cape York , and had been transferred to General Douglas MacArthur's top secret intelligence group , Central Bureau . Using a contact in Tokyo , he was able to find out what happened to Reverend Kentish .
There is an account of The Kentish Affair in the website ozatwar.com .Three Japanese appeared before the Allied war crimes trials in Hong Kong over the beheading , one hanged , two sentenced to life imprisonment .
In 2013, an expedition in search of Arnhem Land secrets found the above part of HMAS Patricia Cam displayed in the graphic . (The late Rupert Kentish , another missionary, was the Member for Arnhem in the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly in the l970s ).
