Kokoda, the Burmese Railway, the POW camps, the Japanese submarines in Sydney Harbour, and the bombing of Darwin still loom large over Australian culture. And yet these nationalist images are rarely challenged. Australia's imperialist motivations in the Pacific War have been whitewashed from history, and the Japanese people have been presented as inherently militaristic and violent.

This talk will demolish these myths and show how the brutality of the Second World War's Pacific Theatre was the product of a clash between various imperialistic forces striving to dominate the region for their own ruling classes.