A WITNESS TO SURRENDER, HOW BURNIE LENSMAN BERT CAPTURES HISTORIC MOMENTS OF WWII IN NEW GUINEA.

A WITNESS TO SURRENDER, HOW BURNIE LENSMAN BERT CAPTURES HISTORIC MOMENTS OF WWII IN NEW GUINEA. 

Bert Winter's images of the Japanese surrender in what is now Papua New Guinea at the end of World War II.

A witness to surrender: Burnie lensman Bert Winter captures historic moments of WWII in New Guinea

Bert Winter's images of the Japanese surrender in what is now Papua New Guinea at the end of World War II capture forever a moment of high emotion and gravity.

His photographs even inspired Julie Harris, a volunteer from Burnie Regional Museum in Tasmania, to make a pilgrimage to the lonely airstrip where the surrender occurred after she recently catalogued the images.

Winter, a Burnie boy, was there as the Royal Australian Air Force's (RAAF) official photographer on September 13, 1945 when about 3,000 Australian servicepeople lined the airstrip at Wom, near Wewak, in the nation's north.

His lens captured the Imperial Japanese Army's General Hatazo Adachi as he was transported by jeep, from an aeroplane, to a table at the end of the airstrip to sign the terms of surrender.

Adachi was also asked to surrender his sword to Australian Army Major General Horace Robertson and the 13,000 men who survived of an original force of 140,000.

The commander of Japan's 18th Army, Adachi had lost over 100,000 men in the conflict.

In the photo, his face is set hard with what must be a pained humility

"It's a great image," Ms Harris said as she cradled the print with archival gloves.

"You also see the happy faces of diggers under slouch hats watching and the detail of a kangaroo and boomerang painted on the jeep."

Winter had followed his father into the family photography business in Burnie during the depression years of the 1930s after he lost his job with the Emu Bay Railway Company.

He trained with the RAAF to learn aerial photography which included photographing a burgeoning Canberra from the air.

"The Winter family collection is just priceless to Burnie; there are around 300,000 Winter images which were donated to the Museum," Ms Harris said.

"I couldn't believe my luck when I was given the job of cataloguing the 1,200 or so wartime photographs."

"My father was a civil engineer who worked in New Guinea after the war so I've always wanted to go.

"Then, after working through Bert's photographs, I felt like I really knew it."

Last November, Ms Harris took a small boat cruise around Papua New Guinea and disembarked in Wewak.

"It was a chance to get to the airstrip at Wom but guides had warned it was dangerous to go alone," she said.

"Luckily I had met a couple onboard and this man had been in the army, based at Wewak, so he knew how to arrange a driver and things like that.

"It felt very special to me, I could just see it all happening and I thought more people should know a boy from Burnie had an important job to do that day."

"Because the museum is temporarily closed in response to the pandemic, it will be a simple display at the Burnie Library in September and that will include one of Bert's cameras he used for aerial photography," Ms Wade said.

"There are quite a few lovely images just documenting the day-to-day existence of the soldiers away from the front and Bert's makeshift studio with a thatched roof."

Among the day-to-day images is evidence of soldiers attempting to establish a surf lifesaving culture during the war.

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