Darwin shares its wartime history

For most of the past 70 years Mary Lee and her family have privately commemorated the death of her father on February 19.

This year will be different for Mrs Lee, 79, and for many others who lost family members and friends when Darwin was bombed by the Japanese in 1942 in the first attack on Australia by a foreign power.

As Darwin prepares for its biggest anniversary of the bombing, Mrs Lee will be at the city's cenotaph on Sunday with thousands of others, including more than 100 veterans of the bombing, to pay her usual respects.

"We've always just remembered it ourselves, fairly quietly," Mrs Lee said.

"All my family wear a hat with a flower in it, just like my father always did.

"We'll do that tomorrow, only this time there'll be a lot of others with us."

Mrs Lee's father, John Cubillo, was a wharfie on the Darwin docks and had gone to work on his day off to help feed a wife and nine kids who had been evacuated to Katherine in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour two months earlier.

"He would have been one of the first killed," Mrs Lee said.

Mr Cubillo, who was helping unload the merchant ship MV Neptuna, was one of at least 243 who died in the first of 64 attacks on Darwin between February 1942 and November 1943.

As dramatic and deadly as the bombing of Darwin was, Mrs Lee and most others in the Northern Territory regard it as a shamefully neglected part of Australia's history.

"They didn't want to say much about it at the time because they thought it could have led to a panic," she said.

"But it's terrible that people know very little about it."

Northern Territory chief minister Paul Henderson reflected her feelings on Saturday at the opening of the Defence of Darwin Experience, an interactive display that tells dozens of the stories of February 19, 1942 and the months that followed.

"For too long, Territorians have commemorated this day alone," Mr Henderson said.

"The bombing of Darwin has never received the acknowledgment it deserves.

"It is our duty to educate Australians about what happened in northern Australia and to preserve and immortalise what it was like living in a war zone."

Governor General Quentin Bryce said the lack of a wide comprehension of Darwin's role in the war effort would be addressed by the new exhibition.

"What happened in Darwin is not well known or understood," Ms Bryce said.

"Neither is the strategic role Darwin played in the war effort from 1942 to 1945."

Federal Veterans Affairs Minister Warren Snowdon said the events of February 19 had often been overlooked.

"It's never had the Hollywood treatment of Pearl Harbour," Mr Snowdon said.

"Perhaps it doesn't need it."

While Territorians believe their story has not had the attention it might have deserved in the past, it seems certain to get it on Sunday.

The commemoration, to be attended by the prime minister, Opposition leader and foreign dignitaries, will begin with the sounding of an air-raid siren at 9.58am, the time it belatedly sounded on the same day 70 years ago.

Forty seconds later an RAAF flyover of the city will represent the first of the two attacks that occurred that day, with Darwin High School Year 12 student Shelley Bryant ending the ceremony with a recital of the Ode Of Remembrance.

An earlier service on Sunday attended by US Ambassador Jeffrey Bleich will commemorate the deaths of 89 American sailors when the destroyer USS Peary was sunk in Darwin Harbour during the attack.

A television documentary, The Bombing of Darwin: An Awkward Truth, premiered on Friday.