The District Commissioner
Addendum 40: The Story of the Australian Christian Martyrs
Additional information for Chapter 14 - Embogi near Sangara Mission)
The New Guinea Martyrs refer to 12 Australian, English and Papuan Anglican missionaries who were brutally murdered in several locations in August 1942 in New Guinea by invading Japanese forces and local New Guinea villagers. They are commemorated annually by the Anglican Church on September 2.
The civilian population was hurriedly withdrawn after Rabaul fell to the Japanese in January, 1942. Anglican missions though were urged by the Bishop, the Right Reverend Philip Strong, to stay with their people, and also believed to have been the decision of the missionaries themselves.
The photo above of the Right Rev’d Philip Strong, Army Chaplain, Bishop of New Guinea, and later Archbishop of Brisbane, with an unknown local man, was sourced from the 2 September 2019 article “Anglican Church remembers missionaries on New Guinea Martyrs Day” on the Anglican Focus website at
https://anglicanfocus.org.au/2019/09/02/anglican-church remembers-missionaries-on-new-guinea-martyrs-day/ and states the image is courtesy of the Records and Archives Centre.
Miss May Hayman, Nursing Sister at Gona Anglican Mission. An Australian nurse, originally from Adelaide, trained in Canberra, engaged to the Reverend Vivian Redlich the Anglican priest in charge of the nearby Sangara Mission who had hailed originally from England. Joined New Guinea staff in September, 1936, was stationed first at Dogura, then at Boianai, before being sent to Gona. She was attached to the Gona Anglican Mission when the Japanese landed there on 22 July 1942 and is believed to have elected to remain behind with three other members of the staff, the Reverend Henry Matthews, Reverend James Benson, and Miss Parkinson.
Miss Mavis Parkinson, Teacher at Gona Anglican Mission. An Australian, from the Parish of St. Paul's, Ipswich, Queensland. A member of the Comrades of St George.
Extracts from ACT Government Libraries - contributed by Michael Hall
“After the Japanese landed at Gona on 21 July 1942 they established a beach head to support their attempt to capture Port Moresby by crossing the Kokoda Track. Sister Hayman and the others at the Gona mission escaped inland, aiming to cross the Owen Stanley Range to Port Moresby ahead of the Japanese. For two weeks they evaded capture; however they were betrayed by locals and ambushed by the Japanese.
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May Hayman and Mavis Parkinson were imprisoned in a coffee hut at Popondetta. Sometime between 13 and 16 August, a native, warned off by the women from attempting a rescue, witnessed their murders by the Japanese at Jegarata, near Popondetta. Both women were buried in a shallow grave just south of Popondetta. May's fiancée, Vivian Redlich, was beheaded at Buna a few days later. When Australian troops re-occupied Popondetta both women were re-interred at the old Sangara Mission. The five Papuan natives who betrayed them were hanged.
Rev Benson was separated from the women during the Japanese ambush and survived. His whereabouts remained a mystery, and was thought dead, until September 1945 when Australian troops entered the Ramale valley in New Britain and found him, along with a Lutheran Bishop and other religious in a POW camp. He died in London in 1955 after emergency surgery to remove his appendix. His ashes are interred under the altar of Holy Cross Church, Gona.
The Australian War Memorial photo Accession Number 072683 above was taken by an unknown photographer 27 April, 1944 at Higaturu. It shows Mr JR Halligan, Secretary, Department of External Territories, standing alongside a small plot in the Sangara Mission grounds which containing the graves of May Hayman, (marked by the cross in the picture), Mavis Parkinson, and Lucian Tapiede (the Papuan Teacher who was killed by his own people when he stood up for the Missionaries he was accompanying), three mission martyrs who were murdered by the Japanese in August, 1942. There is a statue of Lucian Tapiedi, second from the right, of the 20th Century Martyrs, in Westminster Abbey in London.
Extract from the Pacific Wrecks website describes the
tragedy in the war at Buna, Oro Province :
“On August 14, 1942 a group of civilian missionaries turned over to the Japanese at Embi were interrogated and transported by truck to Buna. On the beach at Buna, a group of Sasebo No. 5 Special Navy Landing Party (SNLF) commanded by Tsukioka Torashigo executed a group of civilian prisoners. Each was beheaded by company commander Sub Lt Komai. The group included: Miss Brenchley, Miss Lashmar, Mr. Duffill, Mr. Anthony Gore, his son and wife Mrs. Gore (incorrectly noted as Louis Artango). Afterwards, their bodies were never recovered and were possibly thrown into the sea.”
Margery Brenchley was a Nursing Sister at Sangara Mission. An Australian nurse, from Holy Trinity, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane.
The State Library of South Australia photo above is of Miss Brenchley in the garden at the Mission around the time of 1934.
Miss Lilla Lashmar was a Teacher at Sangara Mission who was from Adelaide.
The State Library of South Australia photo above is of Miss Lashmar (woman at the rear) beside a river near the Mission around the time of 1934.
John Duffill was a missionary worker originally from Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Woolloongabba Queensland.
The photos above were obtained from the paper “Among the Ruins: The Story of the New Guinea Martyrs, by Padre Arthur Bell (1946)“ at anglicanhistory.org/aus/png/bell_ruins1946.html
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In 1947 nursing staff of the Canberra Community Hospital began collecting funds for a memorial to Sister Hayman and Sister Mona Tait who was killed after the fall of Singapore by the Japanese at Radji Beach (on Banka Island near Sumatra) on 16 February 1942. Enough funds were raised for an annual prize, the Mona Tait and May Hayman Memorial Prize, for the most successful candidates in the final nursing exams in the ACT.
The remainder was used to erect a plaque in the main entrance hall to the hospital. When the hospital closed in 1991 the plaque was removed to the RSL Headquarters in Campbell. A memorial stained-glass window was dedicated to May Hayman's memory in Canberra’s St. John’s Church Reid in 1949 and remains there to this day.
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In June 2018, Bishop Jeffrey Driver, former Archbishop of Adelaide, visited Gona where the Anglican Mission once had stood. "An elderly local guide pointed out the hospital where Sister May Hayman worked, and in the opposite direction, to the school where Mavis Parkinson taught. Nearly all the old mission site had returned to bush and, apart from the simple memorials, there were few physical signs of love and blood that had flowed."