Take as much umbrage as you want because I wasn't discounting the US effort in the Pacific at all, what I stated was that I take umbrage at those people who claim that Australia would have been speaking Japanese if it wasn't for the US saving our arse.
The fact is, that both the US and Great Britain plus Australia herself (geographically as much as militarily), prevented the Japanese from taking over Australia.
While the Japanese may have been able to blockade Australian ports, it would have been next to useless as they could not have stopped the flow of supplies from landlines to those ports. What they would have achieved was the temporary prevention of some supplies being received/sent from those ports but within a short enough period of time other ports would have been used. The country is so vast the Japanese would not have had enough ships to permanently blockade enough Australian ports to prevent us from receiving supplies from Great Britain and the US.
The port of Fremantle in Western Australia was one of the most significant ports in Australian wartime use and if the Japanese had succeeded in doing any damage to that port, the next port in Bunbury would have been used and then after that it would have been Albany. Bunbury is approximately 100km away from Fremantle and Albany about 1200km away from Fremantle. Australia's geography alone helped prevent some Japanese ambitions.
The Australian policy of 'Scorched Earth' which would see the complete destruction of all resources and infrastructure would have further made any territory conquered by Japan a hollow victory.
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