Co-winner of the National Archives' Margaret George Award, Dr Christina Twomey, discusses the internment of 1500 Australian civilians by the Japanese in World War II.

Using the rich material held by the National Archives, Dr Twomey argues that civilian internees occupy an ambiguous place in the history of Australians at war.

She discusses internees' experiences of repatriation, their quest to be compensated for hardship and loss and the responses from the Australian Government.

In 1941, Claude and Dorothy Coats, South Australians by birth, were living in Malaya. They were newly married. Dorothy was only 21 years old. She had lived in Malaya for a little over a year. Claude was more experienced, a man in his mid-30s who had worked as a teacher for the Malayan Education Service since 1938. He was ambitious. As a first class honours graduate in philosophy from the University of Adelaide, Claude later said he had ‘looked forward to being Director of Education, Malaya' in the fullness of time. The Coats, Claude in particular, imagined a future as respected members of a prosperous ex-patriot community. ‘The war put paid to this', Claude noted bitterly in the mid-1950s. [1]

What type of war had the Coats endured? Like most of his peers in Malaya, Claude had joined his local volunteer force. One Australian woman who was evacuated to Sydney recalled that ‘in October 1941 practically every white man in Malaya was in camp training'. [2] When the Japanese invaded a few months later, these mostly British volunteer forces became involved in the effort to repel them. Despite actively resisting the Japanese, for official purposes Claude remained a civilian. ‘Although I made many requests I was told that I could not join the Australian Imperial Forces', he later protested. When Singapore fell in February 1942, Claude was interned. His own government and the British considered Claude to be a civilian internee, and not a prisoner of war (POW). POW was a status in international law reserved for defeated and captured members of a nation's armed forces. Claude Coats was a teacher. His Japanese captors had no truck with such fine distinctions, possibly because Coats had taken up arms against them. After spending most of 1942 in Changi, Claude Coats spent the rest of the war working alongside military prisoners on the Burma–Thailand railway. Unlike them, he was not eligible to receive the extensive repatriation benefits available to returned servicemen in the postwar period.

Dorothy Coats, like her husband, had retreated to the peninsula while undertaking various voluntary jobs for the war effort. As the fall of Singapore loomed, she attempted to escape. On 12 February 1942, Dorothy embarked on the Mata Hari, one of a flotilla of ships to leave Singapore. Most were bombed and sunk in the waters of the Banka Strait on Valentine's Day 1942, their occupants killed, drowned or washed ashore. The captain of Dorothy's ship surrendered. Captured at sea by the Japanese, Dorothy was then interned in various women's camps on Sumatra and its surrounding islands for the following three and a half years. [3]

Most of Dorothy's fellow internees were colonial Dutch women and children. There were a few other Australian civilian women in her camp, and a larger group of Australian Army nurses, all of whom had similarly failed to successfully escape Singapore. [4] Conditions in the camp were harsh, and deteriorated as the war progressed. Disease and malnutrition claimed the lives of at least nine other Australian women in Dorothy's camp.

At war's end, Dorothy and Claude were reunited. They attempted to recreate the life they had so briefly shared in Malaya before the war. But the experience of internment continued to affect their health and prey on their minds. Still a young woman, Dorothy had gone deaf in one ear. Claude's physical and mental health had been destroyed by his years as an internee. He firmly believed that his war neurosis and schizophrenia were the result of cerebral malaria. Claude was also painfully aware that his hoped-for career as a senior education bureaucrat was in tatters. Ill health forced his resignation from his Malayan post within a year of returning there. By the mid-1950s the Coats were living in Adelaide, where Claude had been forced to accept what he described as ‘a much humbler position with the South Australian Education Department'. [5] The Coats by this time had four young children, and were in the busy years of their lives. Yet Claude still found the time to write bitter letters to the government, complaining about the lack of consideration given to the losses of civilian internees like himself and his wife. ‘There cannot be many Australians living in Australia in my position', he wrote in 1956. ‘We suffered more hardship and loss than most members of the AIF, in view of the fact that owing to the war, we lost all our possessions in Malaya'. [6]

The story of Claude and Dorothy Coats is just one of hundreds I have assembled as part of my research in the National Archives on the internment of Australian civilians by the Japanese in World War ll. It raises in microcosm some of the issues I wish to explore more fully in this paper.

At war's end civilian internees like the Coats found themselves in a highly ambiguous position when it came to common understandings about participation in war, the nature of sacrifice and entitlements to compensation for suffering. By the mid-20th century in Australia, there was a well developed language that linked military service, sacrifice and the nation. The defence forces were expected to protect the nation and embody its values: their personal suffering was a sacrifice made out of duty to the nation. How, then, were civilian internees to understand their wartime experiences, their pain and suffering?

We can see the confusion in Claude Coat's language: his yardstick of sacrifice was the AIF and for him, internees' war experiences had exceeded that measure. ‘We suffered more hardship and loss than most members of the AIF'. Yet internees were civilians and they had no entitlement to claim that they had suffered as a consequence of service to the nation. In spite of the difference, that one former internee called the ‘accident that they were not in the forces', national allegiance had determined internees' war experiences: as enemies of the Japanese, they had been detained. [7]

Internees felt the contradictions and tensions of their position keenly, as did the Australian Government when it was forced to consider their plight at the conclusion of hostilities. The liberation of the internees from the camps, a moment of joy for internees themselves, posed more awkward problems for administrators. Who was responsible for the welfare of these people once they were released from the camps? Who was to pay for their repatriation? Could, and should, internees receive compensation for their suffering?

Reading the records of the Department of External Affairs and the Department of the Army begins to answer some of these questions. They also offer some basic contextual information about the numbers of internees, the location of their camps, the death rate among civilians. Assembling such information is necessary – not just for context, but to clarify the extent of internment. To date, there has been very little sustained historical study of Australian civilians interned by the Japanese in World War ll. [8] Until I began this research, even the official estimate of Australian civilians interned by the Japanese – 1553 people – was available in archival records, but had not been made public. Perhaps this is why the display cabinet devoted to civilian internees in the Australian War Memorial incorrectly states the number of internees as 500, less than a third of the official estimate.

The one exception to the general historical neglect of this issue relates to civilians interned in the mandated territory of New Guinea. For instance, the fate of 18 Australian women who were transported from Rabaul to Japan, where they spent the remainder of the war, has received some attention. This is largely because six of their number were Australian army nurses and the story has entered the POW canon. The experiences of civilian women in this group have emerged almost by default. [9] A few historians, and surviving families and descendants, have also worked hard to make better known the fate of other Australian civilians interned in the territory. Most of the men – almost 200 of them – perished along with 800 Australian servicemen when the ship on which they were travelling to Japan, the Montevideo Maru, was torpedoed by an American submarine in mid-1942. [10] This tragedy is probably the best-studied facet of civilian internment in the war, but it is only part of the story. Public knowledge about Australian civilians' experience of internment is largely derived from fiction: films such as Paradise Road (1997) and television series like Tenko, an ABC/BBC co-production of the 1980s. [11] The films might make good entertainment, but they are not necessarily good history. For a start, most of these productions focus on the experiences of women – for a particular set of reasons that I have analysed elsewhere – but they leave the interment of civilian men an almost completely unexamined phenomenon. [12] Claude Coats, for instance, would find almost no aspect of his internment experience represented there.

Part of my task, therefore, has to been to conduct research to clarify the extent of internment. The first section of this paper quickly sketches the basic ‘facts' of the internment of Australian civilians. The second, and major, section analyses how the government responded to the problems posed by internees – in terms of repatriation and compensation – when they were liberated. My approach, however, has not been to produce a relatively dry policy history. It would be possible to use the records available in the National Archives to write about civilian internment in ways which foreground the development of policy and the decisions of department secretaries and ministers. At every point along the way in this story, internees themselves contested, criticised and objected policy decisions. Others were grateful for the efforts of the Australian Government and its representatives, and wrote letters of thanks.

It has been one of the pleasures of working on this project to discover previously unexamined files, which contained hundreds of letters from former internees describing exactly how they felt about internment by the Japanese. Owing to the extensive correspondence of individual internees, it is possible to produce a history of civilian internment that includes an assessment of how internees felt about their internment and how it affected their lives. The holdings of the National Archives are more substantial than those of the Australian War Memorial on this point: a history of the internment of Australian civilians cannot be written without reference to them.

There is, of course, no series in the Archives that is entitled ‘Australian Civilians Interned by the Japanese: Personal Papers and Recollections'. There are policy files with titles like ‘Internees – Far East' that are essential tools in a project of this nature. Owing to the presence of an Australian Legation in Chungking, headed at that time by the energetic career diplomat Keith Officer, the records relating to the liberation of internees in China are especially rich.

The key series that unlocked this entire project for me, however, were the papers of a trust fund created in the 1950s to make cash grants to former internees, and enemy property claims files. I was able to reconstruct the story of Claude and Dorothy Coats, for example, by using these files. It could be said that both series have a financial context: former internees wrote to administrators in an effort to gain a grant, or have their property claims settled.

A lasting impression, however, is that for many applicants, the opportunity to bear witness to their war experiences and to articulate grievances overtook them. In the case of the fund, applicants were required to complete a blue foolscap form. But many could not confine themselves to the space allowed. They entered into extensive correspondence with the fund's secretary, detailing their experiences as an internee, their efforts to readjust after liberation, their struggle to comprehend the meaning of internment. Clearly, many were unaccustomed to expressing themselves in written form. The letters are often written on the small notepads of an earlier era, in an uneven hand with random capitalisation and underlining. In some, the emotion is almost palpable. The letters are an amazing resource for historians, and I hope that I do justice to their authors in the sections that follow.

Although the Australians caught and detained by the Japanese were certainly not a homogenous group, they could be considered ‘worldly Australian citizens'. The phrase comes from Jean Armstrong, a single woman from New South Wales now in her eighties, who had worked in Shanghai as a journalist since the 1930s. The Japanese interrogated Miss Armstrong, and she claimed to have been ‘beaten and held in terror for months before internment'. From 1943, Miss Armstrong's war was spent within the confines of the Lunghwa and YangtzePoo Civilian Internment Centres. [13] She described herself as a ‘woman who has been through Hell'. At war's end, after a visit to her camp by an Australian delegation, Jean Armstrong scribbled a hasty note of thanks. ‘Formally [sic] I was a worldly Australian citizen', she wrote on 7 August 1945, ‘now I come to you “beaten & broke”'. [14]

‘Worldly Australian citizens' is, I think, an excellent way of describing the lives of the people who found themselves so trapped by circumstance in 1942. They were a diverse group, many of whom had taken advantage of the increasing mobility that was to become such a defining feature of the 20th-century world. Some had family connections with Australia's political and social elites. One of the men drowned on the Montevideo Maru was the territory's Government Secretary and Deputy Administrator, Harold Page. He was the brother of Sir Earle Page, founder of the Country Party of Australia and Deputy Prime Minister in the 1920s and 1930s. In Shanghai, the cousin of Sir Keith Murdoch spent his war in an internment camp, as did Fred Drakeford, the brother of Australia's wartime Minister for Air, Arthur Drakeford.

Despite such connections, opportunities for advancement and employment seem to have lured these, and many others who became internees, to what was then still known, even in Australia, as the ‘Far East'. A significant proportion had not lived in Australia for many years, and had married within the ex-patriot community. Others had travelled to the region to follow their vocation, usually of a missionary nature. From 1942, and in China from 1943, these religious found themselves interned alongside doctors, nurses, rubber plantation managers, tin miners, schoolteachers, policemen, dock workers, housewives and children.

In all, approximately 1500 Australian civilians were captured by the Japanese in World War ll. Just over a quarter of this number were interned in Malaya and Singapore, most of them in Changi and Sime Road internment camps. The next most significant concentration of Australian civilian internees occurred in occupied China, where 331 Australians spent the war interned in camps in Shanghai and north China. A further 139 were held in Hong Kong. There was also a substantial number in the Australian Mandated Territories of New Guinea and Papua, Nauru and Ocean Island. In these islands, so close to the north coast of Australia, 328 people were captured and interned. A further 100 or so were scattered throughout camps in the Netherlands East Indies, with the majority detained in Java and Sumatra. Approximately 77 were in the Philippines, just over 60 in Japan itself and approximately 40 Australian civilians encountered the Japanese in Thailand. [15]

It is somewhat of an irony that Australians interned closest to the homeland of the enemy, Japan, fared better, in general, than those in Japanese-occupied territories further south. The most physically harsh conditions were endured in regions geographically closest to Australia: the islands of the mandated territory and those of the Indonesian archipelago.

The conditions and experiences of internment varied enormously depending on the region. There were mixed-sex family camps in Hong Kong, the Philippines and China. In other regions, such as the islands of the Netherlands East Indies, men were strictly separated from women and children. In major cities like Shanghai, some camps were in fact ordinary two-storey houses fenced off to become a compound. University campuses were turned into internment camps in Bangkok, Manila and Shanghai. In other cities, internees were crowded into former jails, such as Changi in Singapore and Stanley in Hong Kong. Although these camps were always overcrowded and the food was of limited or poor quality, they at least had the benefit of providing shelter.

In other regions, particularly in some parts of the East Indies, internees languished in atap (palm thatch) huts. The camps in which Dorothy Coats spent her internment, for instance, were little more than elaborate camp sites. Perhaps the most bizarre internment camp was formed on the island of New Britain, north of New Guinea. Here a mixed community composed largely of missionary priests and nuns from all parts of Europe and Australia spent at least half the war living in tunnels they had dug into the side of a hill. Subjected to frequent Allied bombing raids, the tunnels, although dark and airless, were the only safe form of shelter available. Once the brothers had finally created an airshaft, the Japanese commandeered the tunnels for themselves. The internees were then sent to live at the base of a deep valley where the light barely penetrated. The Japanese built a platform around the top of the ravine in order to watch the internees below. In the tropical zones, internees were prey to malnutrition and tropical diseases like beri-beri, dysentery and malaria. All of the camps were crowded and tuberculosis claimed lives during captivity and for many years thereafter.

Owing to these varying conditions of internment, death rates were uneven. In total, a quarter of all Australians interned by the Japanese did not survive the war. This figure, however, masks considerable diversity. Almost 90 per cent of Australians captured in the mandated territories did not survive the war. Most of them died on the Montevideo Maru, but others perished through violence, malnutrition and other means. There was much disease and malnutrition in the Indonesian islands, and at least 15 per cent of Australians interned there died. Internment was more benign in China, where fewer than four per cent of Australians interned died. Most of those who died were aged and ill before their internment. Nevertheless, captivity and inadequate medical care exacerbated existing illnesses. The death rate at Changi, a place synonymous in Australia with cruelty and neglect, was seven per cent. [16] Changi was therefore, in the words of one historian, one of the ‘better places of internment'. [17] But it was still an overcrowded jail with poor food and the continual threat of violence. It is Changi's connection with the Burma–Thailand railway, as the base from which men were transported to work in the slave camps, which is the basis of its reputation.

Three members of the Merritt family spent the war years interned in Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila. Frank and Mary Merritt had lived in the Philippines since the 1920s with their children, although the couple had married in Melbourne and identified as Australians. The circumstances of the Merritts' homecoming after the war were very different from the holidays in Australia the family enjoyed in the 1930s, when they were often accompanied by their Filipina amah. [18] In 1945, their privileged life in the American colony a distant memory, they arrived in clothing supplied by the Red Cross, and had been malnourished for three years.

Newspaper photographs taken of the Merritts in April 1945 show their bewilderment and displacement. Frank Merritt was photographed at Sydney's Central Station, towering above a sea of elderly women in hats, his gaunt face with its sad and haunted eyes staring directly into the camera lens. His daughter Jean appears as a tall, thin girl carrying a blanket tied with string and small hessian bags, belongings crucial in an internment camp, but out of place in metropolitan Sydney. The wrists poking out from her donated cardigan, and the ankles emerging from her ill-fitting striped cotton pants, are almost unnaturally tanned and thin. [19]

In the same months these photographs were taken, the Merritts were informed that £750 had been deducted from their account at the Bank of New South Wales for the costs of their repatriation. Mrs Merritt, incensed and insulted by the government's actions, informed the Australian Minister for Information that General Macarthur had ‘regarded us as soldiers in the front line and commended us for maintaining faith and refusing to cooperate with the enemy'. [20] Clearly Mrs Merritt, bolstered by Macarthur's enthusiastic outburst, considered that her war experiences, which constituted a daily interaction with ‘the enemy' and suffering at their hands, had placed her ‘in the front line' of the war. More tellingly, she also argued that to differentiate between the experiences of civilian internees and military prisoners of war was to make a specious distinction:

I cannot see why civilian prisoners-of-war should not be transported home as are soldier prisoners-of-war. The only difference between soldier prisoners-of-war and us is that our soldiers imprisoned by the Japanese received during their internment a sum equivalent to the pay received by Japanese soldiers, and we received nothing. I would have thought that our Government would be willing to help reinstate us. [21]

Mrs Merritt's husband Frank, an AIF Gallipoli veteran, also wondered how the federal government could turn a blind eye to the sufferings of Australian citizens affected by war: ‘It does not seem fair that Australia, which is funding 12,000,000 pounds for a lot of foreigners who have suffered the horrors and ravages of war, is treating so meanly its own nationals who have suffered just as horribly'. [22] Mrs Mary Merritt went public with her complaints. In May 1945, she addressed a meeting of the AIF Women's Association at the Melbourne Town Hall. If she had been aware before embarking how much repatriation would cost her, Mrs Merritt told the audience, she probably would have stayed behind in the Philippines. [23] The Merritts' public denouncement of the government, and their repeated pleas to officials, ultimately lead to a reversal of the initial decision. All costs associated with repatriating Australian ex-internees from the Philippines and other camps in the Asia–Pacific region, were met by the Australian Government. [24] Well into the 1950s, however, Mrs Merritt was still furious about what she saw as the Australian Government's parsimony and unsympathetic attitudes towards former civilian internees.

Quibbling over repatriation costs is ostensibly a small issue, but it does expose the tensions around issues of citizenship entitlements, sacrifice, service and government responsibility raised by the war experiences of civilian internees. The Merritts felt aggrieved precisely because they believed government-funded repatriation from a Japanese-run internment camp was their right as Australian nationals. They expressly resented the distinction the Australian Government drew between themselves and servicemen. What were the consequences for former civilian internees like Frank and Mary Merritt of returning to a society in which the citizen-soldier was the dominant figure in constructions of sacrifice in wartime? This dominance did not merely occur in cultural or commemorative forms.

The extensive benefits available to returned servicemen and women has led Stephen Garton to suggest that a ‘welfare apartheid' developed in 20th century Australia, one which distinguished and privileged those who had served over those who had not. [25] This ‘welfare apartheid', when coupled with changing attitudes to the state in the 20th century, left civilian internees in a highly ambiguous position. Warfare in the 20th century transformed ‘the conception of the state from an entity that protected the rights of all citizens', American historian John Bodnar has argued, ‘to one that had distinctive obligations to some citizens whom it had hurt or punished'. [26] In the immediate postwar years, the dilemma for former civilian internees was that they felt hurt and punished, but could find no arm of the state willing to assume distinctive obligations for them. Their war experiences prompted a consideration of what, if any, responsibilities the nation state bore towards its citizens who chose to live beyond its borders, and then unwittingly suffered owing to their nationality when confronted by the nation's military enemy. The case of civilian internees became not so much a question of citizenship ‘rights' as it did a matter of charity – and accordingly, it invoked familiar issues of discretion, judgement and contingency.

Commonly held assumptions about participation in war and the nature of sacrifice allowed little space for civilians deeply affected by the consequences of war. One young woman whose parents were prominent Salvation Army officers in Shanghai expressed her confusion over how to interpret a war spent as a civilian internee like this:

I was not fighting for my country (as much as I would like to have been) when taken prisoner by the Japanese, but I am an Australian and I did lose all but what I arrived home in, & that was donated by the Australian Red Cross, & at the age of twenty had to start my life in Australia with no assistance from my parents who had also lost everything they possessed. I have since lost my Dad whom the Japanese took away from me for 3 years, and whom I blame for his death. [27]

The reassurance that this former internee would ‘like to have been … fighting for my country' underscores the central place that war service held in perceptions of wartime sacrifice.

In the early postwar years, the Australian Government's attitude towards assisting and compensating former civilian internees was an effort to blend pragmatism with compassion, with the ultimate aim of limiting expenditure for the Commonwealth. The initial decision to bill released internees for their repatriation cost was reversed and subsequently all former internees were entitled to be returned to Australia at government expense. [28] Upon release, Australian officials provided internees with a non-recoverable cash grant of £10. The federal government also entered into an arrangement with the Australian Red Cross to provide short-term hostel accommodation for repatriated civilian internees – Australians and other nationalities – who had no families or friends to support them upon return. Thus in the immediate postwar years the support for the majority of former civilian internees was decidedly short-term. They had not been serving members of the armed forces, and neither they nor their dependents were entitled to any long-term or continuing repatriation benefits.

This caused resentment among some former internees: ‘Civilian Internees … lost their homes, personal belongings and still suffer ill-health no less than POWs', one former internee complained to the local member of Parliament in 1953. ‘The Japanese treated all their prisoners the same', another woman interned in the Philippines complained, ‘they starved us and ill treated us all whether we were civilians or military men, and no one who went through that ordeal from 1941 … can boast that they are free of any mark'. [29] The English wife of an Australian mining engineer tortured in Siam and ultimately interned at Changi attempted to remind the government that most Australians had been spared the horrors of front-line warfare. Her husband had not. Mrs Scott-Settle believed it only right that her husband received some compensation for all he had suffered. It was unfair in a country ‘where they pride themselves on voluntary service and no conscription', she wrote, where people had been ‘spared Blitz and front-line atrocities' that ‘men who have been nearly ruined physically and mentally too – should have to carry on against overwhelming difficulties of rehabilitation'. [30] Claude Coats, the teacher from Malaya whose story opened this paper, felt it difficult to get help from any source. So did Robert Cherry, a power station engineer in his early-30s who had been interned in Hong Kong. He, like Coats, had tried seeking repatriation benefits from the Australian Government but had been turned down because he was not in the AIF. In the early 1950s, Cherry complained: ‘It seems I have fallen between two stools and have no one to appeal to'. [31]

There was one group for whom an exception was made. They were civilian internees who had been captured in the mandated territories, and the dependents of such internees who had died during, or as a result of, their internment. These parties were entitled to receive benefits under the New Guinea Civilian War Pension Scheme. This scheme entitled eligible recipients to ‘pensions, medical benefits, children's education allowances, furniture grants and remarriage gratuities at the same rates and under the same conditions as would apply under the Repatriation Act to a member of the forces'. [32] In short, the Australian Government gave, and continues to give, full entitlements to civilians captured within the borders of its external territories, and it was also prepared to pass on these entitlements to the dependents of those who died as the result of internment. [33]

Other situations arose in the postwar years where the government would prove to be less generous. The Philippines repatriation scandal would not be the last time that the Australian Government decided that internees had incurred their own expenses in captivity and that the government had settled accounts only on their behalf. In peacetime, such costs should be recouped. This was a 1940s version of user-pays. It resulted in some former internees receiving constant and cruel reminders of the years in captivity. Internees in China, Japan and Bangkok had received small cash advances during their internment from the Swiss protecting power. In this they were fortunate, because most other camps had no such access. The internees had used this money to buy small items from the camp canteen, and had signed notes promising that they would repay the funds once the war was over. Many of them probably completely forgot about the rectangular sheets of thin paper they signed each month. It is a testament to the powers of bureaucracy that in light of all the lives and assets lost during the course of the Pacific War, that in the late 1940s the Australian Government was in receipt of the individual slips of paper that some internees had signed each month prior to receiving their allowance from the Swiss. In the postwar years these slips were used as evidence upon which the Commonwealth Investigation Service, the predecessor of ASIO, followed up former internees in their workplaces and homes and insisted that the money be repaid to the Commonwealth. Sometimes the activities of its officers seemed to fly in the face of the Department of External Affairs' own policy that ‘where repayment of such advance may involve undue hardship, recovery is not pressed'. [34]

The recovery of relief monies was evidence of the advantages of loyal and long-standing service to an employer or religious order. Tin mining companies whose employees had been captured while at work in Siam and Malaya forwarded the monies owing to the government on behalf of their employees with barely a moment’s hesitation. [35] The same was true of the Sacred Heart order, who gladly repaid money that had been given to their nuns interned in Japan. [36] Members of the China Inland Mission, the Salvation Army and the Methodist Missionary Society who received relief payments from the Swiss during the war also had their employers cover such costs. [37]

Individuals fared less well. People whose lives had so clearly been interrupted by internment – families who were living in bedsits in Manly, men working as drovers at the Newmarket Sale Yards or driving a timber jinker – were pursued for the debts they had incurred while interned by the Japanese. Violet Farmer, a widow in her sixties, was pursued for a debt of £600 she had incurred in a Shanghai internment camp. She had the Red Cross write to the department, telling them that she was ‘a very worried and unhappy woman with reason for being concerned about her future’. Even the Department of Social Security wrote on her behalf, saying that Mrs Farmer had been on unemployment benefits for two years and that she ‘is not in a good financial position’. Still the debt was not waived. Three years later, her son, a fruit picker in Innisfail, was contacted to see if he could settle his mother’s debt. [38]

Mr Isaac Uroe, who had been interned in Shanghai, said, in 1950, that the bill for £166 ‘came to me at the most inappropriate moment, as a shock. Having mother & family to support I am absolutely lost having no knowledge how to squeeze blood out of a stone. I have no property and no assets of any type’. [39] Lionel Roope, also interned in Shanghai, stated that his debt ‘was a great surprise, as the relief advances during my internment in Japanese prison camps were for the occasional purchase of peanut butter and other bread spreads in the Camp’s canteens. I felt certain that the Government would bear the expense for us (from the Swiss Consulate there) as prisoners of war. If not, then we must certainly be described as ‘self-supporting’ prisoners of war’. [40]

Others pursued for the debt were more overtly hostile. Judah Whitgob fulminated in 1950: ‘Surely being interned as a loyal British subject … losing every stitch of clothing, and all belongings and losing one’s job besides the inhuman treatment we suffered in camp should be sufficient, and the Government should try and rehabilitate us instead of charging us for loans whilst being interned’. ‘It is the principle not the actual cash which counts’, he concluded. ‘And paying for being interned is hard’. [41] Despite the protests of most people who were pursued, the Department of External Affairs was dogged in its effort to recoup the money. They enlisted the help of intelligence officers, who visited the workplaces and homes of former internees, interviewing them about their financial affairs. They delved into private affairs, in one case unearthing a long-held secret about illegitimate birth. [42]

One former internee lost his job after his employer became suspicious about the visits and inquiries of federal agents. [43] Sometimes the efforts to press people into settling the debts endured for years. There was the capacity to waive the debt in hard cases, but the Department of Finance pressed for settlement. Frank Hooley, a man in his sixties married to a younger Chinese woman, with four children to support, was pursued for years. Many times the External Affairs people who interviewed him felt sympathetic to his plight – the family was clearly in poverty – but they did not receive permission to waive the debt. [44] It is ironic that the files that contain the details of many of these cases are titled ‘Protection’.

Some former internees actively evaded the prying eyes of the government and its officers, in an effort to avoid being harassed for their wartime debts. Others became persistent correspondents, demanding recompense for all they had lost. Almost all of these letter-writers were forced to accept that they would receive no continuing benefits from the government in the immediate postwar years and, for those who were not resident in the territories, no compensation for the destruction or confiscation of their property and assets by the Japanese. Those former internees with links to Australian external territories were eligible to receive compensation from the War Damage Commission for their property that had been destroyed as a result of enemy action. The majority, who had the misfortune to be outside Australian territories, and to have their property there destroyed as a result of enemy action, were less fortunate.

Mr Alexander Grimpel, who had been interned in China along with his wife and daughter, corresponded with the Controller of Enemy Property for over a decade in an attempt to get some compensation for the losses his family had sustained. Mr Grimpel claimed £750 for himself and £500 for his daughter, Lily, in ‘the hope that you will do justice to your subjects who were deliberately robbed of their personal belongings and had to be replaced at a great sacrifice’. [45] The Grimpels were to be sorely disappointed. They were informed in September 1951 that the terms of the Peace Treaty negotiated with Japan ‘do not extend to property lost or damaged in countries occupied by Japan during the war, nor does the Treaty provide for the satisfaction of claims for personal injury’. [46]

There was one exception to this general case. Siam, the only independent nation in the region to declare war on the Allies, paid dearly for its allegiance with Japan. Accordingly, the Australian Government negotiated a separate Peace Treaty with Siam. Article VIII of that Treaty provided for the compensation of Australians ‘detained or interned by the Government of Siam or their agents or subjects’ for ‘any loss or injury sustained by them’ as a result of detention or internment. [47] The dependents of any Australians whose death was caused by the Siamese Government or its agents were also eligible to claim compensation.

In the late 1940s, a British Commonwealth-Siamese Claims Committee was established to arbitrate claims by individuals and companies against the Siamese Government. Some former Australian civilian internees received generous grants from this fund. John Hugh Hughes, a shift engineer for a mining company, had attempted to flee Siam and enter Burma during the chaotic days of December 1941. He and his party of fellow Australians and British were arrested and detained by Siamese troops for almost a month before they were interned in Bangkok. The claims committee awarded him over £2000 compensation in August 1948. [48] A few years later, Geoffrey Scott-Settle received £6502. Now happily settled after a peripatetic postwar life marred by illness – ‘we love Tasmania and everything connected with it, even the bracing weather we have up here in the mountains’ – Scott-Settle and his wife were delighted to receive the money. Mrs Scott-Settle was so moved that she invited the Delegate of the Controller of Enemy Property, a senior Canberra bureaucrat to dinner: ‘If ever you should be this way ‘incognito’ for a holiday or fishing – you are more than welcome to our humble fare’. [49]

The one avenue that remained open to families such as the Grimpels was the funds available from Japanese assets in Australia. In 1952, the Menzies government announced that it would use a portion of these assets, £25,000, to create the Civilian Internees' Trust Fund. Simultaneously, and using the same funds, the government also created a £250,000 Trust Fund for ex-POWs. The proportion of funds granted to the civilians was relatively generous, given that there were 1500 internees and 22,000 POWs. The terms of the fund for civilian internees were different, and allowed greater discretion by the Trustees to determine who would be eligible for the grant, and the type of grant they would receive. Former internees had to provide evidence that they were ‘suffering distress or hardship as a result of loss of limb or other permanent disability (physical or mental) directly referable to the conditions of internment’. Applicants also had to include information on their marital state, the number of children, and fill in one side of a foolscap form detailing their financial position. The same information was to be supplied by dependants of a deceased internee, and they had to prove that the internee died during captivity or, if the death occurred after release, that it was directly referable to the conditions of internment. [50] A further £20,000 was voted to the Fund in 1957, and distributed to existing applicants and any new cases that arose from renewed publicity.

Some former internees considered the Fund to be miserly. John Bryant, who was in his late-40s when interned in Borneo, thought £25,000 was a ‘paltry sam [sic]'. He waived his right to claim on the fund in order that those more deserving and needy should receive assistance. [51] Others thought that the terms of a grant, most specifically the essential requirement that former internees have a permanent disability, were unfair. The former editor of the South China Post, Queenslander Richard Cloake, who spent the war interned in Hong Kong, objected. ‘The losses of most internees were material rather than physical’, he insisted. ‘I feel that at least some nominal recompense should be made to those who seek it and I am raising my small (probably futile) voice to that end’. [52] One Salvation Army missionary interned in China agreed: ‘civilians chief injury was the material losses as well as the physical and mental suffering of the time’. He was also inclined, as Claude Coats had been, to point out that POWs received full pay, full medical treatment upon return and in a material sense had lost only their kit. Civilians, in contrast ‘usually lived in the foreign land’, lost all their assets, received no pay during internment and no rehabilitation. [53]

The requirement to fill out financial details was interpreted in some quarters as the imposition of a means test. Frank Merritt, who had protested a decade earlier about being billed for his repatriation costs from the Philippines commented that: ‘The terms under which Australian ex-internees may claim compensation are without precedent in other countries and are astonishing to say the least’. [54] Another objected so strenuously to the ‘means test’ that he let his application lapse rather than ‘undergo this further humiliation’. [55] The widows of the men lost in New Guinea were appalled at the invasive questioning, and the distinction thus drawn between themselves and POW widows. ‘The military widows had none of this dreadful business’, Mrs Mona Bruckshaw complained, ‘but were just given their money … Before last Christmas’. [56] ‘All have told me that they would greatly prefer an equal allocation to all & be spared the humiliation of filling in this application form’, Mrs Lorna Hosking, widow of the territory's medical officer informed the Fund. [57]

An element of judgement did enter the Trustees’ decisions, and applicants were sufficiently versed in the language of welfare to identify elements of ‘charity’ when they saw them. One man who had been interned in Changi stated baldly: ‘I felt that I was a candidate for compensation, rather than a supplicant for relief’. [58] The widow of another: ‘I appeal for justice not charity’. [59] Means testing, when combined with questions about marital status, and the need for evidence from doctors and psychiatrists caused some to question the equity of the arrangement. ‘I can only conclude with “Let right be done”’, wrote Amy Westwood, ‘I have faith and I am not asking for charity but I feel I have a legitimate claim’. [60] ‘I thought that perhaps some consideration might be shown to all of us who were interned', wrote one who had been interned in Changi, ‘we were interned through no fault of our own’. [61]

Sometimes the Trustees’ decisions did seem harsh. They were inclined to give generously to the widows of men captured in the external territories, even when recipients like Mrs Lorna Hosking withdrew her claim in protest at the means testing. She still received a basic £50 grant. Former internees themselves were not always so fortunate. Mr Robert Roope, who had worked before the war as a Stenographer to the Engineer in Chief of the Shanghai Power Company, was denied any grant. This was despite his inability to repay the money he had received from the Swiss in China and had spent on peanut butter, and for which he had been pursued by the Commonwealth Investigation Service. In his still perfect script, written on notepaper from Long Bay gaol where he had been detained for failing to pay a maintenance debt for his children while unemployed, Roope detailed how his ailments arising from internment had prevented him from finding work. Trusting the prison doctor to forward a medical certificate, an unfounded faith, the Fund’s administrators did not receive it and denied him any grant. The stigma of imprisonment in his home society seems to have militated against Mr Roope receiving any consideration despite his life being so clearly derailed by internment by the Japanese. [62]

There is a sense among some former internees who corresponded with the Trust Fund that they deserved compensation and reparation for all they had suffered, and a corresponding frustration that they could find no state or department of government willing to hear them out. As victims of war, former internees felt entitled to compensation from the state. But which state, which office, which department? Five years after his release from internment in China, James Lewis died at the age of 46 from the after-effects of malnutrition and abuse. He left behind a young widow and three children; the fourth was born two weeks after his death. His wife, Marie, wrote in desperation: ‘All my efforts to obtain some small measure of our family rights, which were taken away by the war, has only resulted in one official Department passing the buck on to another Department, and I am getting very tired of it’. [63] ‘I paid rates and taxes all those years’ and deserve some compensation for wartime suffering, another former internee wrote. [64] Mrs Ruby Taylor, interned in China, stated that she had lost her business and all worldly possessions:

I lodged my claim for these with Canberra on my return to Australia thru Senator Cooper. My opinion is that “Japan” should pay me for all this. I don’t expect my Government or China to pay me but I do expect my Government to see that Japan does pay me. I returned to Australia without a penny after three years internment. [65]

Those former internees who wrote to the Fund thinking that it would reimburse their stolen, confiscated or destroyed assets were to be sorely disappointed. When the Fund closed in the 1960s, the average grant for successful claimants was £140, but this did not settle the claims for the loss of businesses, homes and livelihoods. [66] Throughout the Trust Fund’s decade-long operation, the Trustees always remained anxious that the public not perceive that civilian internees were receiving more than their military counterparts. At times, they appear to have been insufficiently sympathetic to people who had endured a difficult war. At one point, one Trustee expressed frustration that most of the applicants were old anyway and that ‘The question arises in the mind of some of my co-trustees whether it is intended in cases such as these a substantial grant should be made for what, after all, is little more than a failure of health common to most of us as the years overtake us’. [67] The Treasury in fact considered that ‘in comparison with ex-prisoners of war … ex-internees and their dependents have been well treated’. [68]

The workings of the Civilian Internees’ Trust Fund clearly demonstrated that internees felt they had some entitlement to compensation as Australian citizens who had suffered as a consequence of their nation’s involvement in war. The letters former internees wrote to the Fund reflected the ambiguous place that civilian internees occupied in the language of war, and showed how they struggled to understand these contradictions. Some even disputed the definition of what constituted war service and contested the right of former service people to be the most well rewarded beneficiaries of repatriation benefits. The administration of the Fund showed that those in power construed former internees' receipt of a grant as a privilege rather than a right, and it reflected older attitudes of philanthropy and charity. The most ‘deserving’ cases were almost always widows with dependent children, the ‘undeserving’ were those like Mr Roope who were unemployed men who did not appear to support their families.

The ambivalence towards civilian internees present in the 1940s and 1950s did not lend itself to their early incorporation into national commemorations of sacrifice and suffering during World War II. The voices of civilian internees that we can read in the National Archives remained essentially individual pleas. Although there were common concerns expressed by internees – resentment about the distinction between themselves and POWs, the sense that internees did not fit into common ways of understanding sacrifice and suffering – they never merged into any form of public activism. Surviving POWs had links that pre-existed their captivity; in freedom, battalion associations and the like provided important communities of remembrance. Civilian internees, in contrast, were a more diverse group who did not share such extensive and formative ties. Many of them could not return to their homes in the post-war period owing to the colonial independence movements that World War ll had partly set in train. The most cohesive communities prior to internment – the religious orders of nuns and priests, the missionary organisations – were not by nature given to big-noting their suffering for public-political purposes. They were more likely to point to internment as a test of faith.

Collective memories are not simply forged through top-down direction and organisation of remembrance campaigns. They tend to coalesce around the intersection of public pomp and communities of remembrance. Civilian internees have not fared well in either of these arenas, and they remain relatively invisible in Australian collective memories of World War II. While the internment of civilians is a public absence, it was very much present in the minds of those who survived the camps. ‘We very nearly did not come out of that internment camp alive’, Mary Merritt reflected in the 1950s. ‘Every night, towards the end, when I kissed my daughter good-night I wondered if she would be alive in the morning. Only those who were interned under similar conditions could understand how long it took to put the war and the Japanese out of our minds’. [69]