Architectures of the Pacific Carceral Archipelago: Second World War Internment and Prisoner of War Camps

Abstract

Characterisations of the Pacific Basin as a tropical archipelago essentialise its geo-cultural diversity as an alternative way of envisioning the region and its politics. This paper offers a darker projection of this archipelagic imagination as one forged by imperial competition and wartime violence. It traces its genesis across the history of the Second World War internment and prisoner of war camps. Their spatial proliferation as a carceral geography produces a variety of temporary environments where civil and legal rights are suspended. The roles adopted by captors in their treatment of prisoners reflect the social prejudices of the period, the politics of imperialism and the specific responses of warring nations during various stages of the conflict. This paper asks how architectural scholarship might address this imperial history. It draws together diverse models of incarceration related to the Pacific War, acknowledging the different treatment of racially different colonial and national subjects and tracing their passage through multiple spatial configurations of camps. The camps in Australia are contextualised in their wider Pacific geography with special attention to Victoria’s Tatura Group.

Acknowledgements

My special thanks to Lurline and Arthur Knee at the Tatura Irrigation and Wartime Camps Museum and Warwick Finlay and Kay Roberts at the Murchison Historical Society.

Notes

1. Japanese imperial (and military) ambitions for internationalisation, announced in 1940, were of uniting Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceana under the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

2. James Wood, “The Australian Military Contribution to the Occupation of Japan, 1945–52,” Australian War Memorial, accessed May 29, 2016, https://www.awm.gov.au/sites/default/files/BCOF_history.pdf.

3. Australia’s War, 1939–1945; Australian Prisoners of War 1940–1945, accessed May 31, 2016, http://www.ww2australia.gov.au/behindwire/.

4. British Commonwealth Occupation Force, 1942–45; Australian War Memorial, accessed May 28, 2016, https://www.awm.gov.au/atwar/bcof/.

5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), Part Four: Prison, chap. 3, “The Carceral,” 297, 307. See also “Docile Bodies,” 138, and “The Panopticon,” 204–205.

6. Foucault’s ideas on these social technologies which he described as “biopower” were first discussed in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, The Will to Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), Part Five, “The Right of Death and Power over Life,” 140–45.

7. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 293.

8. See Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Frank Dikotter and Ian Brown, eds. (London: Hurst & Co. Ltd, 2007).

9. See “The Camp as Nomos of the Modern,” trans. D. Heller-Roazen, in Violence, Identity and Self-Determination, ed. H. de Vries and S. Weber (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press 1997), 106–118; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

10. Paul Carter, “Tropical Knowledge: Archipelagic Consciousness and the Governance of Excess,” etropic 12, no. 2 (2013), Refereed Proceedings of the Tropics of the Imagination Conference, 4–5 July 2013, The Cairns Institute, James Cook University, 79–95, p. 79, accessed May 30, 2016, http://etropic.jcu.edu.au/pgcontents.htm.

11. Eduard Glissant describes the Caribbean in terms of its cultural plurality. See J. Michael Dash, Eduard Glissent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 23. Glissant depicts the world as made up of archipelagos of culture exemplified in the creative global chaos of the Caribbean.

12. Carter, “Tropical Knowledge,” 90.

13. Luis Filipe F. R. Thomaz, “The Image of the Archipelago in Portuguese Cartography of the 16th and Early 17th Centuries,” in South East Asia, Colonial History: Imperialism before 1800, ed. Paul Krakotska (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 42–88.

14. Alison Mountz, “The Enforcement Archipelago: Detention, Haunting, and Asylum on Islands,” Political Geography 30 (2011): 118–128, esp. 121.

15. The two major sources on penal architecture in Australia are James Semple Kerr, Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Australia’s Places of Confinement, 1788–1988 (Sydney: S. H. Ervin Gallery in association with the Australian Bicentennial Authority); and Australian Convict Sites: World Heritage Nomination (Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, 2008).

16. Perhaps the most significant example is Ken Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Publishing, 2008) which argues for the centrality of these monuments to the Australian social memoryscape.

17. Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1939–1941, Australia in the War of 1939–1945, vol. 1 (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1965). Appendix 4, “The Wartime Treatment of Aliens,” is available at www.awm.gov.au/collection/records/awmohww2/civil/vol1/awmohww2-civil-vol1-app4.pdf; Bill Bunbury, Rabbits & Spaghetti: Captives and Comrades, Australians, Italians and the War, 1939–1945 (Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1995); Margaret Bevege, Behind Barbed Wire: Internment in Australia during World War II (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993); Yuriko Nagata, Unwanted Aliens: Japanese Internment in Australia (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996); Klaus Neumann, In the Interest of National Security: Civilian Internment in Australia during World War II (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 2006); Cyril Pearl, The Dunera Scandal: Deported by Mistake (London and Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1983); The Dunera Affair, Paul R. Bartrop and Gabrielle Eisen, eds., (Melbourne: Schwartz and Wilkinson, 1990).

18. Dan Stone, The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2015).

19. There is a vast literature on this topic. An example that combines material on the United States and Australia is Alien Justice: Wartime Internment in Australia and North America, Kay Saunders and Roger Daniels, eds., (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000).

20. Tatura District and Historical Society, “Collar the Lot: World War 2 Internment Camps, Tatura,” unedited interviews on a compact disc distributed by the Tatura District and Historical Society, 1997; Bevege, Behind Barbed Wire; Joyce Hammond, Walls of Wire: Tatura, Rushworth, Murchison (Tatura: Joyce Hammond, 1990); Lurline Knee and Arthur Knee, Marched In: Seven Internment and Prisoner of War Camps in the Tartura Area during World War 2 (Tatura, Vic.: Tatura and District Historical Society, 2008); Johann Peter Weiss, It Wasn’t Really Necessary: Internment in Australia with Emphasis on the Second World War (Eden Hills, SA: J.P. Weiss, 2003). Other sources include Enemy Aliens, Cate Elkner, Ilma O’Brien, Gaetano Rando and Anthony Cappello, eds., (Bacchus Marsh, Vic.: Connor Court, 2005); Alan Fitzgerald, The Italian Farming Soldiers (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1991); The Dunera Affair, Bartrop and Eisen, eds.

21. Dominique Moran, Carceral Geography: Spaces and Practices of Incarceration (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention, Dominique Moran, Nick Gill, and Deirdre Conlin, eds., (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2013).

22. Moran, Carceral Geography, 1–3.

23. David Arnold, “The Colonial Prison: Power Knowledge and Penology in 19th Century India,” in A Subaltern Studies Reader, ed. Ranajit Guha (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 140–178.

24. Moran, Carceral Geography, 4.

25. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Pimlico, 1998).

26. Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn, Forgotten Captives in Japanese-Occupied Asia (London and New York: Routledge, 2008).

27. Anoma Pieris, “Editorial: Inbetween Spaces for Border Thinking,” Fabrications 25, no. 3 (2015): 301–304.

28. “Japanese Prisoner of War and Internment Camps during World War II,” published in January 1980 by the Medical Research Committee of American Ex-Prisoners of War, Inc. Research and proof of authenticity by Frances Worthington Lipe. Available at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5540008.

29. POW Camps in Japan Proper, POW Research Network, Japan, accessed February 29, 2016, http://www.powresearch.jp/en/archive/camplist/index.html#seikatsu.

30. Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining, UNESCO World Heritage List, accessed February 29, 2016, http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1484.

31. Tokyo No. 4 B, Naoetsu, Center for Research, Allied POWs under the Japanese. Available at http://www.mansell.com/pow-index.html; Diary of Signaller Don Fraser, Prisoners of War of the Japanese 1942–1945, Research and articles by Lt.Col. Peter Winstanley. Accessed February 29, 2016, http://www.pows-of-japan.net/articles/34a.htm. There were approximately 3000 Australian POWs in Japan.

32. War Office records, WO 357/5, 1946–48, The National Archives, UK.

33. Australian War Memorial, General information about Australian prisoners of the Japanese. Available at: https://www.awm.gov.au/encyclopedia/pow/general_info/. See Anoma Pieris, “Changi: A Penal Genealogy across the Pacific War,” Fabrications 26, no. 1 (2016): 50–71, for a previous discussion of this history.

34. Report of the Gillman Commission in Construction and defence of Singapore naval base, 1927, CO273/538 PRO, The National Archives, Kew; L. N. Malan, “Singapore: The Founding of the New Defences,” Royal Engineers Journal 52 (1938): 213–35; Pieris, “Changi,” 57–58.

35. See Between Two Oceans: A Military History of Singapore from First Settlement to Final British Withdrawal, Malcolm H. Murfett, John Miksic, Brian Farell, Chiang Ming Shun, eds., (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1999).

36. Julian Davison and Luca Invernizzi Tettoni, Black and White: The Singapore House, 1898–1941 (Singapore: Talisman, 2006), 109–131.

37. Henry Probert, The History of Changi (Singapore: Changi Prison Press, 1965; reprinted Singapore: Changi University Press 2006), 18, 23; J. F. F., “Changi Cantonment 1933–37,” Royal Engineers Journal 51 (1937): 355–362, esp. 357–362.

38. Geoffrey S. Smith, “The Japanese Canadians in World War II” in Alien Justice, Saunders and Daniels, eds., 106. An important source on Canadian internment is Greg Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 171–175.

39. Roy Miki and Cassandra Kobayashi, Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement (Vancouver: Talon Books, 1991), 30.

40. Henry Shimizu, Images of Internment: Life in the New Denver Internment Camp 1942–1946 (Toronto: Ti-Jean Press, 2008). Based on measurements taken at New Denver Nikkei Internment Musuem.

41. Arnold Krammer, Nazi Prisoners of War in America (New York: Stein and Day, 1979); Ruth Beaumont Cook, Guests Behind the Barbed Wire: German POWs in America: A True Story of Hope and Friendship (Birmingham, AL: Crane Hill Publishers, 2007). Numbers given in these books vary from 371,000 to 425,000 POWs. In the United States, these facilities also included Assembly Centres, Relocation Centres, Isolation Centres, Justice Department Camps and Temporary Camps.

42. Population numbers of naturalised Italians and Germans were too great (several million) to make their detention feasible, so the numbers detained were fewer and more specialised.

43. Tetsuden Kashima, Judgement Without Trial: Japanese American Internment during World War II (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2003), 136. See Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites, Jeffery Burton, Mary M. Farrell, Florence B. Lord and Richard W. Lord, eds., (Tucson, AZ: National Parks Service Publications in Anthropology, 1999).

44. President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorised the internment with Executive Order 9066, issued 19 February 1942. See Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1997, 2000); Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1971).

45. Harlan D. Unrau, The Evacuation and Relocation of Persons of Japanese Ancestry During World War II: A Historical Study of the Manzanar War Relocation Center (Denver, CO: US Department of the Interior, National Parks Service, 1996).

46. There were two island camps: Peat Island, NSW; Rottnest Island, WA.

47. Berrima, Bourke, Trial Bay and Holsworthy (NSW), Molonglo (ACT), Enoggera (Queensland), Langwarrin (Victoria), Rottnest and Garden Islands (WA), Torrens Island and Fort Larges (SA) and Bruny Island (Tasmania). See Gerhard Fischer, Enemy Aliens: Internment and the Homefront Experience in Australia, 1914–1920 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989); Nadine Helmi and Gerard Fischer, The Eenemy at Home: German Internees in World War I Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2011).

48. Camps were established at Cowra, Hay, Holsworthy, Bathhurst, Long Bay, Orange (NSW), Tatura (including Rushworth and Dhurringile, Victoria) and Loveday (SA).

49. Wartime internment camps in Australia, National Archives of Australia (online resource). Available at http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/snapshots/internment-camps/index.aspx. Some 7,103 aliens, naturalised British subjects and those natural born of enemy parents were apprehended and 1875 were released. Some 7862 overseas national aliens were shipped to Australia, 6110 POWs and at its peak in 1942, 10,731 local and overseas internees were held in Australia. Weiss, “It Wasn’t Really Necessary,” 239–240.

50. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 9. Following the National Security (Aliens Control) Regulations of 1939.

51. Report on Directorate of Prisoners of War and Internees (Australian Army Headquarters, Directorate of Prisoners of War and Internees), 1939–1951 ORMF0024 (Official Record), 91.

52. Matt Young and Charis Chang, “The Forgotten History of Australia’s Prisoner of War Camps,” Herald Sun, April 25, 2014. Available at http://www.heraldsun.com.au/anzac-centenary/the-forgotten-history-of-australias-prisoner-of-war-camps/story-fnmeodwa-1226895841822.

53. Judith Bennett, “Japanese Wartime Internees in New Zealand,” Journal of Pacific History 44, no. 1 (2009), 64, 70. Some 803 Japanese POWs were held at the site of the Featherston military camp.

54. War Cabinet Agendum 157/1940, supplement No. 1. New Zealand did not agree to accept prisoners on behalf of Britain. Holsworthy, Enoggera and Rottnest Island date from World War I.

55. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 22.

56. These tables are based on preliminary figures in these and the secondary sources mentioned previously.

57. State Library of Victoria, Australia, 1:31,680 state aerial survey Victoria 1954, topographic map and photo-maps of Victoria, Australia, 799 A, and 799 A1-4 Murchison, prepared by the Department of Crown Lands and Survey, Victoria, and Aerial Survey of Victoria in 1949; Hammond, Walls of Wire, 67.

58. National Archives of Australia, “Cowra Breakout Fact Sheet.” Available at http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/fact-sheets/fs198.aspx. Some 108 Japanese POWs were wounded and 231 met their death.

59. The Immigration Act No. 17 of 1901 placed restrictions on Immigration and provided for the removal from the Commonwealth of prohibited immigrants. It was preceded by the Influx of Chinese Restriction Act of 1881.

60. Pearl, The Dunera Scandal, 12–13.

61. Pearl, The Dunera Scandal, 19; Weiss, It Wasn’t Really Necessary, 197–202; Knee and Knee, Marched In, 36–41.

62. Weiss, It Wasn’t Really Necessary, 80.

63. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 31.

64. Victorian Heritage Register, Dhurringile, http://vhd.heritage.vic.gov.au/places/result_detail/863, registered in 1998. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 34. The name is believed to be crouching Emu in the local Aboriginal language in reference to the shape of the hill.

65. Warwick Finlay, Winter Irving (Murchison and District Historical Society), purchased 2016, undated. It is believed that Wyatt rather than Tayler was responsible for the design.

66. Knee and Knee, Marched In, 7–8.

67. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 66. Ian D. Clark, Goulburn River Aboriginal Protectorate (Ballarat, Vic.: Ballarat Heritage Services, 2013).

68. William Pargeter, quoted in Knee and Knee, Marched In, 13 and 19. The description of the camp is taken from this book.

69. Knee and Knee, Marched In, 20.

70. Knee and Knee, Marched In, 20.

71. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 66.

72. The 12 sides are equally reminiscent of the original panopticon Millbank in London, although there the four quarters protrude as separate blocks from a cruciform structure. The built to unbuilt relationship is an inversion of the Separate Prison at Port Arthur, Tasmania.

73. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 68.

74. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 22.

75. Moran, Carceral Geography, 4.

76. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 117, 119.

77. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 27.

78. Hammond refers to the findings of the psychologist Dr. Vischer, who studied prisoners of the First World War (WWI).

79. See “Behind Barbed Wire,” exhibition at the Duldig Gallery, Malvern in 2016, where the work of Karl Duldig is on display. Tatura Historical Society, “Collar the Lot,” 2. Interview with Eva Duldig; Weiss, It Wasn’t Really Necessary, 354, 428; Yuriko Nagata, “‘A Little Colony on Our Own’: Australia’s Camps in World War II,” in Alien Justice, ed. Saunders and Daniels, 185–204, 186.

80. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 27.

81. Many examples of these are displayed in the Tatura Irrigation and Wartime Camps Museum.

82. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 136.

83. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 144.

84. This study is not based on interviews, largely because many of the internees with clear memories of the period are now deceased; however, this difference is mentioned by many of the local historians I have interviewed regarding their sources.

85. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 68.

86. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 136, 142.

87. Knee and Knee, Marched In, 42–51.

88. Knee and Knee, Marched In, 117.

89. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 9.

90. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 120.

91. Nagata, Unwanted Aliens, 66.

92. Hammond, Walls of Wire, 128.

93. The JIA camps in mainland New Guinea mentioned in online sources include the Wewak Camp and Tunnel Hill Camp, and camps for Chinese civilians and Indian POWs. The territory including German New Guinea, the Bismark Archipelago and Nauru (the eastern half of the mainland) was assigned to Australia after WWI and was the site of major battles between the Allies and the Japanese. The Japanese occupied New Guinea from 1942–1945. It was returned to civil administration under Australia in 1945. It has been the independent nation of Papua New Guinea since 1975.

94. Hiromi Tanaka, “Japanese Forces in Post-surrender Rabaul,” in From a Hostile Shore: Australia and Japan at War in New Guinea, ed. Steven Bullard and Tamura Keiko (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2004), 140, 142. Tanaka mentions the AWM82 collection as one of the rare examples of records from this period.

95. The term “geo-body” is used by Thongchai Winichakul in Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994). He describes the way in which the image of a territory becomes recognisable to people through maps.