Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  Aborigines from the reserves in Queensland who had been redeployed with soldiers from their normal jobs to harvest the crops the Italians no longer worked on were now either interned or released into Civil Alien Corps camps elsewhere in Australia. There had been some doubts about the loyalty of the Aborigines of Cape Bedford Mission in Cape York where George Schwarz was the pastor for nearly six decades. On 17 May 1942, trucks manned by police and army arrived to intern Schwarz and his wife and to take the more than 250 Guugu Yimidhirr Aborigines away. The elderly were sent to Palm Island, the others to a settlement near Rockhampton where they suffered sixty deaths in a year because of the cold winters. Thus, under wartime emergency regulations, Aborigines could be treated as enemy aliens in their own country.

  In 1943, however, fifty Aboriginal women from the Cherbourg settlement in Queensland would dig the greater part of the Lockyer Valley potato crop. Other Aborigines in Cape York joined the Civil Construction Corps, building makeshift aerodromes in the area. In Victoria, meanwhile, five hundred released Italian internees formerly from Queensland were despatched to the saltworks at Underwood and Laverton in Victoria, as well as to the forestry camp at Werrimull. Three hundred and fifty civilian Italian internees were deployed on the Port Augusta–Kalgoorlie link of the Trans-Australian Railway to replace a group of dissatisfied Italian POWs.

  Suggestions were made to deploy the seven hundred Indonesian political prisoners to harvest the Mackay cane crop in Queensland. They were considered reliable workers but suspected of being willing to collaborate with the Japanese as a means of ridding themselves permanently of the Dutch colonial regime.

  Working parallel to these forced labour forces was the Australian Women’s Land Army. The women who enlisted in this force were often as young as sixteen, anxious to serve and acquire a uniform and a measure of freedom, and totally unaccustomed to hard manual labour. In an emergency some of them were sent to cut cane in Sarina, Queensland. But the Land Army’s members were considered somehow inferior to those of the women’s army, navy and airforce, and only some two thousand women joined for a year’s service, and over one thousand more as auxiliaries, who could be called on at harvest time to work for a month.

  By 1942, there were 18,500 Italian POWs in various camps in Australia, locked up in locations from Thompson Point in Queensland to Cowra and Hay in New South Wales, Tatura and Murchison in Victoria, and Northam in Western Australia. In 1943, Australia agreed to accommodate an extra ten thousand Italian POWs from Egypt and Abyssinia who had initially been imprisoned in India. Through regional offices named Control Centres, the government had begun to distribute as labourers Italian prisoners who were obviously not camicie neri (Blackshirts) or dedicated Fascists. The Minister for the Army, Frank Forde, noted in May 1943 that with the progress of the Allied advance in Italy ‘there is a marked tendency amongst Fascists to abandon political faith’. In fact, as the Italians were a conscript army, there was a great range of opinion amongst them, from Communists and anarchists to social democrats and beyond.

  The camps tried to become farms in their own right. Pig, poultry and dairying enterprises were carried out by Italian labour at the Hay camp, where three thousand POWs were housed. By mid-year, nine hundred Japanese and two thousand Italian POWs were engaged in charcoal-burning, brick-making, wood-cutting, trench and irrigation canal-building, tailoring, boot repairs, sail-making, blacksmithing, market-gardening, and road and pavement works.

  Italian POWs were permitted to work within fifty kilometres of a Prisoner of War Control Centre. They were to be provided with spartan but not unhealthy accommodation by the employer outside the house—in sheds or shearers’ quarters—and were allowed to leave only on Sundays from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m., provided they wore their detested burgundy POW clothing.

  In the Stanthorpe district of south-east Queensland, Mrs Barranger, the wife of a returned soldier, and Mrs Haslett, ‘a soldier’s widow with two sons in AIF’, were recommended for the immediate placement of an Italian on their farm in August 1943. On the Atherton Tablelands in early 1945, Rita Costas’ family, despite being Italian themselves, were allocated POWs—but only by the day. After all, Rita’s brother was a member of the 2nd AIF and was engaged in service in New Guinea. ‘We had to supply lunch for them, that was all. They would come out [to the farm] after breakfast and there would be an army vehicle to come and pick them up’ in the afternoons.

  The returned soldiers’ organisations were totally opposed to the employment of Italian POWs, particularly in the Atherton Tablelands area. Smith’s Weekly maintained a hate campaign through the entire war. On 6 July 1940, it had proclaimed ‘Make No Mistake about the Dago Menace’, and it would keep up the cry, though at diminishing volume, for the rest of the war.

  Italian POWs who were returned by their employers for misdemeanours—which sometimes involved political fights between prisoners—received detention, but were sometimes then reassigned. The authorities knew that sometimes the farmer was to blame.

  Marjory Pierpoint’s fiancé, Ron Colvin, owned a sheep and cattle station, Ballandean, twenty-five kilometres from Stanthorpe. In 1944 he decided to grow tomatoes and carrots for the lucrative Brisbane market. According to Marjory’s memory, he got a phone call asking, ‘Do you still want those prisoners?’ He said yes, and the local Control Centre told him, ‘We’ve got some here but we have to warn you, they’re all back because they bashed their bosses.’ Because Colvin knew that there were as many bad bosses as there were bad workmen, he said to send them out. Despite their reputation, the four Italians who arrived proved excellent workers.

  ‘They also made an impression in the local area. We were taking Vincenzo to the dentist and he called out, “Mr Colvin, Mr Colvin, slow.”’ So Ron slowed down and Vincenzo ran off into a field to see someone. ‘We were reported for letting him fraternise.’ Vincenzo was sociable: ‘He’d met a girl on a previous farm.’ Australians believed that ‘no decent Australian girl would look twice at a Dago prisoner’. The problem was that they envisaged the Italian POW as swarthy, dark and lacking in graces. The young men who showed up sometimes more approximated Michelangelo’s David.

  Like many indulgent or satisfied bosses, at great expense Colvin obtained some parmesan cheese at £7 per pound for his POWs when he realised they hated mutton and potatoes. Another POW, Sergeant A. Bisile, had been sent to a farm in Leongatha in Victoria; on 28 September 1943 he wrote, ‘I am with a family of four; a boy of about twenty and a girl about twenty-two years of age. I’m being treated just like in my own home. I have a room for myself with all the comforts. I use their bathroom and basin. In other words, I am considered the third child of the family.’

  Sometimes the knowledge that they were safe and well fed added to prisoners’ depression and feelings of guilt about their families in Italy. And they would not see them again for some years. Though in 1943 Italy surrendered to the Allies and joined them in fighting the Axis, many Italian POWs were not returned home till 1947, in all cases because of the shortage of shipping.

  WOMEN POWER

  Women had been used during World War II in other ways than as industrial labour. In an attempt to free men for more essentially military roles, for the first time in history women were recruited into the services to fulfil support roles, separate from those of nursing. The aviator Nancy Bird Walton was the New South Wales head of the Women’s Air Training Corp, which was founded in 1939 and headed nationally by Mary Bell. Bell, wife of an air force pilot, had herself trained as a pilot in 1927. In March 1941, government, urged by many young female volunteers, authorised the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force (WAAAF), the first women’s service to be formed and the largest, with 27,000 women, though that figure included a minority of nurses, who were its only members eligible for service overseas. Figures of admiration amongst the populace generally, WAAAFs served in radar and signals, in operations rooms and messes and offices, drove vehicles and worked on ordinance. Mary Bell was the auxiliary’s head, but was pass
ed over for the administrative expertise of Clare Stevenson, an executive from the Berlei company in Melbourne.

  By April 1941, there was a shortage of telegraphists in the navy, and the government authorised the recruitment of women into a Women’s Royal Australian Navy Service (ANS). The Australian Women’s Army Service (AWAS) was founded in August. The women recruits worked as signallers, coders, wireless operators, cypher clerks, couriers, cooks and drivers. This latter corps of young women was led by a woman with the rank of colonel, Sybil Howie Irving, and was, amongst other things, employed on searchlight detachments on coastal cliff sides and in cities, and as artillery spotters for the Japanese invasion that seemed imminent soon after the start of the Pacific War. Notably, all these services were in place before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Malaya, and would grow in importance once that attack had occurred.

  Over 36,000 women enlisted in the three women’s services. Thousands more worked in volunteer roles in Nancy Bird Walton’s organisation and the Women’s Emergency Signalling Corp. Around 3500 army nurses were also recruited, although for purely medical rather than for manpower reasons, and it was amongst the nurses that the casualties would occur during the advance of Japan.

  At a quasi-official and organised level there was also a Land Army recruited to work on harvests. The recruits were generally young urban women, some as young as sixteen, although the women who joined were meant to be between eighteen and fifty years. Nearly three thousand permanent members served in the Land Army, and over a thousand casuals, and they worked forty-eight hours a week for a mere thirty shillings. In January 1943, Cabinet decided that these women would be given an official status of a fourth service, but the intention was never enacted. So the women of the Land Army had a struggle to be recognised as contributors to the war. As well as that, they faced many crusty old farmers who disapproved of flighty young women doing farm work and living together in informal barracks far from home. The women suffered not only from toilsome and tedious work, but were endangered by unprotected use of agricultural chemicals. Judy Finley, who had worked for a Sydney frock factory, would remember travelling with other Land Army girls sixteen hours by train to be met at Leeton railway station by the manager of the cannery and its matron. The first task of the young women was to make their own mattresses out of white palliasses and straw. So began months of unglamorous labour, harvesting the peas and carrots considered essential to victory.

  THE IMPRISONED

  On 18 April 1942, Captain Adrian Curlewis, as an example of decent or benignly neglectful treatment from the Japanese, was given a lift into town by Okasaki, commandant of the POW camp at Changi in Singapore, who asked him what he had done before the war. Curlewis discovered that Okasaki had known Tatsuo Kawai, the Japanese legate in Sydney with whom he, Curlewis, had done some committee work before the war as a member of the Japan–Australia Society. ‘Every dealing I’ve had with Japanese for four months has been [marked by] extreme courtesy. What is behind it I cannot make out, but the moment a Japanese knows you are Aussie then you are better off. They hate England.’

  But Private Charles Watson, also in Changi, noticed that the Japanese had been driving groups of Chinese to the edge of the sea and machine-gunning them, ‘mostly lads rounded up as Communist suspects’. One young wounded Chinese man was rescued—‘he spoke English and we have a few Australian–Chinese in our ranks, so it was decided he would be smuggled back to camp, carrying a tin of water, and put into hospital until his slight wounds heal.’ The Japanese themselves rarely visited the hospital, for fear of contagion.

  By May, Curlewis noticed betting on what was the destination of a rumoured party that was being sent away from Changi. There were rumours that three thousand were going and the hopes were that it was a prisoner exchange and that they were going to Australia; in the betting, Australia was at short odds. The reality would be far more grievous. By now Curlewis realised how deficient the diet was, and that he and others were already in declining health. ‘Blood pressure 90/70,’ he wrote. ‘Lack of proteins.’ He had been passed the job by a superior officer of rewriting the 8th Division’s war diary. ‘I fear me some hard words will appear when the whole story is written.’ Curlewis had also been told by his commanding officer on 19 February that he would be the Assistant Director of Education for the fourteen thousand men in and around Changi. He was to be Dean of the Faculty of Law, and indeed he gave lectures on contracts, criminal law, evidence and torts for forty-four law students and 120 interested others. Work parties were often sent out, however, and so classes were interrupted. Some of them worked on wharves and collected scrap iron and furniture for shipment to Japan, while others filled in bomb craters.

  By contrast with the relatively comfortable conditions described by Curlewis, Private Edgar Wilkie, in the harsher prison in Kuala Lumpur, was already recording deaths from disease. Malnutrition weakened men as fever’s opportunistic ally. ‘Lunch of rice and pork, just enough to aggravate my hunger.’ The description of the Pudu prison in Kuala Lumpur in Russell Braddon’s The Naked Island, a prison for men taken behind Japanese lines as he had been, is of a circle of hell where dysentery patients were heaped without medicine in a small room designated as a hospital, and where the dying began earlier than it did in Changi.

  Brigadier Arthur Blackburn, VC, was the senior officer in the POW camp in Batavia, the future Jakarta, in Java. In that camp there were 2600 POWs, of whom two thousand were Australians. The survivors from HMAS Perth and USS Houston, sunk during the night of 28 February–1 March in an engagement known as the Battle of Sunda Strait, were amongst them too. When Blackburn requested clothing, boots, a canteen, pay, freedom to send letters and to receive books, he was told that the Japanese did not recognise these things since they did not recognise the Geneva Convention. However, his requests would be considered.

  On the eve of Anzac Day 1942 in Batavia, the meal was rice and vegetable soup. A slice of white bread was issued every fourth day. The meat ration was so small that it was best used to strengthen the soup. The men from the Perth and the Houston had no razors, toothbrushes or soap and the request to purchase such requirements was fobbed off. Requests for more meat were refused outright. A certain amount of rations had been brought into the camp by the prisoners, which enabled an issue once a week for twelve weeks of two sausages per man and a weekly issue of dried potatoes. Malnutrition seemed an established fact.

  Ultimately, when the information became available, the Australian government kept good statistics on the fates of their men who became prisoners of war, and calculated that of over seven thousand men captured by the European Axis powers, just 242 died, while over seven thousand of more than 21,000 POW in Japanese camps perished—nearly one in three.

  In 1942, though, information was scarce. For many families, to the fear of invasion was added anxiety about the thousands captured in Singapore, Java, Ambon, Rabaul and elsewhere. Little information was coming through about them from the Japanese, who had not signed the Geneva Convention on POWs. The Convention bound its signatories to see that the relatives of captives be quickly informed by way of the Red Cross.

  The wives and mothers of POWs wrote to Curtin in the belief he was the sort of man who would take a personal interest in their anguish. The letters are poignant. Mrs Wallace of Glenbrook in New South Wales wrote to explain that one of her four soldier boys was now a prisoner of war: ‘I am alone, and greatly worried about my son in Japanese hands, who is a good boy.’ Mrs Grace Harrison of South Melbourne: ‘My son is missing in Malaya and I am a very sad mother . . . please forgive me taking the liberty and may Our Lady of Good Counsel help you in a task that is very great.’ Mrs Elsie Salter of Epping in Sydney even wrote to Elsie Curtin, asking her if she could use her good offices with her husband to find out what had happened to Mrs Salter’s husband: ‘I have a baby daughter who was born two months after the fall of Singapore.’ The prisoner of war did not know their child’s name. Could Elsie ask John Curtin to get that name to
her husband?

  In April 1942, Curtin wondered whether he should exercise ‘reciprocity’ in withdrawing privileges from the Japanese prisoners and internees Australia held until the lists of names arrived from the Japanese military by way of the Red Cross. The British wisely reminded him by way of Stanley Melbourne Bruce that there was a disproportion between the small number of Japanese prisoners of war the Allies held and the great number of British, Australian and Indian prisoners the Japanese had taken. In September 1942, the equally frustrated British wrote to ask whether Curtin had received any information. Up to that time only eight Australian names had been provided by the Japanese, and three of those were of dead soldiers.

  As early as mid-March 1942, the Australian government felt it must send out telegrams that notified families only that the son, daughter or husband was missing. Gordon Bennett, the general who had fled Singapore, told the press that ‘evidence so far is that Australians in Japanese hands have been treated quite well, and there does not seem to be any need for undue worry by relatives’. This was a true assessment for the moment—the period while the Japanese worked out what to do with the masses of prisoners they had taken. Bennett’s statement must have comforted the families of the lost.

  Meanwhile the British and the Australians were planning food supplies to be sent to help the Japanese feed the prisoners. Civilian prisoners were to be considered as well as the POWs. Governments would never be certain how many Allied civilians were interned by the Japanese, since exact records would never be received or found. There may have been as many as 130,000 of them, mainly Dutch, British, Australian and American. They were missionaries, nurses, doctors, administrators, teachers and traders. Australian nurses in Rabaul were imprisoned with others at a Catholic mission where some of the nuns and clerics were Australian. In April these prisoners were each allowed to write one letter home, and many of the letters reached their destinations. Thereafter there was no more communication, neither with the Australian government nor with the prisoners’ families. Within six months of capture, with their families still believing that they were prisoners in Rabaul, the nurses were sent off to Japan in an unmarked merchant ship.