Australia’s concentration camps
Australian history is laced with barbed wire. Today’s refugee concentration camps on Manus Island and Nauru are not really new; Australia has long imprisoned the fleeing, the desperate, the “alien” and the radical.
This history has been pushed into the shadows. In particular, the jingoistic fanfare of successive governments’ war commemorations have drowned out the stories of the tens of thousands who were racially and politically profiled, rounded up, herded into camps and denied their freedom.
These stories, when mentioned at all, are often embarrassed footnotes to the nation-building tales of Australian bravery, sacrifice, king and country. In this two-part series, Vashti Kenway looks at Australia’s internment camps in the First and Second World Wars.
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On 4 August 1914, Australia entered the British war against Germany and its allies.
The outcome of the battle to carve up the world’s markets mattered immensely to Australia’s rich and powerful. They wanted the country to emerge from the war as a player on the world stage. This project, however, meant very little to the mass of the Australian population, so the war drums needed to beat a more populist rhythm. Empire became synonymous with “freedom”, while the enemies of the British, the “Dirty German Hun” and the barbarous Turks, became the enemies of freedom, democracy and civilisation.
Declaring an internal enemy gave potency and urgency to the project. In October 1914, the War Precautions Act was passed, giving wide-ranging powers to the federal government. It used these laws to suppress opponents of the war, crush labour agitation, limit civil liberties and curtail freedom of the press. Even red flags, the symbol of internationalism and the labour movement, were banned. Central to the act was the declaration that “enemy aliens” were living in Australia. It was broadened a year later through the introduction of the Aliens Restriction Order of 27 May.
The largest group of these “enemy aliens” was made up of Germans. People of German descent were the largest non-British and non-Irish immigrant group in Australia. Many Germans had lived here for generations. Nevertheless, according to the act, they were all suspect, regardless of political persuasion or the length of time they had been in the country.
All Germans, even those who were naturalised citizens, were required to register at their local police station. They then were made to report, sometimes daily, sometimes weekly, to the authorities.
Further restrictions were imposed. Enemy aliens were not allowed to own or possess cars, cameras, telephones or homing pigeons. Homes were raided and these circumscribed objects were confiscated. Germans living in German colonies occupied by Allied forces were also arrested, transported to Australia and subject to the same conditions.
German clubs, newspapers and some Lutheran churches were closed. German place names were changed. In South Australia, around 70 towns or hamlets had their names changed. A vitriolic press campaign was waged. The slurs and insults were highly racialised – the “German race” as a whole was declared suspect.
Many Germans were harassed on the street; others lost friends and were sacked from work. Many businesses were forcibly closed down by the government. There was an economic element to the anti-German sentiment. Prime minister Billy Hughes wanted to restructure the economy to align it even more closely with British imperialism.
A few months into the war, the mass rounding up and forcible internment of all male “enemy aliens” began. Police arrested them with little warning and put them on guarded trains to the closest camp. The separation from family was traumatic. German Broken Hill miner and boxer Frank Burgandy recorded his arrest in a diary entry in August 1915: “I left my home, a weeping wife and my weeping children bound for the railway station to catch the Adelaide express”.
Initially, there were about a dozen camps across the country. The main ones were Torrens Island in South Australia; Berrima, Bourke, Trial Bay and Holsworthy in NSW; Enoggera in Queensland; Molonglo in the ACT; and Rottnest Island in Western Australia. A number of smaller ones were closed down in an attempt to centralise the internees.
The conditions in these camps were often quite brutal. At Torrens Island, for example, prisoners were humiliated and punished for minor disciplinary infractions. They were left in the burning heat and the freezing rain in open barbed wire cages. They were stripped, handcuffed and sometimes publicly flogged. One particularly sadistic military figure, captain Hawkes, reportedly shot his rifle into a tent full of internees.
By the middle of 1915, all the regional camps were closed and prisoners shifted to NSW. Around 7,000 people of German and Austrian descent were interned in camps there. The largest camp was Holsworthy in Liverpool, which held 6,000 at its height. Trial Bay was smaller and held around 1,000. Of all these internees, about 4,500 had been Australian residents before August 1914. Once they were interned, there was no recourse to appeal. All of Australia’s much-vaunted legal freedoms were junked.
Holsworthy
The Holsworthy Camp was the largest concentration camp in Australian history. According to internees’ accounts, it was a horrific place, crowded and dusty. The corrugated iron barracks were sweltering in the summer and bone chilling in the winter. One of the prisoners, Wilhelm Woelber, described in a diary entry in October 1914: “Barbed wire encloses the whole camp ... soldiers with loaded rifles and bayonets at the ready stand alongside and there are a few mounted guards further away”.
Internees were forced into hard physical labour in the surrounding areas for weeks at a time. They weren’t allowed family visits, and their reading material was censored and monitored. As at Torrens Island, inmates’ behaviour was closely regulated. “Bad behaviour” was punished with public humiliation or hard labour. Hard labour consisted of loading and unloading a wheelbarrow with rocks and pushing it around the compound for eight hours a day.
Restraints reminiscent of colonial times were used: “Handcuffs, leg irons, canvas restraint jackets and the so-called body belt (which had steel wristlets at the side to lock the wrists to the body), the uses of which were prescribed in the regulations with meticulous detail”. Apart from the out and out brutality, internees suffered from “barbed wire disease”, a condition bred from boredom and frustration.
The situation led to violence between prisoners. A mafia-like organisation called the “Black Hand” developed. Gang members would thieve from, bash and brutalise other inmates, all under the watchful, superior eye of Australian officers. In 1916, a group calling itself the “White Hand” formed and bashed back. They threw the thugs and criminals of the Black Hand over the barbed wire and demanded their expulsion from the camp.
The brutality of the Australian state was not met with total passivity. A series of rebellions rocked Holsworthy. The first small strikes occurred in 1915, and in mid-1916 a major outbreak occurred.One of the labour gangs was pushed beyond its limits and made to work an extra half hour.
Sharp words were exchanged, and the guards locked up a few “ringleaders” as punishment. A secret meeting was held later in the night, and the internees agreed to a general strike. The next day, they refused to show to roll call and presented a series of demands. They argued that labour should be voluntary and that camp officials discuss how to improve living conditions with an elected committee.
After a few days, management relented, and committees of elected internees took over much of the running of the camp. They planted gardens, doubled food production, established theatres, orchestras, newsletters and schools. The elections for these committees were fiercely contested events. There were internees who ranged politically from communists and anarchists right through to conservative German nationalists. Sometimes these political battles became physical.
Not all “enemy aliens” were treated equally. Just as in the rest of society, money talks – wealthier Germans were not made to bear the tribulations of Holsworthy. The “better class” of Germans were sent to the Trial Bay or Berrima camps. A lieutenant Edmond Samuels, with no irony whatsoever, described Berrima as “a charming site for a concentration camp”. The internees in these camps were afforded much more freedom: they were allowed to swim and walk, labour wasn’t forced, and cultural activities were plentiful. Despite these “luxuries”, they were still prisoners.
By the end of the war around 700 of the internees were compulsorily deported. Over the course of the war, 202 had died. Hundreds more were kept in the camp until 1920. Thousands released back into the community renounced their heritage, anglicised their names and tried to forget the brutality that was meted out to them. As we shall see in the next part of this series, some Germans internees were in fact re-interned during the Second World War.
