Darren Watson on 'behind barbed wire'

[A man wearing a white-collared shirt beneath a brown jumper approaches a lectern branded with the State Library of Victoria logo.]

Darren Watson: Thank you, Anne.

[Darren Watson points a remote towards an off-camera screen. Cuts to a slide that reads “Behind Barbed Wire. Researching Enemy P.O.W. and internee records in the National Archives”. It is accompanied by a drawing of a soldier holding a gun conversing with an older man wearing a hat and carrying a tennis racket. They are separated by a barbed wire fence. Below the image is the slogan “Your story, our history” and the logos for the Australian Government and National Archives of Australia. Web address naa.gov.au is at the bottom of slide.]

Darren: On sixth of July 1917 the steamship Cumberland was wracked by an explosion ten miles south of Gabo Island, sinking not long afterwards. She was a victim of the mine laid by the German raider Wolf which had paid a nocturnal visit to the area just three days previously and sewn the sea with a deadly field of 30 mines. The Australian authorities were totally unaware of the Wolf’s intrusion …

[Screen reverts to video of Darren speaking and reading from notes at the lectern.]

Darren: … and in the immediate aftermath of the Cumberland’s demise, speculation was rampant in both military and public circles concerning responsibility for what was initially thought to be sabotage. And when they discovered, sometime later, the laying of the mines, the atmosphere of suspicion was nowhere near as intense than in the isolated fishing communities scattered along the Gippsland coast.

Carl Newman was a 54-year-old native of Pommern in Germany who had arrived in Melbourne in 1881, married an Australian girl and settled down at Inverloch to pursue the joint occupations of fishing and siring a brood of 12 children. He became a naturalised citizen in 1908, well before the outbreak of the war.

[Darren points remote at unseen screen. Slide shows a scan of an “Application for Certificate of Naturalization” with handwritten entries from “Charles Newman, Fisherman, Pound Creek”. Below it is the reference note “NAA Series A1; Control symbol 1919/6108; Charles Newman – Naturalization”, followed by the logos and web address.]

Darren: This is Carl’s application of Certificate for Nationalisation submitted in 1808 off the relevant National Archives file.

In 1916 he and his family had moved from Inverloch to near Metung on the Gippsland Lakes, although he fished as far away as Wilsons Promontory. Newman was already known to the intelligence section of the army’s general staff, through a two page letter received in February 1917 from the captain of the Metung rifle club …

[Screen reverts to video of Darren speaking and reading from notes at the lectern.]

Darren: … which noted that amongst the too-numerous Germans in the area, one called Newman had built a house on a remote area of the 90 Mile Beach, had a motor car and several boats, one of which, the largest, was capable of carrying up to ten tonnes. In the captain’s eyes, if enemy submarines ever worked on the coast of Australia this would be a dangerous man. The Lakes Entrance police were duly asked to investigate, but the resulting report dismissed any covert threat Newman might pose, there being absolutely nothing known against him.

Thus affairs stood until 15 days after the Cumberland sinking, another letter arrived; this one from a fisherman who just happened to be a competitor of Newman’s on the same fishing grounds. It accused Newman of having plenty of money, of having previously joked that Germany would have Australia, and finally of possessing an unusually large motor boat which could, it was asserted, lay enough mines in a night to blow up half the shipping around our coast.

This was a coincidence of timing the intelligence authorities could not ignore, and new investigations were soon underway, both by the local police and visiting military intelligence officers who canvassed the local hotels and even turned up at Newman’s home disguised as hunters. But in every instance the investigations failed to turn up any verifiable evidence of disloyal statements or activities, and in one instance actually pointed out the role that jealousy and economic competition were playing in motivating the campaign against him.

None of this however stifled the local gossip and innuendo permeating through the local community and letters denouncing Newman continued to arrive. The final straw seems to have come when the Age newspaper made a reference to some of the rumours on the fourth of January 1918; although it stopped short of naming Newman, the identity of the subject person was clear.

The authorities were now forced to settle the matter one way or another and dispatched a particularly zealous and overtly anti-German intelligence officer to make further inquiries and interview Newman himself. His report was acknowledged by his superiors to be a jumble of unfounded speculation, but his conclusion that there is no question whatever about Newman’s movements being highly suspicious were considered sufficient to act upon.

On 23rd April 1918, Carl Newman was confronted by a military officer and a detective who presented him with an alien restriction order requiring him to move 50 miles from his livelihood on the coast. He refused to comply and was promptly arrested and a warrant issued for his internment.

[Darren points remote at unseen screen. Slide shows a scan of document. Onscreen text: Warrant issued under War Precaution Regulations 1915.]

Darren: This is Carl Newman’s warrant issued under the War Precautions Regulations 1915.

[Screen reverts to video of Darren speaking and reading from notes at the lectern.]

Darren: His offers to sell his boat and donate half the money for returned soldiers did him no good, and most of Carl Newman’s next two years were spent in a concentration camp at Holsworthy near Liverpool in New South Wales.

[Photograph of an unsmiling Carl Newman holding a card bearing the number 5637 in front of him.]

[Screen reverts to video of Darren speaking and reading from notes at the lectern.]

Darren: The official recommendation for Newman’s imprisonment cited the numerous and continued complaints about him, some evasive statements he made concerning his place of birth, the strategic importance of the coastline where he lived and certain activities on the part of the enemy.

[Screen shows scan of typed document. Onscreen text: A Bill - An Act.]

Darren: Internment in Australia during World War One was carried out under the provisions of the War Precautions Act introduced in October 1914 which invested the Commonwealth Government in with wideranging powers in order to more effectively prosecute the war.

[Screen reverts to video of Darren speaking and reading from notes at the lectern.]

Darren: Under this Act, citizens of enemy countries, and I will in the main refer to them as ‘enemy aliens’ from now on being the official terminology used, so citizens of any countries whose conduct was considered suspicious or unsatisfactory could be interned for the duration of the war. Separate regulations under the Act also allowed for the internment of any naturalised person or natural-born British subject of enemy descent who showed themselves disloyal. Internment was not universally applied and many enemy aliens merely had their movements within the country restricted and were required to report weekly to the police.

Ultimately almost 7,000 people were interned in Australia during the course of the First World War. These individuals were mainly of German or Austro-Hungarian background, although many of the latter had originally come from distinct ethnic regions within the Austro-Hungarian Empire such as Serbia, Croatia and Dalmatia. Approximately 700 internees had, as in Carl Newman’s case, become naturalised British subjects. There were also up to 70 second- or third-generation Australians interned, and it was not uncommon for local internees to have siblings and relatives serving in the Australian armed forces while they were interned in the camps.

Of a somewhat different category were the 100-odd members of the Industrial Workers of the World who were imprisoned in the course of the war. The IWW was a radical labour organisation which campaigned strongly against conscription and was declared illegal by Prime Minister Billy Hughes in 1916 under the Unlawful Associations Act.

But not all local internees were incarcerated as a direct consequence of their perceived threat. Until November 1915 there was a provision for destitute alien men to be interned on a voluntary basis and to leave when their circumstances improved. Many who were unemployed and impoverished because of their German backgrounds took advantage of this provision under which a small weekly allowance was paid to their families.

Other internees arrived or were brought to Australia directly from overseas localities; these included crew members of enemy nationality taken into custody from ships in Australian ports, some enemy civilians including women and children from British possessions in Asia and a number of government officials and Lutheran missionaries from German New Guinea, which was occupied by Australian forces soon after the commencement of hostilities.

Crew members of the German surface raider Emden which was caught and sunk by the Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney near the Cocos Islands in 1914 were however probably the only true prisoners of war, in today’s sense, held in Australia during the First World War.

After the war, many internees were voluntarily repatriated to Europe although a few were subsequently able to return to Australia.

At the outbreak of war in 1914, local internment camps had been rapidly established in each of the Australian states and the Northern Territory to address the immediate need for prisoner accommodation.

[Slide shows map of Australia. Onscreen text: First World War Internment Camps. This shows the locations of the camps throughout Australia.]

Darren: This map shows the locations of the camps around Australia.

As a consequence of the improvisation required for such an undertaking the facilities and prevailing conditions in these camps varied tremendously.

[Screen reverts to video of Darren speaking and reading from notes at the lectern.]

Darren: Here in Victoria, Langwarrin camp on the Mornington Peninsula housed up to 500 internees in generally poor conditions. Most of the internees lived in tents and the facilities for washing and bathing were inadequate. Some internees resorted to building huts at their own expense.

Langwarrin camp probably bore a close resemblance to Torrens Island camp in South Australia, as is shown here in its makeshift appearance.

[Photograph of rows of tents. Onscreen text: Concentration camp Torrens Island 1914-15.]

Darren: Torrens Island was particularly notorious with its irregular food supplies …

[Screen reverts to video of Darren speaking and reading from notes at the lectern.]

Darren: … and the requirement for internees to do their own cooking on campfires. Allegations of internees being stripped, handcuffed and publicly flogged finally resulted in an investigation and ultimate closure of the camp. Contrasting conditions existed in Berrima in New South Wales …

[Photograph of wooden shanties.]

[Screen reverts to video of Darren speaking and reading from notes at the lectern.]

Darren: … where the disused sandstone jail was reopened as an internment camp. The 400 or so internees lived in the stone cells and barracks but were allowed to move freely within a two mile radius of the jail during the day. This allowed them to build small huts and grow flowers and vegetables on the banks of the nearby Wingacarribee River, which was also used for recreational activities of various types.

[Photograph of a number of people walking in the concentration camp.]

[Screen reverts to video of Darren speaking and reading from notes at the lectern.]

[Photograph of various people standing on bank of river with others riding in boats on the water.]

[Screen reverts to video of Darren speaking and reading from notes at the lectern.]

Darren: In mid-1915 the majority of the original internment camps around Australia were closed and their inmates were centralised at Holsworthy camp near Liverpool on the outskirts of Sydney. This became the largest camp in Australia, holding a total of 6,890 internees.

[Photograph of an internee whose head is being held up by two Australian soldiers with the number 4353 displayed in front of internee.]

Darren: But regardless of where a person was interned and how good or otherwise conditions and diversions available in the camp were, there remained the overarching reality of incarceration, and as we can see here the threat of force.

[Screen reverts to video of Darren speaking and reading from notes at the lectern.]

Darren: Moving onto World War Two.

[Map of Australia. Onscreen text: Second World War Internment Camps. This shows the locations of the camps throughout Australia.]

Darren: And in World War Two the authorities interned about 7,000 Australian residents, including more than 1,500 naturalised citizens.

[Screen reverts to video of Darren speaking and reading from notes at the lectern.]

Darren: A further 8,000 people were detained overseas by Australia’s allies and sent to Australia for internment; numbers reached peak in 1942 when more than 12,000 people were interned.

The legal basis for World War Two internment was the National Security Act of 1939, which gave the authorities powers exceeding those granted under the previous War Precautions Act. It enabled the government to issue a series of National Security regulations empowering the authorities to intern resident enemy aliens, and also to impose restrictions upon them concerning where they could live, where they could travel and barring them from owning a car, a gun, a radio or a camera.

In the months leading up to the war, intelligence organisations focused their attention on Germans holding strong sympathies for Hitler’s Germany, Italian fascists and communists. They compiled lists of people thought to possess a threat, and upon the declaration of the war the police acted upon these lists. Initially the government adhered to its decision to intern only within the narrowest limits and by November 1939 only 288 men and seven women were being detained under the national security regulations. But in early June 1940 the government’s internment policy changed and hundreds more were interned.

Three factors contributed to this change: the fall of France, Italy’s entry into the war and increasing pressure from the Australian public. Numerous individuals and organisations wrote to their local parliamentarians or the government demanding the internment of all Germans and Italians. Most of the Germans who had been released in 1940 were reinterred and others who had not been considered a security risk in 1939 were also arrested. In addition, hundreds of Italians were detained; many women and children were amongst these internees.

While the government had maintained a relatively selective interment policy with respect to Italians and Germans, it resulted in mass internment in the case of Japanese residents upon the declaration of war with Japan. The threat of Japanese invasion in 1942 also led the government to intern German- and Italian-born residents much more indiscriminately, particularly if they lived in the vulnerable north of the country. By far the most local internees came from Queensland.

The Australian authorities also moved against homegrown organisations suspected of promoting disloyalty, and several communists and members of the right wing nationalist Australia First Movement were interned.

Besides these resident groups, Australia accommodated thousands of individuals interned by its allies in Britain, Palestine, Iran, Malaysia and Singapore, the Netherlands, East Indies, French New Caledonia and New Zealand. They included enemy aliens as well as people who were officially allied nationals. In this latter category in particular were a group of Indonesians interned by the Dutch Colonial Authorities for political reasons and brought to Australia for internment.

The first camps were set up at Ennogera and Liverpool military bases in Queensland and NSW which had been internment camps in World War One and at the disused Dhurringile mansion in Northern Victoria. In 1940 the army established another camp at Orange in NSW where the buildings of the local showgrounds were used to accommodate internees.

[Photo of stadium at showgrounds with high wooden fence with barbed wire attached.]

Darren: See the grandstand in the rear of the picture there.

[Screen reverts to video of Darren speaking and reading from notes at the lectern.]

Darren: These camps were hardly adequate to accommodate the growing number of local internees, let alone the internees sent to Australia by its allies. The first purpose-built internment camps were not ready until September 1940; these included camps at Tatura in Victoria, at Hay and Cowra in NSW, Loveday in South Australia and at Harvey in Western Australia.

Moving on to prisoners of war and the remoteness and open spaces of Australia.

[Slide shows prisoners of war disembarking from ship.]

Darren: Prisoners of war, here we have prisoners of war arriving by ship. The remoteness and open spaces of Australia also made it an attractive holding place for enemy prisoners of war captured in a variety of different military theatres.

[Screen reverts to video of Darren speaking and reading from notes at the lectern.]

Darren: And numbers of them were shipped here progressively during World War Two so that by August 1944 there were 2,223 Japanese prisoners of war in Australia, including 544 merchant seaman, 14,720 Italian prisoners most of whom had been captured in North Africa and 1,585 Germans, some also captured in North Africa, and the remainder largely naval or merchant seamen. Although sharing the same camps, POWs were housed in separate compounds from civilian internees. They were under their own internal military discipline but the conditions under which they lived were otherwise broadly similar to their civilian counterparts.

Italian prisoners of war comprised the largest group and were generally considered to be less ideologically motivated and more compliant, so that from 1943 a large number of Italian prisoners of war were being assigned to farms across the country to help fill the nation’s manpower shortage. There were no guards and the farmer soldiers reported directly to their employers, being the family with whom they lived and worked. In many cases the men became very close to these families. Around one-fifth of these prisoners of war returned to Australia as migrants after the war.

Repatriation of all enemy prisoners of war in Australia proceeded by slowly. After the war, through a lack of shipping, some had to wait until 1947 before finally departing for their homes.

So when researching World War One internees in the National Archives, alien registration records …

[Slide shows copy of a German’s alien registration document.]

Darren: … which were created from 1916 as a result of the Aliens Registration Regulations introduced under the War Precautions Act, are an appropriate place to start.

[Screen reverts to video of Darren speaking and reading from notes at the lectern.]

Darren: The regulations stipulated that all aliens entering the Commonwealth were to register and have their movements within the Commonwealth monitored by alien registration officers, although the role was generally delegated to police or customs officials. The forms such as this required the subjects to enter nationality, birth place, date of birth, place of residence, place of business, occupation, date of entry into the Commonwealth and included personal descriptive details. Notifications of subsequent changes of address were also frequently included on the record. There are 25,500 registration forms from this particular Victorian series which are identified as NT 269/1, which are available and, search online, are available through our website. They date between 1916 and 1921. There are also equivalent collections of records held by the National Archives for NSW, Queensland and Western Australia.

[Darren pauses for drink of water.]

Darren: This particular form relates to Eugene Weller, a 37-year-old German-born cleaner living in Rowena Parade in Richmond with an Australian-born wife and six children, and he escaped being returned.

Now moving on from registration records, there are records relating to the investigation process. During the First World War the investigation of subversive activities in organisations was the preserve of the military intelligence sections attached to the headquarters located in each state.

The local police were required to cooperate in relation to these investigations and were usually called upon to provide reports in the first instance. The National Archives has collections of intelligence files concerning investigations and subjects relevant to the various states.

[Slide shows copy of a handwritten document.]

Darren: This police constable’s report is taken from a Victorian investigation file and it is typical of the type of information that can be found on these files of these records.

[Screen reverts to video of Darren speaking and reading from notes at the lectern.]

Darren: It’s dated the first of September 1914 from Geelong southern district, and reads ‘relative to a German subject called Paul Butserman I have to report that this morning, the city clerk called me over to the town hall and made the following statement. He said that some ladies resident in Newtown, Geelong, whose names he preferred not to give, were in a nervous condition with regard to the probable intentions of the above named man, and his friend a chemist who was employed at the local cement works and whose name is Frederick Flaum and who is on parole and reporting weekly here. From what the ladies have told the city clerk, Butserman has been in the habit of coming to Geelong at weekends and going with Flaum to Barwon Heads and the ladies suppose the two men are concocting some scheme against Great Britain.

[Audience laughter]

[Slide shows typed document titled Record of Aliens.]

Darren: Now this particular record is of a slightly similar nature. It relates to Tasmanian enemy aliens and investigations. It tends to combine the role of enemy alien registration form with that of providing a brief investigation report of the subject concerned. In those instances, naturally, where investigation appeared to justify incarceration the subjects would inevitably find themselves taken into custody under the relevant war precautions regulation and confined to one of the internment camps.

[Slide shows photograph of a typed document in table format. With onscreen text title -148- and eight columns, General Number, Surname, Christian Name, Nationality, Date of Birth, Last date of internment, Remarks.]

Darren: This particular series is a list of prisoners of war captured and interned in Australia. It’s the most comprehensive listing that the archives have of First World War internees. It comprises of a typed alphabetical role providing limited information on each internee in a standardised form. This includes a general number for each internee and specifics relating to their surname, Christian name, nationality, date of birth, last place of internment, date of internment and remarks. In this last field there are generally details of the release of each individual from internment after the conclusion of the war. Generally the subject is reported as being repatriated with the name of the ship given or released on parole with the relevant dates for either event. The internees were also, as we saw previously, photographed.

[Slide shows a page from a photograph album containing nine black and white photographs of different men in three by three formation. Each is holding a white sign with black numbers on it. With onscreen text title NAA Series D3597: Control symbol ALBUM: Album of identification photographs of enemy aliens (civilians and Prisoner of War) interned at Liverpool camp, NSW during World War I.]

Darren: The National Archives holds several albums of photographs of internees; however, they appear to have all derived from the same group of images contained in this particular series. It’s entitled Album of identification photographs of enemy aliens (civilians and Prisoner of War) interned at Liverpool camp, NSW during World War I. It comprises 654 numbered pages of which all but the last ten contain photographs of individual internees mounted in three rows of three. Over 300 individual photographs are unfortunately missing and are represented in the album by penciled numbers. It’s possible that the glass plate negatives were broken or lost before the album was actually compiled. Helpfully, there is also a typed index of 103 pages giving the names and numbers of all of the subjects covered by the album. The photographs are thought to have been taken by the camp authorities to serve as identification in the event of a possible breakout by the internees. Last year, all of the photographs from the album were digitised and are now viewable on our catalogue online. As can be seen from the gentleman in the centre there …

[Darren indicates the middle photograph on the slide, showing an older man lying in a hospital bed.]

Darren: … many internees were in the latter years of life and did not always enjoy good health. In many cases their ailments were worsened by internment and, inevitably, some didn’t survive to be paroled or deported.

[Darren looks up at slide screen and presses button to change to next slide. However, the slide is not shown here.]

Darren: This series is a nominal roll of deceased enemy internees who died whilst in internment. It is a handwritten, alphabetical list of approximately 225 individuals who died during internment, together with an index. The pages are divided into columns within which are recorded the individual’s internee number, name, date of death, place of death and the camp at which they were interned. It also lists the cause of death and the actions taken concerning personal effects at the time of death; for instance whether the camp officers destroyed the personal items or had them forwarded to the deceased’s relatives. This particular internee was accidentally drowned whilst bathing at the Torrens Island camp in 1914.

Moving on to World War Two internees and relevant records that are held.

At the time when World War Two broke out in 1939, the agency in charge of investigating enemy and alien subjects, as well as members of Australian-based organisations whose activities were considered potentially detrimental to the war effort, was the investigation branch within the Attorney General’s department. This had been formed in 1919 by the amalgamation of the Special Intelligence Bureau and the Commonwealth police force. It coordinated the investigation staff of Commonwealth departments and reduced the Commonwealth’s reliance on the state police forces for assistance with investigations. On the outbreak of war the investigation branch and the police were instructed to hand over their files to military intelligence, who had overall responsibility for identifying those to be interned.

The main correspondence series for the investigation branches operations in Victoria, identified as B741, comprised of almost 12,000 files covering all facets of the branches’ duties between 1924 and 1962. Those duties also included immigration- and passport-related investigations. Once again, all of these files are name-searchable on our record search catalogue.

Progressing from investigation to actual internment.

[Screen shows photograph of a typed document].

Darren: The recordkeeping for World War Two internees tended to be more centralised, with two extremely informative collections of records being prominent and easily accessed. Both were generated by the Prisoner of War Information Bureau, an agency established to comply with Article 77 of the Geneva Convention, requiring each belligerent power, at the start of hostilities, to institute an official bureau to give information about prisoners of war within its territory. It was set up in Melbourne after the commencement of the war and was headed by an army officer and staffed by civilians. The two record collections in question are titled: Registers containing service and casualty forms of enemy prisoners of war and internees held in camps in Australia, and one of those records is shownhere …

[Darren indicates document on the screen]

Darren: … and Dossiers containing reports of internees and prisoners of war held in Australian camps.

Both collections cover every internee, both local and those from overseas and prisoner of war, held in Australia through the duration of the war, and consist of standard types of records. The first mentioned forms are identical to those found on all Australian army service records.

[Darren sips from a glass of water.]

Darren: That is the service casualty form seen here and have been adapted for use for internees and prisoners of war. Information recorded about each subject includes identification number, name, date of capture, place of capture, date and place of birth, occupation, religion, nationality, marital status, name and address of next of kin, colour of hair and eyes and any distinctive marks. Information about the period of detainment including hospitalisations, disciplinary matters, transfers between camps, release and repatriation were also recorded on these forms.

This particular service and casualty form relates to a local Japanese internee, Yasukichi Murakami, who was a professional photographer living in Darwin. He was 60 years of age when, like almost all Japanese civilians, he was interned in December 1941. As the form shows, he later died at Tatura internment camp in June 1944.

The second group of records …

[On screen shows slide of document with black typing and black and red handwriting on pale background: onscreen text with the heading Japanese - Internee - Service and Casualty Form.]

Darren:… somewhat misleadingly called dossiers containing reports, generally comprised of another standard type of form. This one specific to internees and prisoners of war to some extent duplicates personal information provided on the service and casualty forms, but with some additional details such as dates of arrival in Australia together with the name of ship and a property statement.

[On screen shows slide of document with black typing on pale background: onscreen text with heading Japanese (stamped on) – Report on Prisoner of war.]

Darren: That is a property statement that sometimes consists of quite detailed lists of prisoners’ possessions. In the case of Yasukichi Murakami it records that he was an Australian resident for 44 years, having arrived in Broome in August 1897 aboard the ship Saladin. For his property statement there is …

[On screen shows slide of document with black typing on pale green background: onscreen text with heading: Japanese – Property Statement – Prisoner of war.]

Darren: … a separate list which, it goes room by room and lists all of his furniture and household possessions …

[On screen shows slide of document with black typing on pale green background listing possessions, with the heading Murakami]

Darren: … right down to kitchen utensils, scrubbing brushes and even a child’s tricycle. This can be compared with the more succinct property statement of Giuseppe Lopo, a 40-year-old Italian plumber from Innisfail in Queensland.

[On screen shows slide of document with black typing on pale green background listing possessions and which room they were in.]

Darren: And his property statement merely lists …

[On screen shows slide of document with black typing on pale green background: onscreen text with heading: Italian stamped on) – Report on Prisoner of war.]

Darren: … six pound eight shillings and four pence cash in hand.

[On screen shows slide of document with black typing on pale green background]

Darren: One pound and five pence in the Commonwealth Savings Bank Brisbane and the tools of his trade valued at approximately one hundred pounds.

[On screen shows slide of document with black typing on pale yellow background, featuring two photographs of the same man; one in suit and tie and the other with the number E40618; also two sets of fingerprints, onscreen text with heading: Refugee – … for Registration.]

Darren: Upon the outbreak of war in September 1939 there were over 70,000 German and Austrian refugees in Britain, many awaiting entry visas to the United States and other countries. In the main they’d fled from Nazi oppression, but with the German conquest of France and planned invasion of Britain herself in June 1940, all male refugee classified enemy aliens under 71 years of age were interned in Britain. The Australian Commonwealth Government was asked and agreed to take 6,000 of these internees and on tenth of July, 1940, the first installment of just over 2,500 internees embarked aboard Her Majesty’s transport Dunera for Australia. Many of these were refugees, frequently Jewish and consequently anti-Nazi, with only a minority of several hundred Italian fascists and Nazis.

[On screen shows slide of document with black typing on off white background: onscreen text with heading: Copyright reserved.]

Darren: This particular record is actually taken from a series of applications for registration of aliens under the national security aliens control regulations, and in the left Commonwealth category of the wider series, there is a separate alphabetical run of forms for persons who arrived onboard the Dunera in 1941. In addition to many forms scattered throughout other categories bear the stamp of refugee. The entire 6,000 records in this series have been digitised and can be viewed on our website.

This particular form relates to Frederick Schroeder, 54-year-old German accountant who arrived aboard the Dunera.

[On screen shows slide of page of book with black handwriting on white paper and headings underlined in red.]

Darren: Advisory committees were established in each state shortly after the outbreak of war in accordance with Section 26 of the National Security General Regulations. The role was to review the cases of individuals interned under this section of the act, British subjects by birth and nationalised aliens, and make recommendations to the Minister of the Army regarding the advisability of release. In October 1940 the War Cabinet decided to establish a similar appeal process for enemy alien internees. The resulting aliens’ tribunals functioned along similar lines to the advisory committees.

The archives hold several collections of records resulting from the proceedings of these committees and tribunals, including a substantial collection of transcripts of evidence relating to individual objections against internment. The transcripts in this series consisting as they do of written records of an extremely searching question-and-answer process that went on at these tribunals, provide a wonderful insight into the security concerns of the authorities and the backgrounds, personal circumstances and outlook of the range of individuals who were caught up in the internment process.

[On screen shows slide of document with black typing and black handwriting, some underlined in red, on pale background: onscreen text with heading: Prisoner of War – Service and Casualty Form.]

Darren: Just as in the First World War, once again in the Second World War, not every internee was fortunate enough to survive the war. This is taken from a register of deceased internees; gives next of kin, personal effects and burial details compiled by the Prisoners of War Information Bureau, covers the period 1940 to ‘45. The entries are in chronological order and include details of …

[On screen shows slide of document with two black and white photographs of full front view and profile of a man and two thumb prints: onscreen text with heading: Personal details.]

Darren: … number and name of the deceased, date of birth, next of kin, assets, cash, personal effects and a reference number relating to a separate series of correspondence files.

[On screen shows slide of black and white photograph of six children with their heads poking out of two windows on a bus with blue and pink onscreen text: finding families – with more onscreen text in white on blue background: Genealogists.]

Darren: Their entries for 263 deceased internees.

Moving now to prisoners of war. As I previously mentioned the service and casualty forms and dossiers of reports are both comprehensive in their coverage of enemy POWs as well as internees, and are searchable online through our website by name.

This particular service and casualty form relates to Philip Willy Schmitz, an able-bodied seaman from the German naval raider Kormoran, a World War Two counterpart to the Wolf which was sunk in a duel off the West Australian coast in 1941 with the Australian cruiser Sydney. And the place of capture on the form is recorded as 70 miles north of Carnarvon. The form records that Philip was incarcerated in Murchison camp but was also employed on a labour detail cutting timber at Greytown and repatriated in January 1947.

A less comprehensive but more varied collection of records for prisoners of war are prisoner of war files, series number A7919 of which over 5,700 are held in our Canberra office, but are viewable online. These files generally contain photographs of the individual prisoners as well as details of their employment, reports on their behaviour by camp authorities and even translations of excerpts from their personal mail.

For a few localities around Australia we also hold prisoner of war identity cards.

[On screen shows slide of black typing on off-white background and black handwriting with onscreen text with heading: Identity Card – Prisoner of War.]

Darren: Which this is an example, issued by the local prisoner of war control centres in charge of regulating those Italian internees released into rural labour. These are often of particular interest because they give the names and addresses of the prisoner’s employers and the relevant dates of their employment.

Finally this concludes my overview of the most significant collections held by the National Archives relating to internees and prisoners of war in Australia during both world wars, with an emphasis on what is available online through our website.

There are a great number of other records in our holdings which relate to the administration and experience of internees and prisoners of war, as well as to internees belonging to specific groups and in specific circumstances. Many of these other records can be discovered through a simple keyword search on our online catalogue.

There are also some resources produced by the National Archives which will assist the researcher to …

[On screen shows slide of poster, part of which shows photographs of men’s and women’s heads; underneath are sepia photographs of a large area encompassed by barbed wire with two wooden gates attached to a wooden gateway, with the figure of a man walking through the gates. The heading in white on blue background says: In the Interest of National Security.]

Darren: … find records relevant to this particular subject. The most immediately accessible of these are the fact sheets which are available on our website and in printed form in our reading rooms. These provide a concise introduction to what record series are held by the various offices in various states, with many of the records identified as being available online.

For more detailed information we have several published guides which are likely to be of interest. That is the Finding families which is the general guide to collections of National Archives; it contains significant sections on internee and prisoner of war records. This particular publication in the interest of national security, civilian internment in Australia during World War Two, provides case studies of …

[On screen shows slide of two posters. The first shows black and white photograph of two women and three men walking along a track with trees on the side. The heading printed in white on a purple background reads: Safe Haven – records of the Jewish experience in Australia. The second shows black and white photograph of a large group of people, some sitting and some standing, with a background of Sydney Harbour with a ship and further in the distance Sydney Harbour Bridge. The heading printed in black on a light brown background reads: Allies, Enemies and Trading Partners – Records on Australia and the Japanese.]

Darren: … ten different people of various ethnic origins and political beliefs who were interned, and discusses the profound effects internment had on their lives as well as giving a brief overview of Australia’s internment policies and a detailed guide to finding relevant records in the archives.

And finally two separate guides.

[Slides with onscreen text: Safe Haven – records of the Jewish experience in Australia and Allies, Enemies and Trading Partners – records of Australia and the Japanese.]

Darren: These two guides concentrate more specifically on the Jewish and Japanese experiences, with each having significant space devoted to records documenting the internment of these two groups.

Thank you very much.

[Audience applause.]

[On screen slide shows white words on a grey background: Your story, our history with the logos of the Australian Government and National Archives of Australia beneath.]