'in defence of liberty'?

Minna Muhlen-Schulte

doi:10.5130/phrj.v26i0.6823

Abstract

After the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe in September 1939, emergency internment legislation passed by the Australian Federal Parliament created a network of camp sites across Australia. What do these historic landscapes mean in Australia today and how can we interpret them? Some feature government-installed interpretation signs; others remain silent concrete ruins concealed within private farmland, unmoored from any context and living memory. These sites are connected to other Allied internment sites globally, and the journeys between these sites vividly rendered in artworks, diaries and letters left behind by internees as well as the isolated cemeteries where they were buried adrift between continents.

Highlights

One-hundred-and-fifty kilometres north of Melbourne, the highway narrows and bends around shoulders of grey ironbark trees
Prime Minister Menzies acknowledged that: ‘The greatest tragedy that could overcome a country would be for it to fight a successful war in defence of liberty and loose its own liberty in the process.’[1]. In 1940, 45,000 people living in Australia became targets of surveillance – because they were born in countries that had become the nation’s enemies.[2]
3 Victoria hosted the largest complex of eight camps near the town of Tatura in an area better known to Australians as the home of Goulburn Valley tinned fruit

Summary

Introduction

One-hundred-and-fifty kilometres north of Melbourne, the highway narrows and bends around shoulders of grey ironbark trees. It is part of Australia’s wartime history, internment is not as acknowledged because it does not conform to the Allied powers ‘epic story of unity, courage, endurance and final victory.’[5] Today the legacy of internment legislation literally marks the landscape in Australia and sites across the globe with camp ruins, cemeteries and memorials forming a strange atlas of incarceration.

Results

Conclusion