Australian Prison Guards and
Others in the Early Years of WWII Internment.
Paper presented on 8th March 2014 at the Cowra Internment
Symposium.
Silke Hesse
Like quite a few others here, I was
interned in the Tatura 3 family camp as a child. I was there from 1942 to 1944,
almost 6 on arriving and 8 when we left, and still have vivid memories of that
time. For me the camp was on the whole a rich and interesting experience. Among
other things it gave me the opportunity to get to know something of my culture of
origin and to learn to read and write German, which we spoke at home; it also took
me away from the worrying hostility of some Australian neighbors. The camp was a
picture-book-like experience, a somewhat exotic miniature world. If I have war-time
scars it is from the social exclusion suffered before and after the camp and
not from internment.
The camp was happy for me because my family
was back together again (my father, my aunt who was like our second mother, and
a foster sister had been interned before us, all suddenly taken away one day)
and because all our three adults wanted us happy. It was also happy because the
bulk of the inmates, the Templers from Palestine, had been a functional,
community-minded group for decades and it was predominantly they who ran our
camp. It was happy because there were many interesting, skilled and cultured
people there who had time to share their knowledge. It was also happy because as
far as my parents were concerned political views, which can be so divisive,
were insignificant compared with human relationships. And it was happy because
the Australian soldiers who ran it were decent and professional and saw
themselves as looking after us rather than punishing us. Australia currently
has camps that are run differently and so I thought I would look at the group
of people in charge of us during those
war years.
Here I will draw on the letters my father
smuggled out of Long Bay Penitentiary in the early months of internment. Just a
brief note on my father, Ekkehard Beinssen. He was born in Sydney of German
parents (his father was a wool buyer) and was thus Australian by Australian law
and German by German. After primary education in Australia, he received his
secondary and later his tertiary education in Germany. Because he was a German
in Germany he was called up for war-service in 1917 and had a year and a half
of front line combat during which he was always conscious that the Australians
in the other team, directly opposite him in his first battle at Passchendaele, were
also his people. Back in Australia he found that while some returned soldiers
befriended him as their mate, his former neighbors in Hunters Hill, including
his best friend, had sworn never to speak to a German again and were keeping
their word. (We children later met with a similar rejection when all the
parents from our kindergarten withdrew their children in protest upon our enrolment.
When they returned, which they eventually did, we were asked to work at a
different table.) These two groups, let’s call them the rigid, often racist patriots
and the friendly humanists, could both be found in Australia during the wars.
After WWI, my father spent years
adventuring in various countries around the world. He returned to Germany in the Depression year of
1931 for health reasons and was lucky to be permitted to leave again in 1933 after
he had been involved in anti-Hitler activities. Following two years in
California, he arrived back in Australia in late 1935, now with my German mother,
to work in his father’s firm. Soon after, I was born and my brothers followed. By
the time WWII started, my father had quite a few influential Australian friends,
among them the much celebrated Xavier Herbert who had published his great novel
Capricornia in 1938. I am mentioning Xavier
here because he helped Ekke to understand and appreciate the distinctiveness of
Australian attitudes, the topic of the talk. Herbert later also insisted on visiting
Ekke in internment in Long Bay.
Among initial signs of the coming war were
increasing difficulties trading with Germany. Ekke’s business friends, mostly also
returned soldiers, there stood by his side. But one day a CIB (Commonwealth
Investigation Bureau) man turned up in his office and asked to see his home. He
greeted my mother Irmhild, by pretending to recognize her from a German
patriotic function which she had not attended. Links with German clubs, reading
the German newspaper Die Brücke,
owning German books (we would soon find other people’s on our doorstep in the
morning), having German friends, corresponding with relatives in Germany and
the like was then the somewhat schematic formula with which the CIB worked. It
was not a particularly good indication of loyalty to Australia or anti-Hitler
views, particularly where educated people were concerned, but it was probably
the best dredging net that could be come up with in a hurry. An attempt by a
CIB officer to record my father’s political views and activities before he left
Germany was hopelessly garbled and inaccurate, an indication of how difficult
it must have been for Australian
intelligence officers to assess complex overseas politics. My bi-national parents
subsequently made no attempt to take precautions; it would have been pointless
anyway. While the bureaucrats and CIB officers were professional sleuths, what
I have called the ‘rigid patriots’ were eager amateur sleuths. When we children
fought over the bathroom light switch one night, the sleuths concluded we were
sending signals to German submarines lying in wait.
Shortly before the war my father was also
asked whether he wished to surrender his Australian nationality. He said ‘no’, giving
as his reasons his business interests and the rights of his children as born
Australians. By the time it came to Ekke’s appeal hearing, his writings and
years worth of confiscated carbon-copies of his letters had been read with some
care. The court allowed my father to explain his perception of his situation as
a committed bi-national, eventually assessing him to be a ‘truthful witness’. His
judges could understand that he did not want to fight against German relatives.
The ultimate test the court came up with was what Ekke would do if approached
by a German sailor from a sunken ship. His rather strange answer was that he
would ask to be interned, giving them their cue. But Ekke also offered them his
word of honor that if allowed his freedom he would never do anything against
Australia’s interests.
On 12th July 1940 my father was
interned in Long Bay Penitentiary in Sydney, a section of which had been
renamed Malabar Internment Camp. At the time it functioned as the initial
reception centre for internees from all over the world. Ekke wrote an account
of his arrest and transportation and smuggled it out to my mother in a box of the
Capstan 333 cigarettes which they both smoked, the first of many such letters.
14.7.1940
My consort of
honor was a delight and my arrest and transportation a comedy. After I had seen
first you and then Edgewater disappear I was brought back to reality in the
first curve when I was almost suffocated by my collapsed mattress. From then on
I fought a wild battle against death by suffocation till we arrived at the
hotel just before the Harbor Bridge, where we stopped as agreed. There we
started the night with a few drinks to celebrate my arrest. Then we went on to
Aaron’s Exchange Hotel where we had a few more starters and then consumed
toheroa soup, lobster mayonnaise and ice cream. We had some bottles of beer to
go with that. Having gorged ourselves thus, we arose. But in the lounge my
companions met friends and asked would I mind if we joined them for a bit. I
was decent and said I didn’t mind and there we then continued to drink till
nine. One of these friends was the comedian Lennie Lower, drunk as a lord and
therefore somewhat disappointing as a ‘wise cracker’. In between, my escorts
left me and I could move around the whole hotel freely and so was able to give
you a ring. Eventually the older man came back and said that it was now time to
put me to bed. Upon my enquiry, whether we shouldn’t take the other fellow
along he said that he was unfortunately dead to the world. He couldn’t take
much.
So we went back
to the mattress in the car and off we drove to Long Bay at sixty miles an hour.
Because of the tempo and the impaired sobriety of my chauffeur I hid behind my
mattress like a coward. We lost our way a few times and three times I got out
and asked passers-by, politely raising my hat: “Can you tell me how I can get
to jail?” or “Can you tell me the quickest way to get to jail?” I have rarely
seen people pull such funny faces. Eventually we arrived and after a lot of
tooting the gate was opened. Then off we went up the long drive to the women’s
prison for that is where we are accommodated. By now it was almost 10pm and the
doorman and -woman gave us an earful because we were so late. I should have
been taken to a city lockup overnight. Then, loaded up like a mule, I dragged
my mattress, blankets, bag, coat etc. into the reception hall where I was
‘checked’.
The arresting detectives obviously trusted
Ekke’s ‘word of honor’ and their own psychological instincts, enjoyed a prank and
a boozy night and did not feel they needed to stick to the letter of the law; and
though grumpy, the inconvenienced prison guards were obviously also ‘good
sports’.
I have translated my father’s letters from
internment because I think they are an important and unique document. They give
a fair bit of detail about the process and experience of internment. But what I
will focus on here is what they tell us about the mentality of Australians employed in the ‘law and order’ sector during those war
years. This mentality was most clearly visible in the early days when there was
still a lot of interaction between guards and prisoners and quite a bit of room
for improvisation.
We have all read about Japanese, Russian
and Nazi prison camps and we know how convicts deported to Australia were
treated.
British guards on board the Dunera with its
civilian internees, mostly Jewish refugees, quite a few of them survivors from
the sinking of the Arandora Star, behaved almost as abominably. Ekke heard their
stories in Long Bay.[1]
Our asylum seeker camps today are not noted
for their humanity either.
In contrast to these horror stories, the
Australian ‘law and order’ culture as Ekke experienced it in 1940 was
characterized largely by a combination of larrikinism and mateship. It was a
culture found above all among returned soldiers, which many of the guards and
policemen probably were. It implied mutual trust based not on rules but on
intuition, egalitarianism, comradely risk-taking and support in danger, a
passion for fairness, a tolerance of disorder and a love of the comic. My father had encountered this culture in New
Guinea and written about it, though without as yet warming to it or fully
understanding it. It was a culture best expressed in the larrikin prank, which was typically not directed against people but
against ’the system’, better, the latent
inhumanity of systems and their proponents and enforcers. Another form this
culture took was getting drunk together.
That would lead to uninhibitedness, risk-taking, mutual vulnerability and consequently
helpfulness and the abandonment of accepted standards of behavior as embodied
in ‘the system’.
According to the historian John Hirst, the roots of larrikan culture,
which some have seen as lying in convict insubordination, or the Irish rebel
spirit, or the attitudes of outback workers [2],
are more likely to have been derived from the uprooted poor who flocked to the
industrial cities of England in the 18th and 19th
centuries and from there to Australia where they thrived. He writes:
The larrikin
spirit is still a mysterious phenomenon. It was not the defiance of the damaged
and excluded; it was the boldness that came from self-confidence, of a young
man who would not be confined. A prosperous working class, free of old-world
condescension, had spawned in its native-born youth this baroque display of
independence. (63)[3]
Whatever its origins, larrikinism in its
original form was not necessarily endearing. Melissa Bellanta[4]
has documented it predominantly as bad, even very bad behavior. But its WWI
melding with mateship raised its ethical status and with the myth of the digger
its national prestige, allowing it to establish itself as the national
character. Les Murray (as quoted by Hirst) writes of it:
The ability to
laugh at venerated things, and awesome and deadly things, may, in time, prove
to be one of Australia’s great gifts to mankind. It is, at bottom, a spiritual
laughter, a mirth that puts tragedy, futility and vanity alike in their place. [5]
Medieval European countries had related traditions
in their carnivals which would make an interesting comparison.
By New Year’s Eve 1940, Ekke and some of
his friends had been in Long Bay off and on for almost six months. Alone or
with his friends Ekke had supported distraught or worried new arrivals, made
peace among fighting Germans and worked on taking the sting out of their
anti-Semitism, mediated between Italians and Germans, helped the Boss to
balance his books while his secretary was on holidays, shown an interest in the
wider work of the prison by going to Mass there one Sunday, presented a series
of evening talks, organized a fitting and moving Christmas celebration for the
Germans and all in all, contributed substantially to keeping the prison on an
even keel. That it was at this time by no means easy to run a camp well is shown
by this report . On 29.11.40 Ekke writes:
What Janssen
reports about Hay is not very nice. Dusty, without a green leaf, flies,
disgusting toilet facilities and wild dissention among the Italians. It is
supposed to be so bad that the camp leadership is in complete despair. The
judges from the Advisory Committee were in Hay last weekend to inform
themselves. The 20 or so Germans of course have no say amongst the 100 or so
Italians and apart from that, there are also rows and disagreements among them.
So it is not surprising that one of the
warders felt that thanks were due. What is interesting is that the form this
acknowledgement took was again the prank, an egalitarian act of insubordination
against ‘the system’ in which the consequences of discovery were likely to be
quite as uncomfortable for the warder as for the prisoners. They were in it together.
On New Year’s Eve Ekke writes:
I have just
discovered that some fairy has softly, inaudibly pushed open the bolt of my
little room. Through the peep-hole the eye of the fairy looked in and winked. A
short military salute and everything was okay. – Later, after ten, when the
lights are turned off, a dark figure will flit through the corridor with soft,
soundless steps, will quietly push back three bolts in a well practiced manner,
two further ghosts will quickly dart across the corridor and disappear just as
quickly in No. 10 and then sit together by candlelight whispering softly and
listening as the great wheel of time flings around on its axis to begin a new
cycle, a new year. And then the four ghosts will raise their mugs with ‘tea’,
will spread a little ‘jam’ on their bread and drink to the fulfillment of all
the wishes that are in their hearts. [The tea and jam brought in regularly by
Irmhild consisted largely of port-wine, also bending the rules.] Later they
will then make a similar noiseless and spectral disappearance, three bolts will
again be shut noiselessly while the fourth bolt, which is mine, will stay open.
In the morning Rossi’s cell No.1 will be opened first, he will then run like a
whirlwind to No. 9 and pretend to open the bolt and (hopefully) no one will
notice. The four specters are Rossi, Brose, Janssen and I [incidentally, all
Australian Germans familiar with the culture of the larrikin] We won’t say any
more about the fairy because they should not really exist in prisons.[...]
And next morning:
Even though the
above story was written two hours earlier, it all happened just as expected.
Only, when I was locking up Rossi two warders from the women’s prison who were
just wishing each other a happy New Year caught sight of me and one of them
called out really loudly: ‘What are you doing out of bed!’ – And then when I
put my finger to my mouth the other one said: ‘Happy New Year anyway!’ I waved
my thanks to her and crept back crouched under the peepholes of the cells. She
must have told the nice warder in the morning, for he came in at six and
quietly closed the bolt to my cell. ‘No one noticed!’ But we had fun and our
mugs with your ‘miserable tea’ were raised to the health of all our loved ones
and a speedy reunion.
This prohibited alcoholic tea was also
shared with the guards on the long cold train-trips between Orange and Sydney. Such
transgressive acts served to demonstrate that the artificial barriers ‘the
system’ erected would never be allowed to come between men.
As to be expected, larrikinism tended to be
a response to bureaucratic ‘wowserism’ embodied by the elite, here above all
Victoria Barracks, and this also existed. Ekke writes:
29.11.40 A new
regulation from Victoria Barracks has forbidden all calls, even ones made by
the Boss. Seidel had no way of informing his wife [of his departure] to give
her the opportunity to come one last time to see him […]. That was messed up
for us by L. whose bride […] is supposed to have claimed at Victoria Barracks
that she had talked on the phone with L., which wasn’t true at all. [The obvious
lesson to be learned: Never try to pull a bureaucrat’s leg! ]
On one of Ekke’s many trips from Orange
back to Sydney his warrant was lost with the result that he was kept at the
Bourke Street Military Prison, a lock-up for drunk and disorderly soldiers, for
nine days till it turned up again. Tolerance of disorder is, as we have said,
intrinsic to larrikinism. Ekke writes:
21.8.40 There
was argument about me because my warrant had been lost. The commandant didn’t want to take me in
without a warrant and the soldiers wanted to be rid of me and go home to their
wives. I was, so to speak, a nuisance [...] Unfortunately, the sergeant
eventually won and the prison reluctantly took me with a lot of cursing about
bloody this and bloody that […]. Then I had to empty my pockets and the
suitcase and everything was recorded in a ridiculously round-about way: 1
mirror, 1 sock, 1 sock, 1 shoe, […] 1 plate of chocolate, 1 sock etc., […] I
was allowed to take along cigarettes, matches and a handkerchief. [..] Then the
locks, which you already know, creaked and with a rough “Get in there!” I was
pushed into the monkey’s cage to join my two Axis-brothers. […] The furniture
consisted of a completely blocked toilet. (Note the full stop after ‘toilet’.)
For that was all there was if you don’t want to count a lot of dirt and us
three fellows with the furniture. The cell had bars as big as a door leading to
the corridor. On these bars hung the captured soldiers from last night; all
unkempt, alcoholic, still drunken, bashed, extremely dirty and with unshaven
faces, swollen up from recent fights, uniforms messy, crushed and with vomit,
and hats on their heads as crooked and crazy as only an Australian can wear a hat.
There was a strong stench of beer and sick. You can see why I called it a monkey’s
cage. – Then the begging for cigarettes
started. We gave them a few and in return one of them brought a ‘glass of
water’ in an unrinsed jam tin and another one (he was still quite drunk but
meant well) brought something to read, being the label from that tin: ‘Gardner
Blue Jam’. Suddenly a fine strong voice from the neighboring cell could be
heard and my two Italians excitedly recognized an aria from a Verdi opera. Then the voice broke off and soon a nice
looking young soldier appeared at the bars with a roll of toilet paper. On it
was written in Italian: ‘We have been here for four days now. Have not seen the
sky or washed our faces in all that time. Don’t speak English.’ And two
signatures. The section was torn off and quickly thrown into the blocked
toilet, for which it had of course been intended in the first place. Then the
soldier, Don he was called, passed in a pencil (the one I am writing with now)
and we wrote a reply: ‘Buck up, you’ll soon go to Long Bay to your fellow
countrymen.’ Then the toilet roll was taken back again and as an expression of
gratitude and delight the Verdi aria resounded once again.
Ekke comments admiringly on the good
humored professionalism of the Military Police at Bourke Street.
Instances of chaos and inefficiency abound
in Ekke’s early letters but in a benign setting they are the stuff of comedy
rather than anger and frustration. From Liverpool camp he wrote:
1.4.41 […] there
is not much to write about here other than that we are daily annoyed by the
fact that we have only three brooms for the entire camp, one ax with an intact
handle and one with a broken one. The pitchforks are about as large and useful
as dining forks and the shovels as teaspoons. You get annoyed, then you say
shit, and that’s the end of it.
When Ekke arrived at the Tatura men’s camp two
months later, things were quite different: ‘This is a beautiful camp, well laid
out and efficiently run’, he writes. Here there would be little contact between
guards and the internees who ran the camp. Letters were now religiously
censored. But it is to be assumed that in Tatura too the benign spirit of
larrikinism cum mateship was always
only just below the surface, balancing the wouserism of the elite and taking
the sting out of the hostility of the rigid patriots. That, I believe, was the
secret behind the running of the Australian camps. But as the Cowra breakout showed, it worked well only on the assumption
of a basic cooperativeness between human beings with similar values. Ekke had had
experience of larrikinism and mateship and could signal that he would be
receptive.
[1] Patkin, Benzion The Duneera
Internees, Cassell: Australia, 1979.
[2] Ward, Russel The Australian Legend. Oxford University Press: Melbouren, 1958.
[3] Hirst, John Looking for
Australia. Black Inc.: Melbourne,
2010
[4] Bellanta, Melissa Larrikins. A History. Queensland University Press: St. Lucia, 2012.
[5] Hirst, John op. cit. p. 71, from Les Murray ‘Some religious stuff I
know about Australia’ in The Quality of
Sprawl. Thoughts about Australia. Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999
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