Examining Internment Through Architecture

Their study, examining internment camps around the Pacific Rim, uses the lens of architecture to explore citizenship and identity during and beyond World War II.

Pieris takes Australia as a starting point and sees the wartime camps as a stage in a longer history of settler colonial practices of incarceration and mandatory detention. While many in Australia tend to think of World War II as something that happened overseas, there were eighteen main camps and a number of smaller temporary camps located across Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia. Over 25,000 Prisoners of War (POWs) and approximately 15,000 internees passed through these camps. The biggest incident in Australia during the war took place at a POW camp, at Cowra, when Japanese Prisoners of War attempted a breakout in 1944; the guards opened fire and 231 POWs (and four guards) were killed. Pieris points out that examining these sites can offer unique insights into war in the Asia Pacific region.

Anoma Pieris and Lynne Horiuchi at the former Cowra Prisoner of War Camp in 2016.

In examining these camps from an architectural perspective, Pieris found that their alteration in shape offered important clues about Australian understandings of national groups. The population of the camps included “enemy aliens” who were resident in Australia, overseas internees sent from Britain or Pacific Island territories of colonial powers, German and Italian POWs taken by Allied troops in the Pacific, German seamen and Indonesians, Formosans, Koreans and Europeans implicated by global changes. “Seen through the lens of design,” Pieris explains, “we begin to understand that Australians, under the White Australia Policy, really had no understanding of complexities that exist within national groups.” The result is camps, purpose-built by both local communities and the military that kept altering in shape in response to the changing dynamics within camp populations. The first camp, near Shepparton, was “quite haphazard,” while the second camp, at Tatura, changed as numbers of internees grew. “The racial attitude of colonisation initially determined the simple figure of the camp, and then fighting broke out,” observes Pieris. “They realised Italian royalists and fascists needed to be divided, or that Austrian Jews couldn’t be with Nazis.” In some later camps, the Australians produced a dodecagon figure and divided it into four compounds, allowing for accommodation of different groups of POWs whilst keeping officers separate.

Pieris’s work also shows that internees expressed their own identities, often challenging the expectations of their Australian guards. “The internees’ perspectives and identities shaped certain spaces, giving us an indication of where they were coming from, their ethno-cultural preferences, whether they were urban or rural, and the forms of modernity embraced by many of their places of origin during the interwar years,” she explains. In Hay, NSW, there’s a small model of the Colosseum that serves as a garden feature, built by Italian POWs, suggesting that the Italians, brought over to do agricultural work, wanted to show the Australians that they were urban and civilised. There were traditional Japanese gardens created at Loveday in South Australia, but also a tennis club, indicating diversity of interests. The Germans POWs were among the most confident of their rights and status, which Pieris notes was due to the belief that they would win the war, and dug many tunnels to try to escape Tatura’s Murchison Camp. German and Austrian internees were also energised to reproduce their urban culture in regional Australia, setting up cafes, theatres, and orchestras inside the internment camps.

The Architecture of Confinement compares the Australian camps with those in New Zealand, Singapore, Japan and North America, with collaboration with Horiuchi making the latter comparisons possible. Singapore is particularly significant, Pieris observes, because many Australians were taken prisoner there. Here, too, architecture tells stories; the camp sites, which included Changi Prison, existing barracks and temporary huts, were limited by the Imperial Japanese Army’s lack of manpower and materials in this part of the world.

Despite the significance of Australia’s internment camps, few traces of them remain. The camps were built on requisitioned land and properties were returned to farmers, with the camps dismantled, at the end of the war. There was, Pieris explains, no desire to preserve memories of internment camps. At Camps 1 and 13, on private land in Shepparton, which are the most intact, only foundations of camp structures and residual garden plantings remain.

Where sites are publicly maintained, this tends to be due to association with human remains. At Cowra, there is a Japanese garden, which Pieris describes as “beautiful,” and a Japanese war cemetery. In Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and Japan, demands for redress or reconciliation following wartime injustices have similarly ensured the longevity of some camps, reimagined as memorial spaces.

The Cowra Japanese Garden

“My research allowed me to visit many of these sites, such as Manzanar in California or Cowra, during such ceremonies and to connect with the remarkable people dedicated to sustaining their histories,” Pieris notes. There were connections within the MSD, also; the Cowra Japanese War Cemetery was designed by Shigeru Yura, who also designed the Japanese Room, while Alex Selenitsch, who retired from the faculty this year, was an inspiration for the project. Selenitsch, as a child, spent time in post-war migrant camps repurposed from these earlier military facilities, and included artworks on Cowra in his Ideal City and Liminal House exhibitions.

This study has broader relevance due to the significance of camps across Australian history, ranging from camps for convicts, Aboriginal missions, migrant camps and detention centres. “There is a history of repurposing camp architecture for migration or detention, so that their violence is normalised as the function of facilities that racialize and criminalise people who are different or powerless,” explains Pieris. Pieris’s research is fascinating, intricate and multi-layered, and The Architecture of Confinement promises to enrich many conversations around Australia’s past and present.

The project was funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship titled Temporal cities, provisional citizens: architectures of internment FT140100190 (2015-18) and by a University of Melbourne Establishment Grant.