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 has 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 the conclusion of this two-part series, Vashti Kenway looks at Australia’s internment camps in the First and Second World Wars.

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Many of those who were locked in the Hay internment camp during the Second World War have abiding, almost physical, memories of dust. Dust in eyes. Dust in coats. Dust under their beds. Tempests of dust sweeping across the arid, hot, flat plains of NSW.

Ernest Frolich, an Austrian Jew who had arrived on the Dunera from England, noted on 27 December 1940: “Continuous dust storm. Hot wind which made one feel that it would burn ones hair. Dust lied [sic] in our hut inch deep”.

Thousands of internees from similar backgrounds to Frolich had never experienced the seasonal bitterness of the Australian outback. They had never seen such breadth of landscape, such sparse vistas.

The physical memories tangle with those of loneliness, frustration, pain and the bittersweet camaraderie that often develops in situations of extreme hardship. Overwhelmingly, the experiences of those whose freedom was denied during the war have been ignored: left in the basement of Australian history to gather their own dust.

Klaus Neumann’s In the interest of national security: civilian internment in Australia during WW2 uncovered a number of these histories, including Frolich’s. There were three categories of those interned here during the Second World War: internal “aliens” who were residents, suspected enemies transported from other parts of the world and POWs.

Over the course of the war, around 7,000 Australian residents were interned. In contrast to the First World War, when the overwhelming bulk of those interned were German, a broader sweep were labelled a possible threat to national security. The majority were Italians, Germans and Japanese, but 30 other nationalities were represented in the camps – including Hungarians, Russians and Portuguese.

Another 8,000 people were sent to Australia to be interned after being detained overseas by Australia’s allies. Some were POWs; others were people who had fled from their home countries as refugees to Britain. At their peak in 1942, the camps held more than 12,000 people, according to the National Archives.

In 1939, the National Security Act had been passed. It was more extensive and draconian than the War Precautions Act of the First World War. A major part of the legislation was the directive to collect the names of those who might be enemies. Long lists were compiled by the secret services. By September 1939, when prime minister Robert Menzies declared Australia’s entry into the war, the police were ready to act.

Initially, the majority of internees were herded into old prisons or abandoned barracks. As the numbers grew, custom-made camps were built. By September 1940, the government had completed its first purpose-built concentration camps. These included four compounds at Tatura in Victoria, three at Hay and one at Cowra in NSW, three at Loveday in South Australia and one at Harvey in Western Australia.

Conditions in these camps varied, and subsequent histories emphasised the creative capacities of the internees and their attempts to make the best of a bad situation. But all camps were run under military discipline, and many internees suffered irreversibly from their imprisonment. Many were clinically depressed, and several internees committed suicide.

Those who were considered enemies were rounded up and numbered – many given just hours to collect their belongings for internment. This was often a traumatic experience. One internee, a Japanese woman called Masuko Murakami, described how in late 1941 “soldiers brandishing bayonets” arrested her younger siblings who attended the convent school in Darwin.

She said of her own arrest: “I took my son to mum’s house and saw two soldiers standing in front of the house … They said ‘What are you doing? You are not supposed to be out. You are not allowed in’ … back at home there were also two soldiers … They said, ‘You are under arrest … This is for your protection”.

The initial batch of individuals detained was relatively small, but it rapidly expanded. The government in 1940 began accepting ships of people to be interned from Britain. One of the most notorious of these was the Dunera, which arrived in Sydney in September.

Crammed onto this ship were 2,800 people, the majority of whom were Jewish refugees whose initial asylum from Germany had been rescinded. They were accompanied by 200 Italian and 251 German prisoners of war. The “Dunera Boys”, as they came to be known, were treated with contempt.

One of them described the feeling of helplessness as he was forced onto the ship in Liverpool. “There was no justice. There was no law. There was just incarceration. You are a spy so off you go.” Another, Bern Brendt, later recalled his time on the ship with extreme bitterness. “But the British guards on the Dunera, I could have happily murdered every one of them”, he said. “They really were scum. They were the scrapings of the barrel.”

As the Pacific War moved closer to Australia, the government expanded its internment policies yet again.

While the Allies were officially at war with the Nazis, the secret service lists included many left wing Europeans, anarchists and communists. Many ruling class figures remembered the industrial and social agitation that accompanied the First World War and were concerned to prevent another such upsurge.

Further, many in the Australian ruling class were fascist sympathisers. Menzies had visited Nazi Germany in 1938 and had come back full of praise. According to a report in the Melbourne Argus: “He had been impressed with German industrial efficiency and with the attitude of responsibility of the big industrial enterprises to the welfare of their employees and their children”.

Internment was accompanied by a broader social crackdown. Organisations considered “disloyal”, such as the Communist Party of Australia, were banned. Others, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, had their activities monitored and limited. Some members of these organisations were interned. A number of these more political internees were refugees from the war in Europe and had even spent time in the same German concentration camps that the Australian government claimed to be liberating people from.

The internees’ differing political allegiances weren’t recognised by the authorities, who lumped fascists and anti-fascists together in the camps. Indeed, army intelligence reports indicate that camp authorities’ sympathies often lay with the interned Nazis rather than the anti-fascists. According to historian Klaus Neumann, “They found the anti-Nazi internees quarrelsome and difficult to handle, and at times admired the discipline of the nationalist German internees in Tatura”. These political divisions expressed themselves in the social life of the camps. On 14 October 1939, Sergeant A. Mackay, the officer in charge of a women-only internment camp on the Hawkesbury River, reported: “The internees are absolutely divided into two cliques … The first group are known amongst themselves as the Nazis and the second group the anti-Nazis. One of the latter group, Alice Meyer, openly denounces Hitler and the Nazi regime, and prefers to remain away from the other internees”.

Italian anarchist Francesco Fantin was murdered by fascists in the Loveday camp in South Australia. Four months earlier, he had written to his friend in Sydney:

“On the evening of the 15th of this month, at 10 o’clock, while I was in bed here in my tent, with my friend Coletti, two fascist ruffians, together with their assistant … called me outside with the firm intention of ruining me. They wanted me to give the fascist salute and shout ‘Long live Il Duce’.

“Having obtained from me neither the one thing nor the other, they began swearing at me … They went on with kicks, seizing me by the neck to choke me, finally telling me that if I say anything more, they will kill me.”

Eventually they did. Giovanni Casotti, an Italian fascist who had been living in Western Australia, smashed Fantin on the back of the head, splitting his skull. As he lay on the ground, Casotti kicked him.

Frolich describes the pain of incarceration: “I cannot enjoie [sic] the sun the intense blue sky the song of exotic birds, the landscape or the sunset with its most magnificent colours. I do not hear the birds or the grasshoppers with my troubled mind nor the sky or sun everything appears to me like the landscape behind the veil of barbed wire”.

The prisoners of war suffered greatly. In particular, the Japanese POWs endured brutal and culturally insensitive treatment. For many Japanese POWs, being captured was worse than being killed. En masse they refused to have their photos taken by the Red Cross because of the shame involved.

In Cowra, where 1,104 Japanese POWs were held, hundreds knelt for a day and a half, hands over faces, in protest. More dramatic was the Cowra breakout. On 5 August 1944 at 2am, a Japanese bugle sounded and more than 1,000 prisoners, shouting “Banzai” (the cry of a suicide mission), charged the fences of the compound armed with baseball bats, knives and garrotting cords.

Many were gunned down; others escaped into the surrounding bush. When it became clear that they had no future, many either killed themselves or killed each other. This desperate and tragic event resulted in 231 deaths.