He ceases to be quite human

Part of the Arts & Humanities Festival 2013: Being | Human
Presented by the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies

This event is free and open to all but booking is required.

‘He ceases to be quite human’: compensating POWs in post-war Australia

This paper examines the transformation of POWs of the Japanese from objects of ambivalence and contradiction in the 1940s to their current status as veterans who arouse profound sympathy. The issues are explored through three moments in the history of compensation for POWs: the ‘3 bob a day’ campaign of the late 1940s, the POW Trust Fund (1952-1977) and the Compensation (Japanese Internment) Act 2001. This is a journey from government denial to acceptance of a claim, with a detour along a route reminiscent of nineteenth-century charity. The paper undermines easy assumptions that POWs always received the empathy of either the government or the broader community.

Biography:
Christina Twomey is an Associate Professor of History at Monash University and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, 2012-2016. In 2012, she was Distinguished Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at the University of Copenhagen and is current editor of Australian Historical Studies. She is the author of three books, including Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners: Civilians Interned by the Japanese in World War II (Cambridge, 2007) and A History of Australia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) co-authored with Mark Peel. Christina has also published widely on welfare history, memory and war, prisoners of war and in the field of atrocity and photography. Her paper today is drawn from a new book she is writing about the post-war fate of POWs of the Japanese. This work was conducted as part of an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, Captive Australians: The place of POWs in post-war Australian culture.