Looking back at Loveday: Australia’s largest WWII internment camp
The camp operated from 1941 to 1946 and held 5382 internees at its peak. It was overseen by Camp Commandant Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Theyer Dean, who led about 1500 defence personnel during Loveday’s five years of operation.
Loveday Internment Camp was not a single camp, but several. The internees – men aged 16 years and older – were divided into camps based on their ‘nationality’. However, many of these so-called enemy aliens had been born in Australia. Others were naturalised citizens who had lived in the country for decades. The camp also received internees rounded up in the territories of overseas allies, including Britain, Palestine, Iran, the Dutch East Indies, New Caledonia and New Zealand.
Facilities in the camps included bunk houses for sleeping, kitchens, mess huts, recreation halls and a hospital. The 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War stipulated that enemy civilians receive the same rations as Australian troops and could not be subjected to forced labour. But many chose to work to overcome boredom, and they were paid one shilling per day. Some internees worked as woodcutters – a job that allowed them to leave the barbed-wire perimeter for several hours each day – and others in the poultry farms or the piggery, whose meat fed soldiers on the frontlines. Poppies and pyrethrum daisies – raw materials used to manufacture morphine and insect repellent, respectively – were cultivated in the lands around Loveday.
According to local historian Rosemary Gowers, popular pastimes included woodwork, sculpting, making jewellery and musical instruments, and holding concerts. The Germans even built a nine-hole golf course.
Italian-born (and naturalised Australian citizen) Fernand Charles Bentivoglio – described by Loveday’s senior medical officer as “one of the cheeriest men in the Compound” – had been a languages professor at the NSW Conservatorium of Music and spent his internment teaching English to Italian internees.
Loveday’s facilities were reasonable, but camp life proved monotonous. Internees’ mental health often suffered from boredom, social isolation and separation from their community, wives and families. Others were indignant at being labelled an enemy alien by the country they were born in. In the Japanese camp, military personnel observed a distinct social divide between internees born in Australia and those born in Japan. Patrick Yoshio Ahmat, born in 1916 in Onslow, Western Australia, was interned at Loveday from 1942 to 1946. An officer noticed he only mingled with other Australian-born Japanese, “none of whom have much in common with the Japanese Internees…”
Loveday’s German and Italian internees were transferred to Tatura Internment Camp in Victoria before VE Day. When Japan surrendered in September 1945, most Japanese civilians were repatriated to Japan – including some who had been born in Australia. The last Japanese internees left the camp on 28 February 1946.
