The internment of the Taiwanese in Australia was more complicated than the
aforementioned situation in Hong Kong. It started long before the War ended, and started
outside Australia. A memoir written by a family member of a Taiwanese internee
provided a rare insight into the experiences of Taiwanese before and after the internment in the Dutch East Indies. 59 Mr. Ke Dai, father of the author of the memoir, went to Malang, Java, alone in 1927; he cultivated coffee and cotton, and gradually established his business there.60 But after the War broke out in December 1941, Mr. Ke was arrested by the Dutch Police because he was considered holding “Japanese nationality”, and sent
59 磯村生得 （李英茂譯），《失落祖國的人》（臺中市：晨星出版社，1996）。
60 磯村生得，《失落祖國的人》，頁 12-13.
to the internment camp in Canberra, Australia; as a result, he lost all his possessions in Malang.61
The National Archives of Australia in Canberra holds the most comprehensive record of the wartime (and postwar) internment of “Formosan”. For each of these Formosan (Taiwanese) internees, a record was created, using the “Service and Casualty Form” of the Australian Military Forces. On the form, most Taiwanese were categorically identified as “internee”, instead of “prisoner of war”.
Take Taiwanese businessman Mr. OEI Sioe as an example:62 according to his record, he was first arrested in Semarang, Java (“place of capture”), and put on board Australian naval ship S. S. Cremer on January 27, 1942; at the time, a “Detention Order” was issued for his arrest, under the authorities of Australia’s National Security Regulations, which stated a particular person can be detained “with a view to preventing that person acting in any manner prejudicial to the public safety or the defence of the commonwealth”.63 After his arrival, Mr. OEI was interned as an “enemy alien” and sent to the internment camp in Loveday in South Australia.64 Another fellow Taiwanese businessman-turned-internee in Australia was Mr. TJIOE Ing See; his record showed that he was arrested in Kertosono, Java, and sent to the Loveday camp on February 11, 1942.65 Mr. TJIO Tjhong Long, a
“biscuit manufacturer” from Taiwan, was arrested on December 8th, 1941 (“date of capture”) in “Sourabaya”,66 Dutch East Indies, together with his wife TJIO (Tan) Kioe Nio; they were later sent to the internment camp in Tatura, Victoria, in Australia.67
These archival records showed that most Taiwanese had been interned in Australia since January 1942; they were put into internment first not by the Australian authorities, but rather by the Dutch authorities in the Dutch East Indies—the present-day Indonesia.
61磯村生得，《失落祖國的人》，頁 13
62 On Australian records, the name of each Taiwanese was listed with given name first and followed by family name; in this paper, following the Taiwanese custom, the name of each Taiwanese will be listed with family name first and family name will be capitalized.
63 National Archives of Australia, Prisoner of War/Internee；Oei, Sioe；Year of birth - 1889； Nationality - Japanese formosa, MP1103/1, IJ50204 and MP1103/2, IJ50204.
64 Loveday camp was the largest internment camps in Australia during the war, with more than 5,000 internees at its peak in May 1943. It consisted of several separate “compounds”, and the Taiwanese (“Chinese from Formosan”) were interned in Camp 14. See “Loveday, South Australia (1941–46)”, National Archives of Australia,
http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/snapshots/internment-camps/WWII/loveday.aspx (accessed 2016/10/7).
65 National Archives of Australia, Prisoner of War/Internee；Tjioe, Ing See；Year of birth - 1894；
Nationality - Japanese formosa, MP1103/1, IJ50168 and MP1103/2, IJ50168.
66 It is commonly spelled as “Surabaya”, but it was spelled as “Sourabaya” on the military record.
67 National Archives of Australia, Prisoner of War/Internee：Tjio, Tjhong Long；Date of birth – 17 March 1901；Nationality – Formosan, MP1103/1, IJ50291 and MP1103/2, IJ50291. Aside from Loveday, Tatura was another camp where many Taiwanese were interned. According to Australia’s official account, in Tatura camp there were “Japanese internees from Australia, Java and New Caledonia.
Included among these were Chinese from Formosa (Taiwan)”; see “Tatura – Rushworth, Victoria (1940–47)”, National Archives of Australia, http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/snapshots/internment-camps/WWII/tatura.aspx (accessed 2016/10/7).
These Taiwanese had been living and working in the Dutch East Indies before the war broke out. Immediately after Japan’s declaration of war against the Netherlands,
following the attack on Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, the Dutch authorities took swift action to intern all the Taiwanese—together with other Japanese nationals—across the Dutch East Indies. Soon afterwards, the Dutch made arrangement with the Australian authorities and transferred all internees to Australia. These Taiwanese, numbered around 2,000, were kept in several different camps across Australia, and were not freed or repatriated till March 1946.
In Australia, the studies of wartime and postwar internment of “enemy aliens” have drawn a great deal of public and scholarly attention in recent years. 68 It has been widely recognized that during the war, the Australian government put more than 12,000 “enemy aliens” into internment, including Japanese, Germans, and Italians who were considered potential threat to national security after the war broke out in the end of 1941.69 In addition, it has been pointed out that Australia had received from outside its border thousands of aliens who were interned by its Allies in “Britain, Palestine, Iran, the Strait Settlements, the Netherlands East Indies, New Caledonia, and New Zealand”.70 It shows that in addition to “local internees”—those “enemy aliens” living in Australia when the war broke out, “overseas internees” constituted a significant portion of Australia’s wartime internment. 71 One study further points out that out of the total 15,000 civilians interned in Australia during the War, 8,000 were “detained overseas”.72
68 Outside Australia, only a handful of scholarly works have touched upon this issue, see 後藤乾一，臺灣 與東南亞（1930-1945），收在黃富三、古偉瀛、蔡采秀合編，《臺灣史一百年：回顧與研究》
（臺北：中央研究院臺灣史研究所，1997)，頁 67-83；藍適齊，〈戰後海外臺灣人的集中與遣返〉，
收入呂芳上主編《中國抗日戰爭史新編》，第六編－戰後中國，第四章－戰爭的終結，第三節（臺 北：國史館，2015 年 7 月），頁 425-465
69 See Joan Beaumont, Ilma Martinuzzi O'Brien and Mathew Trinca, eds., Under Suspicion: Citizenship and Internment in Australia During the Second World War (Canberra, A.C.T.：National Museum of Australia Press, 2008)；Klaus Neumann, In the Interest of National Security: Civilian Internment in Australia During World War II (Canberra, ACT.：National Archives of Australia, 2006)；Yuriko Nagata, Unwanted Aliens：Japanese Internment in Australia (University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Queensland, 1996)；Margaret Bevege, Behind Barbed Wire (University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Queensland, 1993).
70 Klaus Neumann, In the Interest of National Security: Civilian Internment in Australia During World War II (Canberra, ACT.：National Archives of Australia, 2006), p.13.
71 Joan Beaumont, Ilma Martinuzzi O'Brien and Mathew Trinca, eds., Under Suspicion: Citizenship and Internment in Australia during the Second World War (Canberra, A.C.T.：National Museum of Australia Press, 2008), p.3.
72 Klaus Neumann, In the Interest of National Security: Civilian Internment in Australia During World War II (Canberra, ACT.：National Archives of Australia, 2006), pp.2, 7.
The internment of foreign civilians as by the Dutch and the Australian authorities should be understood in the larger context of the handling of “enemy aliens” of the Second World War.73 During the War, the largest scale of internment was carried out by the United States against the Japanese nationals, many were American-born U.S. citizens of nissei/sansei (2nd/3rd generations) Japanese-American; between 1942 and 1945, more than 120,000 Japanese-American were interned.74 During the same period, more than 5,000 Japanese nationals were interned in camps across Australia.75
Because of the isolation of internment, the Australian public was mostly unaware of the existence of the Taiwanese (or the distinction between the Japanese and the
“Formosan”) during the war, and no record is available today to understand the Australian public response specifically to the Taiwanese internment. But since the situation of the Taiwanese was consistent with the “overseas internees”, as enemy aliens taken from outside Australia, the internment of the Taiwanese should be understood as a part of the larger and coordinated action taken by Australia and its Allies after the war broke out at the end of 1941 in dealing with civilians from the enemy countries.