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From Death to Disposal: The Treatment of the Dead in Changi POW Camp
During the Second World War some 22,000 Australian military personnel became prisoners of the Japanese. Many either passed through or spent the duration of their captivity in Changi POW camp, a complex of pre-war British military barracks and a civilian gaol located on the Changi peninsula at the eastern end of Singapore island. While a plethora of memoirs, histories, novels, films and TV programs have detailed what it was like to live in Changi, we know far less about what happened when a POW died there.
This paper will examine the treatment of the Australian dead in Changi POW camp. It will outline how their bodies were prepared for disposal, how they were laid to rest in the camp cemetery, and what happened to their remains at the end of the war in 1945. The bodies of the Changi dead, it will be argued, were invested with multiple meanings: they became objects of investigation and affect.
Such analysis reveals how the POWs, rather than their captors, shaped the policies and processes governing mortuary practices in the camp, and the extent to which dealing with the dead was an integral part of the captivity experience for POWs of the Japanese.
27 August 2025, 11am AEST
Burwood: C2.05.01
Waurn Ponds: IC1.108
Zoom: Click here
Dr Kate Ariotti is an Australian Research Council DECRA Senior Research Fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. She is a historian of Australians at war and is currently writing a history of the Australian war corpse. She has published widely on the treatment of Australian war dead throughout the twentieth century as well as the experiences of Australian prisoners of war, and is Editor of the Australian Army History Unit’s Historical Collection Series.
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