Negotiating Gender, Sexuality and Race in Australian World War II Memoirs of Internment

The Australian experience of the Second World War is well-trodden ground in popular imagination – a process of defending the ‘Mother Land’ that after the Japanese entry revealed the limits of Britain’s fading Empire and prompted shifts in both how the Australian nation was conceptualised and the vision of Australia’s place in the world. This popular history is imagined as particularly gendered, racialised, and (hetero)sexual, featuring certain militarised masculinities, straight romance stories and White Australia’s fears of the ‘Yellow Peril’.

This paper troubles this narrative through exploring two Australian memoirs of life in Second World War internment camps – Russell Braddon’s bestselling 1952 memoir The Naked Island, and Ethel ‘Monte’ Punshon’s 1987 Monte-san: The Times Between, Life Lies Hidden, published in both English and Japanese. Braddon was a prisoner of the Japanese in Changi for four years, while Punshon was a warden at the Tatura camp in country Victoria between 1943 and 1946, working primarily with Japanese internees.  

 In the years after the war, both Braddon and Punshon were revealed as queer – although neither were comfortable with the postwar languages of discrete sexual identities, and neither discuss this explicitly in their writings. In this paper, I look at the gendered strategies of storytelling in Braddon and Punshon’s memoirs of war, through the lens of their postwar queer personas. In examining their descriptions of gendered practices, interracial friendships and sexual relationships in the camps, I ultimately complicate the accepted narrative of Australian war experience as overwhelmingly masculine, heterosexual and anti-Japanese.