Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows a silent amateur film re-enactment of the reunion of Mrs Isabel Sprod and her son George in December 1945 on his return from Changi where he had been a prisoner of war (POW). Scenes of preparation – Mrs Sprod repairing a fence, trimming the hedge and mopping the porch – interspersed with scenes of daughter Kathleen mowing the lawn and granddaughter Gill 'helping’, are followed by George’s arrival. An intertitle depicts him as 'Poor George’. George presents his mother with bottles of alcohol and shows the cartoons he drew in Changi prison.

Educational value points

• This clip reveals one survivor’s view of himself as a non-hero and of his POW experiences in Changi and on the Burma Railway as providing material for humour – two characteristics many commentators see as typical of Australian soldiers’ wartime larrikin humour. In the 'Poor George’ intertitle Sprod (1919–2003) has drawn himself as a comic figure, so thin his trousers are falling down about his ankles.

• As in many Australian families in the Second World War, all the men in the Sprod family were on active service and the women possibly combined the paid and unpaid work previously considered the male domain along with the traditional roles of child-rearing and housekeeping. In addition to the work shown in the clip, Kathleen Carter may have been in the workforce and both she and her mother may have sewed and knitted, grown vegetables and kept chickens.

• The homecoming re-enactment shown in the clip, with its exaggerated handshake between mother and son, reflects one of the fundamental constructions of Australian masculinity at the time – a profound discomfort with the expression of deep emotions. The homecoming scenes probably bear no resemblance to Sprod’s actual reunion with his mother after four years of separation, yet this humorous treatment was clearly how he wanted it portrayed in the movie.

• Sprod, typical of many Australians who enlisted in the army in 1939–40, expected to fight for Britain in campaigns far from Australia, but instead fought in the battle for Singapore and spent three and a half years as a POW of the Japanese. Trained as a gunner in the 2/15 Field Regiment, Sprod fought against the Japanese soon after they declared war in December 1941. He was in action most of the time until the British surrendered Singapore on 15 February 1942.

• In 1943, when Sprod was a POW, reports emerged that Australian and British troops captured by the Japanese in Malaysia and Singapore were subjected to brutal treatment, including forced labour, primitive living conditions, starvation rations and poor medical treatment. They were denied access to the International Red Cross. About 37 per cent of POWs in these camps died and of the 22,376 Australian POWs captured by the Japanese, 8,031 died in captivity.

• Of the 556 members of the 2/15 regiment who became prisoners of the Japanese, only 262 survived, with Sprod’s survival, like many others’, being largely a matter of chance based on where the Japanese sent him. Although he was part of one of the forced labour parties dispatched to build the Burma Railway, he was fortunate in being sent back to Singapore to dig defensive tunnels on the island. Emaciated and ill, he was liberated from Changi in August 1945.

• As with most Changi and Burma Railway survivors, Sprod’s experience of captivity changed his life. He had always wanted to be a cartoonist and in Changi he began to draw in earnest, producing an illustrated journal 'Smoke-Oh’ for sick POWs and teaming up with British cartoonist Ronald Searle to publish a fortnightly prison magazine, 'The Exile’. The cartoons seen here, now in the Australian War Memorial, were his passport to a career as a famous cartoonist.

• Christmas 1945 was the first in four years that many Australian families had something to celebrate and plenty of alcohol to do it with. This was because large numbers of servicemen like Sprod were demobilised in December, collecting their pay arrears and spending up in the service canteens where beer and spirits were freely available. Everywhere else in Australia beer was rationed and imported spirits were mostly unobtainable.