Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows actor Ron Haddrick reading a poem by A C Glendinning, a former prisoner of war (POW), and interviews and scenes of the Changi POW camp in Singapore during the Second World War. An interview with an unidentified man explaining the need for prisoners to be engaged in meaningful activities to overcome the monotony of incarceration is followed by scenes, which include drawings and a voice-over by an ex-POW, focusing on prisoners establishing their own ‘university’ and library. Orchestrated music accompanies the images.

Educational value points

• The 1942 poem ‘POW Changi’ by A C Glendinning, read at the opening of the clip, is one of the poems written by prisoners who were members of the Changi Literary Society. Poetry readings proved to be popular in the camp and gave rise to a literary competition that spawned the Literary Society. Elsewhere, a former member talks of poetry’s importance in ‘unlocking the door’ of the camp. The poems were published in 2002 as Changi Days – The Prisoner as Poet.

• Despite conditions at Changi being less harsh than at other Japanese POW camps, prisoners had little to eat and had to withstand the psychological shock of being ‘broken on the wheel of fortune’, being isolated from outside news and from loved ones, and having their lives effectively put on hold for an unknown period of time. The poem refers to the ‘dull monotony of weeks’. Many believed the Japanese would kill them when the War ended.

• Changi ‘university’ provided some education and activity for thousands of Australian POWs. Many of the soldiers had left school early during the Great Depression and eagerly took on courses, especially the most popular – agriculture, teaching and business principles. Others joined discussion groups and art classes, and 400 learned to read and write at Changi. Anyone who could share their knowledge with others did so.

• Although the Japanese almost certainly filmed some of the footage shown here to give a good impression, Changi was a relatively benign POW camp. The Australian and British POWs were allowed a degree of autonomy, ran a camp hospital and, as indicated in the clip, even a library. However, standards in the camp later deteriorated, rations were reduced and medicines became scarce. Changi was also a transit camp for projects such as the Burma–Thailand Railway.

• The clip shows piles of reading materials being gathered for the Changi library, which held more than 20,000 books for camp inmates. At first the prisoners themselves donated books. Later these were augmented by collections from other Singapore libraries including the Raffles Library.