Australia’s fourth World War II ally, the Dutch. Who knew?

A group of Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) soldiers, photographed at Camp Columbia, taken between approx 1944 – 1947. Source: Paul Budde, Camp Columbia.

Anyone who’s been to Canberra has seen the Australian American WWII Memorial. It’s that huge eagle on the column on the way to the airport. What almost no one knows is that there is another WWII memorial just behind the American monument. Much more subtle, low-rise…and Dutch.

The Netherlands Australia Memorial marks the Netherlands’ contribution in the Asia-Pacific as a regional “fourth ally” joining Australia, the US and UK. It had that role owing to its colonial occupation of the Netherlands East Indies (NEI, now Indonesia).

A Government in Exile

When Japan captured the NEI in 1942, a lot of people escaped to Australia. Sixty-eight, mostly civilians, were killed by a Japanese air attack on Broome, a sad tale with a mysterious twist involving a lost diamond horde in the waters off Broome. Substantial numbers of others, including military and intelligence as well as civilian government elements, ended up spread across Australia. In 1944, most of them were moved to Camp Columbia, at Wacol near Brisbane, the land of the Turrbal and Jagera people, to form the NEI Government in Exile.

This is the only foreign government ever to be established in Australia. It was set up not just to coordinate Dutch interests in Australia during hostilities, but to plan the reoccupation of the NEI at war’s end. There is no space here, but the exiles conducted intelligence, commando and air force operations through the islands across our north, often jointly with Australia. They also developed a proposal to build a reoccupation force. That idea was scuttled by union refusal to allow NEI military recruits to be shipped to Australia, in line with the unions’ support for NEI workers in exile in Australia during a strike for fair pay in 1942, as well as post-war union support for Indonesian independence.

I did my PhD in Canberra, but I didn’t know about the Dutch memorial until the Netherlands Ambassador asked me to deliver the May 5^th Netherlands Memorial Day speech on the site in 2022. Memorial Day is the Netherlands’ Anzac Day. The invitation came because I had recently led an Australian-Dutch archaeological team studying Camp Columbia.

Excavating Camp Columbia

There are records about the camp, but we hoped archaeological evidence would enliven the picture. Modern archaeology is highly forensic. It is key in all historical and indeed many contemporary investigative contexts because it can capture information that written and oral sources forget, misrepresent, or deliberately omit.

Before the Dutch took over, Camp Columbia was the headquarters of the US 6^th Army until the Americans returned to Asia. I knew about the Americans at Wacol, which was part of their enormous WWII footprint in Southeast Queensland, but I never dreamed the Dutch had been there, much less their unique Government in Exile.

Most of the Wacol base was occupied by the Australian Army after the war but it’s now been completely sold off. We took a while to establish exactly where the Dutch had been located. Unluckily, it turned out to be under a state prison complex built after that part of the camp was sold. Prison authorities were strangely reluctant to let archaeologists dig around their facilities. The one place they approved, the oval of a decommissioned prison, became unavailable just before our scheduled start. Another arm of state government piled the oval high with asbestos-contaminated waste as it demolished the decommissioned building. We tried some ‘non-invasive’ subsurface testing with high technology amidst modern buildings in the area where the Dutch HQ had been situated, but everything had been erased by prison construction.

Map 1 shows the WWII Camp Columbia block plan transparent overlay: the blue transparent overlay delineates the camp facilities; the orange overlay shows the associated WWII sewerage infrastructure. The labels describe the location of the current-day facilities (correctional centres, etc.); the bushland reserves (Pooh Corner and Wacol Bushlands); and the suburb names. Click the map to be taken to a full resolution map on the Camp Columbia website.

Then we had some luck. Paul Budde, a project member from the Brisbane Dutch community, suggested we look in bushland across the road from the prisons, an area which wartime maps showed as the edge of the Dutch camp. I was reluctant to go into the head-high grass, not so much because it would be full of snakes but because every 100m along that side of the road there are “DO NOT ENTER – UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE” signs. Undeterred, Paul discovered that the Brisbane City Council maintains the area as a nature reserve and was assured the old ammunition is elsewhere.

Archaeological inspection indicated that there are remains such as a large sewerage tank, building foundations and the like on the surface but little chance of subsurface remains suitable for excavation. Paul also found that metal detectorists – with whom archaeologists have a fraught relationship – had already scoured the site and recovered numerous items including a ceremonial sword. On that basis, I wrapped up the archaeological project and Paul assumed responsibility for pursuing further investigations as a community project, with excellent results so far. His project website is here https://campcolumbia.com.au/.

There are remnants of a large sewerage plant in the area where Camp Columbia was located. A member of the research team stands beside an old pipe, left over from WWII. Source: Paul Budde and Camp Columbia.

An unexpected ending

Extraordinarily, when I was discussing the future of the project with research partner the Bronbeek Museum, the Dutch Ministry of Defence NEI museum in the Netherlands, the Director said he had something to show me. Shortly before I’d arrived, a woman had walked in off the street with an item she thought she should gift to the Museum rather than throw out. It was a beautiful and perfectly preserved project book compiled by a Dutch girl evacuated from NEI. It included postcards and photos as well as her handwritten description of her journey to Camp Columbia. One of the photos shows her on the steps of a Camp Columbia hut. The hut number matches a number that our wartime camp plan shows to be one of those whose foundations still lie in the bushland reserve. What serendipity! It almost makes up for the lack of archaeology. But not quite.

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