The Changi Book
Reviewed By Janet Mawdesley November 30, 2015
Author
Distributor:
ISBN:
Publisher:
Release Date:
Website:
FaceBook:
YouTube:
Instagram:
X formally Twitter:
The Changi Book has been many, many years in the making and is perhaps more significant now than it may have been, should it have come to fulfillment in the years directly after the ending of WW II and the Japanese surrender in the Pacific.
The material for the book was rediscovered in the Australian War Memorial archives, some seventy years after the concept of writing an essay to be published at the end of the war was conceived.
The stories or essays, were about life as POW’s of the Japanese in the notorious Changi Prison and many others, some better or worse than Changi. That Changi gained such notoriety was directly in relation to the infamous and torturous building of the Burma-Thailand Railway; but the reality was that some prisoners transferred there from other camps considered it more like heaven than hell, particularly if they had come from the camps in Burma or Thailand.
The twenty-six stories which have been collated into this intimate and fascinating look at a theatre of war which is perhaps, in many cases not as well known as Gallipoli, but cost the lives of hundreds of Australian soldiers and airmen, is compelling and informative, throwing a different light on the way the men considered their plight, that they largely considered they were ‘agents of their own fate’, to a degree and set about making the best of a very bad situation.
Of the fifty one essay discovered, only a selection have been published in this edition, but this selection gives a very good overview about their Industries, Health and Survival, Work and Work Parties and Thoughts of Home, as well as their overall opinion and aspects of their life in captivity.
A wonderful drawing by Murray Griffin, amongst the many sketches and photographs, show the men who had an amputation playing sport as an important part of their recovery. So many of the sketches show differing aspects of the men’s lives , right down to portraits of the AIF Concert Party, a group that added the very necessary element of entertainment required to keep the spirits up.
There was no limit to the men’s inventiveness as when it was decided a piano would add the extra element to the shows, a small group of eleven men crawled through the wire one night, ‘liberating’ an upright piano from a derelict sailors mess, hauling it back to camp.
This inventiveness saw them creating what passed for a reasonable life, with work, recreation, health care and of course ‘trading’, making up their days. The ‘black-market’ was alive and well although a very dangerous undertaking; this chapter makes incredible reading and if nothing else highlights the constant danger and the lengths the men would go to, have some sort of chance at surviving.
The book is a tribute to the men who were in Changi and many of the other POW camps during this horrific time; a credit to Lachlan Grant for discovering and realising the huge significance of the works but above all it is a true and very personal look at the lives of the men who wrote their stories for posterity and their mates who never made it home.