Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Most Australians thought of themselves as British until the latter part of the twentieth century. This paper looks at the very different cultural attitudes and economic institutions developed by British and Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese, and how Australians living in close confines with the British became aware of how different they were. The structural conditions such as rations, pay, ‘endowments’ and work requirements were largely similar, yet the economic institutions developed by each nationality were distinctly different. This case study examines how within the boundaries of captivity, the British and Australian POWs had the opportunity to compare their cultural attitudes and practices came to see that their own cultural boundaries delineated quite different ethics and expectations of behaviour and institutional forms in times of extreme deprivation and peril. In doing so, the Australians came to redefine their identity as no longer partly British and partly Australian, but instead firmly Australian. Repeatedly, in hundreds of camps, the British POWs established institutions of economic distribution based on hierarchy and social class while the Australians established communitarian institutions based on the idea of equality and the ethic of ‘mateship’. These camps provide quasi-experiments in economic behaviour which emphasise the importance of national culture and moral economy in identity forming.