After the Japanese invasion of Indonesia in 1942, the Dutch fled to Australia taking with them Indonesian soldiers, sailors, government officials and more.
The Dutch Government made a deal with the Australian Government which gave the Dutch extra-terrestrial rights over many Indonesian refugees, declaring several former army camps as Dutch territory.
A camp located in Casino was under the agreement Dutch territory and was named Camp Victory by the Dutch as initially, the Dutch expected to return after victory over the Japanese.
From December 1942, a few hundred Indonesian soldiers arrived in Casino as part of the Dutch Armed Forces Technical Battalion. The group came to be known as ”The Dutch Boys” or ”The Casino Boys”.These soldiers were paid, had permission to leave camp at the end of the day and were given other various privileges. This was different to the first lot of prisoners who were treated otherwise. (The book about ‘The Casino Boys’ can be found at the end of this article).
The first lot of prisoners detained at Camp Victory in 1942-1943 were merchant seamen, then followed by Netherlands East Indies political prisoners that came from Tanah Merah prison camp held in New Guinea. The third lot of prisoners included both soldiers and civilians that were either recruited into the Technical Battalion and trained in a variety of trades or were employed as guards.
After the war’s end, many prisoners became agitated at delays in deporting them and having their wages delayed.
With the proclamation of Indonesian independence on August 17, 1945, many of the Indonesians felt they could no longer serve under Dutch command. The Australian Union Movement, supporting independence, refused to allow the Dutch servicemen to be shipped to the East Indies.
The Dutch responded to this declaration by surrounding the camp with barbed wire fences, twenty-four-hour flood lighting and guards armed with tommy guns.
The Dutch colonial administration started jailing citizens who refused to serve with the Dutch armed forces. They chose Victory Camp to incarcerate them along with Indonesians who had been training as airmen.
According to Dutch born Jack Dalmayer Relationships between the prisoners and their guards were relaxed. The Dutch Boys began to take part in the Casino social scene, seeing movies and playing sport.
With the liberation of the European Netherland regions from 1944. An agreement was reached with the Australian Federal Government for 5,000 airmen and 29,000 soldiers to be enlisted from the newly liberated Dutch areas. They would be transported and trained in Australia, before joining in the Allied advance against the Japanese in the Pacific Campaigns. Only a few hundred airmen, coming via England, arrived and conducted infantry training, when the war ended. They in turn became prison guards for the interned Indonesian soldiers. Leaving with minimal if any flight training at all at Casino Airport.
Finally, near the very end of 1946, the camp was disbanded. The prisoners were taken by train to Brisbane and then loaded on boats. There is still debate today over whether the captivity of the prisoners was legal.
A personal note from Edmund Nyst:
Casino’s Camp Victory was a huge big tent camp. There were a few barracks for offices and amenities, but the men lived in tents. … The camp held the First Battalion of the Netherlands East Indies Infantry. It was made up mainly of what we now call Indonesians. They were all professional soldiers from the Nederlandsch Indisch Leger which had been the army in the Dutch East Indies before the Japanese invasion. They had last fought in Timor with the Australian before being evacuated to Australia in 1942. Now they were used in different theatres of war under General MacArthur. (Source: Edmund Nyst 2007 The Old Fellow’s War. New Holland: Chatsworth, NSW – p138)
Australian Government records concerning Camp Victory
An important collection of official Australian records concerning Camp Victory is held by the National Archives of Australia. The file, entitled Netherlands East Indies – Military Detention Camp – Casino, covers the period 1945–1947 and contains correspondence generated as Australian authorities examined the detention of Indonesian and other Netherlands East Indies military personnel at Casino.
The records show that matters associated with the camp were considered by several Commonwealth departments and agencies, including the Prime Minister’s Department, the Department of External Affairs, the Attorney-General’s Department and the Commonwealth Investigation Service. The surviving correspondence concerns conditions within the detention camp, the legal position of prisoners held under Dutch military authority, reported incidents and deaths, and arrangements for the release or repatriation of the remaining Indonesians.
By late 1946, the Australian Government was considering whether the Netherlands Indies authorities should be required to relinquish control of the detention camp and whether prisoners remaining at Casino should be transferred into Australian custody pending repatriation. The file therefore provides important primary evidence of the political and legal difficulties created by the continued operation of a Dutch military detention facility on Australian soil during the Indonesian independence struggle.
The selected documents reproduced below come from National Archives of Australia: A9108, ROLL 20/39, Netherlands East Indies – Military detention camp – Casino, 1945–1947, item 1353596.
Shootings at Camp Victory September 1946
Tensions culminated on 12 September 1946, following the disputed death of Indonesian detainee Corporal Emod, whose body had been found hanging in the camp the previous day. When Dutch guards entered the compound during the resulting unrest, they opened fire on the prisoners. Soerdo was killed, reportedly after being struck by thirteen bullets, while Parta and Lengkong were wounded. The shooting caused widespread public concern and renewed demands from Casino residents and Australian officials for the detention camp to be closed. It also highlighted the controversial legal position under which a foreign military authority exercised jurisdiction over Indonesian prisoners on Australian soil. Read full article
Article by Ingeborg van Teeseling – 2 September 2022
One of the interesting, and largely unknown, stories about the Dutch in Australia has to do with their ownership of part of Casino, a town in NSW. It is a narrative with a nasty racist streak. When the war broke out, the Dutch also had a colony in Surinam, a country in the north of South America. They had been running it with slave labour and the whip but still, after being run by the Dutch since 1831, most people largely felt Dutch. So with the motherland under attack, 500 men put their hand up to help at the front. The Dutch Prime Minister really didn’t want ‘niggers’, he said, because that would upset white soldiers from South Africa, who were also fighting for The Netherlands. But beggars can’t be choosers, so in 1942 those men were transported to Australia for training at Casino, where the Dutch had set up a camp. After that, they were sent to the front, fighting the Japanese. Their treatment by the Dutch was appalling. They were paid in Japanese invasion money, that was worthless. While they were in Australia, they were not allowed on the street, because Casino had ‘no place for coloureds like you’, as their commander said. They had been promised a post-war job and even land but never received either. The Surinamese men were not even allowed medical care or social services, everything their white peers did receive. Even now they feel ‘neglected’.
But Casino’s Camp Victory, as the Dutch called it, wasn’t only a training camp. It also held prisoners of the Dutch. Long before the war started, Indonesians had been fighting for their independence. Many of their leaders had been arrested and locked up in camps in New Guinea and Timor, where the Dutch were in control. In 1943 and 1944, the Dutch managed to get them out of there and bring them to Australia. There they were locked up behind barbed wire in Casino, guarded by Dutch military men with Tommy guns. The rationale behind this move had been to prevent the Indonesians picking up arms against the Dutch on the side of the Japanese. The Dutch fully intended to take back their ‘overseas territory’, as they called it, after the war. So, to leave motivated freedom fighters to their own devices was not considered a good idea. The result was that a sleepy town in rural NSW suddenly was confronted with a camp with hundreds of political prisoners inside its borders.
On 18 August 1945, just after the Japanese had surrendered, Indonesia proclaimed its independence. In the camp at Casino, this news was received with great joy. The Indonesian soldiers and employees soon started to declare themselves free from Dutch command. Every day, more and more of them followed. The Dutch answer was to lock them up with the political prisoners. Obviously, everybody now wanted to go home. But the Dutch weren’t having any of it. Despite the fact the war was over, they court-martialled the soldiers and convicted them to incarceration of at least a year. The employees who refused service were either locked up too or deported (to Timor, not to Indonesia). The political prisoners were also not allowed out. More barbed wire was added and by 1946, 500 men were locked up inside. Of course, they didn’t take that lying down. They wrote letters to the Australian Prime Minister Curtin. They went on hunger strikes, they organised protests. In September 1946, one of those got out of hand. The Dutch soldiers started shooting at the prisoners. Hundreds of machine gun rounds were fired, leaving one man dead, with 13 bullet wounds to his body. The Australians were powerless to do anything. The extra-territoriality they had given the Dutch meant that the Dutch were in charge of part of an Australian town.
But it would get more complicated. After the Indonesian proclamation of independence, a lot of Indonesians in Australia started to pressure the Dutch government to recognise their new nation. The irony was that a lot of those people were those ex-employees of the Dutch and ex-soldiers, brought to Australia a few years before. Part of them they were in Casino but hundreds were outside and started agitating for freedom. Most of them, despite their centuries of experiences with harsh Dutch rule, had hope that this time they would get their country back. That hope was based on a document that had been signed by all the Allied forces during the war. In 1941, they had developed the so-called Atlantic Charter. One of the promises in that Charter, was that after the war people would be able to choose their rulers. It was an important document, that would eventually be the foundation piece of the Declaration of Human Rights for the new United Nations. On the basis of the Charter, the Indonesians thought that their independence would be recognised immediately. But they were wrong. Almost straight after the Japanese surrender, the Dutch started their ‘police actions’, as they called them. Soon that turned into a full-scale war, with 100,000 dead at the end of it.
But in 1945, the Indonesians were still looking for a way to pressure the Dutch. Many of them were now working at the docks in places like Sydney and Brisbane. There, they spoke to their Australian counterparts, many of them members of one of the militant unions. They advised a boycott of all Dutch ships. Nothing in, nothing out. And especially not military equipment, soldiers, munition, or anything else that could be used to fight the Indonesians. The boycott started at the end of 1945 and by 1946, it really started to bite. So much so, that a high-level meeting was organised between the unions and the Dutch and Australian governments. Lord Mountbatten, then the Supreme Allied Commander for South-East Asia, even flew in for it. The Dutch head negotiator, baron van Van Aerssen, demanded that the unions stop their actions. They laughed at him. ‘You’re not in charge here, friend’, they said. ‘We are’.
The longer the boycott lasted, the more people signed up for it. And it was supported by unions in America, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. It also spread in Australia. To more towns and more trades. Painters, clerks, greengrocers that supplied ships; nobody wanted to touch the Dutch vessels. A large role in keeping the boycott intact was played by Chinese and Indian sailors. A lot of them had been working in Australia during the war. Their countrymen at the docks had been supported the American fleet in Brisbane and even now, they were crewing ships everywhere. During the war, they had not been treated well in White Australia Policy Australia. That had led to protests and the strengthening of their own unions, who were now more powerful than ever. And they had to be because on behalf of his Dutch friends, Prime Minister Curtin presented them with an ultimatum: either you work for the Dutch, or we will deport you. Deporting Chinese and Indians in 1946 meant almost certain death. China and India were in the throes of civil and anti-colonial wars and returning there was not a good idea.
That they were willing to fight for their Indonesian friends regardless, partly had to do with those similarities. The longing for freedom was felt throughout the region and the Chinese and Indians simply understood what the Indonesians wanted and were going through. But there was something else. In 1938, a dispute had played out between the people of the Waterside Workers Federation and the employers in charge of the Port Kembla docks, close to Sydney. In December of 1937, the so-called Rape of Nanking had taken place, an atrocity by the Japanese, when more than a quarter of a million Chinese had been raped and killed in six weeks. The Australians had been appalled and the unions, under the leadership of communist Ted Roach, had decided to boycott Japanese ships. ‘No scrap for the Jap’ was the slogan, and especially pig iron was the union’s bone of contention. The Japanese used pig iron to make weapons to turn against yet more Chinese, and Roach wasn’t having it.
The boycott lasted for ten weeks. Union members were starved, thrown out of their houses and fired. But they kept at it, partly because they were supported by the Chinese who were living in Australia. They sent them money, food and transport if they needed it. The Waterside Workers Federation and the Chinese had forged a bond and that, now, came to fruition in the boycott of the Dutch ships. But they paid a heavy price for that. Hundreds of Chinese and Indians were deported. That, of course, didn’t help the Dutch, who still needed people to crew their ships. From 1946, they started flying them in, mostly from India. Those new people had no idea about either the conflict or the boycott. Often, that was rectified by their countrymen in the unions. When a Dutch ship left with one of those new crews on board, they went after it with dinghies, letting the crew know, in their own language, what was going on. Most of the time, vessels then turned around. Sometimes, crews were forced by the Dutch to come on board, gun against the temple. They then did but jumped ship just before it was about to depart. The boycott lasted until 1949, when Indonesia got its longed-for independence. Most of the Chinese and Indians were then deported or fired. Often, their paperwork was stamped ‘deserter’, which meant that nobody wanted to employ them, ever. Most of them died in poverty.With so many men confined in the Camp, and with the war over with very little for these men to do discipline obviously was difficult to maintain. The town folk started to complain especially about the fact that Aboriginal and also white women were attracted to the camp offering their services to the men. Alcohol was often uses as payments and this led to nuisance in town. The following letter talks about these issues.
This document and file below were researched by Ruby Todorovski, researcher at the University of Queensland.
Repatriation of Indonesians from Casino –1946-48.
In September 1946, 552 Indonesians were still detained at Camp Casino. The Australian Government ordered the Dutch to move these prisoners as the camp was set to close. Of them 223 were due for release on 18th October, 1946. But other 329 release dates range from January 1947 to October 1949. The Australian Government classified these prisoners as political prisoners and asked the Dutch to release them. The Dutch were not cooperative and some of the related issues went on until 1948. This added to the already deteriorating diplomatic relations between the Netherlands and Australia.
Information documents from the Northern Rivers Military Museum in Casino
See also: Camp Victory Collection at the Northern Rivers Military Museum Casino NSW
The Northern Rivers Military Museum has also preserved a remarkable 12-page document from 1946 listing property belonging to 156 people identified as internees associated with Camp Victory.
Deaths and graves at Casino Cemetery
The documents reproduced below form part of a small but significant collection relating to Camp Victory and its role during and immediately after the Second World War.
Among the collection is a research paper prepared for a Camp Victory reunion held in 2015, before the Northern Rivers Military Museum was established. Unfortunately, the museum’s copy does not identify the author, but it remains an important source of information about the camp and its personnel.
The museum’s archival collection was donated by a local family with direct connections to Camp Victory. The documents had been preserved by the daughter of an Australian woman who married a Dutch serviceman after the war and accompanied him to Suriname. Finding life there difficult in the late 1940s, she subsequently returned to Australia, bringing with her records associated with Camp Victory.
These documents provide a rare glimpse into the camp’s postwar history. They include records concerning internees and detainees, investigations into deaths and other incidents, and inventories of personal property apparently left behind when the camp closed. Together, they help illuminate a complex chapter in Dutch–Australian and Indonesian–Australian history.
Related correspondence and administrative records may also survive in Australian, Dutch and Indonesian archives. However, it has not yet been established whether the museum’s lost-property inventory or its other locally preserved documents are duplicated in the National Archives of Australia. The Northern Rivers Military Museum is digitising its collection to help conserve these important records.
According to the museum’s research, the following ten servicemen were originally buried at Casino Cemetery. Their remains were transferred to Jakarta in 1950, although some of the Dutch servicemen were subsequently reburied in the Netherlands.
- Private C.M.J. Lublieck — died 21 September 1944 after drowning near the railway bridge at Casino.
- Private Pickaulina — died from illness on 21 October 1944.
- Private Oboedarin — died in a motor-vehicle accident on 20 December 1944.
- Private S.H. Snepvangers — drowned in the Richmond River on 23 September 1945. The diary of Camp Victory guard Jan de Wit records that Snepvangers was buried with military honours the following day.
- Private Madjarjasih — died from natural causes on 30 September 1945.
- Private Tadjeri, also known as Tarsan — the museum’s record states that he was accidentally shot in the Military Detention Camp and died on 17 May 1946. An Indonesian account gives the date of the shooting as 18 April 1946 and states that it occurred during unrest among servicemen who were concerned that possessions disappeared when they were taken away from the camp. The precise date and circumstances therefore require further verification.
- Corporal C.J.A. “Kees” van Esch — killed by the propeller of a small aircraft at Casino Airport on 16 July 1946. Jan de Wit’s records state that he was buried with military honours the following day.
- Private Koesin — died from illness on 2 August 1946.
- Corporal Emot, also recorded as Emod — found hanging in the camp on 10 or 11 September 1946. Contemporary reports described his death as an apparent suicide, but the circumstances became disputed. Dutch authorities alleged that other prisoners were responsible, while an Australian investigation reportedly concluded that he had taken his own life. Indonesian archival research identifies Emod as a 28-year-old soldier with KNIL service number 9663.
- Private Soerdo — shot and killed by guards on 12 September 1946 during serious unrest following Emod’s death. Two other Indonesian prisoners were wounded. Later accounts state that Soerdo suffered numerous gunshot wounds. His death generated considerable public and political controversy and contributed to Australian pressure for the detention camp to be closed.
The available evidence varies considerably in quality. Some details come from contemporary newspapers and Jan de Wit’s diary, while others are recorded in the museum’s research paper or later Indonesian accounts. The conflicting information concerning Tadjeri and Emod illustrates why these deaths require cautious interpretation and further archival verification.
Mohamad Bondan and the archive of the independence movement in Australia
One of the former Boven Digoel prisoners active in Australia was Mohamad Bondan. After his release, Bondan became secretary of the Central Committee for Indonesian Independence (CENKIM) in Brisbane, which coordinated communication and political activity among Indonesian independence organisations operating across Australia.
Bondan’s surviving archive, now held by the Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, provides an important Indonesian perspective on this history. Covering the period 1945–1968, it contains correspondence, committee records, nominal rolls and repatriation documents relating to Indonesian communities in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Mackay and other Australian centres.
The collection demonstrates how the political networks developed by the former Digul prisoners extended well beyond the campaign for their own release. They helped Indonesian servicemen and civilians seeking repatriation, communicated with the emerging Republican government, worked with Australian trade unions and supporters, and publicised the independence struggle internationally.
The archive includes detailed files concerning Indonesians detained at Camp Casino, correspondence about Camp Columbia and Brisbane, lists of personnel returning to Indonesia, and records of money entrusted to committees in Australia. Bondan later remained involved in efforts to recover and return these Australian savings to their Indonesian owners.
The preservation of this collection in Indonesia is particularly significant because much of the Australian and Dutch documentation presents the events from a government or military perspective. Bondan’s papers record the activities and concerns of the Indonesians themselves.
View the ANRI inventory of the Mohammad Bondan archive, 1945–1968
See also:
Dutch Camp Casino WWII – Archive Jan de Wit
Camp Cowra: Indonesian detainees, Dutch authority and political transformation in wartime Australia
Javanese from New Caledonia, brought to Casino by the Dutch in 1944.
When the Indonesian revolution came to an Australian country town
The Dutch in charge of Casino – Eighty years of Dutch-Australian diplomatic relations
