ARC grant to provide new perspective on WWII in Borneo

ANU will partner with the Australian War Memorial to provide unique insights into how different groups of people experienced World War II (WWII) in Borneo. 

Dr Christine Helliwell from the ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology has secured an ARC Linkage Grant for her three-year project Beyond Allied Histories: Dayak Memories of World War II in Borneo.

Dr Helliwell, who has researched Borneo throughout her academic career, says that she’s excited to explore WWII history in Borneo from this unique angle.

“Western histories of wars involving Europeans focus overwhelmingly on the experiences and perceptions of the European participants,” she says.

“This project focuses attention on WWII in Borneo, but it in a highly innovative fashion – by highlighting the as yet marginalised wartime memories of Borneo’s indigenous Dayak peoples.”

Borneo, an island in Southeast Asia currently divided between Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei, is a highly significant Australian war time site. In Australia, it is best known for the prisoner-of-war (POW) camp in Sandakan and the infamous Sandakan–Ranau ‘death marches’.

Yet the Japanese occupied the entire island for over three years. During this time the war impacted heavily on the local population and there were extensive interactions between local peoples on the one hand, and soldiers and POWs from both sides on the other.

One of the questions Helliwell hopes to find clues to is why most Dayaks appear to have supported the Allies – their former colonial masters – rather than the Japanese, despite the Japanese attempting to redress some of the inequities and discrimination suffered under European colonial regimes.

The idea for the project came about when Helliwell was reviewing notes from previous fieldwork completed in the 1980s.

“I was reviewing some of my notes from the mid-1980s and realised I had lots of narratives about World War II that I’d completely forgotten about and had never had a chance to investigate. I approached the Australian War Memorial, and they were interested, even though they had never been involved in a project like this before.”

The timing of the project, she says, is highly significant. There are now few Dayaks left alive who remember the war first-hand, and their numbers are declining rapidly.

While Helliwell will focus on ethnographic fieldwork in Borneo, War Memorial staff will investigate Australian perspectives based on research in the War Memorial archives, as well as archives in Borneo itself.

One of the main outcomes of the research will be a major public exhibition at the War Memorial in 2017 exploring WWII in Borneo as seen through the eyes of both Australian soldiers and POWs, and Dayaks.

“I’m interested in juxtaposing the memories of the Allied soldiers with those of the Indigenous communities in Borneo,” says Helliwell.

Funding for the project will cover costs such as travel, fieldwork, research assistants, a conference and a scholarship for a PhD student to complete some of the fieldwork and help with the research.