Chapter 11 takes us to the edges of the Pacific archipelago for a closer look at the camps for Japanese Surrendered Personnel and the War Crimes Trials Compounds in the Australian-administered island territories of New Guinea. The chapter traces their changing accommodation in underground tunnels, timber barracks and Quonset huts. The War Criminals Prison at Manus Island precedes the later location there of the infamous offshore detention center, one of many such facilities later created for incarcerating unauthorized asylum seeker arrivals to Australia. The chapter makes the case for a genealogical approach to physical sites of incarceration as important for understanding the continuous historical entanglements of sovereignty and spatial forms of violence.

Chapter 3 discusses how the captive population of Germans, Italians and Japanese, their patriotism sharpened by group incarceration, railed against confinement in Australian and New Zealand’s camps. Using “escape” as its central theme, the chapter examines breakout attempts at camps in Murchison, Cowra and Featherston, offering insights into enforcement of 1929 Geneva Convention regulations for POW treatment. The chapter introduces the dodecagon-shaped POW camp as a unique design tested in Australia for the accommodation of racially different combatants and a continuation of a longer history of convictism. New Zealand’s wartime camps repurpose and adapt facilities associated with quarantine.