Jack Tolsee - Loveday Lives

The Service and Casualty Form of Jack Tolsee, whowing that he was born in 1926 (and thus that he was just 15 years of age when interned) and that the authorities regarded him as an ‘Australian born Japanese’. NAA: MP1103/1, WJ17826 Prisoner of War/Internee: Tolsee, Frederick John; Date of birth - 04 May 1926; Nationality - Japanese

Jack Tolsee was interned in Western Australia in 1942 and spent time at the Loveday, at its associated work-camp Woolenook, and finally Tatura. The Australian authorities viewed him as an Australian born Japanese and ‘Half Caste’ who followed the Christian religion.^[1] Tolsee thought otherwise. When presented with the possibility of securing release, he turned it down:

Captain Brown said, ‘Have you got any Japanese blood in you at all?’ I said, ‘No. I am a Sikh,’ then he said, ‘Well, do you want me to make representation to the government?’ I said, ‘No, no.’ … From the time I was six years old until I was fifteen, I had to work in the field. I was like a slave, no pay … It was a very sad life. So when they took me (interned), I was so pleased. I was free in the camp.^[2]

Records show that Jack Tolsee was not finally released until the beginning of 1947.

Sources:

NAA: MP1103/1, WJ17826 Prisoner of War/Internee: Tolsee, Frederick John; Date of birth - 04 May 1926; Nationality - Japanese

NAA: MP1103/2, WJ17826, Prisoner of War/Internee; Tolsee, Frederick John; Year of birth - 1926; Nationality - Australian born Japanese

Yuriko Nagata, Unwanted Aliens: Japanese Internment in Australia, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1996.

[1] NAA: MP1103/2, WJ17826, Prisoner of War/Internee; Tolsee, Frederick John; Year of birth - 1926; Nationality - Australian born japanese

[2] Jack Truan, interview with Yuriko Nagata, Palmers Island NSW, 22 May 1993, in Nagata, Unwanted Aliens, p. 118.