The Queensland brothers who risked execution to build a radio in a POW camp
By Nick Dent
Queensland Museum senior curator Liz Bissell carefully removes the lid of an ageing box, roughly the size of a shoebox.
Once the container for a Dutch-made gas mask, it contains a mass of rusty wires, capacitors and resistors.
This wireless set was built and operated by two Queenslanders while confined by the Japanese in an internment camp in Java during World War II.Credit: Queensland Museum
“This is from a prisoner of war camp in Java,” she says. “They stored it under a square of concrete with stuff over the top, and only a few people knew about it.
“They would have suffered huge repercussions if it had been found.”
The makeshift radio is the work of two Queensland brothers, Ernest and Charles Hildebrande, who moved to Java as teenagers in 1929 to work as rubber planters.
They were among 10,000 civilians imprisoned when the Japanese took over the island in 1942.
“They used found objects – stuff from the sea, or things that officers had dropped, or that they’d traded with other prisoners.
Queensland Museum senior curator Liz Bissell and assistant curator Tess Shingles examining items from the exhibition.Credit: Nick Dent
“It picked up quite a few radio stations, so they were able to get news from the outside world.”
The Tjimahi camp’s commanding officer offered a reward for the radio, but it was never found.
Nearly 80 years since the donation of the radio to the Queensland Museum by the brothers, it’s appearing in a free exhibition of “secret” items.
Secrets: Objects of Intrigue brings together about 80 items from the museum’s collection. There are exhibits with hidden compartments, objects with mysterious histories, or otherwise related to the theme of the covert or taboo.
This tattoo machine was confiscated from HM Prison, Boggo Road in 1986 and donated to Queensland Museum. Credit: Queensland Museum
Several items from Boggo Road Jail and the Brisbane Correctional Centre are on display, such as a thong found to contain hacksaw blades and a tattoo needle made from a toothbrush, cellophane, wiring and crocodile clips.
There’s also a wooden picture frame with a secret compartment for hiding pornography.
“Incarceration breeds ingenuity,” notes assistant curator Tess Shingles.
General Douglas MacArthur signs Japan’s formal surrender documents aboard the battleship USS Missouri. Credit: Fairfax Photo Library
Bissell indicates a small, withered, 200-year-old shoe found in the roof of the Commissariat Store, on William Street, in 1913, when a storey was being added to the 1829 building – the oldest in Brisbane.
“In lots of cultures it was good luck to conceal a shoe inside a building when you were building it, and children’s shoes specifically. It’s meant to ward off evil spirits and keep witches away,” Bissell says.
“Shoes for convicts would have been prized possessions, so it’s not like somebody would have just left it in the roof by accident.”
A suitcase belonging to disgraced former premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and sketches by a court artist made during the Fitzgerald Inquiry, give the exhibition a local flavour.
As for the Hildebrandes’ radio, it played an important role in the brothers’ eventual liberation.
Aware of its existence, the South East Asia Command broadcast instructions to the camp about the arrival of relief troops after Japan’s capitulation.
“It’s a great story, and a great object that ties into the idea of secrets being life and death,” Bissell says.
Secrets: Objects of Intrigue is on at the Queensland Museum from Friday, December 13. Admission is free.