Torrens Island Concentration Camp

The Torrens Island Internment Camp was a World War I concentration camp, located on Torrens Island in the Port River Estuary near Adelaide in South Australia. The camp opened on 9 October 1914 and held up to 400 men of German or Austro-Hungarian background, or crew members of enemy ships who had been caught in Australian ports at the beginning of the war. They were held without trial under the provisions of the War Precautions Act 1914.The South Australian population included a large minority of German descent, and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 brought a wave of anti-German feeling. At official level, the War Precautions Act permitted sweeping powers of search, seizure of property and arrest. Lutheran churches and schools were closed and German language newspapers were banned. In August 1914, soldiers were sent out under the authority of the Act to round up about 300 of what were called “Germans”. The internees included some German and Austro-Hungarian citizens and some Australian born, a mixture of farmers, intellectuals, and Lutheran pastors. They were only a small fraction of the people of German descent in South Australia, and with them the army had rounded up some citizens of Sweden, the Netherlands, and one from the USA all neutral countries.At first the prisoners were interned in a barbed wire compound at Keswick Barracks within the Adelaide suburbs. As the numbers grew, in October they were taken by boat to Torrens Island. The island was nearly deserted except for a Quarantine Station, built in the nineteenth century. A fenced compound was built on the bank of the Port River about 500m south of the Quarantine Station, which had the only jetty on the island. The prisoners were interned there in tents under armed guard. At the time, it was officially called a Concentration Camp.