Harvey Internment Camp & 3rd Australian Corps Army School Historic Site 1940s

Established in September 1940, the Harvey Internment Camp was established to house around 100 German and 800 Italian Internees transferred from an earlier camp on Rottnest Island.

It was manned initially by a detachment from the 10th Australian Garrison Battalion. In January 1941, a full-time company from the 5th Australian Garrison Battalion moved to Harvey to become the 11th Internment Camp Guard Company, soon after renamed the ‘M’ Australian Garrison Company.

The built form included 68 barracks, several workshops, shower rooms, dining huts, recreation huts, detention cells and officers’ quarters surrounded by a 1.8m high barbed wire fence topped with rolls of barbed wire.

In 1941, a section of it was used to house and interrogate the survivors from the German Raider ship Kormoran which had sunk HMAS Sydney off the Western Australia coast. They stayed at Harvey until their transfer in December 1941 and January 1942 to the No 13 POW Group at Murchison, Victoria.

With Japan’s entry into the war, the government decided to move all internees to the eastern states. This occurred in April 1942, leading to the closure of the Harvey Internment Camp.

The site was then used by the 3rd Australian Corps School.