Reflections on Korea and Australia's longstanding ties

Australian Ambassador Jeff Robinson gave an interesting lecture for RAS Korea this week in which he spoke without notes about his 40+ year engagement with Korea (first coming as a student in 1984) and reflected on the more than 130-year connection between Australia and Korea. I'd had no idea about Australia's role in helping establish POSCO, nor did I know POSCO is Australia's #1 commercial customer. I summarized his lecture here.

One set of stories not included in his talk are of the Australians who survived POW camps in Korea. The first group were POWs captured in Singapore by the Japanese who were interned in Seoul and Heungnam from 1942 to 1945; I drew on the memoir of Australian Eric Harrison in particular when writing the article "To make Koreans positively realize the true might of our empire": The use of Allied POWs for propaganda purposes in Korea during World War II (Transactions, Volume 97).

During the Korean War, Australian missionary Philip Crosbie was interned with other civilians at the beginning of the war and spent three years in an internment camp, surviving the death march of 1950 that claimed around 100 lives. According to Larry Zellers, in his book In Enemy Hands, it was Crosbie who spearheaded an effort to confer with other internees and arrive at the sequence of events and dates related to their imprisonment (Crosbie also convinced Zellers to write a memoir as well). Crosbie's memoir - copied twice - was seized before he was freed, so he rewrote it immediately after he was freed and published it as Pencilling Prisoner in 1954.