dr rosalind hearder
Fulbright Postdoctoral Award
Media Profile
“The close relationship shared today by the U.S and Australia, especially in the field of national security, first developed during World War II. The most common memory of that period focuses on the operational experiences of U.S. and Australian forces in the South West Pacific. However, another shared wartime experience endured by these two groups was as prisoners of the Japanese. The impact on the survivors, however, is yet to be explored.”
Rosalind Hearder has received the prestigious Fulbright Postdoctoral Award to conduct research at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) in the Department of Medical History. Rosalind is an arts graduate who received first class honours in history from the University of New South Wales and then went on to complete her PhD in History at the University of Melbourne, investigating the roles and experiences of 106 Australian medical officers in Japanese captivity. She is currently a Researcher at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University.
Through her Fulbright Award, Rosalind will conduct a comparative historical study of the post-World War II experience of Australian and American prisoners of war (POWs) in the Far East, using a medical, psychological and political framework to examine the responses of governments and communities to ex-POWs’ needs in the post-war decades.
Australian and American armed forces have served together on many occasions since World War II: in Korea, Vietnam, on various peacekeeping operations, in Afghanistan, and currently, in Iraq. However the experiences of Australian and American POWs of the Japanese during World War II have only in recent years become the subject of serious study. The two groups were approximately the same size, (22,000 and 25,000 respectively), had similar mortality rates, and together suffered the worst aspects of Japanese captivity, from ravaging disease and brutal treatment in camps in Japan and the Philippines to the building of the Burma-Thai Railway, which alone claimed 13,000 Allied lives.
“Being in the U.S. will allow me to access specific material including a variety of archival and secondary sources and oral history collections. In addition, a key aspect of this research will be personal interviews with surviving American ex-POWs, and appropriate officials, experts and scholars in the field,” stated Rosalind.
Rosalind’s future research will provide invaluable insights into how each country dealt with the aftermath of captivity and will record how Australian and United States’ authorities and communities respectively reacted to the horror of the POW experience while celebrating an Allied victory. These historical accounts may assist the development of future defence strategies.
Rosalind’s previous research has been acknowledged through various awards including: the C.E.W. Bean Prize, awarded by the Australian Chief of Army for best thesis in military history; the Frank Crowley Prize, for best Australian History Honours thesis; an Australian Postgraduate Award and the John Treloar Research Grant, from the Australian War Memorial.