Imperial heritage in postcolonial settings: the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in Ambon, Indonesia

Abstract

Across the Asia Pacific region can be found a distinctive form of material heritage, the cemeteries to the World War II dead of the British Empire. From their original conception in 1917 by the Imperial (from 1960, Commonwealth) War Graves Commission, such cemeteries had multiple meanings: ranging from sites of official and individual remembrance and commemoration to ambiguous interventions by an external power in a local landscape. The decades-long effort to create the IWGC/CWGC war cemetery in a postcolonial setting on Ambon, Indonesia, attests to the complexity and politicization of this process. Brought to completion by memorial diplomacy, the Ambon cemetery, in which many Australian prisoners of war were interred, became a site of regular Australian pilgrimages but progressively acquired the status of contested heritage as the Australian and Ambonese generations who had personal experience and memories of World War II died. With the changing demographics of Ambon, the vulnerability of this heritage became exposed. Its future remains uncertain. Show more