The Happy Garden

Watercolour landscape featuring two men and a boy working beneath grey skies in a fenced garden plot at Pootung Civilian Assembly Centre, Shanghai. Various camp buildings are visible in the distance. Initially littered with junk and debris, the Pootung compound was cleared by the internees to construct playing fields and garden plots; this area was christened "the Happy Garden". Australian artist Arthur Lindsay was an internee of Pootung Civilian Assembly Centre at Shanghai from 1943 to 1945. Lindsay had originally travelled to Japan for a three month sketching trip in 1939, but stayed on in Asia after accepting a managerial position with an advertising company in Hong Kong. When Japan entered the war, he was serving with the Hong Kong Medical Corps. As an Allied national Lindsay was interned by the Japanese in a men’s camp at Pootung, where up to a thousand men were housed in the former warehouses of the British American Tobacco Company. Despite the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions of the camp, Lindsay completed a number of paintings during his internment, many of which were later exhibited in Melbourne. After the war Lindsay travelled widely and continued to exhibit his work, living for periods in China and Europe before returning to Australia and settling in Caulfield, Victoria.