Somewhere inside a Changi internment camp in the 1940s, two Australian prisoners named Ray Tullipan and Slim de Grey wrote songs. Not for posterity. For morale, theirs and everyone else’s locked up alongside them.
Those songs were printed as the Changi Souvenir Song Album. Then the war ended, the camp emptied, and nobody sang them out loud in Singapore again. That silence breaks this evening.
Liberation of Singapore (LOS) returns for a second edition from 11 to 13 September 2026, split across two wartime sites, and the headline event hands that songbook back its voice.
The Concert That Reopens a Songbook
Heritage in Harmony runs 5pm to 7pm on Friday, 11 September at Changi Chapel and Museum (CCM), sung by 10 student vocalists from the Australian International School. Entry is free for museum ticket holders, and since Singapore citizens and permanent residents walk into National Heritage Board (NHB) museums at no cost, that reads as free for most people in the country.
Who is singing is the part that lands. Tullipan and de Grey wrote as Australian prisoners of war (POWs). Eight decades on, Australian teenagers living in Singapore sing their work on the ground where it was written, which does more for the shared wartime history of the two countries than a wall panel ever manages.
The concert sits on the historic grounds of Changi Chapel rather than in the galleries, so the seating is wooden benches in the open air. Lovely in principle, a September evening in Singapore in practice. Bring water, and go easy on the layers.
Assoc Prof Hamzah Muzaini of the National University of Singapore’s Department of Southeast Asian Studies follows with a keynote on what liberation asks a country to remember. A lecture after a concert sounds like a risk. This one is not, because the room will have heard POW songs sung live ten minutes earlier.
The Songbook Has an Accession Number
The album is formally accessioned under the collection of the National Museum of Singapore, filed as 2020-00502. That is the museum which curated CCM’s current galleries, and Nicholas Aggs is credited as the concert’s researcher and arranger.
An accession number sounds like admin, and it changes how the evening reads. These are not songs half-remembered and pieced together decades later. They are paper in a national collection, with an arrangement built off the archival record. Friday’s performance is a document read aloud, and the document has a tune.
The Camp Behind the Songs
The album collects popular hits written for the A.I.F Concert Party, the Australian Imperial Force troupe that staged shows inside the camp. Entertainment was the job. Given who the audience was and where they were sitting, that job carried weight.
Changi is the other half of the story, and CCM does not soften it. The galleries hold the POWs and civilians interned across Changi during the Japanese Occupation, alongside a chapel built by men working with almost nothing.
An independent visitor account describes the museum as “tasteful and well compiled” and “a very moving museum”, which is a fair read of a site that has to hold grief and a singalong in the same grounds.
That tension is the reason a concert belongs here at all. Songs written in a camp sound different when the camp is the room you walked through to reach your seat.
Elizabeth Choy and Operation Jaywick
Saturday’s centrepiece is Whispers of War, a talk with historian and author Tom Trumble at Reflections at Bukit Chandu (RBC), 2pm to 4pm on 12 September. Pre-registration is required, so book online before the day.
Trumble covers Operation Jaywick, the 1943 Allied commando raid on Japanese shipping in Singapore harbour, then the part usually left off the end. The Double Tenth Incident followed, and civilians were arrested and interrogated over a raid they had no hand in. Elizabeth Choy was one of them, and her name gets attached to Singaporean resilience so often that the events behind it blur. Bishop John Leonard Wilson and Hans Schweitzer-Iten come into the story too.
If the weekend allows one booking, make it this one. It explains why the liberation gets commemorated at all.
Crafts Run All Three Days
The concert happens once. Everything else repeats. Craft activities run 9.30am to 5.30pm from 11 to 13 September at both museums and cost nothing beyond museum entry, so picking this weekend up on Saturday morning loses you the singing and little else.
At RBC the session is Make Your Own Malay Regiment Songkok, built around what the regiment’s headgear meant to the men who wore it. At CCM it is Make Your Own Binoculars, self-guided: children assemble a pair, then hunt small details through the galleries. It is pitched at kids, and the instinct behind it, slow down and look closer, is the thing most adults get wrong in a museum.
S$25 for Trees and a Battlefield
The only paid item on the programme is Heritage Trees & Tour of Pasir Panjang, run by RBC with the National Parks Board (NParks). It goes 9am to 11.30am on both 12 and 13 September, costs S$25 per person, and mixes chartered bus rides with guided walking, indoors and out.
S$25 for two and a half hours of guided ground is fair, and the pairing is smarter than the title suggests. Pasir Panjang is where the Malay Regiment and Lt Adnan made their stand, and the ridge still holds heritage trees that were standing while it happened. A battlefield and a green corridor in one morning. Wear proper shoes.
Getting There and What It Costs
Here is the practical bit the programme sheet leaves out. CCM sits on Upper Changi Road North, reached on the Downtown Line to Upper Changi, then bus 2 or 29 and a short walk, roughly 45 minutes to an hour from town. A 5pm concert start means leaving the city by mid-afternoon. Allow an hour to 90 minutes for the galleries once you are inside.
RBC is up on the ridge in the Kent Ridge and Pasir Panjang area, so budget an MRT ride, a bus, and an uphill walk. Covering both sites in a day means at least an hour of cross-island travel in between. One museum per day is the kinder plan.
Permanent galleries at NHB museums are free for Singapore citizens and permanent residents. Everyone else pays S$9 for an adult ticket at CCM, and S$7 at RBC with S$5 for seniors, students, and persons with disabilities, children aged six and below free. TripAdvisor rates RBC 4.4 out of 5 across 89 reviews, with the guided tour drawing most of the praise.
Bigger Than Last Year
The first LOS ran two days in 2025, on 13 and 14 September, across these same two sites, built around talks and guided experiences including an earlier Whispers of War and the Journey to the East heritage trail. This year’s theme is Moments of Liberation, and the programme adds a day, a concert, a nature trail, and family workshops.
Ms Asmah Alias, Director of Galleries, Exhibitions and Museums at HeritageSG, said the two sites “preserve the memories and experiences of those who lived through the Japanese Occupation and Singapore’s liberation, and help us understand how hardship, courage and resilience have shaped the society we value today.”
HeritageSG is the NHB subsidiary behind Singapore HeritageFest and the Singapore Night Festival, and it has been building weekends like this one for years. Battle for Singapore in 2021 worked off the same principle: less standing and reading, more doing.
🗓️ Date: Friday, 11 September to Sunday, 13 September 2026
⏰ Time: Craft activities 9.30am to 5.30pm daily; other programmes vary
📍 Location: Changi Chapel and Museum, and Reflections at Bukit Chandu
🎶 Heritage in Harmony: 11 September, 5pm to 7pm at Changi Chapel and Museum, free for museum ticket holders
🎙️ Whispers of War with Tom Trumble: 12 September, 2pm to 4pm at Reflections at Bukit Chandu, pre-registration required
🌳 Heritage Trees & Tour of Pasir Panjang: 12 and 13 September, 9am to 11.30am, S$25 per person
✂️ Craft activities: Songkok making at RBC, binocular making at CCM, free for museum ticket holders
🎟️ Museum admission: Free for Singapore citizens and permanent residents
A songbook stops being archive material the moment somebody sings it. If Friday evening has already gone, Saturday and Sunday still hold the Trumble talk, the S$25 ridge tour, and craft tables at both sites, and the full programme with booking details sits on the Changi Chapel and Museum and Reflections at Bukit Chandu pages. Set a reminder for next September while you are there, because LOS 2027 is the next chance at a concert 81 years in the making.
Visuals courtesy of HeritageSG.
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