Before the Japanese occupation, this ground was an agricultural research station operated by the North Borneo Chartered Company. In July 1942, it became a prison camp for 1,500 Australian soldiers transferred from Singapore to build a military airfield. By 1943, the prisoner population had grown to 2,500 with the addition of British and more Australian troops. In January 1945, with the airfield destroyed by Allied bombing, the first group of approximately 455 prisoners was forced to march toward Ranau, roughly 260 kilometers through the jungle. A second march followed in May. The camp was then burned by the Japanese, destroying almost all records. In 1995, the governments of Sabah and Australia, together with the Returned and Services League of Australia and the Sandakan Municipal Council, agreed to transform the former camp into a memorial site. The park opened on 18 March 1999.

The memorial is organized as a circular walking route connecting six stations, each preserving a different aspect of the camp's history. An English-built Ruston-Bucyrus excavator sits where it was abandoned after Australian prisoners sabotaged it during repairs, rendering it permanently inoperable. The wood-fired steam generator and electrical generator that powered the camp's lighting and fencing have been restored -- the same equipment that prisoners secretly used to boost voltage for their clandestine radio transmitter. The food depot and kitchen area preserves a concrete water reservoir that once served the Japanese quartermaster's facility. The main entrance marks the east side of the camp, where the Mile 8 Road from Sandakan to Ranau passed -- the road from which all three death marches began.

The Sandakan Commemorative Pavilion, opened on 18 March 1999 by Australian Veterans Affairs Minister Bruce Scott, contains a permanent exhibition documenting the POW camp and the death marches in both English and Malay. Inside, photographs, maps, and narrative panels reconstruct what the burning of the camp was meant to erase. The exhibition traces the prisoners' journey from Singapore to Sandakan, through the forced labor on the airfield, the deteriorating conditions, and finally the marches themselves. At the end of the war, human remains recovered from the site were transferred to the military cemetery on Labuan island. Those who could be identified received individual graves. Those who could not were commemorated on plaques in Labuan and Singapore.

Sandakan Memorial Park is the first stop on the "POW Route," a series of marked stations tracing the path of the three death marches from Sandakan to the "Last POW Camp" at Ranau. Each station along the route carries a sign, turning the jungle trail into a linear memorial that stretches across the landscape of Sabah. The park hosts the annual Sandakan Memorial Day service on 15 August, drawing visitors from Australia, Britain, and Malaysia. A new Koompassia excelsa tree was planted near the entrance on 25 April 2008, ANZAC Day, replacing the great tree that once towered over the compound. It will take decades to reach anything like the height of its predecessor, but the planting was an act of faith in continuity -- the insistence that this place will be remembered long after the last survivors have gone.