Legacies of Violence: Rendering the Unspeakable Past in Modern Australia 9781785334375

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Legacies of Violence

Legacies of Violence Rendering the Unspeakable Past in

Modern Australia

KL

Edited by Robert Mason

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2017 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2017 Robert Mason

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mason, Robert, 1981- editor of compilation. Title: Legacies of violence : rendering the unspeakable past in modern    Australia / edited by Robert Mason. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical    references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016053207 (print) | LCCN 2016054587 (ebook) | ISBN    9781785334368 (hardback : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781785334375 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Violence--Australia--History. | Violence--Australia--Case    studies. | Marginality, Social--Australia--History. | Australia--Social    conditions. | Australia--Race relations. | Australia--Ethnic relations. Classification: LCC HN850.Z9 V55 2017 (print) | LCC HN850.Z9 (ebook) | DDC    303.60994--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016053207

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78533-436-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-437-5 ebook

Contents

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List of Illustrations Introduction: Rendering the Legacies of the Past Robert Mason

vii 1

1. The Politics of State-Sanctioned Violence in Australia: Racialized Constructions of Nation Linda Briskman

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Part I  Hidden Violence

31

  2. Uncovering the Shameful: Sexual Violence on an Australian Colonial Frontier Libby Connors

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  3. Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Identities in the Workplaces of Northern Australia Robert Mason

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  4. The Family Trust: On Assimilation, Migration and Concealing Ambivalent Identities Ruth Longdin

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  5. Legacies of the Uyghur Homeland and Uyghur-Australians Anna Hayes Part II  Intimate Violence

89

125

  6. The Greek Civil War, Child Removal and Traumatic Pasts in Australia 127 Joy Damousi

vi Contents

  7. From Hell to Hope: Postwar Jewish Holocaust Survivor Migration Suzanne Rutland   8. HIV/AIDS, Loss and the Australian Gay Community Robert Reynolds and Shirleene Robinson Part III  Sanctioned Violence

142 162

183

  9. The RSL and Post-First World War Returned Soldier Violence in Australia Martin Crotty

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10. Service Personnel: Australian Experiences of Interculturality and Violence in British India Richard Gehrmann

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11. Race and Ethnicity in Sex Crimes Trials from 1950s Australia 217 Andy Kaladelfos and Lisa Featherstone 12. The Violence of Exclusion: Australia’s Migration Zone Excision and the State of Exception Farida Fozdar Index

233

253

Illustrations

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FIGURES Figure 5.1 Changing Ethnic Ratios in Xinjiang since PRC annexation in 1949 (%).

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Figure 5.2 Location of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

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TABLES Table 5.1 Key subtext of posts.

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Table 5.2 Key subtexts of response posts.

105

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Introduction Rendering the Legacies of the Past Robert Mason

KL Australia’s sense of nationhood has been born from its experience of violence. This collection investigates the legacies of violence wrought by warfare, indigenous dispossession, migration and prejudice. Contributors focus on the way in which the memories and experiences of violence have created tangible and emotional connections that bind Australians to events and debates globally. Chapters question how these connections have been experienced within Australia, probing the nature of empathy, isolation and Australians’ imagined place in the world through the country’s colonial and modern history. Engaging with these issues is fundamental to a fuller understanding of how past experiences of violence continue to shape Australia today. In common with many other former white-settler societies, modern Australia has been formed by dispossession, war and forced migration. There are patterns and commonalities in how the legacies of these various forms of violence have been experienced. The collection recognizes the authority generally accorded to white experiences of violence, whether on the frontier, in warfare or in domestic spaces. For this reason, it questions how violence is experienced by those perceived to be at the periphery of society – whether migrants, Indigenous Australians or other vulnerable communities. The collection repositions these experiences at the centre of Australia’s connectivity with locales and debates across the globe. Interest in the legacies of the past has increased enormously in the past twenty years throughout the Global North. Museums, heritage precincts, 1

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public inquiries and reconciliation commissions have variously dwelt on the power of the past to influence events in the present. Australia has not been isolated from this, with public inquiries into institutional child abuse, the Stolen Generation of Indigenous Australians and child migration schemes variously dominating public debate. Tourists flock to sites of colonial violence such as the Port Arthur site in Tasmania, although other sites of massacre remain detached from mainstream awareness. Despite the interest in dark tourism and the country’s colonial past, there is little critical reflection on how sites and instances of violence might connect. Nor has there been a systematic critical reflection on how the country’s violent past has influenced Australia’s sense of connectivity with the rest of the world. This collection challenges accepted interpretations of the national narrative and interrogates the legacies of violence in modern Australia. The collection’s title expresses how the past is variously portrayed and positioned to support contemporary arguments. Interpreted differently, the title also suggests an exploration into how those pasts continue to resonate today and what lessons can be drawn from the country’s experience of violence. Undergraduate students often respond enthusiastically to questions about ‘why history matters’ by reflecting on the need to prevent the mistakes of the past repeating themselves. However, such responses frequently frame violence as an occasional aberration that can be safely located and compartmentalized in the past. The contributors in this collection instead investigate parallels and connections across diverse case studies that go beyond specific times, places or groups. Their work draws together history and anthropology with social justice to create a new understanding of historical justice and social memories in Australia. In so doing, the collection interrogates how and why violence is remembered, forgotten or silenced, and the implications of this for a critical reflection on modern Australia. The past has occupied a polemical position in Australian politics for a number of decades. This was clearest during the so-called ‘History Wars’, in which conservative commentators attacked a number of prominent academics and accused them of overstating the violence that occurred during the British settlement of Australia. The then prime minister, John Howard, attacked those who suggested a ‘black armband’ version of Australian history that suggested the nation’s founding narratives were shameful. Instead, he supported an emphasis on British heritage and a triumphal interpretation of Europeans’ presence on the continent. The debates were prolonged and highly emotive, but they demonstrated the power of history to influence contemporary debate, and the extent to which the present remains inextricably entangled in the past.



Introduction: Rendering the Legacies of the Past

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The debates surrounding the History Wars were not isolated examples, although they drew particularly on Australia’s relationship to its colonial and indigenous pasts. The rapid changes to Australian society in the past fifty years have given prominence to debates regarding the nation’s past and their role in defining core values for the country’s present. This is most noticeable in recent debates surrounding the centenary of the First World War and the Gallipoli campaign. Historians continue to contribute actively to public debate regarding Australia’s particular experience of violence, gender and race in contemporary society. The commemoration of Gallipoli is used as a tool to reach beyond Australia and build connections across cultures. However, comparable discussion using the anniversary of James Cook’s landing as a tool for reflection on violence remains fraught with political bias and is almost wholly unconnected to broader social awareness on the legacies of global imperialism. Major commemorations necessarily activate memories and prompt a degree of reflection, but what of the everyday presence of the past? Australia’s burgeoning interest is part of a global growth in interest regarding historical justice and memory. Scholars have focused on the role of history in conflict resolution during protracted conflicts, or of social attitudes to unresolved historical injustices. Truth and reconciliation commissions are now widely used to give voices to the victims of violence as part of a transition to more inclusive societies. Historians have sought to use history to cast light on contemporary immigration and refugee policy, although asylum seekers’ voices remain largely unheard. What of those for whom there is little broad social recognition of injustice, or for whom the injustice no longer appears relevant. This collection seeks to draw together examples from the recent and more distant past to open spaces for reflection on countries’ shared experience of violence. The volume is divided into three parts, structured around three ways in which violence can be positioned: hidden violence, intimate violence and sanctioned violence. Each one draws on chronologically linear examples of violence from throughout Australia’s recent history, ending with an example from contemporary Australia. Contributors have consciously emphasized the personal testimonies and voices that are at the heart of their chapters. In this way, the collection resists the notion of maintaining a critical distance from a problem, and instead encourages the reader’s entanglement in the connections between past and present. The chapters encourage the reader to respond to the emotionality of loss and the affective power of testimony to bind the reader into the research space. Each chapter explores a discrete case study, but a number of themes recur throughout the volume. Whiteness is the first powerful theme that

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integrates the whole collection. Studies in whiteness and race have long demonstrated the former’s powerful influence in the formation of a national narrative and individual sense of self. This idea of Australia draws on a highly masculinized, militarized and overtly heterosexual presence in the landscape. From its colonial beginnings to the traumas of the twentieth century, whiteness has been central to debates regarding the need to protect Australia against external threats from Asia. It has also been a pervasive influence in the positioning of supposed non-white attributes as a form of moral contagion, leading to non-whites being criminalized, excluded and physically distanced from the majority of residents. Chapters also centre on continuities and changes regarding the state’s influence in society. This is closely tied to the evolution of the colonial and imperial project in Australia, and to the transformation of government from its management of a penal colony to a white dominion, and eventual multicultural state. A number of contributors evaluate the state’s power to protect and to deny protection to residents and others, defining the rights of humans within its borders and beyond. The state’s role in forming the language of governance and laws has also been central to the enforcement of power across boundaries of gender, sexuality and race. In examining this, the collection explores what it means to resist this attempt to control and dehumanize. The third theme that integrates the various sections of the book is the transnational context of violence. The collection is predicated on a desire to identify the patterns across legacies of the past in Australia, but does so in the recognition of global movement of people, ideas and capital. Although much of Australia’s history is particular to the continent, its recent history can be placed in a series of global trends, whether in settler societies, imperial endeavours or the management of cultural diversity. More specifically, Australia’s policies and practices of control can be understood in a transnational pattern of discourse relating to the enactment of island incarcerations or the displacement and exclusion from lands of indigenous people, and the resonance of these acts in society. A final theme relates to the ability to speak and bear witness. This explores the need to give voice to those whose life experiences have been silenced, and why experiences might be considered unspeakable. The state and society’s ability to deny testimonies, histories or experiences connects strongly with the notions of silencing through erasure, fear and the presence of taboo subjects. Such themes are recurrent throughout much of modern scholarship and have affected the discursive formulae available to vulnerable migrants, Indigenous Australians, homosexuals, women and others. Constrained in the language available to them, this silencing



Introduction: Rendering the Legacies of the Past

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risked negating key aspects of identity, as the self was denied, attacked or fragmented. The impact across generations and the body politic is at the heart of the collection. More broadly, the volume engages with the cultural meaning of violence in Australia over time and historical context. Violence offers ways of understanding the broader historical moment, revealing social relations and norms that are otherwise hidden or obscured from the historical record. Appreciating the evolution of violence within a society over time enables scholars to move beyond a particular moment to see patterns in society’s sense of itself and its relations with others. Violence is not simply a cultural phenomenon. It is experienced in a real and visceral manner by victims, but also by perpetrators and those who (willingly, consciously or otherwise) bear witness to the act. Together, all three groups give meaning to specific acts of violence. They determine public debate, the historical record and the legacy of the violence in social memories. The categories also help to understand the trajectories of violence over time as the violent incidents are spoken about, performed, embodied and inscribed into landscapes. Just as the violence changes those to whom it occurs, it can have a transformative effect on those who continue to bear witness or feel connection to the violence for years to come. Such connections need not be continuous, and the changing meaning of violence might cause an event to reappear and resonate in public consciousness decades after its occurrence. Violence can give authority to those who wield it, and to those who experience it. Relationships can be transformed as former perpetrators become victims, or as victims are reimagined in their turn. One way to change the perception of past violence can be through public ‘truth telling’ as a means to mend social relations. Acts of witnessing, and its role in the healing process, can extend beyond having witnessed the actual act to witnessing the pain of speaking about violence. In this sense, although violence is not always a singular occurrence but can reoccur, so too can healing. Survivors’ voices demand recognition at the time of the act, but also through history. As Klaus Neumann and Janna Thomson rightly note,1 such remembrance affirms victims and confirms their positionality. In this manner, remembering is itself both an act of justice and a requirement of justice. This requirement lies at the heart of the collection’s chapters. Linda Briskman’s chapter sets the context for the collection’s three parts. In her discussion about the experiences of both Indigenous Australians and asylum seekers, she asks why so many of the injustices imposed on First Peoples are also experienced by the country’s most recent arrivals. She identifies the convergence of fear, racism and exceptionalism, all of which

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structure the lives of the marginalized. Her analysis centres on three themes that connect the banishment of Indigenous Australians and asylum seekers: namely, sites of exclusion, denial of rights and attacks on their identity. Together these three themes are duplicated throughout the chapters within the collection, and for this reason her work acts as an extended, scholarly introduction to the volume as a whole. Libby Connors provides the first chapter in the part on ‘Hidden Violence’, which explores sites and expressions of violence that have not been visible for reasons of fractured evidence or the lack of a common language of expression. Connors’ chapter investigates the nature of evidence in historical contexts of trauma, violence and unequal power relationships. Her work draws directly on the debates of the History Wars to ask how hidden violence might be expressed and explored. Her focus on the colonial frontier across generations situates questions of genocide in the global context of colonialism, race and gender. The chapter’s particular focus on the frontier ‘cult of domesticity’ reveals that attempts to control, displace or erase the Aboriginal presence were connected to an imposition of patriarchal order in the home space. Her analysis reveals the early racialization of crime and gender, which was to continue throughout Australian history, and that is later explored by other authors in the collection. Robert Mason’s chapter continues the focus on non-urban Australia in its analysis of non-English-speaking migrants in the country’s north. The chapter draws on Spanish-language archival materials, highlighting the more general focus on English records that obscures counternarratives to the development of Anglo-Australia. The chapter investigates the nexus between migration, class and economic development to explore how migrants experience whiteness in the workplace. Mason is particularly interested in the global connections that informed the migrants’ active resistance to corporate businesses in the sugar-cane fields of tropical Australia. The workers’ demand for dignity was part of a transnational challenge to racial and class hierarchies, which nonetheless informed the development of labour rights in Australia. Mason uses the political and industrial identities to explore how past experiences are remembered, transformed and enacted in Australia. Ruth Longdin’s chapter explores the violence caused by the silencing of narratives of prejudice and discrimination. Her piece begins with the serendipitous discovery of a collection of letters that had been consigned to a rubbish dump and forgotten. Her chapter uses these letters to trace a family biography across multiple continents and decades, investigating questions of anti-Semitism and the shifting legacy of chance mistakes. It reveals the strategies of concealment used to attain a sense of social belonging. Like a number of contributions, this chapter questions how silences migrate across



Introduction: Rendering the Legacies of the Past

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time and place, and are experienced according to gender, class and religion. Longdin’s case study is an important reminder that migration to Australia was only one phase in a search for security as families dispersed throughout the world. Although Australia allowed a degree of security through the concealment of former experiences, the past nonetheless intruded unexpectedly, and challenged attempts to silence it. The final chapter in Part I continues the examination of mobile populations with a focus on Chinese exiles in Australia. Anna Hayes uses the contemporary case study of the Uyghur community to probe how questions of disputed histories and injustice overseas influence Australians. In common with Mason in his chapter, she explores how overseas disputes connect Australians literally and emotively with groups elsewhere. Hayes analyses internet commentary regarding a prominent Uyghur activist to explore the connections between events in China and Australians’ sense of human rights. She reveals a contested intersection between state security and Australian migrants, which challenged the parameters of freedom of speech. Hayes’ chapter reveals the ongoing, problematic relationship between Australia’s ‘national values’ and its entanglement with the long-feared Asian ‘Other’. Part II, titled ‘Intimate Violence’, focuses on the legacies of violence that are wrought in close personal relationships. The first chapter, by Joy Damousi, investigates the forced removal of children from families overseas. It uses the analytical prisms of war, migration and trauma to investigate the child migrants who came to Australia following the Greek Civil War. As she notes, ‘[w]hile memories of wars in Australian history have of course been the subject of several studies, the impact of transnational migration on the memory and the psychological impact of those who experienced it await further consideration’. The transnational aspects of war, memory and intergenerational identity are at the core of her work. Damousi’s chapter centres on personal narratives regarding motherhood and childhood, and the enduring legacies of parenting in conditions of war. Yet, rather than focus solely on an analysis of family life, the chapter focuses on the twin experiences of war and migration to situate the personal experiences of Australians in their global context. Suzanne Rutland writes of the experiences of those who survived the Holocaust and subsequently migrated to Australia. The context for their movement was determined by the Australian government’s determination to continue its control of new arrivals’ ethnic and religious background through measures that discriminated against the Jewish refugees. Yet, Rutland reveals that the Jewish survivors drew on a number of transnational reciprocal relationships with like-minded others in the United States, Europe

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and Australia. As a consequence, the number of Jewish families in Australia grew markedly in the postwar era. Like Damousi, Rutland investigates the legacy of pre-migration violence on family relationships. At the heart of the Holocaust’s impact was a sense of rupture and silence at the individual and family level. Rutland cites Ruth Wajnryb’s comment that ‘there was no past. The past was cordoned off, sealed out. There was a complete severance with what went before’.2 This inability to articulate the trauma gradually shifted into a search for a public language that could affirm and honour those killed, as well as establishing a public presence for the survivors to bear legitimate witness. Robert Reynolds and Shirleene Robinson continue the exploration of bearing witness in their discussion of the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on the gay community in Sydney. As with other chapters that consider the atomization caused by suffering, they focus on the emotional impact of the epidemic. The chapter explores how the ‘death sentence’ of acquiring HIV/ AIDS severed the individual from anticipated futures, binding them to the ‘fading names and corpses of the otherwise forgotten dead’.3 The authors reveal the difficult search for a language of how to talk about the men’s grief and shock, but also discuss the fracturing of communities under intense stress. Reynolds and Robinson reveal how the experiences of internal exile from friends and loved ones were compounded by the taboo surrounding the illness. Many actively sought to invoke the language of warfare as a means to situate their activism and resistance, honour the dead, and legitimate the epidemic in the national narrative. The collection’s final part, ‘Sanctioned Violence’, investigates violence that is known and condoned, frequently by the state. Martin Crotty’s chapter investigates the Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia, more commonly known as the RSL, and how it attained its high status and influence. He explores how the organization used violence to both threaten and cajole government. The men’s experience of violence flowed from overseas into Australia, where they were able to use it to enhance a sense of public dominance. Their highly gendered campaigns challenged the state’s legitimacy by drawing on their ability to express publicly their indignation and anger at alleged injustices. The threat of violence was used to attain government concessions for the men, but also to discriminate against political and ethnic ‘Others’. Richard Gehrmann’s chapter details the lives of Australian service personnel in India. He analyses their response to violence in its literal sense, but also the violence wrought to people’s dignity by extreme poverty. The Australians who bore witness to this poverty reflected on the construction of subalternity in terms of both race and gender, conveying their thoughts to



Introduction: Rendering the Legacies of the Past

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friends and family back home. The Australians occupied a shifting position as white subjects within the British Empire, being at once complicit in the imperial project and distanced from the metropole. As Gehrmann reveals, their experience in India can be understood as one of a number of emerging contacts with Asian nationalism, helping to inform Australians’ emerging sense of place, vulnerability and race in the region. Andy Kaladelfos and Lisa Featherstone investigate race and gender in postwar Australia through a series of sex crime trials. Their chapter connects with a number of others in the collection, in its exploration of ‘how the state negotiated culturally contested meanings over gender and violence’. By focusing on postwar migrants and refugees, the authors connect this negotiation with the postwar legacy of violence and trauma. Anglo-Australians couched their concerns in the language of threatened national virility ‘at the hands of foreign sexual criminals’, deploying heteronormativity at the heart of a discourse of whiteness. This racialization of crime, overlaid with the portrayal of gender-based violence, is at the core of their chapter (and connects similarly with a number of other chapters in the collection). They reveal how immigration status and cultural preconceptions have fundamentally limited people’s access to justice throughout Australian history, and that this challenge continues in the present time. Farida Fozdar examines Australia’s contemporary migration policy and the restriction of asylum-seekers’ rights as a form of passive violence. Her chapter assesses how a sense of crisis is created by the language of securitization and warfare, which surrounds Australia’s public debate regarding asylum seekers. Her exploration of criminalization and race connects with other chapters, and has been an ongoing theme throughout Australian history. The current manifestation continues to affect perceptions of human rights and duties of care to vulnerable people. Fozdar, similarly to Briskman, uses Giorgio Agamben’s exploration of the ‘state of exception’ to analyse the Australian government’s response to asylum seekers.4 She does this within a context of the Global North, in which the ‘off-shoring’ of responsibilities is increasingly used to buffer states from mobile populations beyond their borders, and to deny safety to non-members of the nation state. Fozdar questions the state’s right to deny such membership by force. The state’s sovereign right to enact violence on others’ bodies, and the role of the law within this, is at the heart of this chapter and of the entire collection. Together, the volume’s chapters provide an in-depth investigation into the experiences of violence in Australia. The collection focuses on one country to draw attention to changing experiences of violence, and to consistencies in how experiences of violence have been silenced and given voice over time. The chapters centre on questions of the role of the state, whiteness and masculinity

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in framing violence. They integrate a wide variety of approaches and case studies, all seeking to give voice to the experience of the marginalized and silenced. The findings shed light on the extent to which Australia’s experience of violence connects with global debates, such as processes of colonialism and globalization. Rather than see Australia as exceptional and isolated, the collection asserts the global connections that have influenced how Australians make sense of violence. It asserts the responsibility of remembering, and the opportunities this presents to develop an inclusive and cohesive society.

ROBERT MASON Robert Mason is lecturer in migration and security studies at Griffith University, Queensland. He is editor of a number of collections, including Cultures in Refuge: Seeking Sanctuary in Modern Australia (2012, with Anna Hayes) and Migration and Insecurity: Citizenship and Social Inclusion in a Transnational Era (2013, with Niklaus Steiner and Anna Hayes). His research focuses on emotion and the legacies of violence in both migration and heritage. He is particularly interested in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking communities in Asia, Australia and North America. NOTES   1. Klaus Neumann and Janna Thomson (eds), Historical Justice and Memory, Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 2015.   2. Ruth Wajnryb, The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2001, p. 6.   3. Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2012, p. 45.   4. G. Agamben, State of Exception, translated by K. Attell, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2005.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Agamben, G., State of Exception, translated by K. Attell, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2005. Neumann, Klaus, and Janna Thomson (eds), Historical Justice and Memory, Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. Schulman, Sarah, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2012. Wajnryb, Ruth, The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2001.

Chapter 1

The Politics of State-Sanctioned Violence in Australia Racialized Constructions of Nation Linda Briskman

KL An image from 2011 still haunts. After a gruelling visit to meet detained asylum seekers at the Curtin Immigration Detention Centre in the remote desert heartland of Western Australia, I stopped at a nearby roadhouse for sustenance. A young Aboriginal man with glazed eyes and unsteady gait came towards me. In a barely inaudible voice he asked, ‘Is this place near Fitzroy Crossing?’ Without waiting for a reply that would tell him he was far away from that town, he staggered away silently and alone on the long dusty road. From that brief encounter I was acutely conscious of the immediacy of moving from one domain of state-sanctioned cruelty to another, just kilometres apart. Violence towards the traditional occupiers of the land and those who more recently came across the seas is endemic and harm-inducing. In Australia it has not always been acceptable to question violence against Indigenous Australians1 and asylum seekers2 in tandem, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have challenged policy and discursive formulations that fail to have their distinctive rights recognized and that fuse their status with immigration and multiculturalism.3 Times have somewhat changed, and with an emergence of solidarity arising from shared oppression, Indigenous Australians are now expressing disquiet at the treatment of people experiencing forced migration. The convergence became apparent through Aboriginal leader Lowitja O’Donohue’s insightful 11

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statement in 2003: ‘How is it that this nation’s First Peoples, and its last peoples, should suffer similar indignity?’4 New discursive spaces provide opportunities for contemplating both arenas simultaneously. To do so enables a challenge to assertions that past policies of exclusion, violence, oppression and domination are the domain of the past alone. Through normative assumptions of rights and justice, and shrouded by fear factors, racism that permits ongoing violent responses is masked in Australian society where dominant constructions are privileged and insidious assimilation tendencies prevail. Whiteness as ‘the invisible omnipresent norm’ determines how the ‘Other’ is positioned and treated, and how practices that discriminate, exclude and harm become normalized.5 Erasure of human rights flows from violence within a nation. Human Rights Watch condemns Australia’s abrogation of human rights responsibilities through increasingly punitive policies for asylum seekers and the lack of access to adequate healthcare, housing, food and water for many Indigenous Australians, despite Australia being one of the world’s wealthiest nations.6 As Donnelly argues, ‘for the foreseeable future, human rights will remain a vital element in national, international and transnational struggles for social justice and human dignity’.7

FROM BEGINNING TO NOW: A CONTINUUM Past treatment of indigenous peoples enabled white nation-building. The ideologies and practices that followed colonization in Australia are similar to those that occurred in other settler nations such as Canada and New Zealand where, upon colonizer invasion, interventions aimed to obliterate the presence of indigenous peoples or at least render them invisible. Johnson and Lawson express a preference for the term ‘settler–invader’ to emphasize the violence concealed by the benign term of settler.8 In Australia, invader terminology is adopted by some Indigenous Australians and their supporters to refer to the anniversary of the date Australia was ‘founded’, 26 January, as Invasion Day. In Australia, a rewriting of history to dispel what is sometimes named ‘the black armband’ view favours those who deny frontier violence and the ensuing anguish across generations. What has become known as the ‘History Wars’ presents a clash of paradigms not only between the major political parties but also between historians. Consider Keith Windschuttle’s notable assertion that ‘the story of the brutality of the British settlers was the concoction of self-hating, left-wing historians; that the law abiding Christian gentlemen who colonized Australia were incapable of savage deeds’.9 Yet



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as McCalman argues, history is about difficult questions and not iconic beliefs.10 The notion of invasion, publicly minimized for violence perpetrated against First Nations peoples, is inverted in popular representations of modern-day asylum seekers, who are depicted as an invasion threat. On a global scale, including in Australia, strategies designed to deter asylum seekers from entering nation states include detention, interdiction en route, and deflecting sovereign enforcement away from territorial boundaries to third countries.11 In a pattern repeated throughout the developed world, unauthorized or rejected foreigners are held in prison-like facilities for extended periods, with minimal legal controls and accountability.12 Criminalization of both Indigenous Australians and asylum seekers has taken hold. For Indigenous Australians, violence of the past begets violence of the present, manifest in high rates of family or intimate violence and ‘criminality’. Suicide rates for Indigenous Australians have increased in the past thirty years, with young males most at risk.13 A criminalizing discourse has been visited upon asylum seekers engaged in lawful entry by the imposition of naval interception, maximum security prisons, employment of guards and the use of physical constraints and weaponry.14 Immigration detention centres are sites where frustration at ill treatment and uncertain futures manifest in the internal despair of self-harm – with suicides at the most extreme end – and externally, in riots and protest. As with Indigenous Australians, the root causes are ignored, and law and order prioritized. In July 2013, fires at an offshore detention outpost in Nauru, a facility established by the Australian government as a deterrence measure, resulted in punitive responses including criminal charges, transfers to prisons and further containment within the camps. Conversely, at the time of writing, no convictions have taken place for staff believed responsible for serious attacks in Manus Island detention in 2014 that left one Iranian man dead and around seventy others injured. Institutionalized violence followed protests staged by detainees. In essence, Australia acts out a desire for control – of borders, of sovereignty, of safety. Media portrayals of Indigenous Australian communities as dysfunctional confront our preferred image of an egalitarian, caring nation. To counter the effect of harsh policies, alternative visions of Australia continue to be portrayed to the world – surf and sun, multiculturalism and exotic natives among them. The Immigration Department’s Visit Australia and Live in Australia segments of its website feature young blonde women, symbolizing people that will be welcomed in this country. This public relations exercise contrasts starkly with a policy decree named Operation Sovereign Borders (OSB), tasked with keeping out the unwanted who are

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presented with messages of the perils that will beset them if they seek to travel to Australia by boat.15 An Australian Customs and Border Protection (ACBP) website included images designed to deter Afghans contemplating seeking asylum in Australia, showing despairing asylum seekers in offshore detention centres.16 The centrepiece of OSB is the utilization of military personnel to disrupt people movement at sea, including pushing them back into international waters in specially designed life boats. As noted by political journalist and commentator Mungo MacCallum, ‘The cloak of a military campaign against the hapless asylum seekers has been adopted as political camouflage, partly to inflate the importance of what is, by any normal measure, no more than an irritant, and partly to justify the cult of secrecy’.17 Overturning hegemonic accounts of a violent past has been fraught and belated. It was not until the 1997 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s inquiry into the removal of Indigenous Australian children from their families and communities – resulting in the Stolen Generations – that the general public was informed of the violence of the forced removals.18 A formal reconciliation process that ran for a decade from the early 1990s received a cynical reaction from many Indigenous Australians, with its ambitious agenda, government-appointed oversight body, emphasis on unachieved ‘practical’ measures, and, as Foley points out, lack of acknowledgment of past crimes.19 Langton perceived the venture as a process for normalizing ‘the natives’ and for dismissing difference.20 There has been occasional lofty rhetoric in the political domain. In 1992 Prime Minister Paul Keating, in what is known as his Redfern speech, acknowledged that the problems began with non-Aboriginal Australians who did the dispossessing, took over traditional lands, smashed the traditional way of life, brought diseases and alcohol, committed murders and took children from their mothers. In 2008 Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made a moving apology to Indigenous Australians, reflecting on the mistreatment of the Stolen Generations, which he recognized as a blemished chapter in Australia’s history. Regrettably, these pronouncements have not resulted in significant changes to the status of Indigenous Australians, who still remain on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder.21 Neither recognition nor apology has been forthcoming from governments about asylum-seeker boat people, with myopia about how the nation will be judged by future generations. In 2008 there were hopes of change when, within a year of taking office, the Labor government seized upon relaxed moments when boat arrivals slowed and then the immigration minister, Chris Evans, introduced a ‘values statement’.22 However, the promises enshrined in the statement were not honoured when boats sailed



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once again, and there was even a reversal in some pronouncements in the statement, such as that detention would be a last resort, children would not be detained and the inherent dignity of the person would be ensured. There has been some questionable invoking of compassion when asylum-seeker drownings occurred at sea but this can be construed as mere theatrics to counter hard-of-heart images while paving the way for increasing interdiction and deterrence measures.23 The election of the conservative Coalition government in September 2013 resulted in sharpened rhetorical and policy devices for people now labelled as ‘illegal’, with immigration minister Scott Morrison stating, ‘Let me be clear. I’m trying to stop people illegally entering Australia by boat. That’s our objective’.24 Morrison has further implied that the Refugee Convention to which Australia is a signatory is ‘being used by people smugglers to basically run death voyages’.25 How can we understand the ill treatment of First Peoples and the most recent arrivals? The following section presents a framework of banishment.

BANISHMENT The construct of banishment sets the scene for exploring questions of exclusion and mistreatment. According to this framework, banishment has taken three major forms in Australia: removal to sites of exclusion; denial of normative state rights; and attack on identity. Each is discussed below.

Sites of Exclusion For indigenous peoples, sites of exclusion included segregation from the mainstream through incarceration in missions, reserves and children’s homes. The urge to eradicate the Aboriginal ‘problem’ appeared in different guises at different times. Under a policy known as ‘protection’, Indigenous Australians were relegated to a special category of law, relocated to reserves and missions, and subjected to a ‘civilizing and Christianizing’ blueprint.26 Later assimilation frameworks endeavoured to destroy Aboriginal cultures and create absorption into mainstream Australia. The removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families was the cornerstone of assimilation, aimed at mixed-race children. The 1997 HREOC inquiry was told of the hundreds of children removed from their mothers and families. It heard of children forcibly removed from schools, and of others taken away in police vehicles, with mothers chasing behind. Narratives of extreme deprivation including hunger, cold, beatings

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and sexual abuse were common,27 with trauma that followed passing down through generations.28 In confidential evidence to the inquiry, one woman who had been placed in a home for girls at the age of thirteen spoke about problems with her own parenting: That’s another thing that we find hard is giving our children love. Because we never had it. So we don’t know how to tell our kids that we love them. All we do is protect them. I can’t even cuddle my kids ’cause I never ever got cuddled. The only time was when I was getting raped and that’s not what you’d call a cuddle, is it?29

Removal and exile recur. The introduction of mandatory immigration detention in legislation in 1992, and the subsequent escalation of the practice, has seen asylum seekers detained in isolated facilities in Western Australia and South Australia, on Christmas Island and in the countries of Nauru and Papua New Guinea (Manus Island). Legislation has also been introduced to excise both island and mainland Australia from the migration zone.30 Debasing and humiliating practices associated with immigration detention constitute cruel, inhumane, degrading treatment and punishment, including serious mental abuse.31 As with the Stolen Generations, the treatment of children is so profoundly cruel that it has been described as ‘organized and ritualized abuse’ by government.32 Indeed, an early childhood worker who advocated for the rights of detained children sees the detention of children as emotional murder.33 A group of Salvation Army welfare workers who were employed in the Nauru detention camp (the Nauru Regional Processing Centre [NRPC]) witnessed asylum-seeker suffering. In response they issued a statement that revealed the plight of asylum seekers held there at the behest of the Australian government: We have worked alongside these asylum seekers since the opening of the NRPC when the men were first housed in tents. Brought them pedestal fans when the temperature within their tents soared to over 50 degrees. Used buckets to empty rivers of rainwater when the same temporary accommodation flooded during the wet season … We saw the scars of self-harm, and suicide attempts. We tried to motivate the hundreds of men on hunger strike to eat again.34

Governments often fail to predict the consequences of policy. For example, the architects of the current policy of OSB did not contemplate what would happen to people who were forcibly pushed back from Australian territorial waters. Many of those pushed back at sea may end up languishing indefinitely in Indonesian detention facilities where Human Rights Watch



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has documented a litany of ill treatment and abuse of both children and adults.35 Those who do enter Australian waters and are transferred by the navy to Christmas Island risk being sent to detention centres on Nauru or Manus Island where they become known as ‘transferees’. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has condemned offshore processing in Nauru.36 In the case of the detention of children on Nauru, the UNHCR called for an ethic of care and not enforcement. It further criticized ‘the pervasive climate at the facility which places an overt emphasis on promoting return’, because asylum seekers who are returned to their country of origin may encounter violence there, or even death.37 A wall of secrecy is now official government policy, consistent with Hage’s assertion that, ‘[W]hen aggressive, non-democratic border politics need to be practised among us, we prefer it to be done as a “secret service” that keeps its actions as invisible as possible’.38

Normative State Rights Exclusion from the polis and state rights is largely hidden from the public domain. Formal citizenship applies to Indigenous Australians but rights erosion continues. Exclusion from rights afforded to others was particularly apparent through constitutional exclusion of Aboriginal people until 1967. The overturning of clauses that disallowed the counting of Aboriginal people and prevented the Commonwealth enacting legislation relating to them has been described by one Aboriginal leader as ‘a concession ticket which only gave us entry into the back stalls at some of the shows’.39 Tentative moves are currently underway for more robust constitutional recognition. Enactment of the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), enabled by displacement from the provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, reveals the precariousness of the civil and political rights won. The NTER was ostensibly introduced to respond to reports of child sexual abuse in the Northern Territory. The inclusion in the NTER of practices reminiscent of earlier protection and assimilation periods caused consternation. These measures included the initial plan to mandate compulsory medical checks for children (later dropped), the quarantining and control of money from Indigenous Australian families, the engagement of government managers with broad powers over community affairs, and acquisition of Aboriginal land through compulsory leases to the Commonwealth government for at least five years.40 When army personnel arrived there were documented episodes of people ‘heading bush, and away from large towns and communities’.41 The language of emergency response

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conjured up national crisis and urgency, which was reinforced by sending in the army and police to implement the measures. Granting police powers to enter private property without a warrant to pursue a person believed to be affected by alcohol blurred public and private space. As Hinkson explains, ‘[t]he discourse of a national emergency also works very effectively to ground the crisis firmly in the present, severing the issue of child sexual abuse from any consideration of the quagmire of past governmental neglect’.42 Other insidious and sustained rights-exclusion continues. At the centre is ongoing diminution of economic and social rights set out in the 1976 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The situation has not significantly changed since 1987 when a journalist pointed out that, ‘[i]n short, an Aborigine is much more likely than a white to be in one or more of the following states: sick, unemployed, uneducated, poor, imprisoned or dead’.43 Here human rights tenets and social justice ideologies converge, where disadvantage in Australia is not merely rights-based in terms of international norms, but where norms of decency, fairness and distributive justice ought to prevail. Another area is discrimination in the criminal justice system with police over-vigilance and the overrepresentation of Aborigines in prisons being key examples. The tragedy of Mr Ward – a 47-year-old Western Australian Aboriginal man who, in 2008, died of heatstroke in the back of a van while being transported for many hours to a distant courthouse without any attempts being made to check on his well-being – reveals the minimization of rights for Aboriginal Australians.44 Indigenous Australians and asylum seekers are at opposite ends of the state rights spectrum. After hard-fought campaigns, Indigenous Australians have the legal protections of others, while still lacking social protections. For asylum seekers the terms ‘unauthorized non-citizens’ and ‘illegal maritime arrival’ denote a sense of not belonging. The privileging of a border security paradigm means that asylum seekers are excluded from legal and social rights, and the adoption of militarization, deportation and securitization is counter to inclusivity, setting the racialized asylum seeker apart from the dignity afforded to others.45 Asylum seekers are positioned as perpetrators of violence against that state rather than victims of state violence, through the adoption of a discourse of border security, as opposed to human security. The conflation of asylum seeking with terrorism after 11 September 2001 (9/11) is illustrative – the then minister of defence, Peter Reith, told a radio journalist of the need to control people entering the country to stop the nation becoming a staging post for terrorist activities.46



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Identity Identity is a third plank of the framework. Banishment is a technique beyond the physical and the tangible to include identity and cultures. In the media, ‘ethnic’ identity is often portrayed as problematic;47 the same applies to religious identities, particularly Islam. Anxiety about difference is at the heart of identity obliteration, and results in the ‘nationalist affirmation of one group over another’.48 An ongoing covert assimilation quest discounts indigenous knowledge and lifeways, and combines with the denial and forgetting that have become features of Australia’s responses to the claims of Indigenous Australian history.49 Spirituality for indigenous people in Australia and globally is of great significance, and rejection of their spirituality creates further marginalization.50 Indigenous spirituality is shaped by and based on collectivity and connection to the natural world, in contrast to ‘worldviews’ of dominant groups in settler societies. Banishment extends to denigration of Aboriginality and has profound effects on those at the receiving end. During an interview I conducted with Indigenous-rights campaigner Brian Butler, he spoke of ‘being thrashed by my father for not wearing a shirt because he said I’d get black and that wasn’t to be’.51 Aboriginal advocate Kathy Fisher told of a man who, as a child at school, was made to ridicule his own culture and feel ashamed.52 A similar process of denial of identity is occurring in relation to asylum seekers. Negation of refugee identity is apparent in assimilation discourses embedded in official reports and media. These were particularly overt from 1996 to 2007, and enacted through such instruments as the values component of a citizenship test based on a limited concept of national identity. Introduced in 2007, it incorporated knowledge that had little bearing on the meaning of ‘good citizen’ and was later assessed to be flawed and discriminatory, and mostly affecting humanitarian visa holders.53 Such measures reveal a tension between an ethos of multiculturalism and a shroud of uncritical nationalism that has its roots in racism. The potency of the limits to national identity is further apparent through an increasing security discourse that provides a rationale for racialized immigration policies. What has become known as Islamophobia sees the holding of a Muslim identity as a threat to nation and is conveniently conflated with asylum seeking, whereby border politics relating to refugees were reshaped after 9/1154 and government statements about asylum seekers reinforced stereotypes of threatening and violent Muslims.55 Stereotypes are further propagated by anti-terrorism laws that took hold in Australia after the so-called War on Terror from 2001 and that are antithetical to civil rights; they are subject to increasing escalation at the time of writing. Such laws, argues professor of

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law George Williams, are ‘proportionate to the fear we felt, rather than … the threat we faced at the time’.56

CONVERGENCE: FEAR, RACISM AND EXCEPTIONALISM Prominent Australian QC Julian Burnside speaks of the difficulty of protecting human rights in a climate of fear.57 He posits that this brings to the forefront the tension between the majoritarian principle of democratic rule and the humanitarian principle of protecting those who are most marginalized and powerless. Heartless reactions are without foundation, for, as former Australian Labor politician Carmen Lawrence said, the developed world has never been safer and is no longer ‘nasty, brutish and short’.58 Yet as McCulloch posits, (in)security politics are manifest in states of emergency manufactured around asylum seekers, terrorists and Indigenous Australians living in remote communities.59 Detention camps remain entrenched because of security anxiety. Fear of ‘dysfunction’ influences special measures enacted on indigenous peoples, including the NTER, resulting in a violation of human rights for both groups. In portraying Indigenous Australians as a risk to ‘law and order’ the media thrives on stories of alcohol and drug abuse, child abuse, crime and other forms of ‘dysfunction’. Media analysis rarely interrogates the violence and oppression to which Aboriginal people have been subjected, or the link to current socioeconomic disorder. Fear and racism intersect. Racism, says Arendt, is not a fact of life but an ideology.60 The deeds to which it leads, she argues, are not reflex actions but deliberate acts founded on pseudoscientific theories. The violence that arises is not irrational but a logical and rational consequence of such racism. Stereotypical underpinnings of notions of inferiority and superiority serve to denigrate the cultures and beliefs of those who are seen to threaten dominant worldviews. In Australia, Aboriginal cultures and spirituality, and Muslim cultures and religious practices have been deemed less worthy than the beliefs and mores arising from a Judeo-Christian base. For asylum seekers, fear has been generated about invasion of sovereign borders, reinforcing the terrorist discourse. The authenticity of such views is rarely questioned in racialized Australia, and this uncritical approach allows racism and institutionalized violence to flourish. The state sustains racism, raising questions about how such practices arise, how they are maintained and who profits.61 Drawing on Agamben’s theorization of states of exception, Stratton argues that the state of exception is fundamentally ‘raced’, as the concept of race is central to the articulation of the modern state.62 




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Agamben’s notion of ‘the camp’ is pertinent to the two case studies of this chapter, particularly his concept of ‘bare life’ where there is a purposive erosion of the qualities of the human.63 His state of exception, which mainly applied to Nazi concentration camps, reveals how the normative processes of democratic states experience a rupture in the wake of constructed emergencies, and how these are selectively applied to those deemed unworthy members of a nation state.64 The social construction of ‘threat’ and ‘crisis’ in Indigenous Australian communities was particularly manifest in the NTER through deployment of an army unit.65 A similar construct of threat and crisis has been applied to asylum seekers through exceptional policies of detention and limiting the right to seek asylum through excision of parts of Australian territory from the migration zone. A former immigration minister created alarm by telling Australians in 1999 that they faced a national emergency as ‘illegal migrants’ were intending to flood Australia from the Middle East.66

CONCLUSION: REVISITING THE ROADHOUSE In the 1968 Boyer lectures, Stanner spoke of the exclusion of Aboriginal history from text. He argued that it could not be explained by absentmindedness but was rather a structural matter, designed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape.67 Stanner’s statement warrants revisiting. Although Aboriginal history is increasingly apparent in the public sphere, including in educational settings and through the arts, the violence of the past, although no longer ignored, remains minimized and discounted. The violence towards asylum seekers was not an issue in the White Australia Policy context in which Stanner wrote. Now the ‘structural matter’ is the exclusion of asylum-seeker narratives, which have violence at the core. The continuum of past and present is evident in the NTER and detention camps. Largely unrecognized is the instrumental nature of political action whereby ‘masculinist imagery lauds toughness, decisiveness and aggression as political values’.68 Australian society is not only ‘raced’ but also gendered with constructions of Australian society built on national mythology, which although increasingly overcome in many spheres of life, retains a ‘culture’ that privileges harshness over compassion, the latter seen as a sign of personal and political weakness. Through creating ‘otherness’, dominant groups fail to empathize with those who have been demonized. The loss of humanity creates an inability to feel bad for discriminating against fellow human beings.69 It can also result in systemic abuse and its effects being depicted as personal dysfunction, with Indigenous Australians blamed for

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the ills inflicted on them, which allows punitive law and order measures to prevail. Asylum seekers are punished for jumping their place in a nonexistent queue, infringing Australia’s border rights and reacting against the imposition of state violence. Adopting this paradigm means that ‘we’ are the victims and ‘they’ are the threat.70 As Lowitja O’Donoghue states: This is the land of my forefathers and mothers. It is a land where refugees have come to find freedom. Look at the landscape and the shoreline of this land and tell me it’s not a fragile yet generous and richly beautiful place. ‘It has boundless plains to share’. And I want to share it with my friends. I have welcomed them. They are here. They are part of us. They are grafted into my ancestry and country.71

Others have taken O’Donoghue’s lead. Aboriginal people sympathetic to the asylum-seeker quest attempted to deliver what they devised as ‘Aboriginal passports’ to asylum seekers detained in the Villawood detention facility in Sydney, as a symbol of welcome and an act of solidarity.72 Australian society and its leadership could take heed from burgeoning Aboriginal solidarity with these ‘Others’, and value an open border mentality. Despite the lack of follow-up action arising from Keating’s 1992 Redfern statement, Australian society could reach into the annals of history and bring his words to the forefront to emphasize that it was ‘us’ who practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance, our prejudice, and, most importantly, our failure to imagine these things being done to us. As Dorfman suggests, condoning degrading and cruel treatment reveals our inability to imagine the suffering of others, and by dehumanizing them we deny that their pain is our pain.73 Ongoing banishment, fear and racism leave little hope for the young man at the roadhouse or his peers; or for his neighbours who were locked up in a detention centre, who, despite proximity, he would not meet. The lexicon of common humanity remains unattainable in current nation-state ideology and response.

LINDA BRISKMAN Linda Briskman is Professor of Human Rights at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research in Melbourne. She previously held the Dr Haruhisa Handa Chair of Human Rights Education at Curtin University. Her research and advocacy endeavours focus on the rights of Indigenous Australians and asylum-seekers. Books include the co-authored award-winning Human Rights



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Overboard: Seeking Asylum in Australia (2008) and Social Work with Indigenous Communities: A Human Rights Approach (2014). She is also a visiting professor at Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran.

NOTES   1. In the Australian context, the term Indigenous denotes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. In this chapter the terms Aboriginal and Indigenous are sometimes used interchangeably to reflect context and literature.  2. An asylum seeker is a person who is awaiting a decision on their application for refugee status. In this chapter the asylum seekers discussed are people who have arrived in Australia by boat.   3. L. Briskman, Social Work with Indigenous Communities, Sydney, Federation Press, 2007, p. 162.   4. L. O’Donoghue, ‘Return to Afghanistan: Resettlement or Refoulement’, Public Forum on Afghanistan: Resettlement or Refoulement, Adelaide, 27 February 2003.   5. A. Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press, 2000.   6. Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Watch 2014: Events of 2013, 2014, www.hrw. org/world-report/2014 (accessed 22 January 2014).  7. J. Donnelly, ‘The Relative Universality of Human Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 2, 2007, p. 306.  8. A. Johnson and A. Lawson, ‘Settler Post-colonialism’, in H. Schwarz and S. Ray (eds), A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2000, p. 362.  9. R. Manne, ‘Comment: The History Wars’, The Monthly, November 2009, https:// www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2009/november/1270703045/robert-manne/ comment (accessed 1 March 2015). 10. J. McCalman, ‘We Must Bid Adieu to Questionable Romance’, The Age, 14 April 1999, p. 17. 11. K. Coddington et al., ‘Embodied Possibilities, Sovereign Geographies and Island Detention’, Shima, vol. 6, no. 2, 2012. 12. D. Wilsher, Immigration Detention: Law, History, Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. ix. 13. J. Healey, The Health of Indigenous Australians, Thirroul, Spinney Press, 2010, p. 27. 14. M. Grewcock, Border Crimes: Australia’s War on Illicit Migration, Sydney, Institute of Criminology Press, 2009. 15. H. Aston, ‘$3m on Blitz so Far, and Continuing’, Saturday Age, 27 July 2013, p. 4. 16. Australian Customs and Border Protection, ‘A Storyboard on People Smuggling’, Australian Customs and Boarder Protection Service Online Newsroom,

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2014, http://newsroom.border.gov.au/channels/Operation-Sovereign-Borders/ photos/a-storyboard-on-people-smuggling (accessed 1 March 2015). 17. M. MacCallum, ‘Asylum Seekers and the Language of War’, The Drum, ABC, 14 January 2014, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-01-13/maccallum-operationsovereign-borders/5196708 (accessed 1 March 2015). 18. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), ‘Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families’, Sydney, 1997. 19. G. Foley, ‘Reconciliation: Fact or Fiction’, The Koorie History Website, 1999, http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_6.html (accessed 1 March 2015). 20. M. Langton, ‘Why Race is a Central Idea in Australia’s Construction of the Idea of a Nation’, in S. Magarey (ed.), Human Rights and Reconciliation in Australia, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press, 1999, p. 35. 21. Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Watch 2014: Events of 2013. 22. C. Evans, ‘New Directions in Detention: Restoring Dignity to Australia’s Immigration System’, 4 August 2008, http://www.minister.immi.gov.au/media/ speeches/2008/ce080729.htm (accessed 10 August 2008). 23. M. Hutton, ‘Dying to Get Here’, in R. Rothfield (ed.), The Drownings’ Argument, Melbourne, Labor for Refugees, 2014. 24. Cited in E. Griffiths, ‘Immigration Minister Scott Morrison Defends use of Term “Illegal Arrivals”, Plays down PNG Police Incident’, ABC News, 22 October 2013, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-21/immigration-ministerscott-morrison-defends-use-of-illegals-term/5035552 (accessed 15 August 2014). 25. Cited in R. Ackland, ‘Unconventional Behaviour’, Saturday Paper, 9–15 August 2014, p. 7. 26. Briskman, Social Work with Indigenous Communities, p. 49. 27. L. Briskman and T. Libesman, ‘De-colonisation or Re-colonisation? Contemporary Social Work and Indigenous Australians’, in P. Swain and S. Rice (eds), In the Shadow of the Law: The Legal Context of Social Work Practice, 3rd edn, Sydney, Federation Press, 2014. 28. J. Atkinson, Trauma Trails: Recreating Song Lines, North Melbourne, Spinifex Press, 2002. 29. HREOC, ‘Bringing Them Home’, p. 225. 30. M. Phillips, ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Excising Australia from the Migration Zone’, The Conversation, 17 May 2013, http://theconversation.com/out-of-sightout-of-mind-excising-australia-from-the-migration-zone-14387 (accessed 14 August 2014). 31. L. Briskman, D. Zion and B. Loff, ‘Challenge and Collusion: Health Professionals and Immigration Detention in Australia’, International Journal of Human Rights, vol. 16, no. 7, 2010. 32. C. Goddard and L. Briskman, ‘By any Measure, it’s Official Child Abuse’, Herald Sun, Melbourne, 18 February 2004, p. 17. 33. Cited in L. Briskman, S. Latham and C. Goddard, Human Rights Overboard: Seeking Asylum in Australia, Melbourne, Scribe, 2008.



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34. Cited in Brigidine Asylum Seeker Project, A Statement from Past and Present Salvation Army Staff Members, 23 July 2014, http://basp.org.au/statement-fromnauru-staff-condemns-cruel-and-degrading-conditions-for-those-in-detention/ (accessed 22 January 2014). 35. Human Rights Watch, Barely Surviving: Detention, Abuse and Neglect of Migrant Children in Indonesia, 2013, https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/ indonesia0613webwcover.pdf (accessed 22 January 2014). 36. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), UNHCR Monitoring Visit to the Republic of Nauru 7 to 9 October 2013, Canberra, 2013, http://unhcr.org. au/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/2013-12-06-Report-of-UNHCR-Visit-to-Nauruof-7-9-October-2013.pdf (accessed 14 August 2014). 37. Ibid. 38. G. Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Annandale, Pluto Press, 2003, p. 32. 39. M. Dodson, ‘First Fleets and Citizenship’, in S. Rufus Davis (ed.), Citizenship in Australia: Democracy, Law and Society, Melbourne, Constitutional Confederacy Foundation, 1996, p. 215. 40. Briskman and Libesman, ‘De-colonisation or Re-colonisation?’. 41. O. Havnen, ‘Healing the Fault Lines: Uniting Politicians, Bureaucrats and NGOs for Improved Outcomes in Aboriginal Health’, 7th Lowitja O’Donohue Oration, 2013, p. 8. 42. M. Hinkson, ‘Introduction: In the Name of the Child’, in J. Altman and M. Hinkson (eds), Coercive Reconciliation: Stabilise, Normalize, Exit Aboriginal Australia, Melbourne, Arena Publications, 2007, p. 7. 43. R. Haupt, ‘The Aboriginal Condition: The Brute Facts’, The Age, 9 November 1987. 44. Australian Human Rights Commission, Inquest into the Death of Mr Ward, 2009. 45. L. Briskman, ‘A Clash of Paradigms for Asylum Seekers: Border Security and Human Security’, in G. Bee Chen, B. Offord and R. Garbutt (eds), Activating Human Rights and Peace: Theories, Practices and Contexts, Farnham, Ashgate, 2012. 46. Department of Defence, Transcript of the Hon Peter Reith MP Radio Interview with Derryn Hinch – 3AK, 2001, http://www.defence.gov.au/minister/8tpl. cfm?CurrentId=999 (accessed 28 November 2013). 47. H. Babacan, ‘Immigration, Nation State and Belonging’, in A. Babacan and S. Singh (eds), Migration, Belonging and the Nation State, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010, p. 13. 48. Ibid., p. 15. 49. A. Haebich, Murdering Stepmothers: The Execution of Martha Rendell, Nedlands, University of Western Australia Publishing, 2010. 50. J. Ife, Rethinking Social Work: Towards Critical Practice, Melbourne, Longman, 1997, p. 10. 51. Cited in L. Briskman, The Black Grapevine: Aboriginal Activism and the Stolen Generations, Sydney, Federation Press, 2003, p. 25. 52. Cited in ibid., p. 81.

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53. K. Murphy, ‘Aussie Aussie Aussie: Is the Australian Citizenship Test Fair’, The Conversation, 15 November 2011, http://theconversation.com/aussie-aussieaussie-is-the-australian-citizenship-test-fair-3917 (accessed 22 January 2014). 54. S. Tascon, ‘Morphing Racial Exclusion in the Al-Qaeda Era’, in J.A. Winterdyk and K.W. Sundberg (eds), Border Security in the Al-Qaeda Era, Boca Raton, CRC Press, 2009. 55. K. Dunn, N. Klocker and T. Salabay, ‘Contemporary Racism and Islamophobia in Australia: Racializing Religion’, Ethnicities, vol. 9, no. 2, 2007. 56. G. Williams, ‘A Decade since 9/11, 54 New Anti-terror Laws’, Law Report, ABC, 6 September 2011, www.abc.net.au/rn/lawreport/stories/2011/3308901. htm#transcript (accessed 23 January 2014). 57. J. Burnside, ‘Protecting Rights in a Climate of Fear’, in Watching Brief: Reflections on Human Rights, Law and Justice, Melbourne, Scribe, 2007, p. 159. 58. C. Lawrence, Fear and Politics, Melbourne, Scribe Short Books, 2006, p. 2. 59. J. McCulloch, ‘Enemies Everywhere: (In)security Politics, Asylum Seekers and Other Enemies Within’, in Alperhan Babacan and Linda Briskman (eds), Asylum Seekers: International Perspectives on Interdiction and Deterrence, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. 60. H. Arendt, On Violence, London, Allen Lane Penguin Press, 1970, p. 76. 61. A. Kundnani, The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain, London, Pluto Press, 2007. 62. J. Stratton, ‘Uncertain Lives: Migration, the Border and Neoliberalism in Australia’, Social Identities, vol. 15, no. 5, 2009, p. 686. 63. G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Redwood City, CA, Stanford University Press, 1998. 64. G. Agamben, State of Exception, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2005. 65. Stratton, ‘Uncertain Lives’, p. 680. 66. A. Burke, In Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety, Sydney, Pluto Press, 2001. 67. Cited in A. McGrath, Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1995, p. 366. 68. A. Burke, ‘Security Politics and Us: Sovereignty, Violence and Power after 9/11’, in S. Perera (ed.), Our Patch: Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001, Perth, Network Books, 2007, p. 124. 69. D. Macedo and L. Bartolome, Dancing with Bigotry: Beyond the Politics of Tolerance, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1999, p. 29. 70. L. Fiske, ‘Riotous Refugees or Systemic Injustice? A Sociological Examination of Riots in Australian Immigration Detention Centres’, Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 27, no. 3, 2014, p. 384. 71. O’Donoghue, ‘Return to Afghanistan’. 72. G. Georgatos, ‘Aboriginal Passports Issued to Two Asylum Seekers Incarcerated at Villawood’, Indymedia, 14 May 2012, http://indymedia.org.au/2012/05/14/ aboriginal-passports-issued-to-two-asylum-seekers-incarcerated-at-villawood (accessed 15 August 2014).



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73. A. Dorfman, ‘The Tyranny of Terror: Is Torture Inevitable in our Century and Beyond?’, in S. Levinson (ed.), Torture: A Collection, New York, Oxford University Press, 2004. 74. The Curtin Immigration Detention Centre near Derby closed in 2014.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Agamben, G., Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Redwood City, CA, Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. State of Exception, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2005. Arendt, H., On Violence, London, Allen Lane Penguin Press, 1970. Atkinson, J., Trauma Trails: Recreating Song Lines, North Melbourne, Spinifex Press, 2002. Babacan, H., ‘Immigration, Nation State and Belonging’, in A. Babacan and S. Singh (eds), Migration, Belonging and the Nation State, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010, pp. 7–30. Briskman, L., The Black Grapevine: Aboriginal Activism and the Stolen Generations, Sydney, Federation Press, 2003. ———. Social Work with Indigenous Communities, Sydney, Federation Press, 2007. ———. ‘A Clash of Paradigms for Asylum Seekers: Border Security and Human Security’, in G. Bee Chen, B. Offord and R. Garbutt (eds), Activating Human Rights and Peace: Theories, Practices and Contexts, Farnham, Ashgate, 2012, pp. 175–87. ———. Social Work with Indigenous Communities: A Human Rights Approach, Sydney, Federation Press, 2014. Briskman, L., S. Latham and C. Goddard, Human Rights Overboard: Seeking Asylum in Australia, Melbourne, Scribe, 2008. Briskman, L., and T. Libesman, ‘De-colonisation or Re-colonisation? Contemporary Social Work and Indigenous Australians’, in P. Swain and S. Rice (eds), In the Shadow of the Law: The Legal Context of Social Work Practice, 3rd edn, Sydney, Federation Press, 2014. Briskman, L., D. Zion and B. Loff, ‘Challenge and Collusion: Health Professionals and Immigration Detention in Australia’, International Journal of Human Rights, vol. 16, no. 7, 2010, pp. 1092–1106. Burke, A., In Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety, Sydney, Pluto Press, 2001. ———. ‘Security Politics and Us: Sovereignty, Violence and Power after 9/11’, in S. Perera (ed.), Our Patch: Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001, Perth, Network Books, 2007, pp. 119–46. Burnside, J., ‘Protecting Rights in a Climate of Fear’, in Watching Brief: Reflections on Human Rights, Law and Justice, Melbourne, Scribe, 2007, pp. 159–64. Coddington, K., R.T. Catania, J. Loyd, E. Mitchell-Eaton and A. Mountz, ‘Embodied Possibilities, Sovereign Geographies and Island Detention’, Shima, vol. 6, no. 2, 2012, pp. 27–48.

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Dodson, M., ‘First Fleets and Citizenship’, in S. Rufus Davis (ed.), Citizenship in Australia: Democracy, Law and Society, Melbourne, Constitutional Confederacy Foundation, 1996, pp. 191–223. Donnelly, J., ‘The Relative Universality of Human Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 2, 2007, pp. 281–308. Dorfman, A., ‘The Tyranny of Terror: Is Torture Inevitable in our Century and Beyond?’, in S. Levinson (ed.), Torture: A Collection, New York, Oxford University Press, 2004. Dunn, K., N. Klocker and T. Salabay, ‘Contemporary Racism and Islamophobia in Australia: Racializing Religion’, Ethnicities, vol. 9, no. 2, 2007, pp. 175–99. Fiske, L., ‘Riotous Refugees or Systemic Injustice? A Sociological Examination of Riots in Australian Immigration Detention Centres’, Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 27, no. 3, 2014, pp. 382–402. Grewcock, M., Border Crimes: Australia’s War on Illicit Migration, Sydney, Institute of Criminology Press, 2009. Haebich, A., Murdering Stepmothers: The Execution of Martha Rendell, Nedlands, University of Western Australia Publishing, 2010. Hage, G., Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Annandale, Pluto Press, 2003. Healey, J., The Health of Indigenous Australians, Thirroul, The Spinney Press, 2010. Hinkson, M., ‘Introduction: In the Name of the Child’, in J. Altman and M. Hinkson (eds), Coercive Reconciliation: Stabilise, Normalize, Exit Aboriginal Australia, Melbourne, Arena Publications, 2007, pp. 1–12. Hutton, M., ‘Dying to Get Here’, in R. Rothfield (ed.), The Drownings’ Argument, Melbourne, Labor for Refugees, 2014, pp. 69–74. Ife, J., Rethinking Social Work: Towards Critical Practice, Melbourne, Longman, 1997. Johnson, A., and A. Lawson, ‘Settler Post-colonialism’, in H. Schwarz and S. Ray (eds), A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2000, pp. 360–76. Kundnani, A., The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain, London, Pluto Press, 2007. Langton, M., ‘Why Race is a Central Idea in Australia’s Construction of the Idea of a Nation’, in S. Magarey (ed.), Human Rights and Reconciliation in Australia, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press, 1999, pp. 22–37. Lawrence, C. Fear and Politics, Melbourne, Scribe Short Books, 2006. Macedo, D., and L. Bartolome, Dancing with Bigotry: Beyond the Politics of Tolerance, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Manne, R., ‘Comment: The History Wars’, The Monthly, November 2009, http:// www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2009/november/1270703045/robert-manne/ comment (accessed 14 August 2014). McCulloch, J., ‘Enemies Everywhere: (In)Security Politics, Asylum Seekers and Other Enemies Within’, in A. Babacan and L. Briskman (eds), Asylum Seekers: International Perspectives on Interdiction and Deterrence, 2008, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 112–27.



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McGrath, A. Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1995. Moreton-Robinson, A., Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press, 2000. Murphy, K., ‘Aussie Aussie Aussie: Is the Australian Citizenship Test Fair’, The Conversation, 15 November 2011, http://theconversation.com/aussie-aussieaussie-is-the-australian-citizenship-test-fair-3917 (accessed 22 January 2014). O’Donoghue, L., ‘Return to Afghanistan: Resettlement or Refoulement’, Public Forum on Afghanistan: Resettlement or Refoulement, Adelaide, 27 February 2003. Phillips, M., ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Excising Australia from the Migration Zone’, The Conversation, 17 May 2013, http://theconversation.com/out-of-sightout-of-mind-excising-australia-from-the-migration-zone-14387 (accessed 14 August 2014). Stratton, J. ‘Uncertain Lives: Migration, the Border and Neoliberalism in Australia’, Social Identities, vol. 15, no. 5., 2009, pp. 677–92. Tascon, S., ‘Morphing Racial Exclusion in the Al-Qaeda Era’, in J.A. Winterdyk and K.W. Sundberg (eds), Border Security in the Al-Qaeda Era, Boca Raton, CRC Press, 2009, pp. 275–306. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR Monitoring Visit to the Republic of Nauru 7 to 9 October 2013, Canberra, 2013, http://unhcr.org.au/wpcontent/uploads/2015/05/2013-12-06-Report-of-UNHCR-Visit-to-Nauru-of-7-9October-2013.pdf (accessed 14 August 2014). Wilsher, D., Immigration Detention: Law, History, Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Part I

KL Hidden Violence

Chapter 2

Uncovering the Shameful Sexual Violence on an Australian Colonial Frontier Libby Connors

KL In the expansive former chapel of the convict barracks, the Brisbane court of petty sessions sat one morning in May 1848. In this frontier township, an unusual case was being tried by Police Magistrate Wickham and assisting magistrate Major de Winton. It was a committal hearing for a white man who was charged with shooting at an Aboriginal woman in the suburb of Kangaroo Point the previous week. Although the defendant was a ticket of leave holder – that is, a convict who had been allowed some freedom of employment – there were no less than twelve men present for the hearing: as well as the two magistrates, there were two arresting constables, the accused man, a solicitor representing him, his two defence witnesses, an interpreter, two Aboriginal men who were unsworn witnesses for the Crown, and a scribe for the Moreton Bay Courier. Members of the public may also have been present although none were reported. Before this group of men, an Aboriginal woman named Ummaum was ordered by the magistrates to bare her breasts so that they could discern any gunshot wounds. In the face of Ummaum’s lack of cooperation, it probably fell to one of the constables to physically undress her. Her partial disrobing revealed no marks of injury – the police had brought in the wrong woman – but the scene is remarkable for its gender inequality and for its lack of respect for Ummaum. Aboriginal women were presumed not to have the same dignity or feelings of modesty as white women, and the authority of the bench to order this disrobing at a public venue was not questioned.1 33

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The undressing of a woman before the bench of magistrates is startling and is a reminder of the gendered nature of colonialism with its encounters between licentious white men and semi-naked Aboriginal women. This chapter discusses some of the methodological problems that confront the historian seeking to understand the sexual violence of settler colonialism. It draws on pioneer memoirs, official sources and the limited evidence available from Aborigines to show how interracial sexual violence featured imperialism as a shameful undercurrent with material effects. As with recent historiography on genocide and empire, historians must not only dissect ideological layers but also place documentary omissions in a broader context for a fuller understanding of the gendered nature of colonialism. The northern township of Brisbane had been established as a closed penal settlement in 1824, meaning that no free white people were allowed within an 80-kilometre radius. The district was then a white outpost, the most northerly in the colony of New South Wales. As wool growing became more profitable in the 1830s, British interest in New South Wales increased. The rush to invest in sheep put immense pressure on the colonial government, as white men pushed beyond the districts of settlement. By 1841, a system of ‘squatting’ on Aboriginal lands had been regulated by the government, and ‘squatters’ or pastoralists were taking up pastoral land on the boundaries of what had once been the remote penal outstation of Moreton Bay. Just nine months after the arrival of the first free men, the penal station was officially closed and the main convict buildings became the small township of Brisbane, which opened to free settlement in May 1842. The township was situated on a navigable river that in part drained rich open grasslands and flowed east to Moreton Bay. Both the river and bay were crucial to the pastoral economy as shipping was the main line of communication to Sydney and to British world trade. Although most convicts were returned to Sydney, individual pastoralists brought their own convict workers north. Additionally some convicts, required for provision of basic government services such as crews for the harbour master, were allowed to remain. Brisbane, like other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century frontier settlements, was dominated numerically by men.2 Kathleen Wilson has drawn attention to the way this masculine colonial experience generated ideas in the metropolitan centre about gender, nationality and difference. The colonial encounter influenced ‘contemporary meanings of “men” and “women,” Britishness and Englishness, and “home” and “Abroad” across a wide imperium’.3 Ideas about class and race were invented as part of that difference, and existed, in the words of Anne McClintock, ‘in and through’



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one another.4 Class intersected very directly with novel ideas about manliness and womanliness in the new cult of domesticity. The wives and daughters of pastoralists at Moreton Bay in the 1840s and later were idealized as part of a discourse of genteel domesticity, despite their proximity to the frontier. It was an ideology that not only romanticized them but also concealed much of the separate world of masculine identity. Recent studies of genocide have placed the Australian frontier in its world history context.5 Previously the domain of sociologists seeking to understand post-Second World War situations, historians have shown how genocide links colonialism, imperialism and world history.6 There have been other lessons from the postwar experience of conflict: from the partitioning of India to the wars that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia, to Rwanda and the Congo, sexual violence has consistently been an attribute of genocide and war.7 In her discussion of the evidence of mass rape and abductions during the partitioning of India and Pakistan, Urvashi Butalia argues that the large-scale rape of women is now not only recognized as a weapon of war or genocide, but in contemporary conflicts has ‘become an almost commonplace occurrence’.8 Feminist scholars of imperialism are also clear on the centrality of sexual violence. Ann Laura Stoler argues that ‘gender-specific sexual sanctions and prohibitions [are] squarely at the heart of imperial agendas’.9 The new scholarship provides fresh techniques for reconstructing frontier killings. Today, as in the past, shame and fear of prosecution often result in deferral of any revelations about killings until long after the event, leading Jacques Semelin to develop new approaches to evidence.10 Lyndall Ryan is an Australian historian who has used Semelin’s methods for engaging with context and hearsay evidence to reconstruct Tasmanian and Gippsland frontier killings.11 The data on sexual violence throw up similar dilemmas. Australian historians frequently acknowledge such violence as a factor on the Australian frontier, but detailed exploration is rare, largely because primary evidence is scant.12 As with criminal killings, illicit crossracial sexual encounters are hidden; the shame that they bring is often only acknowledged indirectly, leaving historians with hearsay and euphemism. The challenge then is to explore beyond the rumours, to find firm evidence of the sexual exploitation that has been so long assumed. This chapter applies these ideas to some of the literature on interracial violence and sexual assault at Moreton Bay in the mid nineteenth century. It argues that forensic examination of primary evidence must be read alongside pioneer and family literature – literature produced long after events and therefore largely hearsay. As frontier experiences refashioned manliness, new ideologies of femininity and domesticity also evolved. Pioneering

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literature encapsulated the contradictions of a sheltered domestic life being imposed as part of the process of taming wild and savage imperial geographies. The separation of the private world of the family from the public economic and political spheres of colonial rule imposed a new kind of femininity. White women were complicit in colonial exploitation but constraints on female worlds also helped men to conceal the extent of racial violence and sexual assault. Accounts by women written long after events may still unlock dark evidence of the gendered frontier when examined in context.

THE IDEOLOGY OF DOMESTICITY AND MEMORIES OF THE FRONTIER Among the best collections of family papers documenting life in early Queensland is that of the McConnels. As a twenty-three year old, David McConnel established Cressbrook Station on one of the finest pieces of land in the Brisbane Valley in July 1841. The family papers, held in the National Library of Australia and the John Oxley and Fryer libraries, include letters David wrote to his mother and his brothers William, Henry and Frederic in the 1840s; account books from a property he owned jointly with his brother John; his wife Mary’s recollections published in 1905; contributions from his daughter-in-law, his daughter, his nephew and great-niece; and his brother Frederic’s recollections of their pioneering days written much later in life. The collection records the young men’s immediate views of their pioneering in the 1840s, and the perspective of a wife who arrived after most of the frontier violence had moved beyond the station’s boundaries and that of members of the next generation when the station was well established and prosperous. David McConnel’s daughter-in-law described him as a man who had the ‘quiet grace of a simple uprightness’. The journal of his brother Fred made several mentions in 1844 of reading prayers and sermons at the station, and in 1901 the family had a chapel built by renowned Queensland architect Robin Dods.13 In reminiscences written for David’s grandchildren, Mary McConnel reassured them that ‘Cressbrook was founded in the fear of God and doubtless in different manifestations the foundation will hold good’.14 It is astonishing then to observe the blitheness with which the brothers corresponded with one another about their violent encounters with the station’s traditional owners in its founding years. Letters home to mother avoided rough business talk but in their letters to one another it was frequent. In October 1844 David wrote to Fred of his plans to ‘try all means to get a black boy, when we can pay them off well, & can put terror in their hearts’. He had



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already written of similar plans to his brother William the previous May when he explained that a ‘black boy’ could be used to track the local people after their attacks on his cattle, & enable us to find their camps, & then –; people living in England … think it a great crime to hurt a poor black fellow, but when one has had one’s sheep & cattle & horses killed … & one’s own life attempted, one feels inclined to retaliate … so that many of us think it is wiser to shoot any of them that we meet & any number, anywhere beyond settled districts, until they are thoroughly pacified. [David McConnel’s blank and underlining]

This was no intemperate chatter on David’s part; he was sharing with William an ongoing conversation between himself and Fred, adding that ‘Fred says this is rather strong, but we are both prejudiced against them just now’. Fred took the trouble to add his own notation to this letter to William, explaining ‘I am bitter against certain blacks but I do not think we are justified in shooting all blacks’, and signing this with his initials.15 This ‘conversation’ between David and Fred had by that stage been running for three years. In June 1842 David, his manager and ten of the station men had shot a leading warrior at close range, bayoneted another man and shot ‘2 balls’ into a third, while a boy escaped the carnage by fleeing through the hut’s chimney.16 Just a few months later David joked in a letter to William that the visit of his brothers John and Fred was to be the occasion of some enjoyable game hunting: ‘In three or four months there will be very little game left, I think. The rifle is to be in use too for practising at eagles, pelicans, wild geese & swans, & emus & black ducks’. The underlining was significant for he subsequently added what was intended as a humorous play on shooting black ducks: ‘which latter annoy our sheep & put our men’s lives in danger’. This again led Fred to add an initialled qualification in the margin: ‘(The latter was written by David without my sanction)’.17 Nonetheless, many years later, Fred recalled his own participation in violent reprisals on a neighbouring station in 1844, including his neighbour’s use of the tactic of capturing an Aboriginal man for information and as a hostage.18 David returned to England and Scotland in 1847 and the following year married Mary McLeod. Mary spent only a few months at Cressbrook in 1849–50 and did not live there permanently until 1862. Although her marriage took place several years after the most violent confrontations occurred on the station, the wider district of south-east Queensland was still subject to sporadic Aboriginal assaults. Despite her gentility, it seems unlikely that her husband and brother-in-law would not have discussed some of the tension that had occurred in the station’s founding years. When Mary penned

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her memoirs some five decades later it was a highly fictionalized account in which Aboriginal people were dealt with in only a few lines. Her pious and upright husband, she claimed, set himself at once to make friends with the [local Aboriginal people], and they soon got to like and trust him. He never failed to do what he promised. I know that one or two of the men were treacherous, that they speared cattle, once an imported bull from England, but of course they had no idea of the value of the animal. When the tribe behaved badly my husband would not allow them to come up to the head station, nor give them presents – a shirt, or red pocket handkerchief, tobacco or pipe; when they did no work they got no rations, but little was expected of them.

The local people’s dispossession was only mildly disconcerting: ‘It did seem hard to have it all taken from them,’ she wrote, ‘but it had to be. They cultivated nothing; they were of no use on it’.19 Mary’s daughter, also named Mary, was born more than two decades after the violence so graphically represented in the McConnel brothers’ letters. Her reminiscences of growing up on the station were deeply romantic and marked by a gentle paternalism towards those Aboriginal people who remained at Cressbrook as well as towards the Pacific Island labourers who were employed on the station under colonial Queensland’s indenture system. She was far more reflective than her mother about their plight and far more sympathetic. She learnt about Aboriginal culture and the system of law and spirituality that bound Aboriginal people to their country, but still distanced herself linguistically from the acts of her father’s dispossession: If a tribe was chased away from its native district, its own place on the river or among the hills, there was no place for it anywhere else. The surrounding country belonged to other tribes, who allowed no trespasser on their preserves; the displaced tribe became outcast and homeless, and often died miserably. The first settler knew nothing of these tribal laws, of the totem’s home, or of the virtue pertaining to certain places. We must weigh this fact when passing judgment on him.20

There are a few more lines in which she acknowledges that ‘the blacks’ were driven from their grounds and even shot, but always her father is unnamed and written about in the third person. Had Mary read her father’s and uncles’ correspondence? Was she able to confront the reality of what had taken place on Cressbrook? Clearly she was, despite the emotional pain of their revelations:



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It was not until years after my childhood that I learnt of cruelties to the blacks, and I refused at first to believe it possible. This I know, that there were very many places where the natives were treated with kindness and affection, and that much of the harshness was due to ignorance and misunderstanding. But for actual cruelty, which unfortunately cannot be denied, no excuse is possible.21

Despite a gender ideology that spared genteel white women from a brutal reality, Mary Banks had read her father’s papers and reluctantly accepted the violence of the station’s founding, although acknowledgement of David’s active participation was still resisted.

COLONIAL MANLINESS AND SEXUAL UNDERCURRENTS IN OFFICIAL SOURCES If violence was politely hidden from female family members, sexual assault was deeply buried. The McConnel brothers were witnesses in the 1840s in one of the few cases that featured child rape at the Brisbane court, although the evidence surfaced not in the family archive, nor in a criminal trial, but in a workplace tussle between servant and employer. Despite its absence from personal pioneering archives, institutional and government records offer hints of a high level of sexual exploitation of indigenous women. The German mission at what is now the suburb of Nundah was established before the close of the penal settlement and has left a broken record of reports, mission diaries and journals of travel through Aboriginal lands. On Saturday 13 November 1841 the mission diary recorded an incident at the Aboriginal camp, which was opposite the missionaries’ homes on Kedron Brook. A prisoner of the Crown, armed because he was returning from hunting, threatened to shoot the local Aboriginal people unless they gave him a ‘gin’ (or ‘jin’) – the colonial term for an Aboriginal woman. The missionaries were amazed at his audacity, given the proximity of the Aboriginal camp to the mission huts. However, the next night two prisoners were found at the camp, forcing Reverend Eipper to intervene and to threaten them with being reported to Commandant Gorman.22 On another expedition into the country of local people a year later (November 1842), Reverend Eipper was informed that the previous night, soldiers had gone to the Brisbane Aborigines’ camp near the township, demanded women at gun point and then rifled the camp stealing weapons and tools before setting fire to the Aboriginal huts. These Turrbal people had fled to join their Pine River neighbours, some thirty kilometres to the north, but Eipper soon found that the soldiers who had participated in the previous night’s carnage had also

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followed, so ‘that they may have the free use of a black gin’. Aboriginal men complained to Commissioner Simpson, then the leading government official in the district,23 who uncovered the culprits among the local military detachment. There is no evidence of any attempt at prosecution although, according to the mission record, Simpson did impose a punishment.24 The women who were assaulted are never named and the actual terror of these encounters is only indirectly conveyed because the missionaries reported that families of seventy or more people had been forced to flee in the middle of the night as armed white men unexpectedly intruded into their camps. Reverend Eipper indirectly recorded another case of rape when he and Commissioner Simpson journeyed more than two hundred kilometres north to Bunya Country near Tiaro. After they had passed a number of abandoned sheep outstations, Eipper noted: ‘There are no natives here at present but lately a man has been speared through the arm … for which however he deserves no commiseration as his own conduct exposed him to the wrath of the Natives’.25 The police magistrate at Brisbane was less coy when he was required to report on the number of killings of Europeans in the north in October 1844. Eipper’s wounded man was Sussex and four of his shepherding companions had been killed by the Gubbi Gubbi after he had ‘forcibly abused a Black woman’.26 Again, there was no attempt at prosecution and only third-hand evidence, but these two accounts written independently months apart substantiate events. Perhaps the most dramatic case to deal with sexual abuse of local women was the inquiry called by Governor FitzRoy into the shooting of an Aboriginal man by town police in December 1846. White officials had attempted to keep a lid on appalling police behaviour towards the local Aboriginal people, which had worsened following an Aboriginal attack on a station to the north of the township. After receiving complaints, the government based in Sydney insisted that an inquiry be held, but the local police magistrate attempted to stack it by calling only witnesses who upheld the town constables’ version of events. The local sub-collector of customs, William Duncan, confronted Police Magistrate Wickham and insisted he be allowed to give evidence. When he was finally called after three weeks of sporadic hearings, Duncan testified as to what local Aboriginal people had told him – not only about the police raid on the Aboriginal camp in December, but also about the abduction of two Aboriginal women by men from the local surveyors’ camp; the theft of the wife of Canary, a Stradbroke Island warrior who was repelled at gun point by the abductor (‘a sawyer named Smith’); and that the Stradbroke Island Aborigines claimed that the harbour pilot and his crew based at Amity had abducted the young women, numbering around ten, ‘sometimes by force and presenting firearms’.27



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This second-hand evidence was angrily refuted by other local officials as the inquiry became politicized around discussion of the methods of frontier relations. The surveyor (J.C. Burnett) indignantly defended his men in a long letter in which his contempt for Aboriginal women was to the fore; it was the usual frontier argument:28 there was no need to use force to abduct Aboriginal women because ‘a black gin can be got at any time with the full consent of all her relations for a pannikin full of flour or a fig of tobacco’.29 Thomas Dowse, the Brisbane correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, added his own comments to the report of Duncan’s testimony, assuring the readership that the harbour pilot had a happy village of Aboriginal men and women living about his station.30 In the racial politics of a frontier town, convicts employed in the Survey Department and pilot’s crew were suddenly defended by white officials as being incapable of sexual brutality. It was a position Duncan continued to oppose. In his autobiography he insisted that sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women was not only condoned by white officials, but was also a factor in subverting the inquiry. He claimed that the town police had held two local Aboriginal women on trumped-up charges at the local watch house as an inducement to two Aboriginal men to give misleading evidence.31

AN INTERSECTION OF CLASS, RACE AND SEX The McConnel brothers were not called upon to give evidence at the Inquiry into the Affray with Aborigines, even though they were involved in a police case in January in the weeks during which the inquiry was being conducted. The case proved a sexual assault upon an Aboriginal girl from Stradbroke Island and the ready use of aggression by a white servant – in complete contrast to Surveyor Burnett’s callous assertions of Aboriginal consent. In the latter months of 1846, David and John McConnel decided to hire the cutter Nelson and its owner David Peattie for a trip to Stradbroke Island to collect natural history specimens. At Dunwich they hired Aboriginal people, including a girl said to be around ten or eleven years old, to help with collecting. On the return journey they moored in the bay off St Helena Island, where a group of Aboriginal people and a crew member, Peter Glynn, decided to spend the night. Peattie, David and John McConnel slept on board, but during the night were awakened by cries from the Aboriginal girl on shore who was then brought on board to sleep below. A few hours later David McConnel was again awakened – this time by noise on deck – and found that Glynn had rowed out to the cutter to retrieve the girl. When McConnel objected, Glynn ‘made use of insulting and disgusting

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expressions, which confirmed Mr McConnel’s suspicions that he had been abusing her person’. David and John McConnel then went ashore to try to extricate the girl, but Glynn was defiant and ‘put himself in a menacing attitude, and dared them to take her away from him. They then returned to the cutter’. The next morning a passing ferry was called upon to return the girl to Dunwich but David McConnel was still faced with a problem: as an employer he could not allow Glynn’s boldness to go unchecked.32 On Friday 15 January 1847, Glynn was summoned to the Brisbane court to answer a charge, not of sexual assault, but of misconduct while in service. Despite the chilling evidence of Glynn’s depravity, he produced his former employer who argued that Glynn was technically only absent from his service for three weeks while on the cutter and that he regarded Glynn as still in his employment. David McConnel was left unable to provide clear proof that he had employed Glynn and so the charges were dismissed by the bench.33 This case is important on a number of levels – firstly, that the charges were not more serious. The McConnels apparently concluded that there was no point in pursuing criminal charges, which would have depended on the testimony of an Aboriginal child who could not give sworn evidence. It is an obvious point but a reminder of why it is so difficult to obtain first-hand ‘forensic’ evidence of rape. There were no criminal prosecutions for rape of Aboriginal women in the twenty-year interregnum between the closing of the penal station and the north’s establishment as the separate British colony of Queensland. The second reason for the importance of Glynn’s trial is that at the subsequent Brisbane inquiry, white witnesses scorned the notion that Aboriginal women has been held unwillingly and that their men could not release them from armed white men; yet here were two well-known, fit, young, squatting gentlemen who could not extricate a young girl from a drunken servant. There is another related point arising from the inquiry that must be noted: despite being only ten or eleven years old, it is possible that the little girl from Dunwich was one of the ten young women about whose abduction Canary had complained – that is, one of the ‘wives’ referred to by Duncan. Aboriginal girls were sometimes betrothed at birth, and the system of promised wives was integral to tribal politics in south-east Queensland. Young men running away with young women who had been promised to older men upset the balance of power among the tribal people of south-east Queensland in the 1840s.34 The McConnel v. Glynn case is important in alerting us to the fact that colonial stories of whites stealing Aboriginal wives may include assaults on little girls.35 Thirdly, Glynn’s trial provides an important case study of the intersection of masculinity and class ideologies. Although the McConnels’ concept



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of colonial manliness easily incorporated racial violence, it appears to have also adopted a rather limited notion of paternalism to the little girl that crossed racial lines. That same paternalism expected due respect from a hired hand. Colonial masculinity did not have the same meaning for Glynn and his employer (referred to as Hulland in the press report). Their understanding of manliness placed them in a position of class defiance to gentlemen such as the McConnels, and they celebrated their power to sexually exploit an Aboriginal child. Even the Moreton Bay Courier – an unabashed champion of the war waged against the local Aboriginal people in these years – found Glynn’s sexual brutality disconcerting. It reported: There are two things to be noticed in this man’s conduct … The utter indifference he exhibited on being accused of committing an outrage on the person of a native female; and the open derision with which he treated the remonstrance of his employer; thus showing an amount of brutality, and depth of ignorance, only accountable for in mere youth, or the existence of thorough demoralization … conduct like his ought to call down the indignation of every properly constituted mind.36

The ‘reordering of land and labour’ in colonial New South Wales was a problematic colonial enterprise with new definitions of masculinity contested among men of different classes. Glynn’s assault exposes, to use McClintock’s words, one of those intimate and contradictory moments of colonial masculinity.37

THE IMPORTANCE OF ABORIGINAL EVIDENCE Moreton Bay provides one other very notable source of genteel domesticity; notable because it is a very powerful one that surprisingly enables further reconstruction of the sexual violence of this frontier. Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland was written by Tom’s daughter Constance, fifty to sixty years after many of the events it records actually took place.38 Petrie’s childhood and early adulthood were lived in close proximity to Aboriginal people and he was so assimilated that he spoke the local language without an accent; thus his representation of the Aboriginal perspective is invaluable. As well as the delay in recording the events, his memoirs provide one other interpretive difficulty for historians: his reminiscences were told to his daughter, Constance, and were collected for publication in the Edwardian era, the peak period in the ideology of feminine domesticity. Constance’s femininity and the Petrie family’s sense of their middle-class domesticity are two factors that likely prevented them

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referring to sexual assaults or rape. Petrie does not elide them completely; his preferred euphemism was the very brief and unelaborated ‘wife-stealing’. Despite the polite language, his daughter’s writing has provided us with a key to interpret references to a number of Aboriginal assaults on whites at Moreton Bay in the 1840s and 1850s. On 27 January 1859 the decomposing body of a white dugong hunter, Bob Collins, was found floating near the mouth of the Brisbane River. Collins had set off with an American and a Dutchman to go fishing in the bay a fortnight earlier. As was his usual practice, he also intended to recruit some Bribie Island Aboriginal men to assist with the hunt. Medical evidence at the inquest was that there were wounds on Collins’ neck and chest justifying a finding of wilful murder.39 With no sign of the boat or the other two white men, the residents of Brisbane feared the worst – another attack on Europeans by the Bribie Islanders. Four weeks later Tom Petrie reported to the authorities that ‘northern’ Aborigines had informed him of the fate of Collins and his crew:40 the white men had been fishing at Redcliffe with some Aboriginal people but as the catch was poor and rations were getting low Collins became argumentative, fired his rifle among the Aboriginal families – although no one was injured – and boasted that he had a warrant for the Bribie Islanders’ renowned warrior, ‘Dr Ballow’.41 As the conflict escalated, Collins loaded the boat and ‘took’ two Aboriginal women and their children, and two Aboriginal men, and headed to St Helena Island. In omitting the fact that these were two Aboriginal families, the paper effectively denied ‘domesticity’ to these Aboriginal women and their husbands.42 Its language also diminished the likelihood that this was an abduction, although many years later Petrie’s memory softened this initial coercive aspect of the story, which was reported as the men and women going voluntarily in the boat because Collins had promised to take them to Bribie Island, a meeting place for those on their way to the Bunya Mountains for that year’s assembly of tribal nations. Once on St Helena Island, the two Aboriginal men separated Collins from his cronies in order to kill him, and despatched the other two white men similarly, leaving each of the bodies at low water mark to float away. They then took their wives and children in the boat to Bribie Island, to Caloundra and then on to Maroochydore where the boat was left, still stocked with all its provisions. The newspaper report of March 1859 omitted any reference to sexual violence but it did include the information that the boat still contained ‘a gun, two pistols, harpoons, sails and a tent, oil tins, and blankets, all the same as left by the deceased’; 43 this is important proof that this was not a dispute over provisions or payment – something more was at stake to justify the taking of three European men’s lives.



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Petrie is a little clearer in the version told to his daughter more than four decades on. In the later account he wrongly states that there were three Aboriginal men and their wives, although he was able to name the leading warrior as Billy Dingy and correctly referred to Bob Collins by his pseudonym of Hunter. Once on St Helena the three white men ‘took possession of the young gins, paying no heed to Billy, who pleaded for their wives and to be taken to Bribie as promised’. It is hard to imagine two young Aboriginal men standing by while their wives were ‘taken’ if the assault was not at gunpoint. Despite the delicate way in which the story is rendered in the reminiscences, Constance Petrie positions this story after an account of the brutality of Lieutenant Frederick Wheeler of the Native Police, and despite the sparse language, ends it with the comment ‘who can say the blacks were wholly to blame’, adding to the gravity of this act of ‘possession’ of wives.44

INDIGENOUS MANLINESS If European law was incapable of dealing with the abuse of young Aboriginal women, Aboriginal law was not. At the committal hearing that resulted from an 1847 attack on Europeans by the Aboriginal leader Dundalli, the victim – a sawyer named James Smith – testified that on a visit prior to the attack Dundalli had asked him ‘where the jins were’, though this line of questioning was not pursued in any detail in the courtroom. It is a remarkable coincidence given that earlier in that year William Duncan had testified that ‘a sawyer named Smith’ had stolen one of the Stradbroke Island wives. Smith, however, was also linked to the killing of a leading Aboriginal man, so he may have been a target for Aboriginal retributive justice on several grounds. In quite dramatic testimony in the courtroom, Smith described how Dundalli had stepped from behind a tree to tell him why he was being attacked, but spoke in his own language, which Smith did not understand, and so the words were never recorded.45 The avenging of sexual abuse of local women is implicit in another case that was a remarkable coincidence. Although David McConnel’s efforts at using British law to punish Peter Glynn for his sexual abuse of a ten-year-old girl were disturbingly unsuccessful, the Bribie Islander warrior Dr Ballow succeeded in exacting a painful punishment on him. Again, we know about this only thanks to Tom Petrie’s recall: according to his daughter he learnt the basic outline of the story from Glynn himself, who omitted any mention of his past offences against Aboriginal people, including the Stradbroke Island girl. Glynn and a party of white men took a boat to Caboolture River – an unsettled district about fifty kilometres north of Brisbane. There, three

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young Bribie Island men, one of whom was Ballow, volunteered to help them to search for cedar. A small group decided to land and search on foot through scrub, so Glynn and another white man named Grant went armed, accompanied by the three Aboriginal men. Despite being armed, Grant became increasingly nervous about their situation; Glynn claimed that as he turned around to calm Grant, his weapon accidentally discharged and injured Ballow. This infuriated Ballow, who tried to wrest the weapon from Glynn’s hands and continued to beat his hands and head ‘unmercifully’. Glynn eventually passed out and was left for dead alongside the body of Grant. When he came to, Glynn’s swollen hands were too painful to use and he had to crawl back along the path towards the boat.46 With Glynn surviving and another white witness remaining back at the boat, it is not surprising that Ballow and his friends insisted to Petrie that self-defence had been their only motive.47 However, the question is raised of whether avenging the sexual assault of the Stradbroke Island girl had not been the prime motivation for young Ballow all along, given Ballow’s volunteering to help Glynn, the Bribie Islanders’ remarkable intelligence gathering across the region, and Grant’s extreme nervousness. He had finally repaid Glynn for assaulting the Stradbroke Islander girl eleven years earlier.

CONCLUSION An Aboriginal explanation given in their own language to a young white man who conveys the story to his daughter more than fifty years after the event would normally be regarded as weak evidence. However, disconnected official and newspaper sources affirm essential elements of the Aboriginal version of stories provided by Petrie. With only one court case testifying to the sexual abuse of an Aboriginal girl in the 1840s, the primary source material is scant, leaving us with a completely unbalanced view of sexual violence on the south-east Queensland frontier. Both this case and the disputes that were aired as part of the official government inquiry of January–February 1847 indicate an extraordinary capacity on the part of the male community to defend and conceal sexual exploitation in this colonial outpost. The ‘forensic’ data on frontier rape might be weak, but critical reading of the papers of two colonial families, the McConnels and the Petries, provides important contextual evidence. The resulting image is faint but nonetheless it is a disturbing picture of gendered frontier conflict. Other than when it affected ‘innocent whites’, there was little official concern for the sexual violence towards Aboriginal females that resulted from colonial expansion. It is a theme that resonates with contemporary Aboriginal women who still face



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problems of under-policing in relation to violent assaults. In the 1840s and 1850s it fell to Aboriginal men to enforce traditional law against white working-class men who assaulted Aboriginal women and girls. Because official archival data are weak, historians require awareness of contradictory and conflictual imperial ideologies to interpret family papers and Aboriginalfriendly sources sensitively, to produce a richer and more accurate picture of a gender-imbalanced, masculinist and violent racial frontier.

LIBBY CONNORS Libby Connors is senior lecturer in history at the University of Southern Queensland. She is co-author of Australia’s Frontline (1992), A History of the Australian Environment Movement (1999), and author of Warrior (2015), which won the Queensland Premier’s Award for a work of State Significance at the 2015 Queensland Literary Awards. Her current research interests focus on social history of law and colonialism, and she is currently president of the Australia and New Zealand Law and History Society. NOTES  1. R v. Timothy Duffy, Ticket of Leave in Supreme Court: Criminal Jurisdiction: Depositions & Papers: Brisbane 1848, 9/6345 New South Wales Records Centre (NSWRC); Moreton Bay Courier (MBC), 29 April 1848, p. 2; Moreton Bay Courier, 6 May 1848, p. 3. Duffy was taken to Sydney for his criminal trial but both the South Brisbane elder who had made the original complaint to the Brisbane police, and Ummaum, were so intimidated by the committal process that they refused to cooperate further with authorities, and did not appear. Duffy was found not guilty. Maitland Mercury and Hunter River Advertiser, 7 June 1848, p. 3.  2. Philippa Levine, ‘Sexuality, Gender, and Empire’, in Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004.   3. Kathleen Wilson, ‘Empire, Gender, and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century’, in Levine, Gender and Empire, p. 16. This point is also made by Robert Hogg in his study of colonial masculinity; Robert Hogg, Men and Manliness on the Frontier: Queensland and British Columbia in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Basingstoke, Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, p. 17.   4. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, New York, NJ, Routledge, 1995, p. 5.   5. Dirk Moses, ‘An Antipodean Genocide? The Origins of the Genocidal Moment in the Colonization of Australia’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 2, no. 1, 2000, pp. 89–106.

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  6. A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, New York, NJ, Berghahn Books, 2010.  7. Contemporary feminist literature was stirred by the tactical use of rape for ethnic cleansing during the war in Bosnia, and has grown alongside most conflicts since. On its philosophical underpinnings, see Robin May Schott, ‘War Rape, Natality and Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 13, no. 1–2, 2011, pp. 5–21; ‘Violence against Women and International Law: Rape as a War Crime’, Panel Discussion, in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law, vol. 90, 27–30 March 1996, pp. 605–11; L. Amowitz et al., ‘Prevalence of War-Related Sexual Violence and Other Human Rights Abuses among Internally Displaced Persons in Sierra Leone’, Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 287, no. 4, 2002, pp. 513–21.  8. Urvashi Butalia, ‘Legacies of Departure: Decolonization, Nation-Making, and Gender’, in Levine, Gender and Empire, p. 205.  9. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2002, p. 16. 10. J. Semelin, ‘In Consideration of Massacres’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 3, no. 3, 2001, pp. 377–89. 11. Lyndall Ryan, ‘Massacre in Tasmania? How can we Know?’, ANZLH E-journal, 2006, paper 6; Lyndall Ryan, ‘Settler Massacres on the Port Phillip Frontier, 1836–1851’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 34, no. 3, 2010, pp. 257–74. 12. Rape as a feature of Australian colonial frontiers was recognized by C.D. Rowley as early as 1972 and most histories refer to the menace of womanless frontiersmen, although first-hand accounts are rare. Queensland historiography attributes the worst frontier sexual assaults to the ‘native’ troopers of the Queensland native police; Australian scholarship is stronger on the concubinage of Aboriginal women on northern sheep and cattle stations post-frontier. C.D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Ringwood, Vic., Penguin, 1972; Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 2008; Ray Evans, ‘“Don’t you Remember Black Alice, Sam Holt?”: Aboriginal Women in Queensland History’, Hecate, vol. 8, no. 2, 1982, pp. 6–21; also Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families, 1800–2000, Fremantle, WA, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000. 13. ‘Cressbrook Homestead’, Australian Heritage Places Inventory, http://www. heritage.gov.au/cgi-bin/ahpi/record.pl?QLD600503 (accessed 20 November 2013). 14. Story of Cressbrook by Mrs M. McConnel (i.e. Mary E. McConnel’s daughter-inlaw), in McConnel Family Papers OM78-72/11, John Oxley Library (hereinafter ‘JOL’). 15. David to his brother William, 22 May 1844, David Cannon McConnel Papers, Item 36 in Box 5621 JOL. 16. David to his brother Henry, 3 July 1842, David Cannon McConnel Papers, Item 24 in Box 5621 JOL.



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17. David to his brother William, 11 December 1842, David Cannon McConnel Papers, Item 28 in Box 5621 JOL. 18. Frederic McConnel, ‘Stories of Australian Bush Life’, 1844: Experiences of the late Frederic McConnel, typescript, http://nla.gov.au/nla.aus-f7689, National Library of Australia (NLA). Frederic recalled this event long after he had retired to Scotland and dated it as 1844, but his description shares similarities with an attack on Major North’s station in the Brisbane Valley in 1846. Cf. report of the killing of Aboriginal warrior Campbell in MBC, 5 September 1846, pp. 2–3; Coutts to Simpson, 4 September 1846, enclosed in Simpson to Colonial Secretary, 12 September 1846, l/no. 46/7120, CSIL: CCL(3) 1846 4/2720.1 NSWRC. 19. Mary McConnel, Memories of Days Long Gone By, By the Wife of an Australian Pioneer, Brisbane, M. McConnel, 1905, p. 13. Available at http://nla.gov.au/nla. aus-f7689, NLA. 20. Mary MacLeod Banks, Memories of Pioneer Days in Queensland, London, Cranton, 1931, p. 42. 21. Banks, Memories of Pioneer Days, pp. 42–43. 22. Mission Diary 13–14 November 1841, Lang Papers, Mitchell Library (hereinafter ‘ML’); see also Colonial Observer, 13 January 1842, p. 116. 23. Simpson was the commissioner of Crown lands for Moreton Bay. He held the Commission of the Peace, meaning he could hold Courts of Petty Sessions. Captain John Wickham was appointed police magistrate for Brisbane and became the leading government official when he arrived in January 1843. 24. Journal of the brethren Eipper and Hartenstein who were among the natives on the Pine River, 4–11 November 1842. 25. Entry for 30 March 1843, Observations March–April 1843, Lang Papers, ML. 26. Return of the number of white men killed and wounded by the Aborigines in the District of Moreton Bay from the Year 1841 to 1844 inclusive, enclosure in l/ no. 44/7954 Police Magistrate Moreton Bay, 19 October 1844, in CSIL Moreton Bay 1844, 4/2656.2 NSWRC. 27. Inquiry into Affrays with Aborigines at York’s Hollow, sworn statement 12 February 1847, CSIL/10 Dixon Library; Sydney Morning Herald, 23 February 1847, p. 3. As per Aboriginal traditional law, Canary carried out vengeance punishment by ejecting the last of the Catholic missionaries from the island; see Osmund Thorpe, First Catholic Mission to the Aborigines, Sydney, Pellegrini, 1950, pp. 116–18. 28. On the supposedly debased femininity of indigenous women in British colonies across the globe, see Wilson, ‘Empire, Gender, and Modernity’, p. 44; on the supposed sexual brutality of indigenous peoples, see Levine, ‘Sexuality, Gender, and Empire’, p. 137. 29. J.C. Burnett to J.C. Wickham, 15 February 1847, in Archival Estrays Add. 82, Dixon Library. 30. Sydney Morning Herald, 23 February 1847, p. 3; also J.C. Wickham to Colonial Secretary, 25 February 1847, in Archival Estrays Add. 82, Dixon Library. The

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facts presented were contradictory, and Duncan and a fellow employee in the local Customs Department could only provide hearsay evidence. Governor FitzRoy concluded that despite his good intentions Mr Duncan had been misled, and no further official action was taken. 31. William Augustine Duncan, Autobiography, p. 69, ML. 32. Although their station Cressbrook had been noted as a place for holding Courts of Petty Sessions in the 1840s, it appears that neither David nor John held the Commission of the Peace in 1846. Both were later appointed to the Brisbane bench – John in October 1848 and David in June 1849. See Wickham to Colonial Secretary, 18 October 1848, L/no. 48/11860 in CSIL: 1848 4/2815.1 NSWRC & Wickham to Colonial Secretary, 30 June 1849, L/no. 49/6450 in CSIL:1849 4/4567.2 NSWRC. 33. MBC, 16 January 1847, pp. 2–3. 34. Libby Connors, ‘Women on the South-East Queensland Frontier’, Queensland Review, vol. 15, no. 2, 2008, pp. 30–31. 35. The Church Missionary Society’s Wellington Valley mission, founded in 1832, became unpopular with local station owners when the missionaries began objecting to local stockmen cohabiting with Aboriginal girls as young as eight years of age. Reverend Watson recorded a twelve-year-old girl in an advanced state of pregnancy brought to the mission in April 1836. Entries for 4 April and 26 August 1836, Watson Diary; Volume 2, The Papers of William Watson 1832–40 in Hilary M. Carey and David A. Roberts, ‘The Wellington Valley: Papers Relating to the Church Missionary Society Mission to Wellington Valley, New South Wales, 1830–42’, 2002, http://www.newcastle.edu.au/school/ hss/research/publications/the-wellington-valley-project/watson/watson-diaries/ (accessed 22 November 2013). 36. MBC, 16 January 1847, p. 3. 37. McClintock, Imperial Leather, pp. 15–17. 38. Constance Campbell Petrie, Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland, Hawthorn, Vic., Lloyd O’Neil, 1975, facs. of 1904 edn. 39. MBC, 29 January 1859, p. 2. 40. Ibid. 41. For an example of the white community’s lurid claims about Ballow, see MBC, 7 May 1859, p. 2; and North Australian, 10 May 1859, p. 4. 42. MBC, 2 March 1859, p. 2. On the denial of Aboriginal ‘households’ to Aboriginal mothers and the depiction of Aboriginal men as their cruel oppressors, see Wilson, ‘Empire, Gender, and Modernity’, p. 43. 43. MBC, 2 March 1859, p. 2. 44. Petrie, Reminiscences, pp. 8–10. 45. MBC, 15 November 1851, p. 2; Smith’s testimony in R v. Dundalli (2) in Supreme Court, Criminal Jurisdiction: Clerk of the Peace, Brisbane, 1854, 9/6386 NSWRC. 46. Petrie, Reminiscences, pp. 170–72. 47. Ibid., pp. 174–75.



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BIBLIOGRAPHY ‘Violence against Women and International Law: Rape as a War Crime’, Panel Discussion, in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law, vol. 90, 27–30 March 1996, pp. 605–11. Amowitz, L., et al., ‘Prevalence of War-Related Sexual Violence and Other Human Rights Abuses among Internally Displaced Persons in Sierra Leone’, Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 287, no. 4, 2002, pp. 513–21. Banks, Mary Maclead, Memories of Pioneer Days in Queensland, London, Cranton, 1931. Butalia, Urvashi, ‘Legacies of Departure: Decolonization, Nation-making, and Gender’, in Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004. Connors, Libby, ‘Women on the South-East Queensland Frontier’, Queensland Review, vol. 15, no. 2, 2008, pp. 30–31. Dirk Moses, A. (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, New York, NJ, Berghahn Books, 2010. Evans, Ray, ‘“Don’t you Remember Black Alice, Sam Holt?”: Aboriginal Women in Queensland History’, Hecate, vol. 8, no. 2, 1982, pp. 6–21. Haebich, Anna, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families, 1800–2000, Fremantle, WA, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000. Hogg, Robert, Men and Manliness on the Frontier: Queensland and British Columbia in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Basingstoke, Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Levine, Philippa, ‘Sexuality, Gender, and Empire’, in Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004. May Schott, Robin, ‘War Rape, Natality and Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 13, no. 1–2, 2011, pp. 5–21. McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, New York, NJ, Routledge, 1995. McConnel, Mary, Memories of Days Long Gone By, By the Wife of an Australian Pioneer, Brisbane, M. McConnel, 1905. Moses, Dirk, ‘An Antipodean Genocide? The Origins of the Genocidal Moment in the Colonization of Australia’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 2, no. 1, 2000, pp. 89–106. Petrie, Constance Campbell, Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland, Hawthorn, Vic., Lloyd O’Neil, 1975. Richards, Jonathan, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 2008. Rowley, C.D., The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Ringwood, Vic., Penguin, 1972. Ryan, Lyndall, ‘Massacre in Tasmania? How can we Know?’, Australia & New Zealand Law & History E-Journal, 2006, paper 6, pp. 1–21. ———. ‘Settler Massacres on the Port Phillip Frontier, 1836–1851’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 34, no. 3, 2010, pp. 257–74. Semelin, J., ‘In Consideration of Massacres’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 3, no. 3, 2001, pp. 377–89.

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Stoler, Ann Laura, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2002. Thorpe, Osmund, First Catholic Mission to the Aborigines, Sydney, Pellegrini, 1950. Wilson, Kathleen, ‘Empire, Gender and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century’, in Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004.

Chapter 3

Fighting for Dignity Migrant Identities in the Workplaces of Northern Australia Robert Mason

KL During the early years of the twentieth century, Australia north of the Tropic of Capricorn was characterized as ‘a multi-racial society [in a] territory of heroic proportions’.1 The country’s northern expanse had proved central to debates about the colonies’ recent Federation in 1901; how to accelerate the region’s economic development without radically altering the vaunted goal of a ‘White Australia’? As the early decades of the twentieth century progressed, Australia continued to think of itself as a nation under siege. Its development of new immigration regimes to safeguard the white majority was broadly similar to events in Canada, South Africa and the United States. Yet, the north of Australia was obsessively imagined as vulnerable to invasion from its near neighbours to the north. Sugar-cane farming dominated the industries of tropical northern Queensland at this time. Small townships along the Pacific coast relied on this industry for employment and for the expansion of their European populations. For decades the hard labour of clearing lands and picking the cane had been carried out by Pacific Island labourers, many of whom had been forcibly removed from their homes, and all of whom were exploited. Although the cane industry in the Pacific, Caribbean and southern United States relied on cheap non-white labour, no such option remained for the cane farmers of Australia. The new White Australia Policy severely curtailed the entry of non-Europeans and forced most Pacific Island labourers to leave the country. Although few Australians were convinced that northern 53

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Europeans could thrive as farmers in the tropics and thereby replace the departed Pacific Islanders, all agreed there was a need for the strategically crucial area to expand economically in order to boost Australia’s position in global trade and build a population that could defend the country against threats from the north. Despite the many attempts to attract north Europeans to Australia, areas such as northern Queensland rapidly became home to highly diverse populations. Less than ten years after the commencement of the White Australia Policy in 1901, the area was home to Pacific Islanders, Filipinos, Chinese, Lebanese, Italians, Maltese, French, Scandinavians and many more. Although the increase in the non-Asian population was broadly welcomed, many anglophone Australians remained concerned at the ownership of farms by people other than north Europeans. Indeed, it was widely assumed that such ethnic diversity would have as its corollary a breakdown of law and order, morality and British culture. In fact, and in the context of the hard work required and the extreme climate, industry became a forum for intercultural exchange as well as expressions of progress and personal success in a strange land. Industry has been an acknowledged part of the standard ‘push–pull’ analysis of migration for decades. The primary focus of scholarship has been on the role of economic opportunity in attracting migrants, or on the role of employment in fostering community inclusion and belonging. Workplaces are much less often analysed for their role in migrants’ identity formation. Yet the sites, whether farms or associated rural industries of the north, evoked a range of gendered, racialized and politicized identities. This chapter examines the intersection of occupational identities and migration to investigate the legacy of past experiences in Australian history. In doing so, it recognizes that the actions connect supposedly isolated migrants to places and people that are temporally and physically distant, and that have a powerful effect on their lives in Australia.

MIGRATION AND INDUSTRY For most of the twentieth century, Australia’s underlying framework for the analysis of migration was centred on the White Australia Policy. The policy was introduced to control entry of non-European migrants into the country, in the belief that this would secure the continent for ‘white civilization’ and the British Empire in the face of a rapidly expanding Asian population to its north. This decision to implement racially discriminatory policy is part



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of related actions globally. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have written powerfully on the emerging ‘global colour line’ of white men that connected the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans at the turn of the twentieth century.2 This imaginary of a threatened white solidarity was crucial to the White Australia Policy. More broadly, however, European empires were changing as the global reach of capitalism similarly shifted in scope. At the same time, Europeans’ capacity to migrate to far-flung destinations increased markedly. Most migration to Australia remained anglophone, but European arrivals were far fewer than to the geographically closer destinations in the Americas. Even those who arrived in Australia most commonly remained in the capital cities of Sydney and Melbourne. The economic development of Australia beyond the urban fringe was similarly connected to the need to develop a prosperous white nation in a global context. These questions were experienced with particular urgency in the northern state of Queensland. Its cane industry was strongly reliant on Pacific Islanders for its global competitiveness, and any move to limit or expel the workers was recognized as having serious repercussions. This economic risk was so serious as to potentially imperil Queensland’s accession to the Commonwealth. The state relied on an emerging plantation-style economy for its cane industry, and it was not clear how white men’s positions could be secured in any shift away from this. Even once transitional arrangements had been put in place, Queensland retained a particularly racialized social and economic hierarchy. Queensland’s very large size created a highly decentralized state. The state’s capital of Brisbane was more than a thousand kilometres from population centres to the north, and steamships and telegraph remained the primary means of communication with far-flung townships. Despite the desire to protect the northern economy through immigration controls, the regions remained highly diverse. Lebanese and Chinese traders were commonplace as they moved through towns and regions selling wares. Many new arrivals cleared new land while working others’ farms until they became farmers in their own right. Although this cultural diversity dashed earlier hopes, whiteness remained a powerful force within the communities. Migrants were under strong pressure to speak English in public, and to engage deferentially with powerful workplace organizations such as trade unions. However, the distance from centres of power provided scope to contest dominant expressions of whiteness in multiple places such as work sites. Immigration researchers are increasingly seeking to recover the sites of contestation and networks of connectivity experienced by migrants. Rather than focus on demographic analyses of the north, or comment on its

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unusualness, current research maps transnational patterns of communication and imagining.3 The study of memories has provided another such space for new research. Originally, much memory-based research focused on the Holocaust or relationships to place in rapidly changing societies. More recently, scholars have sought to apply the burgeoning interest in memories to migration studies.4 Much of this is focused on literature and oral history, but it is increasingly being applied more broadly to study how people’s remembered pasts influence their present. Such approaches offer opportunities to reimagine the supposedly isolated north of Australia through a focus on people’s broader life histories. There has been surprisingly little work completed in Australia on topics of memory and migration. Studies of memory are growing rapidly, drawing on the important works of scholars such as Alistair Thomson.5 Works relating to migration, such as those by Loretta Baldassar and Francesco Ricatti, have tended to focus on the family units in the aftermath of the Second World War.6 Others, such as Joy Damousi and Nathalie Nguyen, have begun important conversations on the effects of wartime trauma on migrants to Australia.7 However, there has been relatively little research on the pre-war period. Similarly, there has been very little work on the intersections between migrants’ wartime trauma and their potential radicalism in Australia, whether at work sites or other spaces of intercultural debate. This is a significant gap, given current concerns regarding Australians’ connectedness to political conflicts overseas. Ghassan Hage’s research with Lebanese Australians is one example of this important work,8 but there has been very little extended investigation by historians. Tony Moore’s Death or Liberty does investigate early examples of political radicalism, but his analysis does not foreground the exiles’ lives as forced migrants.9 Viewing the development of Australia’s political traditions through such a prism reveals a more complicated picture of global connectedness than is commonly portrayed. Industrial dispute has long been recognized to be at the heart of the radical tradition in Australia, emplaced in mythologized locations such as Barcaldine’s Tree of Knowledge or the Eureka Stockade. The prevalent narratives of popular culture do recognize migrants to have had important roles in these events. However, their presence is generally incorporated into an Anglo-centric model that frames the disputes through the prism of developing labour rights across the British Empire. In this manner, the migrants’ own contributions to the evolution of political thought and workers’ rights are often marginalized. Where those contributions are recognized, such as with respect to the 1860 Lambing Flat Riots or the 1919 Red Flag Riots in



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Brisbane, the migrants are simultaneously victims, and a provocative law and order issue. The close association of migration with law and order is clearly connected to enduring constructs of whiteness and national development. National debates on the topic occurred disproportionately in the more urban south of the country, where the ‘piebald’ nature of the northern frontier was a source of great concern.10 For those clearing land and establishing farms in the north, political debates were indeed an important part of daily life and were embedded in the intercultural exchanges that characterized it. Just as Anglo-centric trade unions sought to reinforce their particular authority, other groups challenged their dominance in the workplace. Ethnic groups had a powerful capacity for collective support, and political affiliations overseas retained their vibrancy. It was in the workplace that many such debates were enacted most pointedly.

ANARCHISM IN SPAIN AND AUSTRALIA Queensland became the home of hundreds of Catalans in the period from Federation in 1901 to the 1930s.11 The largest direct migration was organized by the powerful Colonial Sugar Refining Company in 1907 to replace the Pacific Island labourers displaced by the White Australia Policy. It was not the first time that organized schemes had sought to attract Catalans; both the Catholic Church and colonial government of Queensland had done so during the nineteenth century.12 The company offered a group of two hundred Catalans free passage, with participating farmers also contributing to offset the cost of each man they received.13 Once in Queensland, they formed working gangs of men who lived together in barracks in the fields. Unknown to the company or farmers, many of the men had participated in the violent 1909 riots in Barcelona, when church and state buildings were attacked as symbols of social and economic oppression. These riots were part of an escalating radicalization among Barcelona’s working class. The Spanish Empire had collapsed as a result of the 1898 Spanish–American War, with the loss of territories such as Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. The end of empire and rising unemployment caused a collapse of state authority that was aggravated by the political corruption that denied workers a voice in the process of political reform. Many Spanish industrialists hoped to use the crisis as an opportunity to incorporate the country into the modern European mainstream. Yet, this presupposed a Europe of capitalist corporations rather than international worker solidarity. Given this, Spanish workers resisted attempts to co-opt them into the

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modernization projects and new imperial adventures, instead seeking to reimagine political, social and economic possibilities. Barcelona’s working class moved decisively towards the anarchist movement in the early decades of the twentieth century, as a means to secure immediate material benefits and reconfigure the hostile political landscape.14 Anarchism was one of the region’s most influential radical ideologies, and Catalan anarchists were among Europe’s most prominent. At the same time, as greater numbers of Catalans began to migrate to Queensland, the cost of living rose by 50 per cent, and Barcelona underwent a severe crisis in families’ ability to support themselves.15 The state failed to help, and a radicalized proletariat turned instead to support from the extended family economy and their local communities. Family and friends pooled resources to form cooperative childcares and rental assistance in lieu of assistance from the state. Barcelona’s working-class world was defined by conflict with management, as well as by unions that maintained power through coercive membership.16 The deep divide between employers and employees became increasingly significant, as gunfights and lockouts became standard methods of industrial dispute resolution.17 Violent general strikes occurred in 1902 and 1907, but the so-called ‘Tragic Week’ of 1909 proved particularly shocking as protesters destroyed vulnerable symbols of state and class control. Although there had been an earlier tradition of violent terrorism, this had evolved into anarchist syndicalism by the twentieth century, which was focused on the workplace as the site of oppression. This commitment to workplaces as sites of political and personal transformation was to prove an important continuity for the Catalans in the north of Australia. Migrants who sought to establish their own farms in north Queensland’s tropical rainforests faced enormous difficulties. Many borrowed money to buy land they had never seen, clearing their new properties with an axe after a day of gruelling paid work. One man recalled his shock and the painful re-evaluation of his status from self-made intellectual to a labouring animal.18 Another recalled the global context of both the cane industry and the Spanish-speaking world: he ‘came back very disgusted. He said the work done there was done in Cuba by the blacks. He said we might as well try to get back to Argentina and live like white people’.19 Migrants remained in the north only when they realized the difficulty such a return to Argentina would involve. The Catalans arrival occurred at a particularly tense moment, as anglophone workers blamed new migrants for a decline in working conditions. As Britons, local workers refused to be bound by the Masters and Servants Act, which tied migrant workers to their employers.20 No such caveat was avail-



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able to the Catalans, whose employers could determine the nature, time and quantity of their work with the full backing of the courts. Farmers’ ability to compel the men as indentured workers had no precedent in Barcelona, and the horrified men viewed the Australian situation through the prism of the violent workplace relations of their former homes. The migrants’ response to farmers’ attempts to control them was assertive and unequivocal. Three farmers reported that Spaniards had armed themselves in the fields with daggers and revolvers, and refused farmers’ orders.21 Such actions recall the Catalan experience of workplaces as sites of contested authority, rather than pieces of exclusive property. Farmers felt compelled to reciprocate, and armed themselves with loaded rifles and revolvers before entering the fields where the men worked. Groups of Catalans were seen travelling through the townships to visit their fellow migrants, and organized a coordinated set of demands and ‘go slows’.22 Additional police were required from cities over 230 kilometres to the north, and so many Catalans were arrested that the ring leaders were sent 260 kilometres south to the jail in Townsville.23 The Catalans were clearly motivated by their hostility to the Master and Servants Act, with its direct loss of workers’ dignity. Immediately following the arrival of the Catalan protest organizers, one mill manager noted: ‘They objected to being tied down by an agreement which they termed a “black-fellows agreement” (evidently a phrase given them by some Labour Unionist), and said that they would still work amongst the farms, but wished to be free to move from farm to farm according to the inducements offered in the way of good masters and better pay’.24 Complaints about trade unionists were not new in the context of the repeated strikes among workers, but unions had relatively little engagement with non-anglophone workers. The workers’ motivation, and the literature they were seen to distribute, was more likely to have been anarchist in nature. Indeed the organizers of one protest were reported to have been ‘anarchists in their own country and the police there put them in our way to get them out of the country’.25 The men’s commitment to the dispute resolution tactics of their former homes was not a passing phase. The anglophone anarchosyndicalist group, the International Workers of the World (better known as the Wobblies), retained a strong support in the north of Australia in the years immediately after the end of the First World War. Groups aligned with the Wobblies were prominent in local communities that had high proportions of Spaniards, where they ran libraries, distributed letters and organized meetings. One Catalan, Jesús Rosende, was known to have helped develop a Wobbly cell in the mining town of Mount Cuthbert, which went on to stage a series of disruptive strikes.26 José Manuel was identified as an active Wobbly

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member in Innisfail, and two other Spaniards, Frank Bilboa and Peter Villalabetia, were deported to Chile for their participation in the then-illegal organization.27 From the 1920s, Spaniards began to establish successful cane farms of their own. This shift from being indentured or contract labourers enabled them to bring their family members to Australia, but also signalled difficult debates about the best economic organization for the north. Not all were willing to relate private property directly to state-sponsored capitalist oppression, although many would do so persistently. However, most Spanish smallholders concurred that the powerful mill owners had become a nefarious influence in the north’s social and economic structure. Salvador Torrents recorded his initial shock at the mills’ and large growers’ unbridled pursuit of selfish interests. Before he left France, Torrents had wondered how ‘the salaried slaves were treated’ in Australia compared to ‘old Europe’.28 It was with disappointment that he lamented that ‘those possessors of fortune do not only conform to [European model to] draw the blood of their slaves, but they want more’.29 Queensland’s cane fields were witness to ‘the same crimes as Europe’ but on a more devastating scale, and Torrents believed that the majority of workers ‘have lost the dignity of men’ through sheer exhaustion.30 Torrents wrote that farmers were so consumed by market values that the cane cutters were treated worse than animals and machines, whose fixed market value commanded them greater respect than a human life. In the early 1920s, cane workers of all nationalities and backgrounds began to protest the conditions in the fields. Again, however, those not of British or Irish descent were viewed as the cause of the problems. In the 1922 South Johnstone strike, one anglophone protester was attacked by a man who was widely reported to be an Italian. As violence escalated, south Europeans became particularly vulnerable to accusations of undermining the recognized trade union strike. Such legitimacy had little relevance to them, many being union members in name only and felt thoroughly excluded from the organization. One Spaniard recalled later that strikers across all nationalities had armed themselves with ‘all kinds of firearms from pistols to shotguns’.31 Newspapers in the south of the state became increasingly concerned at the breakdown of law and order, and police were similarly alarmed when they intercepted cases of revolvers they inferred were destined for south European protesters.32 Spaniards were certainly involved in these attempts to use violence to force mill owners and wealthy farmers to pay workers more. When police arrived at Miguel Martínez’s camp, they found ‘bundles of gelignite tied together, each of three packets and met with fuse and caps. There



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were another dozen sticks of prepared gelignite and five detonators in the bundle’.33 Such items were not unusual in the northern farms. However, all were hastily thrown out of Martínez’s kitchen window as the police arrived, and no one claimed ownership. Although it did not eventuate, police had been aware of strikers’ plans to seize the mill by force and return it to its earlier model of cooperative ownership. Spaniards wholeheartedly supported a model of community ownership that would break corporate mill owners’ monopoly on the processing of cane. Emilio Duran remembered the strikers’ decision that if ‘the position looked like going against us, [and in defiance of union directions] we should blow up the vital parts of the mill’.34 Although the violence was eventually defused, the strike remains a revealing example of the application of ‘foreign’ political tactics to Queensland issues. The ability to cut cane in the north and to join cutting gangs was regulated by possession of a union ticket, certifying membership of the Australian Workers’ Union. In 1930, the union and farmers cooperated to introduce the British Preference Policy, ensuring that at least 75 per cent of mill workers were ethnically British or Irish. A predictably irate Torrents wrote that ‘it does not matter that one is naturalised and [holds] a union ticket, you are a “dago” and you do not have the right to life’.35 The policy sharpened Spaniards’ awareness of racism within the economic order. Although obliged to purchase a union ticket to cut cane, an infuriated Rosende ripped it up in organizers’ faces after securing his employment. When Torrents attended union meetings to suggest alternative ways to secure jobs and safeguard workers’ unity, British and Irish members would turn away to signal their disregard and disrespect. In lieu of union protection, south Europeans strengthened their own inter-ethnic cooperation to safeguard their interests against what they perceived to be deliberate humiliation.

NORTHERN AUSTRALIA IN THE GLOBAL CONTEXT Events in the north of Australia were not unconnected to elsewhere in the world. The number of Spaniards remained relatively small throughout the interwar period, and their proportion steadily decreased as the Italian population increased throughout the 1920s; yet Catalans continued to dominate around their original settlement in towns such as Innisfail. Numbers remained relatively steady throughout the 1920s, once shipping became available in the aftermath of the First World War. Numbers peaked in the early years of the Depression, as people fled the difficulty of industrial Barcelona to be with relatives in Australia. However, the declaration of the

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Second Spanish Republic in 1931 caused a sharp decline in emigration to Australia. Indeed, a number of Catalans in Queensland returned to Spain, eager to participate in the new era. Spain’s corrupted political system was overturned on the declaration of the new republic, but quickly became gridlocked between polarized political groups. Throughout the world, the republic’s descent into civil war was portrayed as a dichotomous conflict between fascist nationalists and communist revolutionaries; yet, in reality, there were significant differences between left-wing groups. These divisions were replicated in Australia, where the Catalan anarchists refused to send funds to the umbrella fundraising organization run by anglophone communists.36 Wider Australian society viewed the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) in the light of the unfolding global contest between fascists and communists, and was strongly sympathetic with the insurgent right-wing forces. Such sentiments correlated with the growing fear of the increasing communist presence in Australia’s strategically vulnerable north. The Catalans in the north did not view global events in passive isolation. Some returned to Spain to fight for the republican forces, and many more raised funds to support the republic’s fight against the right-wing insurgents.37 Anarchist political identities had long relied on clandestine networks of like-minded individuals, who rarely met directly. A number of the migrants in Australia’s north had previously been part of such networks, travelling between France, Spain and the United Kingdom. Such groups relied on the circulation of newspapers, books and letters, as much as faceto-face meetings. With the defeat of the Spanish republicans in 1939, this global diaspora of left-wing Spaniards underwent a sudden increase as the republican forces fled the country. The increased radical diaspora provided opportunities for groups such as those in the north of Australia, where the community pooled resources to import radical periodicals and books from overseas. A number wrote to various Spanish exiles in Latin America, Europe and the United States, while others wrote for newspapers based in Europe and the Americas. In this manner, they retained their identities as self-educated individuals committed to subverting the capitalist imperialist system through semi-covert networks of workers. Few of the Catalans commented particularly on the injustices that colonialism had caused to Indigenous Australians, beyond a general commentary on Anglo-Australians’ racism. In the main, however, Indigenous Australians were not central to the Catalans’ understanding of capitalism or colonialism. Despite their awareness of the effects of the Spanish Empire in Africa and the Americas, they were largely uninterested in an understanding of Indigenous Australian culture that afforded it equal value to their own.



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The men remained enraged that ‘Latinos are considered blacks … They see us, and most see [us] as inferior beings’.38 The migrants viewed their dignity as white men through the prism of their labour and their minor role in the challenge to global imperialism.39 Their views were closely tied to the sense that it was capitalism that prevented workers from uniting, degrading the human condition and causing racism and division. Torrents displayed his firm belief in workers’ potential international solidarity when he noted the extent to which Sri Lankans in Colombo downplayed their intelligence to act as rickshaw drivers and servants; men who were ‘condemned and despised because of their colour’.40 Similarly on his way to Australia, Torrents described the Egyptian port workers who ‘worked as true slaves’, citing the French realist author Emile Zola to express their horrifying conditions.41 For Torrents, as with his favourite philosopher Fauré, capitalism had created the pernicious conditions through which human nature and servitude was experienced. From their home in the rural tropics of north Queensland, the anarchist cane cutters viewed the interwar world through a realm of possibility for change. This change involved a global overturn of the economic and political structures. Although they were isolated in the north of Australia, the men drew on their European experiences to understand the violence and hardship surrounding them. Torrents commented depressingly in a letter that ‘today, I find in the bottom of Oceania, in a tiny village in Australia, the same crimes as in Europe’.42 His distance from the European capitals did not dim his ability to analyse and critique the conditions of economic exploitation. He had never worked the land before his arrival in Australia, and his back-breaking work in the fields of the north reinforced his commitment to the universal needs of the worker. For Torrents, and the dozens of other anarchists in the small townships, anarchism gave them ‘an idea for how an individual can enjoy autonomy from within a capitalist society’.43 This liberation of the mind enabled the migrants to resist the pressures of dehumanization and reconnect with fellow anarchists globally. The Catalans held strongly to the belief that ‘ignorance was the mother of slavery’,44 and that education was an important precursor to any future revolution. Nonetheless, they reacted angrily to any suggestion that a capitalist world could ever support the needs of workers. In ‘My Philosophies’, Torrents excoriated ‘the Sacred Name of Business’ for torturing the poor and defenceless.45 For the migrants, Australia was a ‘corrupt society, emblazoned “humanitarian” but denying [them] the right to life’.46 During the hard years of the Depression, Torrents wrote that ‘while the people suffer the consequences of this capitalist regime, its defenders dare to talk of justice, blatantly mocking the patience of the working people’.47

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This ongoing association of human rights, democracy and capitalism was to strengthen in the years from 1939. During the Cold War, migrants found themselves silenced by the social opprobrium and general fear of communism. Rather than centre on the dignity of the human individual, socialist doctrines now appeared to extol the state above all others. Despite the fading away of socialist alternatives to communism or capitalism, migrants in the north continued to influence its political dynamic. The region retained its commitment to anti-corporatism and anti-establishment politics. For the highly diverse population, this connection was deeply tied to their experiences before migration and continued global connections. Rather than engage in abstract political debates or join formal political parties, it was sites of everyday interaction around workplaces that made sense of global economic and political change.

CONCLUSION The Catalans at the centre of this chapter came to Australia to bolster the economic development of the north after the exclusion of Pacific Island labourers. The company paid for their tickets with local farmers, and expected quiescent workers. It was assumed these men would bolster the economic and ethnic norms of an Anglo-Irish Australian culture. This was quickly recognized as a serious mistake, with the workers taking the initiative to push for workers’ rights and dignity in the workplace. This does not suggest the farmers were correct to fear morally subversive south Europeans. It does demonstrate that migrant workers retained an active commitment to the industrial lessons of their former lives, and a willingness to challenge corporate capitalism in their new homes. The migrants hoped to resist the violent capitalism that they had experienced in Barcelona, in the hope that northern Australia would pioneer a new world based on dignity over profit, and the individual over the state or property. Their identity as workers, suffused in a commitment to selfeducation and communication with intellectuals globally, allowed them to challenge preconceptions about the dignity of labour in the cane fields of the north. These workplaces had cultural and social expectations no less vigorous than the bureaucratic controls of the White Australia Policy, and which demanded conformity in a way that supported a continued racialized hierarchy. Yet migrants resisted this pressure, drawing on their past experiences and continued global connectivity to reflect critically about contemporary Australia.



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ROBERT MASON Robert Mason is lecturer in migration and security studies at Griffith University, Queensland. He is editor of a number of collections, including Cultures in Refuge: Seeking Sanctuary in Modern Australia (2012, with Anna Hayes) and Migration and Insecurity: Citizenship and Social Inclusion in a Transnational Era (2013, with Niklaus Steiner and Anna Hayes). His research focuses on emotion and the legacies of violence in both migration and heritage. He is particularly interested in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking communities in Asia, Australia and North America. NOTES   1. H. Reynolds, North of Capricorn: The Untold Story of Australia’s North, Crows Nest, NSW, Allen and Unwin, 2003, pp. vii, xiv.  2. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008.   3. S. Loy-Wilson, ‘A Chinese Shopkeeper on the Atherton Tablelands: Tracing Connections between Regional Queensland and Regional China in Taam Szu Pui’s My Life and Work’, Queensland Review, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 160–76.   4. J. Creet and A. Kitzmann (eds), Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2011.   5. A. Thomson, Moving Stories: An Intimate History of Four Women across Two Countries, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011.   6. See, for example, L. Baldassar, C. Baldock and R. Wilding, Families Caring across Borders: Migration, Aging and Transnational Caregiving, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; F. Ricatti, ‘Elodia and Franca: Oral Histories of Migration and Hope’, History Australia, vol. 7, no. 2, 2010, pp. 33.1–33.23.  7. J. Damousi, Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-war Australia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001; N. Nguyen, Memory is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora, Santa Barbara, CA, Praeger, 2009.  8. G. Hage, ‘The Differential Intensities of Social Reality: Migration, Participation and Guilt’, in Ghassan Hage (ed.), Arab Australians Today: Citizenship and Belonging, Melbourne, Melbourne University Publishing, 2003, pp. 192–205.  9. T. Moore, Death or Liberty: Rebels and Radicals Transported to Australia 1788–1868, Sydney, Murdoch Books, 2010. 10. Reynolds, North of Capricorn, p. viii. 11. R. Mason, ‘Repositioning Resistance: Basque Separatism, Religion and Cultural Security in Regional Queensland, 1945–70’, Queensland Review, vol. 20, no. 1, 2013, pp. 37–51.

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12. C.M. Fernandez-Shaw, España y Australia: Quinientos Años de Relaciones, Madrid, Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales y Científicas Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores de España, 2000, p. 310; William A. Douglass, ‘The Catalan Factor in Australian Immigration History’, Ken Garrad Working Papers in Hispanic Studies, No. 5, Melbourne, Department of Romance Languages, Monash University, 1992. 13. Douglass, ‘The Catalan Factor’, p. 7. 14. G. Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working Class Movement in Spain, 1868– 1898, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1989. 15. C. Ealham, Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, 1898–1937, Abingdon, Routledge, 2004. 16. C.M. Winston, Workers and the Right in Spain, 1900–1939, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1985, p. 102. 17. R.W. Kern, Red Years Black Years: A Political History of Spanish Anarchism, 1911– 1937, Philadelphia, PA, Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978, p. 4. 18. ‘Cronicas escritas en mi intancia en el Norte de Queensland, Australia’, n.d., Salvador Torrents Collection, James Cook University Special Collection (hereinafter JCU), ST 5–7. 19. Emilio Duran Memoirs, Robert Mason Collection (hereinafter RMC), p. 53. 20. J. Armstrong, ‘The Sugar Strike, 1911’, in D.J. Murphy (ed.), The Big Strikes: Queensland 1889–1965, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1983, p. 107. 21. Macknade Letter Book, 8 August 1907, Noel Butlin Archive Collection (hereinafter NBAC), Colonial Sugar Refining Company (hereinafter CSR Co.) Z303–142. 22. Goondi Letter Book, 5 December 1907, NBAC, CSR Co. Z303–142. 23. ‘Interstate: Geraldton’, North Queensland Herald, 14 December 1907, p. 6; Emilio Duran Memoirs, RMC, p. 71. 24. Goondi Letter Book, 5 December 1907, NBAC, CSR Co. Z303–142. 25. Macknade Letter Book, 8 August 1907, NBAC, CSR Co. Z303–142. 26. Letter from Investigation Branch to Home and Territories Department, 16 February 1923, Mackay, National Archives of Australia Canberra, A435 1946-4-6645. 27. F. Cain, ‘The Industrial Workers of the World: Aspects of its Suppression in Australia, 1916–1919’, Labour History, vol. 42, 1982, p. 60; Report by Boyland of Waterside Workers’ Federation, Innisfail, Undated, Queensland State Archives (hereinafter QSA), RSI 13214-1-586. 28. ‘Impresiones de mi viaje a Australia’, Salvador Torrents, n.d., Acción Fabril, JCU, ST 5–18. 29. ‘Cronicas escritas en mi intancia en el Norte de Queensland, Australia’, n.d., JCU, ST 5–7. 30. Letter from Torrents to Nettie Palmer, 28 February 1947, Mena Creek, Nettie Palmer Manuscript Collection, National Library of Australia (hereinafter NLA), 1174-1-7119. 31. Emilio Duran Memoirs, RMC, p. 90.



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32. Police Report, Babinda, 24 July 1927, QSA, RSI 13214-1-730. 33. Police Report, South Johnstone, July 1927, QSA, RSI 13214-1-730. 34. Telegram from Mann, South Johnstone, 6 July 1927, QSA, RSI 13214-1-730; Emilio Duran Memoirs, RMC, p. 91. 35. Letter from Torrents to Palmer, 16 April 1943, Mena Creek, NLA, 1174-1-6324-32. 36. R. Mason, ‘Anarchism, Communism and Hispanidad: Australian Spanish Migrants and the Civil War’, Immigrants and Minorities, vol. 27, no. 1, 2009, pp. 29–49. 37. A. Inglis, Australians in the Spanish Civil War, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1987; J. Keene, ‘A Symbolic Crusade: Australians and the Spanish Civil War’, in G. Massa (ed.), La Mistica Spagnola. Spagna America Latina, Rome, Centro di Studi Americanistici, 1989, pp. 141–55. 38. S. Torrents, ‘My Philosophies’, n.d., JCU, ST5–4. 39. For closer analysis of the migrants’ gender, see R. Mason, ‘On the March: Radical Hispanic Women in Northern Australia’, Labour History, no. 99, 2010, pp. 149–65. 40. S. Torrents, ‘Impreciones de un viaje Australia’, n.d., JCU, ST5–10. 41. Torrents, ‘Impreciones’. 42. S. Torrents, ‘Cronicas escritas en mi intancia en el Norte de Queensland, Australia’, n.d., JCU, ST5–7. 43. S. Torrents, ‘Conversaciones comentadas sobres el ideal anarquico entres los compañeros de Lyon’, n.d., JCU, ST5–13. 44. S. Torrents, ‘Mi Anarquismo: Trabajo leido en el Centro Emancipation Anarchste de Lyon Por Salvador Torrents’, n.d., ST5–13. 45. S. Torrents, ‘My Philosophies’, n.d., JCU, ST5–4. 46. Torrents, ‘Cronicas’. 47. S. Torrents, ‘Desde Australia’, n.d., JCU, ST5–18.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Armstrong, J., ‘The Sugar Strike, 1911’, in D.J. Murphy (ed.), The Big Strikes: Queensland 1889–1965, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1983, pp. 100–16. Baldassar, L., C. Baldock and R. Wilding, Families Caring across Borders: Migration, Aging and Transnational Caregiving, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Cain, F., ‘The Industrial Workers of the World: Aspects of its Suppression in Australia, 1916–1919’, Labour History, vol. 42, 1982, pp. 54–62. Creet, J., and A. Kitzmann (eds), Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2011. Damousi, J., Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-war Australia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Douglass, William A., ‘The Catalan Factor in Australian Immigration History’, Ken Garrad Working Papers in Hispanic Studies, No. 5, Melbourne, Department of Romance Languages, Monash University, 1992.

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Ealham, C., Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, 1898–1937, Abingdon, Routledge, 2004. Esenwein, G., Anarchist Ideology and the Working Class Movement in Spain, 1868–1898, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1989. Fernandez-Shaw, C.M., España y Australia: Quinientos Años de Relaciones, Madrid, Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales y Científicas Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores de España, 2000. Hage, G., ‘The Differential Intensities of Social Reality: Migration, Participation and Guilt’, in Ghassan Hage (ed.), Arab Australians Today: Citizenship and Belonging, Melbourne, Melbourne University Publishing, 2003, pp. 192–205. Inglis, A., Australians in the Spanish Civil War, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1987. Keene, J., ‘A Symbolic Crusade: Australians and the Spanish Civil War’, in G. Massa (ed.), La Mistica Spagnola. Spagna America Latina, Rome, Centro di Studi Americanistici, 1989, pp. 141–55. Kern, R.W., Red Years Black Years: A Political History of Spanish Anarchism, 1911–1937, Philadelphia, PA, Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978. Lake, Marilyn, and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008. Loy-Wilson, S., ‘A Chinese Shopkeeper on the Atherton Tablelands: Tracing Connections between Regional Queensland and Regional China in Taam Szu Pui’s My Life and Work’, Queensland Review, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 160–76. Mason, R., ‘Anarchism, Communism and Hispanidad: Australian Spanish Migrants and the Civil War’, Immigrants and Minorities, vol. 27, no. 1, 2009, pp. 29–49. ———. ‘On the March: Radical Hispanic Women in Northern Australia’, Labour History, no. 99, 2010, pp. 149–65. ———. ‘Repositioning Resistance: Basque Separatism, Religion and Cultural Security in Regional Queensland, 1945–70’, Queensland Review, vol. 20, no. 1, 2013, pp. 37–51. Moore, T., Death or Liberty: Rebels and Radicals Transported to Australia 1788–1868, Sydney, Murdoch Books, 2010. Nguyen, N., Memory is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora, Santa Barbara, CA, Praeger, 2009. Reynolds, H., North of Capricorn: The Untold Story of Australia’s North, Crows Nest, NSW, Allen and Unwin, 2003. Ricatti, F., ‘Elodia and Franca: Oral Histories of Migration and Hope’, History Australia, vol. 7, no. 2, 2010, pp. 33.1–33.23. Thomson, A., Moving Stories: An Intimate History of Four Women across Two Countries, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011. Winston, C.M., Workers and the Right in Spain, 1900–1939, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1985.

Chapter 4

The Family Trust On Assimilation, Migration and Concealing Ambivalent Identities Ruth Longdin

KL I found myself sitting at a trestle table in front of one of the wireless receivers. Beside me sat an older woman with frizzy hair, to whom I did not take at first. She was short and overweight, and she addressed me in German, which irritated me a lot. It was something to which I was still very sensitive. My secret was, I imagined, not obvious to anyone. —Margaret Weeden, Memoir

Some years ago, my flatmate came home from his job as a scavenger at a tip in Canberra and told me that he had found six boxes of letters and diaries tied up with string. They looked old – the boxes dated from around the 1960s. Unsure of what to do I suggested that he bring them home and I would take a look at them. One of the first letters that I picked up was between two women detailing a lunch that one of them had had that day with T.S. Eliot. The letter was dated 1946 and it was the tip of the iceberg. The mixed group of people whose lives are held within this collection comprised of a family that originated from Vienna and a group who had originally met working for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Monitoring Service during the Second World War. They had interpreted radio broadcasts coming out of many European countries, including Germany, Spain and France. The above quote comes from a memoir written by Margaret Weeden (nee Rink), the holder and creator of the collection, and it details her first meeting with Ilse (pronounced Ilsa) Barea (nee Pollak) who became a lifelong friend. 69

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It also touches on something that had been concealed that is so critical to the story revealed by the collection. Margaret’s secret, which she had only recently learnt herself in 1936 at the age of 24, was that she was Jewish. Both of the women originated from Vienna and both had Jewish ancestry. Throughout the collection of letters and diaries, made up almost exclusively of assimilating Viennese people, there is only one reference to assimilation and none to the fact that any of them were Jewish. It was a silence that could not be ignored and one that illuminated the story of a transnational Jewish assimilation process in the years preceding and following the Holocaust. What the collection, and the history that was subsequently written, revealed was a study of the emancipation and assimilation of the German-speaking Viennese Jewish cultural elite over a hundred-year period from the 1860s to the 1960s. The family originated from Vienna, moved to London and finally, after the Second World War, a considerable number of them moved to Australia where other members of the family had previously lived for a short time at the end of the nineteenth century.

PRELUDE TO THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ASSIMILATION Prior to the Enlightenment, Jewish people suffered many hundreds of years of violence, exploitation and persecution. The first legislation introduced against Jewish people was done through a series of decrees around the year 478 denying them various rights of citizenship.1 By the end of the millennium, throughout much of continental Europe, massacres and pogroms began to occur. Over a two-day period in 1096 in the Rhineland, over eight hundred Jews – men, women and children – were massacred. Two days later another seven hundred Jews died in a massacre in Mainz.2 In both of these cases, after realizing they had no defence against the onslaught, Jewish people ‘took arms against their wives, children, mothers, brothers and sisters, and killed each other not to fall into the hands of their enemies’.3 From this time onwards, massacres, pogroms, banishments and returns were a regular feature of Jewish life in Europe. The Crusades, in tandem with various other political and economic influences, led to further massacres and banishments. Throughout this period, Jews were blamed for the plague, the Black Death, stealing and killing Christian children, stabbing the host, desecrating Christianity and poisoning Christians.4 Throughout Europe during the Middle Ages, Jews were both embraced and rejected by the ruling aristocracy at regular intervals. Jews were banished from Britain in 1290 and this was reinforced in 1498 by Henry VII when he took an oath not to allow Jews into his dominions.5 Many countries



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devised different ways of differentiating Jews from their gentile neighbours, beginning around the thirteenth century. Such methods ranged from special hats (Germany), to yellow badges (France), to strips of fabric worn on the chest (England).6 In the case of Vienna and other places in Europe, Jews were often invited to participate in the economy, acting as advisors to the aristocracy. After a period of time, up to a few hundred years, they would be banished and all of the wealth accrued by them would then be confiscated by the ruling monarch of the time.7 Conflict between Jewish communities and the dominant societies in which they were living waxed and waned throughout Europe, but in Poland and Russia, particularly towards the middle of the seventeenth century, violence began to escalate. The Cossacks led an insurrection against the Polish gentry and massacred Poles and Jews indiscriminately.8 Accounts of the time allude to indescribable violence. Russia and Poland then joined forces in the signing of the Treaty of Andrusovo, leading to the redistribution of lands between Poland and Russia and, as Jews were already not allowed to settle in Russia, the ensuing massacres led to one-quarter of the entire Jewish population being annihilated.9 The Crusades and the Reformation also led to massacres of Jews who refused conversion. Eventually, however, out of the mysticism of the Middle Ages came the Enlightenment. Many Jews throughout Europe openly embraced the Enlightenment, particularly those in Central Europe. The values of the German Enlightenment (or Haskalah) were particularly focused on high culture and education, and these values melded well with those of traditional Jewish culture. Jews were drawn to Germany and to Vienna, which was then seen as the last outpost of the German Enlightenment, in search not only of security but, in the case of the middle classes, of education and culture. The term assimilation is worth exploring at this point. C.B. Sherman developed terms and definitions regarding Jewish assimilation in 1961.10 Assimilation was seen as a two-step process through which people assimilated into a broader, dominant society. The first stage, known as ‘acculturation’, referred to the behavioural changes required, such as learning a new language and culture, and the expectations of the new dominant culture. The second stage, referred to as ‘structural assimilation’, was signified by ‘a breaking down of the distinctiveness of the group culture’.11 This is achieved through intermarriage or religious conversion to the dominant faith. This second stage requires a complete rejection, and often subsequent concealment, of the original cultural and religious beliefs and identity. In essence, the collection revealed the experience of assimilation as it occurred in multiple countries and at least two generations.

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The collection began in Vienna in the mid-1870s, moved to Britain at the turn of the twentieth century and finally to Australia in 1953. Anti-Semitism is present in all of these countries, not necessarily in its overt political form as in Vienna towards the end of the nineteenth century, but often as a form of cultural code that prevented Jews from gaining positions of influence and security, and also acting to remind those who were assimilating that they were not the same as other people. This prejudice had the effect of constantly reminding those who were assimilating that they were, as Babbha suggests, ‘almost the same, but not quite’.12 This notion, which speaks to the ambivalence inherent in the assimilation process, is crucial when contemplating cultural assimilation and its effects on identity. Margaret’s family had originated in Furth, Germany, and her grandfather had developed an import business in Vienna. Max, Margaret’s father, was born in Vienna in 1865, meaning that the Rindschopf family, as they were then known, migrated to Vienna prior to the emancipation of Jews in 1867. The family were Jewish but not Orthodox, and indeed celebrated Easter, and Christmas with a tree, suggesting that their religion was not a significant part of the family’s life.13 The family typified many assimilating Jewish families in Vienna in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Although many Jews converted to Catholicism, this part of the Rindschopf family adopted a more secular route. Max, who was the fourth of eight children, remained an agnostic throughout his life. He and his brothers were all successful businessmen, many of whom left Vienna for London towards the end of the nineteenth century and, in doing so, left their old, Jewish, Viennese identities behind them.

VIENNA, ASSIMILATION AND THE SACRILEGE OF ELLA ZWACK Much more has been written about the subject of Jewish assimilation in Vienna than in the other two countries that have been examined, largely due to the effect that Jews had on that city during the emancipation era.14 The city’s Jewish population rose rapidly from 3,739 in 1854 to 201,513 in 1923, and their influence was significant. They remained at the centre of the city’s remarkable cultural explosion during that period, to the extent that Beller observes: ‘[T]he awkward but inescapable conclusion seems to be that it was indeed its Jews [who] made Vienna what it was in the realm of modern culture’.15 It is important, at this juncture, to consider the history of the emancipation–assimilation process as it was undertaken in Vienna. The revolutions that worked their way throughout Europe in the middle of the nineteenth



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century had a significant effect on Vienna, and signalled the beginning of what is referred to as the Liberal era. Jews were emancipated in 1867 in Vienna and were asked, in essence, to abandon their culture, religion and heritage to gain rights of citizenship, which many did. In its earliest days, conversion to Catholicism (the form of Christianity that predominated in Vienna at this time) emancipated people and assured their safety and security within that society. However, this did not last long. Economic depression in Vienna in tandem with the rise in evolutionary thinking and then racial theories in the 1870s led to a backlash against the assimilation process and a rise in overt political anti-Semitism, first in Germany and then Vienna. Once Jewishness became a racial consideration, not merely a religious one, it became increasingly difficult to assimilate into a dominant society that was progressively becoming antagonistic to its Jewish citizens. Although in the initial stages it was possible to be baptized and convert to assimilate, by the end of the nineteenth century this view was no longer held by the dominant culture in Vienna. In 1903 Max and his family moved to London while other members of the extended family remained in Vienna. Max’s favourite sister, Franza, was among them. She was the youngest in the family and suffered as a result of what is referred to as a ‘wall eye’ – one eye being significantly lower than the other. This was a major issue for a young woman of the middle classes whose sole job it was to make a good marriage. Franza’s diaries make up the first half of the collection. They are all written in German and a great deal of the collection of diaries, spanning from 1875 through to the mid-1920s, is focused on how ugly she felt and how depressed she was. Despite this obstacle Franza married an academic named Sigmund Feilbogen, known in the family as Lutz, whose gradual deafness was affecting his ability to work as an academic. This was then compounded by an event in 1908 that led to their hasty departure from Vienna, and which remained a secret in the family for many years. Margaret Weeden wrote about it in her memoir: But there was another – and much more compelling – reason for Franza and Lutz’s departure from Vienna and settling in Zurich: it was one of the family’s best kept secrets and it was many decades before I learnt, in the greatest secrecy, about it … Franza had visited Rome along with her sister Ella. It seems that they were allowed into the Vatican, along with many other visitors, most of them pilgrims. As they knelt at the front rail it seems that Ella spat out the spatula [the host or wafer] the Pope placed on her tongue. The scandal rocked the world, which is hardly surprising! Franza, it seems, was the most affected by her older sister’s scandalous behaviour, and I believe it was the reason why, in the aftermath, she and her husband left Vienna and settled in Switzerland.16

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When Margaret and I first discussed this incident I had presumed that the ‘worldwide scandal’ was perhaps an exaggeration. However, the incident was indeed written about in the international press. The Viennese Jewish editor of Die Fackel, Karl Kraus, described it as a ‘religious disturbance that scandalized the faithful … and [had] grown into a European sensation’: For the fact is that Professor Feilbogen, whose academic and middle-class inoffensiveness is recognized by the more responsible, clerical journalists, and whose sister-in-law’s superfluous presence in the Sistine Chapel and lack of practice in receiving Holy Communion precipitated the disaster, did not come to Rome with the intention of committing a sacrilege. This cannot be seriously denied by anyone. It is an infamy beyond compare to inflict the animosity of pious mankind on a man, whom one can only accuse of a certain lack of tact in having sought entry to the Easter Mass or who may, perhaps, merely have been the victim of a female thirst for sensation. The fact that he apologized to the editors of the Deutsches Volsblatt and remorsefully offered to convert to Catholicism, and that the Professorial Standing Committee of which he was a member promptly saw fit to denounce him publicly, is merely further melancholy evidence of the way in which politics ruin this country.17

This version of events fits perfectly with that of the family and led to the development of the family trust. This fund was developed to protect the vulnerable members of the then Rink family. All of the brothers in the family had changed their name from Rindschopf to Rink in 1893. This change of name coincided with Max temporarily departing Australia, where he had worked for a few years with his brother Heinrich, to live in the United States. The brothers often worked together and it seems that all of them were involved with the maintenance of the trust, which lasted throughout much of the twentieth century. It was this trust that supported Franza and Lutz during the rest of their lives, spent in exile in Switzerland as a result of the incident in the Vatican.18 There were a number of vehicles to assimilation. Education and socialism were two such means but by far the most common was conversion to Catholicism. Heinrich Heine, the famous German poet, struggled with his Jewish heritage and identity throughout his formative years and, as a result, separated himself from his Jewish peers and adopted German culture and gentile friends. Barry Rubin discusses this and how an altercation with his fellow students at his Catholic school led to him being beaten by a priest. Rubin quotes from a letter that Heine wrote to a friend: ‘I regret that I’ve been baptized. I don’t see that it’s helped me very much … I am now hated by both Christians and Jews. I have become a true Christian – I now sponge on rich Jews … I often get up at night and stand before a mirror and call



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myself all sorts of names’.19 The conflicting and paradoxical nature of the assimilation experience and its effect on identity is well illustrated here. The family trust was devised to ensure that the most vulnerable in the family, the women, would have support should they be unable to make a financially advantageous marriage. Later on it was extended to include members of subsequent generations, in particular the grandchildren of Max’s brother Heinrich, who had made his fortune as a young man and invested heavily in war bonds upon his return to Vienna before the First World War. He lost everything and his direct family were unable to leave Vienna in the 1930s as most of the extended family had done. A number of Heinrich’s children and grandchildren followed their father’s earlier example and migrated to Australia in the postwar years. This period and the development of the trust speaks to the vulnerability felt by a family that counted themselves among the wealthy cultural elite of Vienna. Franza’s experience and ultimate exile illustrates the effectiveness of the anti-Semitic cultural codes in operation at this time, as well as their close association with class. The trust provided the extended family network with the means to enact support across long distances. It also allowed them to maintain a status that enabled their assimilation and to conceal their Jewishness.

LONDON, OXBRIDGE AND THE MOMENT OF DISCOVERY The study of the Jewish emancipation–assimilation period in Britain has been undertaken by a small group of scholars over the last thirty years or so.20 Their work has re-evaluated earlier analysis of Anglo-Jewish history as an uncritical ‘happy narrative’.21 Although long standing, Jewish communities in Britain were sharply divided between rich and poor.22 Jewish industrialists and merchants from Central Europe had moved to Britain’s large cities during the Industrial Revolution to develop their businesses. These German-speaking merchants were already well assimilated into other European cities, and had little to no traditional Jewish education. Most did not identify with their Jewish heritage and maintained a secular worldview. They, as with Max and his brothers, used the moment of migration to jettison their Jewish identities. As Endelman notes, they had come from a place where they had been considered second-class citizens, and this did not necessarily change with the move to Britain.23 Unlike in Vienna, there was no singular liberating moment of emancipation, but a series of legislative changes enabled Jews to have the right to vote. In Britain by the end of the nineteenth century, the aim of middle-class

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Anglo-Jewry was to merge seamlessly with British society. Indeed Judaism in Britain at this time anglicized itself to the point where Rabbis wore clerical garb and were called ‘Reverend’, and temples took on the appearance of the churches of England. Elements of this remain in Anglo-Orthodox Jewish practice today. Max took his small family to London in 1903 where they lived until the 1920s, when they returned, briefly, to Vienna. Both Margaret and her brother George attended good public schools. George and Margaret went on to study at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge respectively. George was very focused on a successful assimilation into British society throughout his life, and took the process the most seriously of all the family. Oral history suggests that George had been bullied at school, and that this may have been based on his Jewish background.24 There was a twelve-year gap between George and Margaret, and throughout her life he operated very much as a parent to her. He was adamant that Margaret’s Jewishness be hidden from her, as this would relieve her from the burden of concealing her identity. Jon Stratton, in his Coming Out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities, refers to this ‘moment of discovery’: For assimilating Jews, the discovery myth marks also the moment of repression. For the time that they have the awareness of their Jewishness forced on them they live in their assimilated states with the possibility that their secret, their Jewishness, will be displayed to the world, their assimilation will be shown to be a failure, and they will be (re)discovered.25

Although very little had been written about anti-Semitism generally in Britain at this time, considerably more has been written about it and its links to writers living and working in Britain in the twentieth century. T.S. Eliot is one such writer, who was, interestingly, a friend of Ilse Barea – herself an assimilating Jew – during the 1950s, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. He is mentioned here not only because of his relationship with Ilse but also because of his well-known views, which typify the nature of the anti-Semitism that pervaded British society in the pre-Holocaust era. It is important to note, as M.W. Reder suggests, that anti-Semitism during this period was common among the professionals of any ‘occupation requiring a high level of education’.26 Although there has been some debate regarding the extent of Eliot’s anti-Semitism, his The Idea of a Christian Society and Christianity and Culture (1946) dispel the idea that he did not sympathize with such views. The premise of both works was that Britain should be a homogenous society: one culture, one religion. The arguments against the notion that Eliot was anti-



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Semitic are largely based on the fact that he had so many Jewish friends.27 However, this was not uncommon, and perhaps the best example of this is the behaviour of Virginia Woolfe towards her Jewish husband Leonard. Reder illustrates this point with the following account: Virginia Woolfe’s diaries are sprinkled with anti-Semitic remarks, some written to Leonard himself … Her attitude toward her husband is suggested by the following incident: ‘During one visit to Vanessa’s house … someone asked a question and Virginia called out, “Let the Jew answer”. “I won’t answer until you ask me properly”, Leonard said with restraint’.28

Reder goes on to say that the Bloomsbury set, like many of their contemporaries, expressed their anti-Semitism freely and this has been described as a ‘mild pervasive anti-Semitism as omnipresent and unnoticed by Leonard’s friends as the air they breathed’.29 It was considered vulgar to be openly anti-Semitic and this notion was not relegated to the cultural elite. The extreme right-wing political organizations that emerged during this period, including the British Brother’s League and the British Union of Fascists, did not stand on an openly anti-Semitic political platform. Holmes asserts that this was because open anti-Semitism was socially unacceptable; these organizations feared a lack of support if they were openly anti-Semitic, and so developed platforms described as ‘anti-alien’.30 It is important to note that anti-Semitism became increasingly open after the rise of Hitler. The paradox of assimilation is most evident here – to be reminded constantly that you are, again in Babbha’s words, ‘the same … but not the same’. Humbert Wolfe too touches on an important aspect of this, with his comment that ‘when the taint of Jewry means only exclusion from garden parties, refusal of certain cherished intimacies and occasional light-hearted sneers, it is difficult to maintain an attitude of racial pride’.31 It is here, in this place, that some of the worst problems associated with assimilation lie; in being made to feel negatively about one’s identity and traditional culture but also left feeling similarly about the dominant culture. It is here that alienation takes root. It was into British society, in the pre- and postwar years, that many of the people in this collection assimilated. George was arguably the most affected by this process as he developed his legal career. At this point, Jews were excluded from the private clubs that so influenced the success of men’s careers for the upper and middle classes in Britain. George married a British woman who was a general practitioner and had two sons by a previous marriage to a man considered a war hero.

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My discussions with Margaret indicated that George believed that people did not know of his Jewish identity and he spent considerable effort ensuring this was so. There are many examples of this in the correspondence. For example, George had his secretary type up his letters to the family and would leave blanks where Jewish names or other details that needed to be concealed would be handwritten in later. This concealment of his family and their background increasingly became problematic for him as relatives from Vienna started to arrive in the mid- to late 1930s. However, interviews with their peers suggest that most people knew of George’s ancestry despite his best efforts. Although George eventually became a QC, Margaret and others believed he did not go on to become a judge because of his Jewishness. Information about the family trust is scant during this period. Margaret’s cousin Ruth Bernard has this to say about it: I don’t know whether the five brothers contributed equally to the fund or whether Arnold (who was probably the richest at the time) put in the most money. Arnold died around 1930 and Max took over the administration of the fund. However, apparently in the thirties he made some unfortunate investments with the money in the fund or it was diminished because of the general economic downturn after the Wall Street crash, but by the time of the Anschluss with Germany there was no money in the fund. Certainly none of the members of Heinrich’s family, who all migrated to Australia in 1939 and in the 1940s and 1950s and were rather impecunious, got any financial help from the fund or Max.

A number of relatives made their way from Vienna to London at this time, including Alice’s mother Vilma. As an indication of the importance of the need to hide their Jewishness, she was kept from the prying eyes of servants and neighbours in a nursing home until her death before the end of the war.32 Ruth Bernard was living in Vienna at the time of the 1938 Anschluss, with her family. I asked her about her experience of this time: When Hitler went into Austria in 1938 my sister and I were still children. We were young girls, and our parents … well they couldn’t get away straight away, but they said ‘we must save the children’. So they sent us to England and some of these relatives in England were supposed to look after us and they did financially but they didn’t want to bother looking after us in any other way … I was ten I believe. One of the relatives said ‘I’ll pay so long as I don’t have to see them’, and Max and Alice they came to see us once. My sister and I, we were there for six months in England. Max and Alice, in all those six months, came to see us once, they took us for a little picnic; they didn’t want to take us to their



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house, they explained to us, because they didn’t want the maid to know that we were Jewish children. So they took us for a picnic in one of the parks or commons, Wimbledon or Richmond Common – I don’t know – somewhere in England, somewhere in London. My sister is older than me, three years older; Max said to her – which again was a very prosaic sort of thing, but he didn’t have much empathy for a child – he said, ‘Of course you realize that you may never see your parents again’. My sister, of course, dissolved into tears and so on, you know. And both Max and Alice said to us, ‘You should both be baptised now and become Anglican or whatever’, and Alice gave us both a little pendant with a Christian motif on it.33

The fact that no one in the family was prepared to risk taking the young girls in is a reminder of the family’s vulnerability and the consequences of discovery. The comment regarding the children’s religious conversion reflects the original cultural and religious nature of assimilation in Vienna in its earliest stages. Despite the fact that this understanding of Jewishness had changed by the end of the nineteenth century, Max in particular persisted with this somewhat outdated view. What the above quote suggests, among other things, is that there was no money in the trust during this period; otherwise more relatives would have been assisted out of Vienna. Ella Zwack’s daughter Marianne did not escape Vienna and she died in Auschwitz. Her son, Fred Gruen, did escape, moving first to England and then sailing on the Dunera to Australia. He went on to become professor of economics at the Australian National University. Margaret worked briefly for Harrods after university, after which she undertook a secretarial course and took a job with the International Nitrogen Association. This organization was made up of companies from all over Europe, but was based in Germany. They moved their offices to London after the rise of Hitler, and it was here that Margaret met Paula Quirk, who was to become a lifelong friend. It was Paula who interviewed Margaret for the job; at the end of the interview she asked Margaret whether she was Jewish. Margaret replied ‘no’ and did not think much about it. However, once Margaret returned home and told her family about the interview there was a stunned silence. Then George asked me to leave the room for a few minutes. When I came back George said, in an embarrassed tone, that in fact the family had Jewish ancestry and I had better tell Mrs Quirk about it. It came as a complete surprise to me, but I returned to the office the next day and told her, who just nodded and said ‘yes’.34

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Margaret and Paula remained friends throughout their lives. Margaret created a section in her memoir entitled ‘Being Jewish’, and had the following to say about her experience of being Jewish and concealing her heritage: We were all placed in a difficult position. If you know you are living a lie but that most people are not interested, where do you begin? Do you go around saying to your friends out of the blue that no doubt they are aware you are from a Jewish background, even though you and your family have never been practising Jews? It is not an easy subject to broach.35

Margaret worked for the company until the BBC Monitoring Service advertised for interpreters early in 1939. The service moved to Evesham almost immediately, and it was on one of her first days that Margaret met Ilse. Margaret left the service at the end of the war and went to work for the Reparations Commission in Brussels. A few years later she went to work for UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), and it was there, during a conference, that she met Jock Weeden who was then the deputy director of the Commonwealth Office of Education in Australia. It was on their second meeting that they took a trip to the Taj Mahal on New Year’s Eve and fell in love.

AUSTRALIA, MARRIAGE AND THE EXTENDED FAMILY Australia was the final destination for Margaret and for the collection. Her family had had a long-standing relationship with Australia, with both Max and Heinrich living there in the 1890s, so her journey in some ways retraced her family’s steps. Although there are a number of scholarly books about the Jewish diaspora in Australia and its history, few focus on assimilation exclusively.36 An exception to this is Stratton’s book, which is a cultural study rather than history as such. It does, however, speak to many of the themes touched upon here.37 The Australian experience of Jewish assimilation varies from that of its European counterparts, not least in the lack of laws prescribed to discriminate against Jews. There was no moment of emancipation for Jews in Australia, essentially because Jews were not denied rights of citizenship there as the constitution was written after the Enlightenment. It is also important to note that considerable racism was focused on Aboriginal and Chinese people in Australia, and this, among other factors, may have taken the pressure off Jews in colonial Australia.



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A great number of Jews in Australia in the nineteenth century were middle-class Anglo-Jews who would have seemed more British than many in the broader white Australian community. Unlike in both Britain and Vienna, Jewish people and communities in Australia were not concentrated in a single area and the rate of total structural assimilation was much higher. C.A. Price in his study Jewish Settlers in Australia makes the following point: ‘Of the nearly 2,000 German–Jewish males who arrived between 1851 and 1910, and subsequently became naturalised, only 37 still returned themselves as Jewish in the 1911 census’.38 The small number of Jewish women compared to men is a significant factor when examining the nature of structural assimilation in Australia. As a result of the lack of suitable marriage partners and the absence of institutionalized anti-Semitism, structural assimilation occurred almost to the point where, if it had it not been for the arrival of refugees into Australia in the 1920s, its Jewish communities may have ceased to exist.39 Margaret arrived in Sydney in September 1953; she and Jock were married at the Perth Registry Office and they honeymooned in Geraldton. They then travelled by boat to Sydney where they spent the first year of their marriage living in Jock’s flat in Elizabeth Bay. Margaret seems to have settled very quickly into her new life, but her letters to her friends and family do not indicate the immediate love for her new country that her memoir suggests. She stated in a letter to Olive, a friend from the BBC Monitoring Service, that she found it impossible to separate her personal happiness from her feelings towards the place. She went on to say: ‘As for J and myself, I can only say that we are both happier than either of us had believed possible and can see no conceivable reason why it should ever be different. It was well worth waiting 9½ months (or should I say 21 years?) for, and coming 12,000 miles to get’.40 There is no doubt that this was a marriage for love, and Margaret made the point frequently, in our conversations together, that she had a very happy marriage and was very happy living in Australia. Around the mid-1950s, correspondence regarding the family trust picked up between Max and George, and then Margaret. Max was reaching the end of his life and felt that someone needed to take over the trust’s management. Indeed the correspondence regarding the trust increased significantly in these postwar years. It is entirely possible that the Holocaust influenced Max’s sense of security, and it was perhaps this that spurred on the family’s focus on the trust’s management. The decision was made that Margaret should take over its management, largely due to the fact that most of the potential recipients of the moneys now lived in Sydney, having migrated there after the Second World War. Margaret had little interest in money and was initially not keen on undertaking this

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task. Max was insistent, however, and made the three-month boat trip to Australia at the age of eighty-eight. In 1941, Max wrote a detailed account of his career. Throughout his life he had made considerable amounts of money undertaking a wide variety of different jobs, businesses and investments. He had begun by working for his older brothers in their enterprises, until Heinrich suggested that he join him in Australia where he had been working since the early 1880s. About a visit from Heinrich when he was living in London, Max wrote: It was Heinrich who suggested my going back with him, as his firm was in need of trustworthy people, and in his opinion I should have a brighter future in Australia than in England. He could give no definitive promise as to the class of work that I should be expected to do, but in the Colonies people did not consider any kind of work beneath their dignity, and would lend a hand wherever it was required. It did not take me long to decide. In fact his steamer was scheduled to sail within a fortnight of his making his proposition.41

Max first arrived in Australia in 1890 and went to work for Pfaff, Pinschof and Co. as a bookkeeper in Melbourne. Three years later he was sent to Sydney to set up the new office there. During his time there he lived in a large house in Annandale, with horses and stables. In 1893 he sailed from Australia to the United States, where he travelled around the country selling printer’s ink. Other business interests during his career included a connection with a Russian company seeking to produce asbestos goods in England, and a small oil company that ‘turned out a winner in the end; nothing spectacular, but sufficient to leave me in comfortable circumstances’.42 Despite his financial success, Max remained an extraordinarily frugal man. He bought his ties from Woolworths and weighed all of his letters to his family. Indeed he would send his letters to Margaret from Switzerland to George in London, because postage to Australia was cheaper from there. George would then forward them on to Margaret along with his own letters. Margaret would then attach her carbon copy reply to Max and George’s letters and file them away, sending her reply to Max. Max would also weigh Margaret’s letters, and when she sent a letter on hotel stationery on her honeymoon he berated her for wasting money. All of this suggests that Max felt very strongly that money, and the making of it, was very important. Indeed his disappointment in Margaret’s lack of interest in matters financial was made very clear in the correspondence in the year leading up to his visit. He accused her of being proud of the fact that she was not interested, and no doubt Margaret would have felt somewhat torn between her father’s need for her to protect the family trust



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and her own political ideology, which had been significantly influenced as a young woman by her socialist friends. In the end she acquiesced and, with George’s help, took over management of the trust. In preparation for Max’s visit, Margaret and Jock made the decision to buy a newly built house in Pymble, and undertook much of the finishingoff work themselves. Jock made bookshelves and Margaret made curtains. Suburban Sydney during the 1950s was the era of the home builder and renovator. Indeed, their neighbour was digging his own pool. This led to many discussions in the correspondence, particularly with George, about how Australians undertook their own labouring work whereas the British may not. Regardless, when Max arrived he contributed to the effort, and there are pictures of him, shirtless and in shorts, helping with the garden and other tasks around the house. However, the main purpose of Max’s visit was to apprise himself of the Australian economic situation and to tutor Margaret. Max had created for the family a story about a benefactor (known in the family as ‘the Wohltater’) based in Switzerland, where Max was then living, who liked to donate moneys to young people in need – although this was sometimes extended to other worthy people. Margaret took over the role of ‘the Benefactor’ from the early 1950s and managed the trust at least until 1966, when the collection ends; we do not know what happened to it in later years. Ruth Bernard was the daughter of Hilda and niece of Vera and Edith, all of whom were sisters to Max. Max’s brother Heinrich had three daughters who had arrived in Sydney with their husbands and children just prior to and after the Anschluss. The family knew of the original trust fund that had been established largely for Franza and Eleanor and then Heinrich’s wife Helene. Ruth Bernard was asked what she knew about the trust during this period: After Max’s death, Margaret started to give money to Hilda, Edith and Vera, who were all not well off financially. Hilda, by that time was a widow … and neither Edith nor Vera ever had any money. Margaret was actually very generous and gave sometimes small supplements and sometimes quite substantial amounts to Hilda, Edith and particularly Vera. She was always very secretive about it and told each of them not to talk about it with the other two.43

It would seem that after Max’s death, the fabrication about the identity of the Benefactor was abandoned. The reasons for the creation of this story remain uncertain. Was the story created to ensure that the recipients were not embarrassed, or was it to enable Max to have control over where the money went? The latter option fits with what could be described as the

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paternalistic view apparent in some of the correspondence, particularly with respect to providing financial support both to members of the family and to former servants. It is noteworthy that the secrecy regarding who had received moneys, and what amount, was maintained even after the story was dropped.

CONCLUSION During one of our early conversations, on a hot Canberra afternoon, Margaret and I were standing outside her apartment. She had not long since finished her memoir, in which she had written candidly about many things in her life, including her experience of being Jewish. We were talking about her Jewishness, which she maintained was ‘not a good thing to be’, when she said that she did not think that any of her neighbours knew she was Jewish and she always had a problem with how she should go about telling people. As she was talking, she shrugged her shoulders and lowered her head. Even all those years later, in the twenty-first century, after a lifetime of personal success and a happy marriage, Margaret was still experiencing her Jewishness as a burden. All of the people in the collection did everything that was asked of them in terms of merging into the dominant societies in which they lived. And yet most of them carried their heritage as a burden that must be concealed. Assimilation is a paradox – you must meld indistinguishably into the dominant society, yet you will never be fully accepted as a member of that society. This holds true for each of the three countries examined here. This evidence, which is particularly strong given the effects through the generations as studied here, suggests that complete structural assimilation is not only unattainable but also has the capacity to be very negative in terms of a person’s identity and their relationship with both their traditional culture and the dominant culture in which they are living. It is the ambivalence regarding a person’s relationship with their identity, the traditional culture from which they come and the dominant culture into which they are merging, that is so problematic. Indeed if we consider that assimilation, and its essential flaws, is a legacy of the violence that Jews have experienced throughout history, then this legacy continues in the paradox inherent in the assimilation process today. This family, and many others, educated themselves to be productive members of the dominant society into which they were merging; they participated as concerned members of their communities in all manner of good works, and created businesses and professions that were successful.



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Nonetheless the existence of the trust speaks to the vulnerability and lack of basic security that the family, justifiably, felt. The legacies of violence towards Jewish communities over the past millennia reverberate into the present in our memories of the Holocaust but also in the assimilation process where so much was sublimated for ultimately so little. During the research for this project the point was made by assimilated Jews that despite its many flaws, assimilation was the only viable option for Judaism emerging from the Middle Ages. Prior to the twentieth century there was no other solution. Zionism did not gain political traction or popularity until the assimilation project had already begun to fail in the lead up to the twentieth century. Indeed it arose out of Vienna as a significant political movement led by Theodor Herzl, who himself was an assimilated Jew. The ultimate view of Herzl, and of many at this time, was that the Jewish people would never be accepted in Europe and so the logical solution was to establish a Jewish state elsewhere. Although the merits and failures of the Jewish assimilation process may be debated, learnings from it may well inform future policies regarding the development of multicultural societies. It must be possible to create societies where people of different cultures can live together without fear of being ‘almost the same … but not quite’.

RUTH LONGDIN Ruth Longdin works in the cultural heritage sector, and has fifteen years’ experience working in a cross-cultural environment with indigenous cultures and other culturally diverse groups. She has taught heritage to postgraduate planning students and young adults. More recently, she has collaborated with Aboriginal communities to develop histories for use both by the communities and the state government national parks service. Her research and professional work focuses on the importance of people’s cultural heritage to their sense of self and identity. NOTES   1. D. Cohn-Sherbrook, Anti-Semitism: A History, Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 2002, p. 50.  2. Ibid., p. 52.   3. Cohn-Sherbrook, Anti-Semitism.   4. Ibid., p. 50.   5. Ibid., p. 80.

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  6. Cohn-Sherbrook, Anti-Semitism.  7. Encyclopaedia Judaica, Jerusalem, Keter Publishing House; New York, Macmillan, 1972, p. 124.  8. Cohn-Sherbrook, Anti-Semitism, p. 134.  9. Cohn-Sherbrook, Anti-Semitism. 10. C.B. Sherman, The Jew within American Society, Detroit, IL, Wayne State University Press, 1961, p. 37. 11. M.F. Salom, In Sure Dwellings: A Journey from Expulsion to Assimilation, Henley Beach, SA, Seaview Press, 2000, p. 9. 12. H. Bhabba, quoted in J. Stratton, Coming Out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities, London, Routledge, 2000, p. 58. 13. Oral history interview with Ruth Bernard, 26 September 2003. 14. S. Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989; I. Barea, Vienna: Legend and Reality, London, Secker and Warburg, 1966; C. Schorske, Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1981; W.M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History 1848–1938, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1971; A. Janik and S. Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, New York, NJ, Simon and Schuster, 1973. 15. Beller, Vienna and the Jews; Barea, Vienna: Legend and Reality; Schorske, Fin-DeSiecle Vienna; Johnston, The Austrian Mind; Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna. 16. Weeden, Memoir, p. 28. 17. Die Fackel, 28 April 1908, translated from the original by the late Dr Marlene Norst. 18. Oral history interview with Ruth Bernard, 26 September 2003. 19. B. Rubin, Assimilation and its Discontents, New York, NJ, Times Books, 1995, p. 15. 20. These works include T. Kushner, The Jewish Heritage in British History: Englishness and Jewishness, London, Frank Cass, 1992; G. Alderman, ‘English Jews or Jews of the English Persuasion? Reflections on the Emancipation of Anglo-Jewry’, in P. Birnbaum and I. Katznelson (eds), Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States and Citizenship, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1995; T.M. Endelman, ‘German Jews in Victorian England: A Study in Drift and Defection’, in J. Frankel and S. Zipperstein (eds), Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992. 21. D. Feldman, ‘Jews and the State in Britain’, in M. Brenner et al. (eds), Two Nations: British and German Jews in Comparative Perspective, London, Leo Baeck Institute, 1999, p. 142. 22. T. Endelman, ‘English Jewish History’, Modern Judaism, vol. 11, 1991, p. 93. 23. Endelman, ‘English Jewish History’, p. 63. 24. Oral history interview with Margaret Weeden, 15 October 2000. 25. Stratton, Coming Out Jewish, p. 75.



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26. M.W. Reder, ‘The Anti-Semitism of Some Eminent Economists’, History of Political Economy, vol. 32, no. 4, 2000, p. 833. 27. R. Schuchard, ‘My Reply: Eliot and the Foregone Conclusions’, Modernism and Modernity, vol. 10, no. 1, 2003. 28. Reder, ‘The Anti-Semitism of Some Eminent Economists’, p. 833. 29. Ibid., p. 840. 30. C. Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society, 1876–1939, London, Edward Arnold Longs, 1979, p. 117. 31. Cited in T. Kushner, ‘Comparing Anti-Semitisms: A Useful Exercise?’, in Brenner et al., p. 104. 32. Weeden, ‘Memoir’, p. 91. 33. Oral history interview with Ruth Bernard, 26 September 2003. 34. Weeden, ‘Memoir’, p. 84. 35. Ibid., p. 79. 36. S. Rutland, The Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia, Sydney, Collins, 2000; both W.D. and H. Rubinstein have written Jewish histories, including: Chosen: The Jews in Australia, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1987; The Jews in Australia: A Thematic History, Melbourne, Heinemann, 1991; and Judaism in Australia, Canberra, AGPS, 1995. 37. Stratton, Coming Out Jewish. 38. C.A. Price, Jewish Settlers in Australia, Canberra, Australian National University Press, 1964, p. 18. 39. Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora, p. 142. 40. Correspondence from Margaret Weeden to Olive Renier, 4 January 1954. 41. From Max’s own account of his career, written in 1941. 42. Ibid. 43. Personal communication with Ruth Bernard, 5 September 2004.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alderman, G., ‘English Jews or Jews of the English Persuasion? Reflections on the Emancipation of Anglo-Jewry’, in P. Birnbaum and I. Katznelson (eds), Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States and Citizenship, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 128–56. Barea, I., Vienna: Legend and Reality, London, Secker and Warburg, 1966. Beller, S., Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989. Cohn-Sherbrook, D., Anti-Semitism: A History, Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 2002. Encyclopaedia Judaica, Jerusalem, Keter Publishing House; New York, Macmillan, 1972. Endelman, T., ‘English Jewish History’, Modern Judaism, vol. 11, 1991, pp. 91–109.

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———. ‘German Jews in Victorian England: A Study in Drift and Defection’, in J. Frankel and S. Zipperstein (eds), Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992. Feldman, D., ‘Jews and the State in Britain’, in M. Brenner et al. (eds), Two Nations: British and German Jews in Comparative Perspective, London, Leo Baeck Institute, 1999, pp. 141–61. Holmes, C., Anti-Semitism in British Society, 1876–1939, London, Edward Arnold Longs, 1979. Janik, A., and S. Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, New York, NJ, Simon and Schuster, 1973. Johnston, W.M., The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History 1848–1938, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1971. Kushner, T., The Jewish Heritage in British History: Englishness and Jewishness, London, Frank Cass, 1992. ———. ‘Comparing Anti-Semitisms: A Useful Exercise?’ in M. Brenner et al. (eds), Two Nations: British and German Jews in Comparative Perspective, London, Leo Baeck Institute, 1999, pp. 91–110. Price, C.A., Jewish Settlers in Australia, Canberra, Australian National University Press, 1964. Reder, M.W., ‘The Anti-Semitism of Some Eminent Economists’, History of Political Economy, vol. 32, no. 4, 2000, pp. 833–56. Rubin, B., Assimilation and its Discontents, New York, NJ, Times Books, 1995. Rubinstein, W.D., and H. Rubinstein, Chosen: The Jews in Australia, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1987. ———. The Jews in Australia: A Thematic History, Melbourne, Heinemann, 1991. ———. Judaism in Australia, Canberra, AGPS, 1995. Rutland, S., The Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia, Sydney, Collins, 2000. Salom, M.F., In Sure Dwellings: A Journey from Expulsion to Assimilation, Henley Beach, SA, Seaview Press, 2000. Schorske, C., Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. Schuchard, R., ‘My Reply: Eliot and the Foregone Conclusions’, Modernism and Modernity, vol. 10, no. 1, 2003, pp. 57–70. Sherman, C.B., The Jew within American Society, Detroit, IL, Wayne State University Press, 1961. Stratton, Jon, Coming Out Jewish, London, Routledge, 2000. Weeden, Margaret, Memoir, Canberra, unpublished, 2000.

Chapter 5

Legacies of the Uyghur Homeland and Uyghur-Australians Anna Hayes

KL Despite official narratives to the contrary, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region1 has a contested history and competing claims of sovereignty. It is also a region beset by inequality, ethnic tensions, periodic outbreaks of ethnic violence and harsh crackdowns by security forces. The Chinese government has long pursued an assimilationist policy in the region, which has resulted in serious problems of inequality along ethnic lines becoming a feature of the province, with the majority Han Chinese faring far better than regional nationalities like the Uyghurs. However, due to long-held beliefs in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that Xinjiang has always been a part of Greater China2 – indeed that this has been the case since ‘ancient times’ – it could be argued that Xinjiang constitutes an unrecognized and unacknowledged colony of the PRC, even in the present day.3 This failure to reconcile the region’s past with the present applies both inside and outside the PRC. Although many people outside China are aware of, or at the very least have some familiarity with, the issues over Tibetan sovereignty and human rights abuses there, far fewer are aware of similar concerns within Xinjiang. These territories have similar historical experiences of annexation and colonization by Chinese forces, and subsequently both have possible claims to independence, or at the very least to greater autonomy and self-determination within the PRC. In addition, since their annexation and later absorption into the PRC, both territories have experienced assimilationist policies designed to ensure they remain part of the PRC, including massive Han Chinese immigration to these 89

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regions. The PRC has also used their natural resources to bolster Chinese development, power and prosperity, and both regions provide a comforting buffer zone between the PRC and other powers along China’s western borders. However, due to the failure of the Chinese government to recognize that Qing annexation could be perceived as an act of colonization – instead referring to it as a unifying process where ‘old territory [was] returned to the motherland’4 – policies in the region are not viewed as assimilationist in nature. Rather, assimilation policies have long been framed in terms of modernization and regional stabilization, where Chinese of all ethnicities are working towards a shared goal for the ‘multiethnic motherland’. This official view of these territories very much reflects the relationship of the dominant powers – the Han Chinese and the Chinese state – with the region. Therefore, the reality of the lived experience of Uyghurs and other regional nationalities is not widely acknowledged, nor is there an official understanding or appreciation that some segments of Xinjiang’s multiethnic population have long regarded this region as a colonized territory, beset by legacies of colonization, and very much a place devoid of multiethnic harmony. A series of events in 2009 highlighted the problematic conditions that Uyghurs and other ethnic groups in Xinjiang have long experienced. These events were a watershed for Uyghurs globally because they drew attention to the as-yet-unachievable goal of Uyghur self-determination in Xinjiang, through either real autonomy or full independence, and to the sustained human rights abuses occurring there. Footage via mobile communication technologies, as well as eyewitness accounts from locals, foreign journalists, tourists and academics in the region, generated media attention on these events and provided a voice to Uyghurs, whereas previous similar events had not received such exposure nor drawn any significant attention to the Xinjiang problem. For Uyghur-Australians, these events found even more traction when they became front page news in Australia. The events under consideration here include the Shaoguan Incident and the resultant Urumqi riots, both of which were essentially domestic issues in the PRC. However, these events took on transnational dimensions when they spilled over onto a visit to Australia by prominent ethnic Uyghur, Rebiya Kadeer, at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) screening of ‘The 10 Conditions of Love’ – a documentary on Kadeer’s life – and her National Press Club (NPC) address, all of which are examined in this chapter. Kadeer, leader of the World Uyghur Congress, is based in Washington DC. She is an important member of the Uyghur diaspora and is a key political activist who highlights the ongoing human rights abuses occurring in Xinjiang. The scheduling of her visit to Australia so soon after the Urumqi riots, along



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with her position as a leading member of the Uyghur diaspora, provoked a strong rebuke from the Chinese. This chapter provides an overview of how these events in Australia, called here China’s ‘down under blunders’, unfolded. However, I am also interested in how these events were reported by the media, how they were received by the public, and how they may have influenced political debate at the time. During this period, Australia’s prime minister was the Mandarinspeaking Kevin Rudd, and there was an early fear that he may pander to the Chinese, to the detriment of Australia’s relationships with the United States and Japan. Therefore, the 2009 events were also an important test of Rudd’s leadership on issues related to the PRC. The events also coincided with the arrest in China of Rio Tinto’s Stern Hu, a Chinese-born Australian citizen who was initially charged with stealing state secrets – although charges were later downgraded to corruption and bribery charges – and who is still serving a lengthy jail sentence in China. Therefore, sections of the electorate were wary of China and there was an undercurrent of fear over the rise of China among the Australian population. This climate potentially made it easier for mainstream Australians to lend their support to the Uyghur cause, especially when faced with what was widely perceived to be heavy handedness and a threatening Chinese state. In addition to providing an overview of how these events unfolded, the chapter analyses the comments contributed to a news story published in the online version of The Australian, which was the most-read national newspaper in Australia at the time of these events.5 The article selected for analysis was written by the national security editor, Patrick Walter, and was published on 11 August 2009. The timing of the article meant that most of the significant events being analysed in this chapter had already occurred, and that readers of The Australian had already been exposed to several news articles covering these events. In analysing the 108 comments accompanying this article, I was interested in examining how readers responded and how this represented perceptions of the China–Australia bilateral relationship. Granted, analysing one article and the comments it contains can only inform on a sliver of the public opinion of these events at that time. However, in the absence of in-depth sampling, these comments do represent the range and types of views being expressed at the time. Therefore, they allow us to tap into some of the concerns and issues readers were willing to express online in response to the article analysed. In addition, in the analysis of the cyberspace exchanges that took place in response to the selected article, the netizens6 remain anonymous and their identity is not of significance for this study. Instead, it is the sentiments contained within these published posts, which have a continued online presence, that

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Figure 5.1: Changing Ethnic Ratios in Xinjiang since PRC annexation in 1949 (%). Chart compiled by the author

are of importance here. Therefore, while the author acknowledges that the analysis contained in this chapter represents only a small sampling of public opinions expressed at the time, these views do go some way in demonstrating how significant these events were, not only for Uyghur-Australians and the digital Uyghur diaspora, but also the importance of 2009 in the Australia– China bilateral relationship and how that relationship was perceived by the electorate. Overall, this chapter argues that the 2009 events were a watershed for greater awareness of the ‘Xinjiang problem’, both inside and outside China. Furthermore, all of these events demonstrate that although Uyghurs living in Australia have left their homeland, they are unable to fully escape the legacies of their homeland; their experiences of colonization, whether this is regarded as a form of external or internal colonization, continue to affect them and their lives in Australia.

A REGIONAL SNAPSHOT OF THE XINJIANG UYGHUR AUTONOMOUS REGION Xinjiang lies in north-west China and is the largest province in the PRC. It is home to a number of minority nationalities, including the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim population of Turkic origin. The Uyghurs are the regional majority population, numbering in the vicinity of 10 million. Xinjiang’s total civilian population numbers around 21.5 million, of whom 61 per cent belong to minority nationalities.7 Xinjiang is also home to increasing numbers of China’s Han majority. Since 1949, Han migration to Xinjiang



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Figure 5.2: Location of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Vector graphics image created by Wikipedia user TUBS with Adobe Illustrator and uploaded with Commonist. Image includes elements that have been taken or adapted from ‘China edcp location map.svg’, created by Uwe Dedering. Reproduced under a CC BY-SA 3.0 licence (https:// commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16493522).

has had a significant effect on ethnic ratios in the region. In 1949, Uyghurs accounted for 76 per cent of the population,8 with Han Chinese making up just 6.7 per cent.9 However, waves of Han migration, resulting from both government programmes and private economic motivations, have seen the Han population recently reach approximately 40 per cent of the overall population in Xinjiang. This has led to a significant change to ethnic ratios there, with recent figures indicating that Uyghurs now account for around 42 per cent of the overall population.10 The volatility of ethnic relations in Xinjiang can be partly attributed to the historical background of Chinese attempts to control the region. After the Qing Empire took control of the territory in 1884, Uyghur resistance against Chinese rule periodically broke out across the region. This resistance even included attempts in 1933–34 and again in 1944–49 to establish an independent state, East Turkistan, in parts of the province.11 Against this

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backdrop, there were several suppressions of uprisings and riots by Chinese forces. In post-1949 China, there is continued resistance among some Uyghurs to Chinese Communist rule. This dissent is driven not only by unfulfilled goals of self-determination, but also by the influence of various religious, social, political and economic policies imposed on the region by the Chinese Communist Party and regional authorities. Since the late 1970s, there have been periods of political outspokenness by Uyghurs, including periodic outbreaks of factional, anti-government conflict. Resistance to the government was swiftly countered, however, and this again increased racial tensions in the region.12 Ethnic stereotyping by Han Chinese about the minority nationality populations, who were often regarded as inferior and developmentally backward, has also been a problem in the province. Mao Zedong called this stereotyping ‘Han chauvinism’, and he critiqued it, and local nationalism, in one of his essays: It is imperative to foster good relations between the Han people and the minority nationalities. The key to this question lies in overcoming Han chauvinism. At the same time, efforts should also be made to overcome local nationalism, wherever it exists among the minority nationalities. Both Han chauvinism and local nationalism are harmful to the unity of the nationalities; they represent a specific contradiction among the people, which should be overcome.13

Nonetheless, almost fifty years later, Han chauvinism is alive and well in Xinjiang, as is local nationalism. Uyghurs have reported they feel like ‘second class citizens’ and ‘criminals’ in their own homeland.14 This lived experience complicates ethnic relations not only on the ground in China, but also in new home locales such as Australia, and also, increasingly, in cyberspace – thereby adding a transnational dimension to these issues, especially as Uyghurs are increasingly going online, forming a digital Uyghur ‘diaspora’. In addition to unfulfilled goals of self-determination, economic disparity fuels ethnic tensions in Xinjiang. Xinjiang is not an economically prosperous province, and it ranks far behind the provinces along China’s eastern seaboard. For many years, Beijing largely overlooked the developmental and economic woes plaguing Xinjiang, and poverty and poor education were common features of the province. Worse still is that Beijing has long exploited Xinjiang for its natural resources, which have been sold at prices that have been kept artificially low. These cheap resources have been used to bolster the development of China’s coastal cities. This practice has had a



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significant effect on Xinjiang’s economic and environmental security, and is further evidence of the perceived Han takeover of Xinjiang.15 However, recognizing contemporary issues in Xinjiang as legacies of Chinese colonization of the territory would require the Chinese government to have a realistic reset of the region, its people and its contested history. Faced with increasing ethnic unrest and tensions, hitherto the Chinese government has proclaimed the region to be an example of multiethnic harmony, thereby ignoring, or at the very least downplaying, the reality of the situation on the ground. Certainly, there are countless daily examples of ethnic harmony in the region, and Han Chinese and Uyghurs for the most part coexist in Xinjiang. However, violent events like the Urumqi riots, which will be discussed shortly, demonstrate that ethnic tensions do remain a feature of the region. Therefore, to simply overlook these problems is not helpful and could prove counterproductive in the long run. In addition, in the latter part of the twentieth century there was an intensification of multiethnic difference in the region, evidenced by the resurgence of Islam and the continued residential segregation of the population, even in large multiethnic cities such as Urumqi. Against this backdrop, Uyghur calls for greater self-determination are highly problematic. Such calls are labelled ‘splittist’ by the Chinese government. Following the introduction of the ‘Strike Hard’ campaign in the mid-1990s, unofficial political organizations, ‘splittism’ or separatism, and other criminal activities such as drug trafficking have been targeted by Chinese authorities.16 This has meant that political activism is very difficult for Uyghurs, not only inside Xinjiang but also among the Uyghur-Australian population, due to fears over repercussions for family members still living in Xinjiang. This chapter now provides a brief overview of the Uyghur population in Australia.

UYGHURS DOWN UNDER The Australian Uyghur population is often difficult to detect in official statistics as an individual’s homeland is normally recorded as the PRC.17 As a result, they are accorded an identity that may be alien to them; one that stands in stark contrast to how they perceive and enact their own identity and nationality. Therefore, it is necessary to consult the Uyghur-Australian community for population information. According to a spokesperson from the East Turkistan Australian Association (ETAA), Adelaide has the largest population of Uyghurs (1,500 including children) in Australia. The community is well organized with community outreach programmes and a drop-in centre, Uyghur language school, Uyghur restaurants in the city, and regular

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community groups and activities.18 There are smaller Uyghur populations in Melbourne and Sydney, with a few families residing in Brisbane (totalling around 1,000 for these locations combined).19 ETAA states that the first Uyghur migrant to Australia was a woman named Patagul, who migrated from Kashgar to Sydney in 1948, accompanied by her brother Ahmat and her Pakistani husband. According to ETAA, she was fleeing the Chinese invasion of East Turkistan,20 making her the first Uyghur political refugee to reach Australia.21 In the 1950s and 1960s, considerable numbers of Uyghurs, also fleeing persecution in their homeland, resettled in Australia. This was the first main wave of Uyghur migrants to Australia. Subsequent waves of migration occurred in the 1990s, when significant numbers of Uyghurs sought asylum following localized unrest in Xinjiang and a series of harsh crackdowns by security forces, some of which were in response to the introduction of the aforementioned Strike Hard campaign. This wave of migration was also prompted by the persecution of Uyghurs following the Baren uprising and again in the aftermath of the Ghulja massacre. These two events share some similarities to the domestic events in China under consideration in this chapter. However, they occurred before the advent of mobile communication technologies and at a time when few foreigners were present in Xinjiang. Therefore, they did not receive the same media attention as the Shaoguan Incident or the Urumqi riots, thereby limiting their effect on wider audiences. However, their effect on Uyghurs living inside and outside Xinjiang continues to the present day. The Baren uprising occurred on 5 April 1990. Although it began as a protest against government policies in Xinjiang, it quickly escalated into a serious local uprising. There were clashes with police in the town of Baren, near Kashgar, during which rioters overwhelmed police and seized arms and ammunition. Skirmishes between armed rioters and police and security forces continued over the next couple of days. Eventually, local police and security forces were joined by the People’s Liberation Army troops, and the uprising was put down on 10 April 1990.22 According to Rudelson and Jankowiak,23 over three thousand Uyghurs were killed in the clashes. Similarly, during April 1997, the city of Ghulja experienced a series of anti-government protests-cumriots by Uyghurs. Local security, police and military personnel suppressed the riots with force. It was reported that approximately two hundred people had been killed, but eyewitnesses claim that figure could have been as high as thousands.24 These events were examples of serious regional tensions and they both demonstrate the swift nature of Chinese crackdowns on riots in the region. Both events also led to Uyghurs fleeing China, seeking refuge in other states, including Australia. Following these two events, Uyghur migration to



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Australia has been a mixture of family reunifications and individuals seeking political asylum in Australia upon arrival. By virtue of advanced communication technologies, and rising numbers of Uyghurs living in the Global North, the Uyghur-Australian community has increasingly become part of the connected digital Uyghur diaspora. According to Marat, digital capability has provided power to members of the Uyghur diaspora who may otherwise have been ‘powerless in [the] physical space’.25 Alongside feelings of power also comes unity and transnational sentiment. This unity fosters community, identity and belonging among disparate populations of Uyghurs across the globe. The Uyghur online presence is also a vehicle of diasporic politics, and politically active members of the community have been able to offer significant counterpoints to Beijing’s official line regarding the province.26 Therefore, the digital diaspora can be ‘an empowering tool’ personally,27 as members of the Uyghur diaspora connect with one another across vast geographic spaces, but also politically, as ethnopolitical activism becomes a key desired outcome of the digital Uyghur diaspora. This chapter now turns to an examination of the events of 2009, beginning with domestic events in the PRC.

TROUBLES IN THE HOMELAND During 2009, the problematic nature of ethnic relations in Xinjiang and beyond repeatedly became the subject of international attention and scrutiny. The first incident to attract international attention was the beating deaths of migrant Uyghur workers at a toy factory in Guangdong Province. Initially described as a ‘brawl’ by Xinhua News Agency, the events at the toy factory have since become known as the Shaoguan Incident.28 Earlier, in May 2009, forty Uyghurs from Kashgar Prefecture were sent to work at the factory as part of a government mandatory labour transfer programme. By June, their numbers had increased to eight hundred. The Uyghur migrant workers did not go unnoticed by the large Han Chinese workforce – numbering in the vicinity of sixteen thousand – or by the local Han Chinese residents, who became increasingly distrustful of the Uyghur migrant workers. On the nights of 25 and 26 June, riots erupted at the factory after rumours were circulated online that Uyghur men had raped two Han Chinese factory workers. The allegations, despite being later disproven, were enough to tip the balance, and Uyghur factory workers were beaten to death in the dormitory compound of the factory by their Han Chinese coworkers. Official estimates state that two Uyghurs were killed29 and 118 were hospitalized as a result of their injuries.30 Some workers used mobile devices

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to film the murders and beatings of the Uyghur migrant workers, and posted the footage on YouTube and other online sites. Within days of their upload, these clips went viral across China and beyond. On 5 July 2009, protests over perceived government inaction regarding the Shaoguan Incident were staged by Uyghurs in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. The protests escalated into ethnically motivated attacks on Han Chinese residents by protesting Uyghurs, after reports surfaced of heavy handedness by security forces, including allegations that authorities began to fire rounds into the crowd.31 Han Chinese residents responded to the violence by launching counterattacks, and the streets of Urumqi were beset by brutal beatings, violence and killings. The official death toll of the ethnic riots is reported to number around 197 people, with 1,600 injured and 1,434 detained in the days immediately following the riots.32 With mounting pressure on authorities to release figures on the ethnic identity of those killed, the government released data via Xinhua News Agency in August 2009. Xinhua News Agency reported that of the 156 civilians killed, 134 were Han Chinese, 11 were Hui Chinese (Muslim Chinese), 10 were Uyghur and 1 was Manchu.33 They also stated that 12 other people were shot dead by authorities while engaged in violent or criminal acts, but did not provide data on their ethnic background. Although there have been other incidents more recently,34 the 2009 Urumqi riots remain one of the most serious examples of ethnic unrest in Xinjiang in recent years. The resulting media attention raised greater international awareness of the Uyghur and other minority nationalities in Xinjiang, and of ethnic tensions within that region. In Australia, reportage of these events drew wider public attention to the contested sovereignty of the region, and the inequality and oppression faced by the Uyghur in their homeland.35 However, soon after these domestic incidents in China, a series of events occurred in Australia that transplanted the issue to Australian soil and directly involved the Australian public.

CHINA’S ‘DOWN UNDER BLUNDERS’ Not long after the Urumqi riots, the Uyghurs and Xinjiang became highly reported topics in Australian mainstream media. This renewed attention on the Xinjiang problem stemmed from the planned visit by Rebiya Kadeer to Australia to attend the screening of ‘The 10 Conditions of Love’. The documentary is based on her life and experiences as a spokesperson for the Uyghurs, and was to be screened as part of the 2009 MIFF, which coincidentally had the tagline of ‘Everyone’s a critic’. Kadeer was scheduled to attend the premiere screening of the film, and also hoped to meet members



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of the Uyghur community in exile and Australian parliamentarians during her time in Australia. However, her planned visit to Australia was not well received by the Chinese government, and Chinese officials tried to pressure the government not to grant her a visa. The incident quickly became a source of diplomatic tensions and culminated in the cancellation of a high-level visit to Australia by Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei. He was due to attend the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) in Cairns and a meeting afterwards to discuss Prime Minister Rudd’s Asia–Pacific Community proposal.36 Although China did not withdraw entirely from the PIF (sending the Chinese ambassador instead), they did not attend the scheduled post-event meeting to discuss the proposal. Chinese attempts to prevent Kadeer being granted a visa had been widely reported during July and early August, but the serious nature of these events for the China–Australia bilateral relationship were only fully realized when the Kadeer issue was raised in the federal parliament on 18 August 2009 in a question without notice by Julie Bishop (member for Curtin and then deputy leader of the opposition), and a subsequent question by Bronwyn Bishop (member for Mackellar). Stephen Smith (member for Perth and then Australian foreign minister), provided a lengthy response to their questions. The following excerpt is taken from his overall response: The Chinese authorities at a range of levels, including my counterpart, Foreign Minister Yang, made very strong representations to us that we should prevent her visit. I considered those representations and came to the conclusion that there was no basis for denying her entry to Australia. As a consequence of Australia granting her a visa for the third occasion that she had visited Australia in [a] private capacity, the Chinese authorities made it very clear to Australian officials that they were most unhappy with her visit. As a consequence of her visit, they indicated to Australia that the proposed visit to Australia of Vice-Minister He to attend the Pacific Islands Forum Post-Forum Dialogue would not occur … As a consequence of Vice-Minister He not attending the Pacific Islands Forum Post-Forum Dialogue, the senior officials’ meeting between Australia and China would also not take place. Both of those actions on the part of Chinese authorities were said by Australian officials to be a direct consequence of, and a direct response to, Australia’s decision to allow Rebiya Kadeer to enter Australia – as a direct result of my decision not to interfere with our usual and normal immigration processes. When I made that decision, I indicated to China that Australia of course respected the territorial sovereignty and integrity of China over the western provinces. Australia very much regrets that China has decided to effect that response. Whether China proposes to effect any further responses as a result of our decision to allow Rebiya Kadeer to enter Australia is entirely a matter for the exercise of China’s discretion. If China does take further action as a result of us allowing

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Rebiya Kadeer to come to Australia, we will of course regret that. But the basis of the Australian government’s decision is this: we have a longstanding productive economic relationship with China … From time to time in any bilateral relationship there will be difficulties. These difficulties need to be managed carefully and successfully, as Australia is currently managing difficulties that we have in our relationship with China – in particular, the visit of Rebiya Kadeer to Australia and the Stern Hu case.

He then went on to state: I make this final point: If China takes any further action in response to our decision, that will be for us a matter of regret. But we will deal with the matter sensibly, and we will not resort to the flip-flop politicking that the opposition makes of our relationship with China. I vaguely remember the Leader of the Opposition saying to the government some time ago that we should stand up to China. We did on the Rebiya Kadeer issue.37

Occurring alongside this political fallout, however, Kadeer’s visit was also causing other rumblings, most notably for the MIFF. With the increased media attention on Kadeer’s visit, the documentary about her life, which was to be screened at the MIFF, also attracted considerable interest. As a result, the festival organizers were subject to several requests by Chinese consulate staff in Melbourne that the documentary be pulled from the festival line-up. In addition, representatives of the Chinese government contacted Melbourne’s lord mayor, Robert Doyle, requesting the same thing – a request he did not action.38 Following this, the MIFF’s website was hacked and online ticket sales were temporarily shut down after hackers filled online shopping carts with tickets to various sessions, and the MIFF received a barrage of emails condemning them for not withdrawing the film.39 According to a MIFF spokesperson, during this time there were hundreds of attempts to hack the website.40 One hacker, who self-identified as ‘oldjun’, but was later identified as a Chinese citizen living in China, was successful in completely hacking the site. He was able to put a Chinese flag on the MIFF website and it was accompanied by the message, ‘We like film, but we hate Rebiya Kadeer! We like peace and we hate East Turkistan terrorists! Please apologize to all the Chinese people!’41 The MIFF was undeterred, the film was screened, and it attracted a larger audience than was previously expected.42 Some netizens openly identified the Chinese government’s reaction to the film as being the key factor in them choosing to view it. One netizen stated, ‘I know exactly which film I will be seeing now! Thanks China, you just made my choice all so easy!’43 The attention and increased audience attendance was a coup for Uyghur nationalists, and for Rebiya Kadeer. However, the series of events



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did not end there. Kadeer’s profile and the Uyghur cause were further elevated in August 2009 when Chinese authorities also attempted to have her National Press Club appearance cancelled. Chinese officials met with NPC representatives, who also remained unmoved, and Kadeer gave her address as planned.44 In her NPC address, Kadeer reflected on the series of events she had experienced. Through an interpreter, she joked, ‘I deeply appreciate the support of the Chinese government in raising my profile … I could not have spent millions of dollars in getting this sort of publicity, but thanks to the Chinese government for raising my profile and informing Australians of the plight of the Uighurs’.45 As identified by Kadeer, the actions of the Chinese government served to elevate her profile in Australia, and increased awareness of the Uyghur plight across Australia. In discussing Chinese attempts to have her NPC address cancelled, Michael Danby, a federal Labor member of parliament, raised human rights as an important consideration in the debate, stating ‘[w]e think the human rights of national minorities in the People’s Republic of China should be respected as their constitution says it should be’.46 He added that the events had provided him ‘a useful insight into some of the challenges facing the Uighur people’,47 a sentiment that echoed earlier statements by Jeff Daniels, the director of ‘The 10 Conditions of Love’. In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Daniels remarked that ‘Melbourne is getting a small taste of the position that the Chinese Government has put Rebiya Kadeer and her family and the Uighur population in for the past 60 years’.48 As a result of this attempt to silence Kadeer in Australia, her visit and documentary became highly publicized issues in mid 2009.

NETIZENS REACT A newspaper article on the attempt to prevent Kadeer’s NPC address was analysed for this section of the chapter. I deliberately selected an article on this particular blunder, due to the events and media attention that had preceded it. Obviously, regular readers of The Australian had been kept up to date with news stories on these events, and the earlier events in Urumqi. However, greater awareness of the Xinjiang problem did not lead to a consensus of opinion about these events, and netizens were divided in their views on Australia’s response to Chinese attempts to silence Kadeer. The comment forum accompanying the article titled ‘Call for Press Club Ban: Chinese Pressure Media’ demonstrated this diversity of public opinion, with 108 comments expressing very different viewpoints. These offer an interesting insight into how these events were being received by the Australian public.

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One netizen, identifying as ‘James of Melbourne’, felt Australia had acted insensitively towards China. He stated: ‘We’ve invited a person that China puts on their “axis of evil” to speak at our press club. No wonder they are up in arms. What does this show? A clear disrespect for their country and their policies’.49 This reference to China’s ‘axis of evil’ is clearly a reference to the language and rhetoric of George W. Bush and the War on Terror (WoT) (2001–present). Therefore, its use here is not out of place. Since 9/11 and the onset of the WoT, Uyghur separatists have increasingly been recast as ‘terrorists’ and the Chinese government has attempted to position them within the WoT. According to Mackerras, 9/11 and the resultant WoT gave Chinese authorities greater scope for the suppression of Uyghur separatism due to the international antiterror campaigns linking Islamic fundamentalism to terrorism.50 However, the real significance of this recasting is that it led to confusion about the motivations of advocates for an independent East Turkistan nation state. For example, when the U.S. State Department labelled the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) a terrorist organization in 2002, other groups advocating East Turkistani independence51 were sometimes erroneously viewed as being part of the ETIM.52 This mindset also caught on in cyberspace, and in 2009, Uyghur separatism was being viewed through the lens of Islamic terrorism. The subtext of the post by ‘James of Melbourne’ indicates that this recasting was having some influence over public opinion. Other netizens, however, were concerned by perceived Chinese attacks on free speech in Australia. ‘Ian of Brisbane’ stated, ‘The Chinese government is horrifying almost every time it makes a move. But not at all surprising. Maybe in future, the free speech issue should actually be brought up at the point of “politely refusing” … Like “Sorry but that would impede free speech”’.53 Free speech, however, was disregarded by ‘Madison of Melbourne’, who was also focused on the threat of terror, although she seemed a little confused over the Australian government’s stance on the issue. She stated: All the people here who are up in arms about our government’s lack of response to the situation are foolish. Unlike the media, who’d do anything to get a story, the government has our nation’s best interests in mind when prioritising diplomacy over hypocrisy. Because that’s what it would be. By supporting Kadeer, you’re supporting terrorism. There’d be no way we’d allow Bin Laden into our country, so why should we allow Kadeer? Double standards? China has every right to ask Australia to pull the plug on this one. All this talk about free speech is absolute nonsense in this case.54

These excerpts represent but a few of the 108 posts contained in the forum. However, the selection accurately conveys the currents of thought reflected in many of the posts, demonstrating just how divided netizens were over these



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issues. Quantitative analysis of the posts undertaken as part of the research for this chapter further illuminates the range of key subtexts of each of the posts. This analysis involved the author reading each post, and identifying the key subtext of each of the posts. The categories for each subtext emerged organically after an initial read through of the comment posts. These findings are reflected in Table 5.1. When netizens wrote a response post, that is a post written by one netizen to deliberately respond to an earlier post by another netizen, the subtext of these posts was also recorded, and these findings are reflected in Table 5.2. The quantitative analysis of the posts demonstrated that the key concerns expressed by netizens were centred on the unacceptable nature of Key subtext of posts

Number of Overall percentage posts reflecting of key subtext key subtext (Total 108)

Australia–China bilateral relationship

9

8.33%

Australia’s interference in China’s domestic 5 affairs is inappropriate

4.62%

Chinese foreign ownership in Australia

1

0.92%

China’s foreign policy/relations

4

3.70%

China is an authoritarian state/regime

3

2.77%

China’s interference in Australia’s domestic 18 affairs is inappropriate

16.66%

China has a right to intervene/defend itself

–

–

China ‘threat’ perception

2

1.85%

Condemnation of separatism

-

-

Double standard expressed by Australia/the 9 West

8.33%

Economic/trade interests

1

0.92%

Freedom of speech

8

7.40%

Human rights abuses in China

2

1.85%

Illogical or rant post

10

9.25%

Lack of official condemnation by PM Kevin 4 Rudd/Government silence

3.70%

Linking of Rebiya Kadeer/Uyghurs to 3 terrorism

2.77%

Rebiya Kadeer

2

1.85%

Rebuttal to another post using quotes or 1 other information

0.92%

Response post to another netizens

24.07%

26

Table 5.1: Key subtext of posts. Illogical or rant posts were those that did not have a clear subtext or were completely off-topic. Table compiled by the author.

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Chinese interference in Australian domestic affairs. This interference was regarded by netizens as evidence of ‘Chinese despotism “gone global”’55 and that Chinese attempts ‘to enforce their will on us is of grave concern’.56 However, other netizens found Australian and Western double standards towards the Chinese reprehensible. They believed that Australian complaints about Chinese interference in things they believed to be domestic Chinese issues (that is, the July 2009 riots and the plight of Uyghurs in Xinjiang) to be ‘breathtaking hypocrisy’57 and evidence of a double standard towards China that reflected ‘Western ethnocentrist ideology’.58 Of course, these latter arguments could be applied to Chinese attempts to have Kadeer denied a visa, have the documentary banned and prevent her NPC address from taking place, all of which were essentially domestic issues in Australia. Other key concerns included that the events were linked to, or were a direct cost of, the Australia–China bilateral relationship. One netizen, concerned that ‘neither [Kevin] Rudd nor [Stephen] Smith are to meet with Ms Kadeer’ found the whole episode to reflect the problems of Australia’s bilateral relationship with ‘[a] country that denies democratic rights to its people, practises gross human rights abuses and tries to muzzle and manipulate other countries into serving its own purposes’.59 Another accused China of being ‘hell-bent on undoing twenty years of capable diplomacy it has invested in its Australia relationship’, castigating the Chinese Foreign Service for demonstrating ‘Stalinist finesse’ in handling the Kadeer visit.60 Other netizens criticized Australia for ‘putting all our apples in the one China basket’,61 identifying the down under blunders as a timely warning that Australia needed to ‘review our export and trade policy to enhance diversification and avoid over concentration on one nation, particularly a nation whose ideology is so different from ours and who by all means is a dictorial [sic] regime’.62 Free speech was also a popular topic. However, not all netizens were motivated by a belief in the importance of maintaining free speech. One netizen who raised free speech as an important issue linked it directly to Kadeer. They warned that Kadeer should not be allowed a vehicle for ‘disrespect[ing] those precious and innocent lives killed by the terrists [sic] during the 7.5 Riot’.63 Clearly, for this netizen, Kadeer’s speech at the NPC did not embody freedom of speech, but instead was seen as an exercise in Uyghur ‘propaganda’ (refer to Table 5.1). Also notable was the online discussion of these issues that took place among netizens who posted to the forum. The initial subtext of around 24 per cent of the 108 posts involved direct responses to posts by other netizens. When examining the subtext of those response posts, it became clear that they were primarily concerned with rebutting the information contained in the original post. However, unlike the identified subtexts of the posts in



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Table 5.1, these posts appeared to be more pro-China, with netizens conveying deep concerns over the perceived double standard being expressed towards China by Australia (and the West). Like the results in Table 5.1, those in Table 5.2 demonstrated that netizens were divided in their support for Australia and China. However, the majority of response posts were attempts to defend China’s efforts to interfere in the Kadeer visit. One netizen declared: ‘[It’s] also obvious that any country other than China has to meet a far lesser burden of proof in order to have their current enemy labelled as a “terrorist”… Double standards, that’s what’s obvious to me’.64 Responses to other posts were also centred on the right of China to defend itself. For some netizens, this was a fairly easy equation: ‘China has labelled Kadeer as a terrorist and who are you to question it?’65 The condemnation of separatism was another key concern, with one netizen arguing that ‘separatism is an unacceptable way to improve your circumstances and that people should work within the confines of the system to solve problems’.66 Others, however, did question China, and they condemned the authoritarian nature of the Chinese state, warning ‘that as China grows stronger it will increasingly try to impose it autocratic values on the democratic West’ (see Table 5.2).67 Key subtext identified Number of response posts Overall percentage in a response post Australia–China relationship

reflecting key subtext

of key subtext of

(Total 26)

response posts

bilateral 1

3.84%

Australia’s interference in 1 China’s domestic affairs is inappropriate

3.84%

China is an authoritarian 2 state/regime

7.69%

China has a right intervene/defend itself

11.53%

to 3

Condemnation of separatism 2

7.69%

Double standard expressed 5 by Australia/the West

19.23%

Freedom of speech

1

3.84%

Human rights abuses in 1 China

3.84%

Illogical or rant post

1

3.84%

Linking of Rebiya Kadeer/ 1 Uyghurs to terrorism

3.84%

Rebuttal to another post using 8 quotes or other information

30.76%

Table 5.2: Key subtexts of response posts. Table compiled by the author.

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The debate over the nature of a ‘rising’ China, hyper Han nationalism, and human rights in China is not surprising here, given that Australia has long struggled to come to terms with its relationship with China. As demonstrated by numerous authors, racism, fear, fascination and the ‘Othering’ of Chinese Australians and China has long been a feature of the Australian social and political landscape.68 In addition, the Tiananmen Incident of 1989 raised the profile of human rights abuses in China among the Australian electorate, and resulted in Australian support for United Nations Human Rights draft resolutions on China (1989–96), followed by the Australia–China Bilateral Dialogue Approach to improving human rights in China (1997–present).69 The aforementioned posts on the Kadeer article reflect the continuing public uncertainty over how Australia, and Australians, should feel towards China and its rise. They also convey how the past continues to affect the present when it comes to Australia–China relations. The comments on the news article by Walters are also of importance to this particular study as they demonstrate how the down under blunders did raise overall awareness of the Uyghurs to the point that netizens were engaging in debates about Xinjiang and Kadeer, even though their views were sharply divided and sometimes reflected poor overall understanding of the issues involved. Interestingly, while the overwhelming majority of the 108 posts had a recorded location in Australia, twelve identified a geographic location outside Australia.70 The wide interest in this one news story, and the debate presented in the forum, highlights that this was an issue netizens engaged with and debated. Thus, it is feasible that Uyghur issues could attract significant attention among netizens if they were to receive more political and media attention. The locations of the posts are interesting also because they demonstrate how the ‘networked society’ can result in borderless media politics.71 This is not the first time the Chinese have experienced this type of globalized media politics. Issues around the ‘colonization’ of Tibet and subsequent Chinese treatment of Tibetans, as well as reports on human rights violations in China, were highlighted by non-government organizations and protest groups in a sustained campaign in the lead-up to both the torch relay and the hosting of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.72 Chinese attempts to control or filter depictions of the Beijing games, and a reluctance to ‘“win consent” through strategic incorporation of oppositional forces’,73 led to further criticisms of the Chinese government, their treatment of Tibetans, and human rights violations in China. This in turn served to reinforce the negative connotations that were being ascribed to them by the globalized media politics at work. Similarly, in the case of the down under blunders,



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attempts to silence dissident voices, like that of Kadeer, in established democracies like Australia, merely served to further alienate China from those suspicious of it and its motivations. Yet this also reflected the failure of those Chinese officials to fully grasp the difference between their own political system and those of other states worldwide. When asked in an ABC interview why he thought consular officials had attempted to have the documentary pulled from the MIFF, international relations expert Dennis Woodward replied that he believed it was partly to do with a mindset where within China the government has much greater controls over the activities of civil society than in Western liberal democracies. And so they think in the Australian case, that Australian governments have the same power, and blame the Australian government when they don’t crack down on groups that the Chinese government would like it to crack down on.74

Therefore, as indicated by many of the abovementioned posts, friendship and fascination with China is still tempered by fear and suspicion. However, sometimes this fear is driven by the actions of Chinese officials, and in the case of the down under blunders, this was certainly the case.

RESPONSES FROM UYGHUR-AUSTRALIANS The response of Uyghur-Australians to the down under blunders was also considerable. The events of 2009, both in their homeland and in Australia, prompted members of the Uyghur-Australian community to demonstrate outside the Chinese consulates in Sydney and Melbourne, and outside Melbourne Town Hall prior to the screening of ‘The 10 Conditions of Love’. These protests were a bold and courageous undertaking given that, in June 2006, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) had warned that ‘[i]t is likely that Chinese authorities seek to monitor Uighur groups in Australia and obtain information on their membership and supporters’.75 Therefore, even though Uyghur-Australians are no longer living in China, it would appear that they are not free from attempts at control and censure by Chinese officials. For the one hundred and fifty or so protesters outside the Melbourne consulate on 7 August 2009, consulate surveillance cameras were likely to have recorded their movements. However, that did not appear to dampen their resolve to advertise their message – that they considered the Chinese government to be the ‘terrorist’. One representative from the ETAA saw

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the protests as an important opportunity for the Uyghur community in Australia to unify so they could inform the wider Australian population of the plight of the Uyghurs. He also expressed a desire that the Australian government would use diplomatic means to pressure the Chinese government to release figures on how many Uyghurs had been arrested in Xinjiang following the Urumqi riots and to explain the reasons behind such arrests.76 Given that many of the protesters had travelled from Adelaide to Melbourne, the importance of this ethnopolitical activism was clear. Also noteworthy is that Kadeer joined this particular protest, demonstrating her support for the Uyghur-Australian community and their ethnopolitical activism in response to the events in China and in Australia. Through an interpreter she stated: Australia is a great democracy because of that the Uighur people can come out today to peacefully protest against Chinese government injustices. And here we see in a democracy that peaceful protest is not cracked down by security forces, unlike in China. So we are very grateful for the great nation of Australia and for all the Uighurs who are living here.77

Kadeer’s comments are important here as it is not only Australian democracy that provides the foundational basis for Uyghurs to take to the streets to protest events occurring in their Uyghur homeland. Australian multiculturalism, which stands in stark contrast to the assimilation policy they have long experienced in China, is also worth some consideration. Australian multiculturalism attempts to provide scope for migrant communities to maintain their cultural identities, including social and political connections with their homelands. Therefore, protests like those staged in Melbourne and Sydney by Uyghur-Australians are not that uncommon in the Australian context. However, the virtues of Australian multiculturalism should not be overstated as it is a contested concept within Australian society, politics and academia, and it has been subject to heavy criticism and debate. In addition, even though multicultural policies were introduced into Australia in the 1970s, intercultural citizenship within the Australian context remains underdeveloped,78 and multiculturalism largely remains focused on a dominant white imaginary.79 Further, according to Schech and Rainbird, although Australian multiculturalism encourages and assists the formation of ‘community organizations based around national and ethnic identities … [members of migrant communities are still] expected to know and embrace Australian values and … [they are] required to do much of the work of building bridges across cultural boundaries’.80 Overall, however, regardless of the challenges Australia still faces in its further



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development of multiculturalism and intercultural citizenship, Australian multiculturalism has provided agency for Uyghur-Australians to maintain a cultural identity within Australia, and to legally protest the ongoing human rights abuses occurring in their homeland. In response to Kadeer’s speech, the representative from the ETAA expressed his hope in her visit and its effect on Uyghur-Australians and wider Australian society. He stated: The Ms Rebiya Kadeer visit will improve the unity among the people; among the community members in Australia as well. It will help us to send our voices to the Australian people about our country, about our people and about our culture, and about, most importantly, the current situation in East Turkistan.81

These bold displays of ethnopolitical activism by members of the Uyghur-Australian community were unprecedented. However, they were also potentially quite dangerous for family members still living in the Uyghur homeland. In 2006, DFAT also warned that the repercussions of political activity in Australia could lead to ‘Chinese authorities harassing individuals and/or their family members (for example, including, but not necessarily limited to, creating difficulties in pursuing education or public sector employment opportunities)’.82 In addition, instances of harassment by Chinese nationalists of members of the Uyghur diaspora are well documented by Uyghur rights groups and this harassment has reportedly been experienced by Uyghur-Australians.83 Therefore, with the threat of surveillance of demonstrators, and repercussions of political activity being a very real issue for the UyghurAustralian community, some protesters were concerned that their actions may have consequences for loved ones back home. One of the organizers of the Sydney consulate protests stated that ‘he fear[ed] his role in organizing the Australian protests could put his family in danger’.84 However, he stated that he was moved to organize the protest by his hope that the Australian government would apply diplomatic pressure on the Chinese government over the problems faced by Uyghurs in Xinjiang. He stressed that the protests presented a moral dilemma for Uyghur-Australians in that the decision had to be made whether or not to self-censor on the ‘killings of other Uighurs’ so as to protect one’s own family, or to speak out for the collective good of one’s people. This in itself demonstrates one of the heaviest legacies of the homeland for Uyghur-Australians. Ultimately, this protester was driven to join the protests by the determination and outspokenness of Uyghur-Australians, all of whom sought to draw attention to the tragic events in their homeland. He stated:

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Surprisingly for the first time I saw that so many Uighurs attended the [Sydney] demonstration and they were crying and they were yelling slogans; they just expressed their deep anger over the massacre that’s continuing in Uighur land. I was so impressed by the feeling and the passion, this kind of inexpressible spiritual bond among my people. This tragedy united us.85

Therefore, like the representative of the ETAA, this protester felt that the events of 2009 served to not only inform the wider Australian community of what was occurring in the Uyghur homeland, but also strengthened the unity of the Uyghur-Australian community. In this moment, their purpose was crystallized behind the goals of securing wider public awareness of the problems faced by Uyghurs in the homeland, and to secure political support for greater diplomatic pressure to be applied to the Chinese government so it could be held accountable for what had transpired in Xinjiang during the riots, and to curtail the arbitrary arrests of predominantly Uyghur men that had taken place in the weeks and months following the riots. Perhaps another key driver motivating the protesters in Australia was that this time the violence and killings were largely done by the civilian population. Rather than attacks on military and security forces, followed by security force crackdowns on the ‘three evil forces’, this was an outbreak of ethnically driven civilian violence, fuelling widespread mistrust of the Other. This civilian-based conflict has prompted a very tenuous situation to develop for the residents of Xinjiang, and since 2009 ethnicity in the region has become even more noticeable and divisive. It also demonstrates a marked change in the sites at which physical violence is enacted in Xinjiang and in who perpetrates the violence. Whereas some previous attacks had targeted the civilian population alongside military and police personnel and stations, the Urumqi riots saw civilians targeting other civilians in a long-building yet spontaneous frenzy of violence on the streets of Urumqi. This stands in stark contrast to official Chinese protestations of what ethnic relations are on the ground, instead demonstrating that there is multiethnic disharmony in some segments of Xinjiang’s society. According to Thum, local discontent in Xinjiang has also become ethnicized with Han residents in Xinjiang adding to Uyghur voices of discontent over how the province is administered and organized.86 However, Han and Uyghur are not united in their discontent, and ordinary residents of Xinjiang are now drawing ethnic boundaries against the Other. This was evident to the author while conducting field research in Urumqi in 2012. A third-generation Han Chinese resident of Urumqi declared ethnic battlelines had been drawn in 2009. Prior to that time he felt that the Han Chinese had adopted a ‘softly-softly’ approach to Uyghurs. However, since the riots



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he reported the Han Chinese as saying: ‘[We have] taken over Urumqi and we will never give it back. It is ours now!’87 Although one could dissect the accuracy of the first part of his statement, it is the second part that has resonance here. It reinforces the observations made by Thum, and it should be a sobering warning to regional authorities that the stage is set for future outbreaks of civilian ethnic violence to erupt at any time. This is reinforced by Holdstock: ‘What the Uyghurs who dragged Han out of cars and beat them, and the Han who wanted to hurt Uyghurs with cleavers and shovels, had in common was that they wanted to hurt strangers purely on the basis of their ethnicity’.88 Clarke linked this ethnic conflict to the inherent contradictions and failures of successive government policies in Xinjiang, stating that it is time for Beijing to rethink its approach to the region.89 In addition, Clarke argued that the Chinese government needs to recognize that its efforts to silence Kadeer and to link her to terrorism, and their continued interference in her visits to states such as Australia will not go unchallenged by the Uyghur community in exile.90 It also demonstrates the pressing need for official recognition of the process of colonization – be that an external or internal process – that has occurred in Xinjiang, and the ongoing legacy of this process for the region’s indigenous inhabitants.

CONCLUSION Rebiya Kadeer did elicit more political attention during her stay in Australia. In a meeting between Bob Brown, the then leader of the Australian Greens political party, and Kadeer, Brown reportedly described Kadeer as ‘an extraordinary, powerful and motivating human being’. He is also quoted as stating that he ‘look[ed] forward to the next visit to Canberra of President Hu Jintao so that we can take it right up to him in Canberra, that it is time for your [Rebiya’s] family and the people of East Turkistan to be free’.91 Such public expressions of support for Uyghurs by political leaders like Brown will also likely increase the political power base of the Uyghur diasporic community. It is this community that will provide the media with newsworthy stories, particularly if they are in response to human rights violations, crackdowns occurring in Xinjiang, or further outbreaks of civilian ethnic conflict. Further to this, future incidents of Chinese interference in Australian domestic affairs, such as occurred in Australia in 2009, will also serve to focus political and international attention on the situation of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. For the Uyghur-Australian community, repeats of these types of events will

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likely increase their agency further if they again find broad sympathy among the Australian media and politicians, and among segments of the Australian population, as demonstrated by the more sympathetic posts contained in the online discussion analysed in this chapter. However, a repeat of the events of 2009 will also mean that concerns over events in the Uyghur homeland will continue to affect the lives of Uyghur-Australians, reinforcing the point that until the issues of contested sovereignty and problematic ethnic relations are resolved, they will never be truly able to move beyond the legacies of their homeland.

ANNA HAYES Anna Hayes is a senior lecturer in Political Science at the College of Arts, Society and Education, James Cook University. She is co-editor of three recent books: Inside Xinjiang: Space, Place and Power in China’s Muslim Far Northwest (Routledge 2016) with Michael Clarke; Migration and Insecurity: Citizenship and Social Inclusion in a Transnational Era (Routledge 2013) with Niklaus Steiner and Robert Mason; and Cultures in Refuge: Seeking Sanctuary in Modern Australia (Ashgate 2012) with Robert Mason. Her most recent research examines human insecurity and contested histories in Xinjiang, as well as the Uyghur-Australian community. NOTES   1. Hereinafter referred to as Xinjiang.  2. Information of the State Council, White Paper on History and Development of Xinjiang, May 2003, http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200305/26/ print20030526_117240.html (accessed 14 September 2011).   3. The territory that comprises Xinjiang was annexed by the Qing Empire in 1884. With the collapse of the Qing Empire, the territory became part of the Republic of China (ROC), later to become part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, after the communists’ defeat of the nationalists in the Chinese Civil War (1927–49). In October 1955, the province was given an autonomous status within the PRC, becoming the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. However, real autonomy in the region is severely limited, and the failure to recognize the legacy of Qing colonization of the region, and how the transferal of this territory to the ROC and then PRC encompasses this legacy and extends it into the contemporary era, seriously complicates the region’s ethnic politics. This would represent a form of external colonization. However, even if the territory was regarded as an integral part of the Chinese state, and therefore not a territory



  4.   5.

  6.  7.

 8.  9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

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that has been colonized by the Chinese acting as an external force, the policies enacted on this region and its peoples could be viewed as a process of internal colonization, especially given the significant ethnic differences between the indigenous populations of the region and the Han Chinese. Information of the State Council, White Paper. Roy Morgan Research, ‘Roy Morgan Readership Results Year Ending 2010’, December 2010, http://www.roymorgan.com/industries/media/readership/ readership-archive (accessed 9 December 2015). In this chapter, ‘netizens’ refers to ‘citizens of the internet’ who actively participate in the online community. Statistical Bureau of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Xinjiang Statistical Yearbook 2010, Beijing, China Statistics Press, 2010. This figure includes population statistics on the Uyghur, Kazak, Hui, Kirgiz, Mongolian, Xibo, Russian, Tajik, Uzbek, Tatar, Manchu and Daur ethnic groups, as well as the category of ‘Other’, which would include other Chinese ethnic minority groups who have migrated to Xinjiang. Baogang He and Guo Yingjie, Nationalism, National Identity and Democratization in China, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000, p. 147. Robyn Iredale, Naran Bilik and Wang Su, Contemporary Minority Migration, Education and Ethnicity in China, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2001, p. 166. Statistical Bureau of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Xinjiang Statistical Yearbook 2012, Beijing, China Statistics Press, 2012. Linda Benson, The Ili Rebellion: The Moslem Challenge to Chinese Authority in Xinjiang, 1944–1949, New York, M.E. Sharpe, 1990; Michael Dillon, ‘Death on the Silk Route: Violence in Xinjiang’, BBC News, 3 August 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/world-asia-pacific-14384605 (accessed 22 August 2011); James Millward and Nabijan Tursun, ‘Political Histories and Strategies of Control, 1884–1978’, in Frederick Starr (ed.), Xinjiang China’s Muslim Borderland, New York, NJ, M.E. Sharpe, 2004, pp. 63–98. Elizabeth Van Wie Davis, ‘Uyghur Muslim Ethnic Separatism in Xinjiang, China’, Asian Affairs: An American Review, vol. 35, no. 1, 2008, pp. 15–30. For a more detailed examination of the integration of Xinjiang into China, see Michael Clarke, ‘The Problematic Progress of “Integration” in the Chinese State’s Approach to Xinjiang, 1759–2005’, Asian Ethnicity, vol. 8, no. 3, 2007, pp. 261–89; Michael Dillon, Xinjiang – China’s Muslim Far Northwest, New York, NJ, RoutledgeCurzon, 2004; and Colin Mackerras, China’s Ethnic Minorities and Globalization, New York, NJ, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. Mao Zedong, Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tse-Tung, translated by the Editorial Committee for the Selected Readings from the Works of Mao TseTung, Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1967, p. 372. Colin Mackerras, ‘Ethnicity in China: The Case of Xinjiang’, Harvard Asia Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 1, 2004, pp. 4–14; Christopher Cunningham, ‘Counterterrorism in Xinjiang: The ETIM, China, and the Uyghurs’, International Journal on World Peace, vol. 29, no. 3, 2012, p. 37.

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15. David Kerr and Laura Swinton, ‘China, Xinjiang, and the Transnational Security of Central Asia’, Critical Asian Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, 2008, p. 121. 16. Dillon, Xinjiang, p. 84. 17. Please note that for Uyghurs migrating to Australia from states within Central Asia other state identities may be recorded, including Kazakh or Russian for instance, and similar identity/nationality issues may be experienced. However, this chapter is specifically interested in Uyghurs migrating from Xinjiang in the PRC. 18. Anna Hayes, ‘Uighur Transnationalism in Contemporary Australia: Exile, Sanctuary, Community and Future’, in Anna Hayes and Robert Mason (eds), Cultures in Refuge: Seeking Sanctuary in Modern Australia, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2012, pp. 179–93. 19. Ibid. 20. In this instance, East Turkistan refers to the same geographic territory as Xinjiang. The use of this term within this chapter should not be regarded as support for the independence of the region by the author. 21. Hayes, ‘Uighur Transnationalism in Contemporary Australia’. 22. Dillon, Xinjiang, pp. 62–66; Justin Rudelson and William Jankowiak, ‘Acculturation and Resistance: Xinjiang Identities in Flux’, in Frederick Starr (ed.), Xinjiang China’s Muslim Borderland, New York, NJ, ME Sharpe, 2004, p. 316–17. 23. Rudelson and Jankowiak, ‘Acculturation and Resistance’, p. 316. 24. Michael Dillon, China: A Modern History, London, I.B. Tauris, 2010, p. 380. 25. Aizhamal Marat, ‘Uyghur Digital Diaspora in Kyrgyzstan’, Diaspora Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 2016, p. 63. 26. Marat, ‘Uyghur Digital Diaspora’; Yu-wen Chen, ‘Transporting Conflicts via Migratory Routes: A Social Network Analysis (SNA) of Uyghur International Mobilization’, NTS-Asia Research Paper No. 5, Singapore, RSIS Centre for Non-Traditional Security (NTS) Studies for NTS-Asia; Dru Gladney, ‘Xinjiang: China’s Future West Bank?’, Current History, vol. 101, no. 656, 2002, pp. 267–70. 27. Marat, ‘Uyghur Digital Diaspora’, p. 54. 28. Xinhua News Agency, ‘Guangdong Toy Factory Brawl Leaves 2 Dead, 118 Injured’, 27 June 2009, http://www.china.org.cn/china/news/2009-06/27/ content_18023576.htm (accessed 12 December 2013). 29. YouTube footage and photographs posted online of the incident show numerous beaten and bloodied Uyghurs lying on the ground. This led to accusations that the real death toll had been downplayed by the authorities and that it was much higher than two (Edward Wong, ‘China Locks Down Restive Region After Deadly Clashes’, New York Times, 7 July 2009). In his investigative report on the Shaoguan Incident, Watts claims the figure could be as high as thirty dead, including some Han Chinese victims; see Jonathon Watts, ‘Old Suspicions Magnified Mistrust into Ethnic Riots in Urumqi’, Guardian, 11 July 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/10/china-riots-uighurs-hanurumqi (accessed 12 December 2013).



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30. British Broadcasting Corporation, ‘Man Held over China Ethnic Clash’, BBC News, 30 June 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8125693. stm (accessed 11 December 2013); China Daily, ‘Peace Reigns at Toy Factory in Shaoguan’, 7 July 2009, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-07/07/ content_8385041.htm (accessed 11 December 2013). 31. Agence France-Presse, ‘“They Went Crazy”: Witnesses Describe Xinjiang Violence’, ABC News, 6 July 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-07-06/theywent-crazy-witnesses-describe-xinjiang/1343802 (accessed 12 December 2013). 32. Helen Lewis, ‘Xinjiang – An Inevitable Explosion’, Amnesty International Australia, 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20110602224236/http://www. amnesty.org.au/china/comments/21781/ (accessed 28 March 2011). 33. Xinhua News Agency, ‘Innocent Civilians Make Up 156 in Urumqi Riot Death Toll’, 5 August 2009, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-08/05/ content_11831350.htm (accessed 11 December 2013). 34. Since the Urumqi riots there have been a number of other outbreaks of violence in Xinjiang and beyond, including, but not limited to, the August 2010 Aksu bombing [David Barboza, ‘Blast Kills 7 in Western China’, New York Times, 19 August 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/world/asia/20china.html?_ r=1 (accessed 11 December 2015)]; separate attacks in Kashgar and Khotan in July 2011 [Dillon, ‘Death on the Silk Route’]; the October 2013 car bomb attack at the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Tiananmen Square [William Wan, ‘Chinese Police Say Tiananmen Square Crash was “Premeditated, Violent, Terrorist Attack”’, Washington Post, 30 October 2013, https://www.washingtonpost. com/world/asia_pacific/chinese-police-say-tiananmen-square-crash-waspremeditated-violent-terrorist-attack/2013/10/30/459e3e7e-4152-11e3-8b74d89d714ca4dd_story.html (accessed 11 December 2015)]; the March 2014 deadly knife attack at the Kunming train station [Didi Kirsten Tatlow, ‘After Prodding, U.S. State Department Labels Kunming Attack “Terrorism”’, 4 March 2014, http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/after-prodding-u-s-statedepartment-labels-kunming-attack-terrorism/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 (accessed 11 December 2015)]; the April 2014 Urumqi train station attack, which occurred during a visit by Xi Jinping [Jing Li and Adrian Wan, ‘Security Tightened after Three Killed in Bomb, Knife Attack at Urumqi Train Station’, South China Morning Post, 1 May 2014, http://www.scmp.com/print/news/china/ article/1501108/three-killed-explosion-rocks-urumqi-train-station (accessed 11 December 2015)]; and the May 2014 marketplace attack in Urumqi [Michael Clarke, ‘Why is Xinjiang Violence Escalating?’, BBC News, 23 May 2014, http:// www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-27534049 (accessed 10 December 2015)]. 35. See, for example, ‘Unchanging Ideology: China’s Rulers Deal with Dissent the Way the Emperors Did’, The Australian, 10 July 2009, http://www.theaustralian. com.au/news/unchanging-ideology/story-e6frg6n6-1225747961647 (accessed 12 December 2013); ‘Violence Leaves 140 Dead: Police’, ABC Premium News, 6 July 2009, EBSCOhost MegaFILE Premier, Australia/New Zealand Reference Centre. Item: P6S331596895409 (accessed 12 December 2013); Robert Saiget,

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‘Thousands Flee China’s Restive Urumqi’, The Age, 11 July 2009, http://news. theage.com.au/breaking-news-world/thousands-flee-chinas-restive-urumqi20090711-dgb7.html (accessed 12 December 2013); Mark Colvin, ‘Reasons behind the Ethnic Rivalry in Xinjiang’, PM with Mark Colvin, 8 July 2009, http:// www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2620505.htm (accessed 12 September 2011). 36. Sabra Lane, ‘Smith Confirms: China Cancelled High-Level Visit’, PM with Mark Colvin, 18 August 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2659742.htm (accessed 9 December 2015). 37. Stephen Smith cited in ‘House Debates: Questions without Notice. Ms Rebiya Kadeer’, Open Australia, Tuesday 18 August 2009, http://www.openaustralia. org/debate/?id=2009-08-18.80.1 (accessed 30 August 2011). Emphasis added by author. 38. Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ‘Dalai Lama Sends Message of Support to Kadeer’, ABC News, 9 August 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-08-09/ dalai-lama-sends-message-of-support-to-kadeer/1384062 (accessed 30 August 2011); Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ‘China Squeezes Press Club over Kadeer’, ABC News, 11 August 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-08-11/ china-squeezes-press-club-over-kadeer/1385906 (accessed 30 August 2011); Gus Goswell, ‘Demonstrators Turn Out at Kadeer Film Screening’, ABC News, 10 August 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-08-08/demonstratorsturn-out-at-kadeer-film-screening/1384564 (accessed 30 August 2011); Chen, ‘Transporting Conflicts via Migratory Routes’, p. 32–33; China Daily, ‘Kadeer Film Prompts Hacker Attack on Website’, 28 July 2009, http://www.chinadaily. com.cn/china/2009-07/28/content_8479251.htm (accessed 31 August 2011). 39. Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ‘Chinese Hackers Attack Film Festival Site’, ABC News, 1 August 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-08-01/ chinese-hackers-attack-film-festival-site/1375162 (accessed 9 December 2015). 40. Louise Heseltine, cited in China Daily, ‘Kadeer Film Prompts Hacker Attack on Website’. 41. Ibid. 42. Chen, ‘Transporting Conflicts via Migratory Routes’, p. 33. 43. Bob, 26 July 2009, comment to a 774 ABC Melbourne blog by Simon Leo Brown; see Simon Leo Brown, ‘Melbourne International Film Festival Website Hacked’, 774 ABC Melbourne, 25 July 2009, http://blogs.abc.net.au/ victoria/2009/07/melbourne-international-film-festival-website-hacked.html (accessed 12 December 2013). 44. Patrick Walters, ‘Call for Press Club Ban: Chinese Pressure Media’, The Australian, 11 August 2009, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/in-depth/ call-for-press-club-ban-chinese-pressure-media/story-e6frgah6-1225760024515 (accessed 30 August 2011). 45. This is an accepted variation in the spelling of Uyghur. Cited in Nic Macbean, ‘Kadeer to China: Thanks for the Publicity’, ABC News, 12 August 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-08-11/kadeer-to-china-thanks-for-thepublicity/1387168 (accessed 30 August 2011).



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46. Cited in ABC, ‘China Squeezes Press Club over Kadeer’. 47. Danby, cited in ibid. 48. Cited in Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ‘MIFF “Sticking to Guns” over Uighur Film’, ABC News, 27 July 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/news/ stories/2009/07/26/2636770.htm?site=adelaide (accessed 3 October 2011). 49. Comment 1. All comments were accessed from the following news article: Patrick Walters, ‘Call for Press Club Ban: Chinese Pressure Media’, The Australian, 11 August 2009, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/in-depth/ call-for-press-club-ban-chinese-pressure-media/story-e6frgah6-1225760024515 (accessed 30 August 2011). 50. Mackerras, China’s Ethnic Minorities. 51. The region of Xinjiang is known to Uyghur nationalists as East Turkistan. 52. Graham Fuller and Jonathan Lipman, ‘Islam in Xinjiang’, in Frederick Starr (ed.), Xinjiang China’s Muslim Borderland, New York, M.E. Sharpe, 2004, p. 343. 53. Walters, ‘Call for Press Club Ban’, Comment 6. 54. Ibid., Comment 23. 55. Ibid., Comment 9. 56. Ibid., Comment 15. 57. Ibid., Comment 33. 58. Ibid., Comment 52. 59. Ibid., Comment 7. 60. Ibid., Comment 18. 61. Ibid., Comment 50. 62. Ibid., Comment 39. 63. Ibid., Comment 94. 64. Ibid., Comment 104. 65. Ibid., Comment 90. 66. Ibid., Comment 100. 67. Ibid., Comment 80. 68. Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West, London, Routledge, 2001; John Fitzgerald, The Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia, Kensington, UNSW Press, 2007; Marilyn Lake, ‘Cosmopolitan Colonials: Chinese Australians and Human Rights: How Did Early Chinese Immigrants Change Australia’s Socio-political Landscape?’, Agora, vol. 29, no. 3, 2008, pp. 13–7; Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2008; Andrew Jakubowicz, ‘Empires of the Sun: Towards a Post-multicultural Australian Politics’, Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, vol. 3, no. 1, 2011, pp. 65–85. 69. Caroline Fleay, ‘Engaging in Human Rights Diplomacy: The Australia–China Bilateral Dialogue Approach’, International Journal of Human Rights, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 233–52. 70. Identified locations included Hong Kong, Mexico, Malaysia, China, the United Kingdom, Yemen and Canada.

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71. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, vol. 2, Malden, MA, Blackwell, 1997. 72. Susan Brownell, ‘The Beijing Olympics as a Turning Point? China’s First Olympics in East Asian Perspective’, Asia–Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 23 April 2009, www.japanfocus.org/-Susan-Brownell/3166 (accessed 3 February 2014); David Rowe, ‘The Bid, the Lead-Up, the Event and the Legacy: Global Cultural Politics and Hosting the Olympics’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 63, no. 2, 2012, pp. 285–305. 73. Rowe, ‘The Bid, the Lead-Up’, p. 300. 74. Cited in Simon Lauder, ‘China Film’, ABC News, 15 July 2009, http://www.abc. net.au/news/2009-07-15/china-film/1362288 (accessed 9 December 2015). 75. Cited in Refugee Review Tribunal, RRT Research Response: CHN31854, 29 May 2007, http://www.ecoi.net/file_upload/2107_1310371298_chn31854.pdf (accessed 11 December 2013). 76. Cited in Samantha Donovan, ‘Exiled Independence Leader Rebiya Kadeer Joins Uighur Protesters in Melbourne’, PM with Mark Colvin, 7 August 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2649700.htm (accessed 9 December 2015). 77. Ibid. 78. Anna Hayes and Robert Mason, ‘Securing Twenty-first Century Societies’, in Niklaus Steiner, Robert Mason and Anna Hayes (eds), Migration and Insecurity: Citizenship and Social Inclusion in a Transnational Era, London, Routledge, 2013, pp. 3–16. 79. Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, Annandale, Pluto Press, 1998. 80. Susanne Schech and Sophia Rainbird, ‘Negotiating Integration: Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Australia and the UK’, in Niklaus Steiner, Robert Mason and Anna Hayes (eds), Migration and Insecurity: Citizenship and Social Inclusion in a Transnational Era, London, Routledge, 2013, pp. 112–13. 81. Cited in Donovan, ‘Exiled Independence Leader’. 82. Cited in Refugee Review Tribunal, ‘RRT Research Response: CHN31854’. 83. For more information, see Lucas Smith, ‘10 Conditions of Oppression’, The Nose, 16–19 December 2012, http://docs.uyghuramerican.org/UYGHURS-byLucas-Smith-Dec2012.pdf (accessed 11 December 2013). 84. Cited in Brigid Andersen, ‘Exiled Uighur Urges Govt to Pressure China’, ABC News, 9 July 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/07/09/2621414. htm?site=adelaide (accessed 3 October 2011). 85. Ibid. 86. Rian Thum, ‘The Ethnicization of Discontent in Xinjiang’, The China Beat, 2 October 2009, http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=905 (accessed 18 December 2013). 87. Personal communication, September 2012. 88. Nick Holdstock, China’s Forgotten People: Xinjiang, Terror and the Chinese State, London, I.B. Tauris, 2015, p. 193.



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89. Michael Clarke, ‘China, Xinjiang and the Internationalization of the Uyghur Issue’, Global Change, Peace and Security, vol. 22, no. 2, 2010, pp. 213–29. 90. Ibid. 91. Brown, cited in Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ‘Dalai Lama Sends Message of Support to Kadeer’.

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Mackerras, Colin, China’s Ethnic Minorities and Globalization, London, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. ———. ‘Ethnicity in China: The Case of Xinjiang’, Harvard Asia Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 1, 2004, pp. 4–14. Mao, Zedong, Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tse-Tung, translated by the Editorial Committee for the Selected Readings from the Works of Mao TseTung, Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1967. Marat, Aizhamal, ‘Uyghur Digital Diaspora in Kyrgyzstan’, Diaspora Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 2015, pp. 53–63. Millward, James, and Nabijan Tursun, ‘Political Histories and Strategies of Control, 1884–1978’, in Frederick Starr (ed.), Xinjiang China’s Muslim Borderland, New York, NJ, M.E. Sharpe, 2004, pp. 63–98. Open Australia, ‘House Debates: Questions without Notice. Ms Rebiya Kadeer’, 18 August 2009, http://www.openaustralia.org/debate/?id=2009-08-18.80.1 (accessed 30 August 2011). Refugee Review Tribunal, ‘RRT Research Response: CHN31854’, 29 May 2007, http://www.ecoi.net/file_upload/2107_1310371298_chn31854.pdf (accessed 11 December 2013). Rowe, David, ‘The Bid, the Lead-Up, the Event and the Legacy: Global Cultural Politics and Hosting the Olympics’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 63, no. 2, 2012, pp. 285–305. Roy Morgan Research, Roy Morgan Readership Results Year Ending 2010, December 2010, http://www.roymorgan.com/industries/media/readership/ readership-archive (accessed 9 December 2015). Rudelson, Justin, and William Jankowiak, ‘Acculturation and Resistance: Xinjiang Identities in Flux’, in Frederick Starr (ed.), Xinjiang China’s Muslim Borderland, New York, NJ, M.E. Sharpe, 2004, pp. 299–319. Saiget, Robert, ‘Thousands Flee China’s Restive Urumqi’, The Age, 11 July 2009, http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-world/thousands-flee-chinas-restiveurumqi-20090711-dgb7.html (accessed 12 December 2013). Schech, Susanne, and Sophia Rainbird, ‘Negotiating Integration: Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Australia and the UK’, in Niklaus Steiner, Robert Mason and Anna Hayes (eds), Migration and Insecurity: Citizenship and Social Inclusion in a Transnational Era, London, Routledge, 2013, pp. 108–26. Smith, Lucas, ‘10 Conditions of Oppression’, The Nose, 16–19 December 2012, http://docs.uyghuramerican.org/UYGHURS-by-Lucas-Smith-Dec2012.pdf (accessed 11 December 2013). Statistical Bureau of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Xinjiang Statistical Yearbook 2010, Beijing, China Statistics Press, 2010 (Chinese). ———. Xinjiang Statistical Yearbook 2012, Beijing, China Statistics Press, 2012 (Chinese). Tatlow, Didi Kirsten, ‘After Prodding, U.S. State Department Labels Kunming Attack “Terrorism”’, 4 March 2014, http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes. com/2014/03/04/after-prodding-u-s-state-department-labels-kunming-attackterrorism/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 (accessed 11 December 2015).



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Thum, Rian, ‘The Ethnicization of Discontent in Xinjiang’, The China Beat, 2 October 2009, http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=905 (accessed 18 December 2013). ‘Unchanging Ideology: China’s Rulers Deal with Dissent the Way the Emperors Did’, The Australian, 10 July 2009, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/ unchanging-ideology/story-e6frg6n6-1225747961647 (accessed 12 December 2013). Van Wie Davis, Elizabeth, ‘Uyghur Muslim Ethnic Separatism in Xinjiang, China’, Asian Affairs: An American Review, vol. 35, no. 1, 2008, pp. 15–30. ‘Violence Leaves 140 Dead: Police’, ABC Premium News, 6 July 2009, EBSCOhost MegaFILE Premier, Australia/New Zealand Reference Centre. Item: P6S331596895409 (accessed 12 December 2013). Walters, Patrick, ‘Call for Press Club Ban: Chinese Pressure Media’, The Australian, 11 August 2009, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/in-depth/call-forpress-club-ban-chinese-pressure-media/story-e6frgah6-1225760024515 (accessed 30 August 2011). Wan, William, ‘Chinese Police Say Tiananmen Square Crash was “Premeditated, Violent, Terrorist Attack”’, The Washington Post, 30 October 2013, https://www. washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinese-police-say-tiananmen-squarecrash-was-premeditated-violent-terrorist-attack/2013/10/30/459e3e7e-415211e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html (accessed 11 December 2015). Watts, Jonathon, ‘Old Suspicions Magnified Mistrust into Ethnic Riots in Urumqi’, 11 July 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/10/china-riotsuighurs-han-urumqi (accessed 12 December 2013). Wong, Edward, ‘China Locks Down Restive Region After Deadly Clashes’, New York Times, 7 July 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/world/asia/07china. html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed 22 May 2012). Xinhua News Agency, ‘Guangdong Toy Factory Brawl Leaves 2 Dead, 118 Injured’, 27 June 2009, http://www.china.org.cn/china/news/2009-06/27/content_18023576. htm (accessed 12 December 2013). ———. ‘Innocent Civilians Make up 156 in Urumqi Riot Death Toll’, 5 August 2009, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-08/05/content_11831350.htm (accessed 11 December 2013).

Part II

KL Intimate Violence

Chapter 6

The Greek Civil War, Child Removal and Traumatic Pasts in Australia Joy Damousi

KL In 1948, during the height of the Greek Civil War, children in the northern region of Greece were transported by communist forces fighting the Greek army. An estimated twenty-eight thousand children were taken to Poland, Albania, Bulgaria, Rumania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in a mass exodus. The Greek government also orchestrated its own evacuation of children from the war zones, and the Greek Queen Frederica led the campaign to prevent children from being taken by Communists over the borders of Northern Greece.1 This episode in Greek modern history has captured the attention of historians who have sought to illuminate these remarkable events and to grapple with the details of how and why this incident occurred. The paidomazoma – the removal of Greek children, as it has been termed – has attracted wide scholarship and much controversy, especially regarding whether these children were abducted by communist forces against their will, or were voluntarily given up by their parents so that they could escape the horror and destruction of war.2 Coming at a time when the Cold War was forming its hardened alliances, the case of the fate of these children went to the United Nations during the 1940s as the Greek government sought assistance and intervention from the international community to prevent what it described as communist forces removing children. The findings of the United Nations Special Committee on the Balkans found 127

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that indeed some parents, mainly those from Greek-speaking regions, had explicitly refused to hand children over. Equally, there is evidence that, however painful and difficult it may have been, children had been moved voluntarily by parents of supporters of Communists from the war zones into safer regions.3 Greeks worldwide whose families had been caught in these circumstances attempted to retrieve their children from Eastern Europe. In Australia, Greeks whose children had been removed in this way approached the federal government and the Australian Council of International Social Service to arrange to be reunited with their children. Typically, the parents who approached these organizations were male Greek immigrants who had arrived in the 1930s and had not yet had the chance to bring out their wives and children when the events of the Second World War and the Greek Civil War intervened to separate them further from their families.4 This chapter positions the paidomazoma within the transnational intersection of war, migration and trauma. It considers an unexamined aspect of the presence of war memory and experience in Australia within two dominant themes of Australian history: war and migration. Although memories of wars in Australian history have of course been the subject of several studies, the psychological effects of transnational migration on the memories of those who experienced it await further consideration. The point of departure in this chapter then lies in these two respects: relating war and memory to the wider transnational context of migration, and considering the role of war trauma of immigrants in negotiating new ethnic identities. There is now a substantial literature on the residue of war for the families who endured its effects after the Second World War. The children of fathers who went to war, and the experience of war on children in general, are areas in which recent research has been proving fruitful.5 The hidden residue of wartime experience in relation to the effect of war on the waves of immigrants remains a significant gap in Australian historiography. I argue that the specific case study of the paidomazoma provides a new narrative of the history of these wars in the Australian context, and how they have been remembered beyond national boundaries. It also adds a hitherto unexplored dimension to histories of Australian migration: the enduring legacy of traumatic war experiences that transcend place and nation. I now briefly turn to the cataclysmic events that led to migration to Australia by Greek migrants who had experienced war.



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GREEK CIVIL WAR AND GREEK MIGRATION The dramatic events of 1940–49 in Greece form the brutal and bloody backdrop to this study, and it is to these events I will now briefly turn. Greece entered the Second World War when it was invaded by Fascist Italy in 1940; Greece was then defeated by German attack in 1941. What followed was an armistice – or capitulation – as the German army occupied Athens and the first collaborationist government of occupied Greece was formed. Greece was then divided among the Axis powers: the Germans, who occupied central Macedonia, including Thessaloniki; Eastern Macedonia, which was controlled by the Bulgarians; and the rest of Greece, including the Peloponnese, which remained under Italian occupation. It was under these circumstances that the Greek Communist Party emerged with considerable strength and support. The struggle for survival during the wartime occupation of Greece was intense, as was the five years of uninterrupted civil war that followed it. This period has been described as ‘probably the deadliest period in modern Greek history’.6 The experiences of war were compounded by the protracted civil war that took place during and after the Second World War. Two forms of civil conflict emerged at this time: the first was between the collaborators (usually on the right) and resisters (on the left); the second began in 1942 and was among the resisters themselves. Tensions between collaborators and resisters increased, and when the Germans withdrew in September 1944, fighting between the two groups intensified; by 1946, violence had dramatically escalated. In the years that followed, and until 1949 when the civil war finally ended, the casualties rose dramatically and the country was in turmoil. By 1950, a strained peace set in, and it was arguably not until the collapse of the military junta in 1974 that there was genuine harmony. In the years that followed the civil war, there was mass migration by Greeks to countries throughout the world, as they looked beyond a ravaged Europe to rebuild their lives. The postwar immigration policy saw around 214,000 assisted and non-assisted Greek immigrants arrive in Australia in the period from 1947 to 1972.7 Its concerted efforts to attract workers after the war because of labour shortages, and its relative distance from war-torn Europe, made Australia an appealing destination given the devastation that the war had left behind. Many of those who migrated to Australia had experienced war directly or indirectly, and had survived under these conditions.8 However, historical studies of war experience in Australia have not fully explored the presence of war stories, narratives and experiences in the host country. One of those stories is that of the paidomazoma.

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A MOTHER’S PAIN At the heart of the story of the paidomazoma is a powerful moral and ethical dilemma that emerges over and over again in the collective memory. How could a mother ever ‘give up’ her child? What sort of mother would do so? Both sides mobilized this question of maternity for their own cause: the Communists claimed that agreeing to have their children removed demonstrated good mothering as it protected the children from warfare; whereas the Greek government argued that no mother would ever give up her child voluntarily and cited cases in which mothers apparently had been forced to sign letters approving their children’s removal, under threat of losing other members of their families or having their villages burnt. There was a contemporary precedent of child removal in war. British children had been transported internationally for their safety during the Second World War to homes in the United States and Australia.9 On the question of Greek children, because of the dispute about forcible removal, women’s organizations across the world demanded the prompt repatriation of the children, to put an end to ‘the agony of the Greek mothers’.10 Sofka Popova recalls the dilemma she faced in the context of the civil war. She frames her recollections in terms of this moral dilemma, but as far as she was concerned she had very little choice in the matter. For her, while war raged around her threatening the lives of her family, ‘responsible maternity’ – however difficult and painful this decision was for her – meant she had to hand over her children. Born in 1918 in the village of Lagen, she describes the way in which her two daughters crossed the border from their village out of the war zones in 1948. At the time, there was only herself, her mother-in-law and her daughters in her home – the men in the family had either been killed or were fighting with the partisans. However, the decision to relinquish her children was not simply made on political lines. Even for those who may have been supportive of the partisans, the decision to relinquish or to keep their children was not easily made: In 1948, the partisans told us we had to let the children go over the border or they would be killed by the bombing. I certainly did not want to part with my children, but there was really no choice. The village was being shelled and we didn’t know where to hide ourselves. It was terrible. So we set off at night to help our children escape from that horror. We went through the village of Bapchor across to Konomladi. It was wet and cold. We were crossing a river and Fania [her daughter] was mounted on a donkey and fell into the water. She was wet through and cried but I was severe with her and told her to keep quiet or the



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Greek soldiers might hear us and kill us. We managed to find houses in which to stay for the night in Konomladi. At the house in which we stayed the people were initially a bit reluctant to accommodate us, but they were persuaded to help by the partisans who accompanied us … it was better that we had evacuated the children so that they would remain alive.

She felt the only solution was to separate the children and for two of them to cross the border and the third to stay with her: From Konomladi I returned home to my village, leaving my oldest girl Tsila and my middle girl Fania to be taken over the border. The youngest stayed with me in the village. You can imagine the heartache it causes to leave your children like that. Afterwards there wasn’t a day when they weren’t in my thoughts. It was really painful to be constantly wondering whether they were safe and sound or whether they had enough to eat and were not starving. We were terrified for them.11

This led to many years of separation from her daughters, but for her, the fact that they survived and were alive was the main consideration: In the period after they left, from 1948 to 1951, I exchanged just two letters with them from Yugoslavia where they lived in refugee homes. As they were little, my daughters hadn’t been sent to the war front to fight as partisans, which happened with the older children, who were virtually all killed.

They were eventually released after the war, which made them among the lucky ones, as many of the children were not able to leave or did not survive: In 1951, we found out through the Red Cross that the children would come back from Yugoslavia. We were told to go to Salonika to meet up with them. The Red Cross paid for our travel expenses. When I saw my two girls, they were more grown up and we hardly recognised each other. But the reunion was very happy with both crying and laughing.12

The action of sending her children abroad, however difficult it was, allowed her to determine their future, and to make this decision at the time seemed empowering for her. She was very fortunate in being able to retrieve her daughters. Others were not so fortunate and spent many years after the war in search of their children. Popova travelled to Australia to live with her daughter Fania and her family in 1969. The fragmentation that this episode created is captured in her reflection of her migration:

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When my mother-in law died and I was left on my own, I came to Australia to live with Fania and her family in 1969. It is peaceful here in Whittlesea but I haven’t been completely happy in this country; life is different here, the language is different and it is difficult for me. I went back to the village in 1982 for a visit and found it practically all in ruins, with about twenty families left. I can’t live anywhere, either back there or here.13

The ‘responsibility’ of motherhood during the war is highly contested. Among those who remember it, the civil war created a particular understanding of motherhood, which was defined by the notion of ‘responsible maternity’. For some women, this involved surrendering their children, whereas for others it was translated to mean retaining their children and not relinquishing them. Whatever action mothers decided to take, it entailed a deeply anguished decision that continued to haunt them several decades after the event.

CHILD REMOVAL The view that the separation of children from their parents creates trauma emerged following the experiences of the Second World War. As Zahra has argued, though children had been separated from their parents prior to the wars of the twentieth century, this act had been conceived as an infringement of parents’ rights, against religious communities and a threat to natural law. The Second World War shifted this focus onto the psychological effect on the child, humanitarian aid for children and connections to the future of nations.14 As the following testimonies of child refugees suggest, the fragmentation and emotional scarring continued for decades after the separation. Tanas Lazarov was taken out of his village as a child, and tells his story of a fragmented identity created by war and migration. He was born in 1939 in Neret in northern Greece. He left as a child in 1948, aged nine, and arrived in Australia in 1957, aged eighteen. He was not conscious of politics as a child and he had little idea of why he might need to be removed from his village and from his family: In 1948, we didn’t understand much as kids, but there were people who came from the People’s Liberation Front to the village. They gathered the young children from the school and told them there would be fighting very soon and that to avoid being killed by the bombs they should run away to the mountains. Once the war was over, they could come back to the village and life would continue as normal … They asked the women to take responsibility for small groups



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of children and go over the border with them to Yugoslavia … So two mothers [left] with about 30 children.15

Between the ages of ten and seventeen, his formative years, he moved several times and finally settled in Poland where he was educated and lived until he was eighteen. His name changed several times, depending on the cultural context: ‘When I left the village in 1948, my surname was Surlev. In Poland I adopted the surname Surlewsky … in Australia … Lazarou’. He lamented having to leave his connections in Poland when his parents arranged for him to join them in Australia, but longed to be reunited with them: After a few months in Australia I had a feeling that it was a mistake to have come here. It was not a mistake being with my [family], but rather for having come to an unfamiliar land. I had come from a place where I felt free and had many friends. I had lost my friends and I started feeling broken up, fragmented. I asked myself why my father had brought me here when I lived so well in Poland. I became confused and very uncertain. I thought of my [brother] in Poland who had married a Polish woman and was raising a family there, and how it would be for him to leave all that.16

The experience of being separated for several years from his family during the civil war and its aftermath was expressed in the following terms, which suggests the enduring legacy of violence and war: ‘For me personally, the fact that I grew up in homes in Poland without parents has given me many problems. I had great difficulty in using words like “father” and “mother” with my parents because I had never used them in all those early years. I felt awkward and embarrassed’. Later, his dealings with his own children were also affected as the past continued to reverberate: With my own children, as they grew up, I had problems being understood. I was used to doing things differently. Children had to be obedient. My children, and all the children of today, want equality. I grew up under different conditions and this made it very difficult for me. My children want to be more independent and have a mind of their own. But I find it very hard to give up the values I grew up with.17

He returned to the village in 1989 and decided to cross the border into Yugoslavia, encountering difficulties with the authorities on the vexed issue of cultural identity:

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On the way there, at the border, we were each asked by the Greek authorities to fill out a form. Apart from name, surname, father’s name etc. there was also a question about nationality. I didn’t know what to write. I consulted my wife and like people … we wrote ‘Greek’. But when I handed the form in with my Australian passport, the official said I was no longer ‘Greek’ but ‘Australian’.18

This type of fragmentation of identity in transnationalism is further illustrated in the following example, as is the ongoing relationship between violent pasts and the present. Mara Kalincev was born in 1941 in Krushoradi, which she left at the age of seven, and eventually arrived in Australia in 1969. She vividly recalls the war and its conditions, and when she was removed from the village. Women from the village were put in charge of the children – ‘We called these women majki [mothers]’ – and they were eventually transported in army trucks and trains. They had anticipated returning, but as she says: ‘I was only seven years old and my sister even younger, and we had no idea what was happening to us’.19 Although children were sent in various directions – to Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland – she and her sister were sent to Hungary where there they were placed in homes for refugees and in dormitories. There was a regimented system that was well organized and highly disciplined, and where education was highly valued. Although the children were educated and well cared for, it was the emotional aspect of the experience that could never be compensated. Spending these formative years in institutions away from her parents had a lifelong effect, and one that was not easy to overcome: It is one of my big regrets in life and think it the biggest disadvantage that resulted for me because I spent those tender childhood years in homes instead of being close to a mother’s love. This is something I have lost forever, something that cannot be retrieved. I am sure that this is true for all refugee children; this lack of close family feeling has been the saddest part of our experience … My experience as a child refugee devastated me emotionally because I missed out on a mother’s love. That is why I became personally severe and feel as if I am like stone inside and may not seem soft like other mothers. That is the most negative aspect of my refugee experience. That is the biggest loss in my life.

On the more positive side, she reflected: If I had remained in the village I would have been killed and not escaped with my life. Also, if stayed in the village, I would never have had the opportunities created for me in the other countries I have lived; I really enjoyed city living and am thankful that I got an education. So I regard myself as having a better life and certainly a better job for having got out of the village.20



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Lefa Ognenova-Michova remembered the ‘planes flying over us’, the ‘raining of bullets’ and the houses burning in March 1948. This is how she described her childhood experience of the paidomazoma: The whole village came out in empathy, families holding onto their children and weeping. The atmosphere was like a funeral procession; villagers escorting their children and mourning the loss of their young and future hopes … My mother had decided to walk with the escort for as long as possible, not wanting to part with her children any earlier than she had to. This was the last time I ever saw my parental grandmother, Baba Gela, and my maternal grandparents, Dedo Traiko and Baba Kata. They tearfully farewelled us knowing that they may never see us again. Baba Gela was stricken with grief at farewelling not only my brother and I but also two other grandchildren, my cousins llo and Tsana who were also making the journey with us. This only left my sister Mara at home.21

Four women aged in their early twenties and mid thirties were assigned to look after the children. They were responsible for looking after seventy to eighty children aged from two to fourteen. The mountains proved treacherous and difficult to climb, especially for the children. Older children would carry the smaller children; some eventually were barefoot, but Lefa’s mother escorted her, so there was food for them.22 Their parting at the village of Shelevo was of course traumatic and very distressing: This is where the mothers who were walking with us parted with their children. Mother told [my] brother and [me] that she could not come any further and said that from here on we would not see each other. She wept as she pushed us away, telling us to go. I did not understand what this really meant. I thought the separation was only temporary and I would be home in a couple of days. Our escorts continually encouraged us and promised us sweets. I did not understand what was happening and so I went easily. To this day I can hear the parting cries of the mothers and their children. Mothers in pain, distressed at giving up their own children, children sobbing, not wanting to let their mothers go. Mothers begged the maiki to care for their children as if they were their own.23

From there they just walked and walked, never looking back, ‘but with thoughts … of where were we going, the unknown, and what I had left behind’. It was for Lefa, a childhood lost forever: ‘We left behind our childhood games, stories and everything we had ever known. These all died just as something did the day I said goodbye to my mother. I left my home, never turned back nor took one last look. This part of my life had been taken, never to return. A childhood lost’.24 Her sister was sent by her grandmother in the next group from the village but they were not united. The family had

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been divided, with her father in Australia, her mother in Neret, she and her brother in Hungary and her sister in Czechoslovakia.25 The adjustments she had to make in Hungary were significant: We had to adjust to a new way of life with different food, a different language and a big city life. It was very different from what we were accustomed to in the village. Considering that a lot of us had not been out of the village or away from our families it was both surprising and overpowering. We stayed close to those we knew, the maiki and other children from the village. Of all differences, the language barrier was the most difficult to break.26

Lefa was taken to Budapest to live with a surrogate family, with a surrogate mother. She had great respect for the maiki who cared for her: The maiki, in the absence of our own mothers, became our mothers. They were the ones we called for when we were in trouble and who came to us when we were crying. They became our teachers in life and were the ones who taught and encouraged us to remember our birthplace and our families … Today, when I think of them, my thoughts are of respect and love for the women who cared for us like their own.27

She grew up thereafter in Hungary but corresponded with her family – her mother in the village, sister in Czechoslovakia and uncle in Poland. There were difficulties as well as positives, despite this separation: I was never short of food or clothing but missed my mother, her love and her warm embrace … I felt her grief from every written word in her letters. While we lacked the love of our own family, we were provided with greater opportunities than we could ever have had in Neret.29

The longing to be reunited with her parents was pronounced and enduring, although her sense of identity was to some extent connected to her former place, and remained in her newly adopted country: During my time living in Hungary, I had always dreamed of returning to my home in Neret and seeing all my relatives, but as mother had now migrated to Australia, this had all changed. I longed to be reunited with my parents, but also longed to return to my home in the village and to see my loved ones once more. I felt this loss for most of my life.30

One of the common themes to emerge in the testimonies of those who as children experienced the paidomazoma is that because they had not expe-



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rienced parenting, they had difficulty parenting themselves. The dormitory style of growing up had provided many material benefits – and crucially, survival – but issues of maternity remain unresolved. As evidenced by difficulties they experienced with their own children, their past experience of child removal has remained an enduring presence. Another manifestation of their experience has been a romanticized version of motherhood during war; its deprivation is glorified in their narratives. In the memories of some of those who experienced these events, Australia provided a refuge: ‘After the Second World War,’ wrote another immigrant who had endured similar fragmentation, ‘Australia provided a home where the healing of many people could take place. The wounds closed, but the scarring would be there for a lifetime. The pain would linger to be felt by their children, and often the trauma remained unresolved’.31 The emotional effects of war and their enduring marks on the waves of immigrants remain gaps in Australian war historiography. This absence was enhanced by the climate in which many of these immigrants arrived in the 1950s. The assimilation policy that greeted them was based on building a new identity that was to be achieved by relinquishing one’s personal past and one’s history. Expecting that migrants would readily and seamlessly ‘adopt’ the assimilation policy effectively denied a place in the national story of the war memories of migrants. It also rendered invisible the legacy of violence in ethnic communities in Australia.32

CONCLUSION By 1952, the collective memory of the fate of removed Greek children had begun to be defined by a narrative of ‘the family’. The Greek Red Cross argued that ‘No institutional care, however good, can substitute for the deep love and tender care which a child receives in its own home … The Greek children, involuntarily away from their homes, are thus deprived of the very essence of their normal upbringing and the joys of childhood’.33 Since then, the collective memory in Australia of this event has largely remained within the families of those who experienced this traumatic episode. It is one that is remembered by many in terms of apportioning blame and responsibilities. By focusing on the other aspects of war experience and memory, I have argued that perpetuating a version of such events in this way does not help us to extend our understanding of this traumatic historical event of war. Instead, it is timely to review our understandings of the meanings of war and migration within Australian history. Only then can we examine the enduring emotional experiences through the stories of those

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who lived it, and of those who continue to carry the burden of the enduring legacy of war into the present, towards a new collective memory where issues of identity, trauma and transnationalism are positioned at its historical centre.

JOY DAMOUSI Joy Damousi is professor of history at the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne. She is the author of numerous books, which include The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge, 1999); Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-war Australia (Cambridge, 2001); Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia (UNSW Press, 2005; winner of the Ernest Scott Prize); and Colonial Voices: A Cultural History of English in Australia 1840–1940 (Cambridge, 2010). She is fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. NOTES   1. L. Bærentzen, ‘The “Paidomazoma” and the Queen’s Camps’, in L. Bærentzen, J.O. Iatrides and O.L. Smith (eds), Studies in the History of the Greek Civil War 1945–1949, Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press, 1987, p. 127.  2. For this literature, see L. Danforth, ‘“We Crossed a Lot of Borders”, Refugee Children of the Greek Civil War’, Diaspora, vol. 12, no. 2, 2003, pp. 169–209; Keith Brown, Macedonia’s Child-Grandfathers: The Transnational Politics of Memory, Exile, and Return, 1948–1998, Washington, DC, University of Washington, 2003; Bærentzen, ‘The “Paidomazoma”’, pp. 127–57; Riki van Boeschoten, ‘The Impossible Return: Coping with Separation and the Reconstruction of Memory in the Wake of the Greek Civil War’, in Mark Mazower (ed.), After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation and State in Greece, 1943–1960, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 122–41; Loring Danforth and Riki van Boeschoten, Children of the Greek Civil War, Chicago, IL, Chicago University Press, 2011; Milan Ristovic, A Long Journey Home: Greek Refugee Children in Yugoslavia, 1948–1960, Thessaloniki, Institute for Balkan Studies, 2000.   3. Amikam Nachmani, International Intervention in the Greek Civil War: The United Nations Special Committee on the Balkans, 1947–1952, New York, NJ, Praeger, 1990; Bærentzen, ‘The “Paidomazoma”’, pp. 127–57; Herbert V. Evatt, The Task of Nations, New York, NJ, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949; Evan Luard, A History of The United Nations. Volume 1: The Years of Western Domination, 1945–1955, London, Macmillan, 1982, pp. 121–29.



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  4. See Joy Damousi, ‘The Greek Civil War and Child Migration to Australia – Aileen Fitzpatrick and the Australian Council of International Social Service’, Social History, vol. 37, no. 3, 2012, pp. 297–313.   5. Joy Damousi, Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-war Australia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001; Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996; Michael McKernan, This War Never Ends: The Pain of Separation and Return, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 2001; Bruce Scates, Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007.   6. See David Close, The Greek Civil War, 1943–1950: Studies in Polarisation, London, Routledge, 1993; David Close, Origins of the Greek Civil War, London, Longman, 1995; Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941– 1944, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1993; Andre Gerolymatos, Red Acropolis, Black Terror: The Greek Civil War and the Origins of Soviet–American Rivalry, 1943–1949, New York, NJ, Basic Books, 2004; John O. Iatrides and Linda Wrigley (eds), Greece at the Crossroads: The Civil War and Its Legacy, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.  7. Yiannis Dimitreas, Transplanting the Agora: Hellenic Settlement in Australia, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998, p. 158.  8. Jock Collins, Migrant Hands in a Distant Land: Australia’s Post-war Immigration, Sydney, Pluto Press, 1988, p. 20. See also Eric Richards, Destination Australia: Migration to Australia Since 1901, Sydney, UNSW Press, 2008; Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, Melbourne, Scribe Publications, 2005; Janis Wilton and Richard Bosworth, Old Worlds and New Australia, Melbourne, Penguin, 1984.  9. See Carlton Jackson, Who Will Take Our Children?, London, Methuen, 1985. 10. United Nations, Economic and Social Council, Commission on the Status of Women, fourth session, 18 May 1950, ‘The Problem of Greek Mothers whose Children have not been Repatriated’, Text of resolution adopted by the Commission on 17 May 1950, Repatriation of Greek children, Series Number A6530 (A6530/2), Australian Archives, Canberra. 11. Macedonian Welfare Workers’ Network of Victoria, From War to Whittlesea: Oral Histories of Macedonian Child Refugees, Wareemba, NSW, Pollitecon, 1999, p. 47. 12. Ibid., p. 48. 13. Ibid., p. 48. 14. Tara Zahra, Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2011, pp. 18–21. 15. Macedonian Welfare Workers’ Network of Victoria, From War to Whittlesea, p. 52. 16. Ibid., p. 60. 17. Ibid., p. 63. 18. Ibid., p. 64. 19. Ibid., p. 68. 20. Ibid., p. 77

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21. Lefa Ognenova-Michova and Kathless Mitsou-Lazaridis, A Girl from Neret, Abbotsford, NSW, Pollitecon, 2006, pp. 58–59. 22. Ibid., p. 61. 23. Ibid., p. 63. 24. Ibid., p. 65. 25. Ibid., p. 67. 26. Ibid., p. 68. 27. Ibid., p. 69. 28. Ibid., pp. 74–76. 29. Ibid., p. 76. 30. Ibid., p. 82. 31. Pandora Petrovska, Picture on the Mantelpiece: A Biography Recounted by Sefo and Lena Duketovski to Pandora Petrovska, Wareemba, NSW, Pollitecon, 2008, p. 111. 32. See Joy Damousi, ‘“We are Human Beings, and have a Past”: The “Adjustment” of Migrants and the Australian Assimilation Policies of the 1950s’, Australian Journal of History and Politics, vol. 59, no. 4, 2013, pp. 501–16. 33. Repatriation of Greek Children. Reports from the Secretary-General of the International Red Cross, Greece – Relations with United Nations – Abduction of Greek Children, Series number A1838 (A1838/1) 1952–55, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bærentzen, L., ‘The “Paidomazoma” and the Queen’s Camps’, in L. Bærentzen, J.O. Iatrides and O.L. Smith, (eds), Studies in the History of the Greek Civil War 1945–1949, Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press, 1987, pp. 127–58. Boeschoten, Riki van, ‘The Impossible Return: Coping with Separation and the Reconstruction of Memory in the Wake of the Greek Civil War’, in Mark Mazower (ed.), After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation and State in Greece, 1943–1960, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 122–41. Brown, Keith, Macedonia’s Child-Grandfathers: The Transnational Politics of Memory, Exile, and Return, 1948–1998, Washington, DC, University of Washington, 2003. Close, David, The Greek Civil War, 1943–1950: Studies in Polarisation, London, Routledge, 1993. ———. Origins of the Greek Civil War, London, Longman, 1995. Collins, Jock, Migrant Hands in a Distant Land: Australia’s Post-war Immigration, Sydney, Pluto Press, 1988. Damousi, Joy, Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-war Australia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001. ———. ‘The Greek Civil War and Child Migration to Australia – Aileen Fitzpatrick and the Australian Council of International Social Service’, Social History, vol. 37, no. 3, 2012, pp. 297–313.



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———. ‘“We are Human Beings, and have a Past”: The “Adjustment” of Migrants and the Australian Assimilation Policies of the 1950s’, Australian Journal of History and Politics, vol. 59, no. 4, 2013, pp. 501–16. Danforth, L., ‘“We Crossed a Lot of Borders”, Refugee Children of the Greek Civil War’, Diaspora, vol. 12, no. 2, 2003, pp. 169–209. Danforth, Loring, and Riki van Boeschoten, Children of the Greek Civil War, Chicago, IL, Chicago University Press, 2011. Dimitreas, Yiannis, Transplanting the Agora: Hellenic Settlement in Australia, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998. Evatt, Herbert V., The Task of Nations, New York, NJ, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949. Garton, Stephen, The Cost of War: Australians Return, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996. Gerolymatos, Andre, Red Acropolis, Black Terror: The Greek Civil War and the Origins of Soviet–American Rivalry, 1943–1949, New York, NJ, Basic Books, 2004. Iatrides, John O., and Linda Wrigley (eds), Greece at the Crossroads: The Civil War and Its Legacy, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. Jackson, Carlton, Who Will Take Our Children?, London, Methuen, 1985. Luard, Evan, A History of the United Nations. Volume 1: The Years of Western Domination, 1945–1955, London, Macmillan, 1982. Macedonian Welfare Workers’ Network of Victoria, From War to Whittlesea: Oral Histories of Macedonian Child Refugees, Wareemba, NSW, Pollitecon, 1999. Mazower, Mark, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–1944, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1993. McKernan, Michael, This War Never Ends: The Pain of Separation and Return, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 2001. Nachmani, Amikam, International Intervention in the Greek Civil War: The United Nations Special Committee on the Balkans, 1947–1952, New York, NJ, Praeger, 1990. Ognenova-Michova, Lefa, and Kathless Mitsou-Lazaridis, A Girl from Neret, Abbotsford, NSW, Pollitecon, 2006. Petrovska, Pandora, Picture on the Mantelpiece: A Biography Recounted by Sefo and Lena Duketovski to Pandora Petrovska, Wareemba, NSW, Pollitecon, 2008. Richards, Eric, Destination Australia: Migration to Australia Since 1901, Sydney, UNSW Press, 2008. Ristovic, Milan, A Long Journey Home: Greek Refugee Children in Yugoslavia, 1948–1960, Thessaloniki, Institute for Balkan Studies, 2000. Scates, Bruce, Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Tavan, Gwenda, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, Melbourne, Scribe Publications, 2005. Wilton, Janis, and Richard Bosworth, Old Worlds and New Australia, Melbourne, Penguin, 1984. Zahra, Tara, Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2011.

Chapter 7

From Hell to Hope Postwar Jewish Holocaust Survivor Migration Suzanne D. Rutland

KL One of the most traumatic events of the twentieth century was the Jewish Holocaust, which involved the murder of six million Jews. After the war, survivors sought to leave the graveyard of Europe,1 and many wished to get as far away as possible, even to distant Australia. This chapter deals with the Australian story of Jewish Holocaust survivor migration. It will investigate different aspects of this ‘unspeakable’ story, relating both to government immigration policy with regard to Jewish Holocaust survivors after 1945, and the story of survivor silence once they arrived in Australia and the eventual breaking of that silence. Responding to ‘anti-refo hysteria’ that echoed sentiments against Jewish refugees globally, the postwar Labor government introduced bureaucratic measures to secretly limit the number of Jews granted landing permits, and to exclude them from the mass migration programmes. However, the government strongly denied that there was any discrimination on the basis of race or religion, even when faced with evidence presented by the Jewish community leadership. The Labor government also denied that Nazi war criminals had entered Australia in the mass migration scheme coordinated by the International Refugee Organization (IRO). This story of racism and discrimination was only revealed with the opening of the relevant Australian archives in the late 1970s, shedding light on one unspeakable element of Australia’s past. There was another level of silence that related to Jewish Holocaust survivors. Those who arrived on Australia’s ‘lucky shores’ on the whole 142



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successfully rebuilt their lives in Australia, but for many, their Holocaust experiences were too painful to talk about. For them, their terrible wartime lives were ‘unspeakable’. This changed with the emergence of Holocaust denial, with many feeling that it was beholden on them to speak out. The eventual opening of Holocaust museums in Melbourne and Sydney further opened up the discourse to the broader public, although the question of how these should be funded echoed debates in the United States and Germany, and revealed ongoing tensions in the articulation of suffering. Thus, this chapter seeks to explore the different levels of silence in relation to the experience of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Australia. These levels related to actual government policy, the level of assistance provided by U.S. Jewish welfare organizations and their relationship with the IRO, and the reluctance of survivors to speak about their experiences during the Holocaust.

AUSTRALIAN POSTWAR JEWISH MIGRATION POLICIES Immediately following the Second World War, the Australian government sought to increase Australia’s population substantially by encouraging British immigration and also by tapping previously restricted immigration sources, especially non-British Europeans displaced by the war. In this way, the Australian Labor government, and the newly created Department of Immigration under its minister Arthur A. Calwell, evolved an immigration policy that, while retaining Australia’s traditional immigration criteria, was different in its thrust. For the first time in Australian history, non-British immigrants were regarded as a viable migrant source.2 Given the need for immigrants, it appeared that at least some of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would be granted a chance to create a new life in Australia. However, after initial optimism, the fears and prejudices that had frustrated a humanitarian approach to Jewish immigration in the free world before the war reappeared, leading to the introduction of discriminatory measures that limited the number of Jewish displaced persons (DPs) permitted to settle in Australia.3 The Australian experience with regard to postwar Jewish immigration mirrored attitudes and responses elsewhere. In the period between 1945 and 1954, the countries of the free world did accept some Jewish DPs, but the nature of anti-Semitism based on centuries-old suspicion of Jewish people and the fear of a political backlash meant that this intake was only a token gesture. These events highlighted a contemporary explanation that ‘justice is never complete monarch in the present immoral world’.4 This was

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true of Australia where in the past other ‘undesirable’ groups such as Asians were also excluded. Both before and after the war, proposals to admit Jewish refugees met with a hostile reception. Known as ‘anti-refo’ feeling, this manifested itself in newspapers and statements made by members of parliament. In August 1945, immediately after his appointment as the inaugural Labor minister for immigration, Calwell announced that Australia would admit two thousand Jewish survivors on a humanitarian basis. Although the Jewish community welcomed the announcement, this number was in fact less than half the pre-war annual quota of four thousand Jewish and one thousand nonAryan refugees; yet Calwell’s announcement led to an immediate outcry. Henry (Jo) Gullett, Liberal member for Henty, Victoria, stated in federal parliament: ‘We are not compelled to accept the unwanted of the world at the dictate of the United Nations or anyone else. Neither should Australia be a dumping ground for people whom Europe itself, in the course of two thousand years, has not been able to absorb’.5 Jack Lang, representing his breakaway Lang Labor Party, was equally vitriolic in federal parliament in his condemnation of Jewish survivor migration.6 The acceptance of Jewish refugees and survivors was strongly opposed by the Returned Services League, the Australian Natives Association and a number of organized groups within the community. Fearing a backlash as a result of this outcry, before the 1946 election Calwell introduced a policy that limited the quota of Jews on any ship from Europe to 25 per cent; he later extended this policy to aeroplanes, claiming that in relation to the department’s decisions on the 25 per cent quota, an aeroplane could be considered equivalent to a ship. At the same time, Calwell introduced plans to increase Australia’s population. In a small book entitled How Many Australians Tomorrow?, published in 1945, he argued that given Australia’s low birth rates, the only way to increase population was by immigration, even if this meant targeting populations outside the traditional Anglo-Celtic source for migration. In July 1947, he travelled to Europe to sign an agreement with the IRO that in the end brought 170,000 people from the European DP camps to Australia. They arrived as sponsored ‘indentured workers’, who signed a two-year work contract agreeing to accept the employment assigned to them by the Australian government. However, in a secret arrangement, Jews were largely excluded from this programme and only around five hundred arrived under the auspices of the IRO.7 Ironically, among the non-Jewish DPs who arrived during this period were a number of collaborators and actual Nazi war criminals, particularly from the Waffen SS in East European countries.8



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Jews could only receive an Australian landing permit as sponsored migrants, either through family reunion (Form 40) or economic sponsorship (Form 47). The Jewish leadership, through the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, then located in Melbourne, accused the government of discrimination with respect to the 25 per cent quota on ships, and lobbied for a more flexible approach; however, the government consistently denied there was any discrimination on the basis of race or religion. In January 1949, Calwell agreed to increase the quotas of Jews on incoming ships to 50 per cent, provided that the Jewish community would guarantee accommodation and employment for all Jewish DPs and that no more than three thousand would be sponsored annually. When the number in 1949 exceeded this quota by around eight hundred, the Labor government imposed the ‘iron curtain embargo’, excluding immigrants from communist countries – including Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the countries from where most Jews originated.9 This policy, which was purportedly introduced on security grounds but specifically targeted Jews, succeeded in reducing the number of European Jews able to migrate to Australia and was maintained by the Liberal government after its election in December 1949.10 Yet, every time the Australian Jewish leadership approached government with evidence of this discrimination, both the Labor and Liberal parties and the Department of Immigration, headed by Tasman Heyes (later Sir), strongly denied the accusation.11 Thus, the story of these discriminatory policies had to wait until the opening of government archives, which revealed this ‘unspeakable past’.12 This was also true in regard to the entry of Nazi war criminals into Australia after the war through the IRO programme. Any accusations of this nature were strongly rejected by the government, with Heyes claiming that key personnel making the accusations, such as Judah Waten, secretary of the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism, were communists.13 This full story was only revealed in the 1980s through the research of Mark Aarons. In his study of Italian immigration to Australia, Joseph Pugliese has highlighted connections between race and ethnicity, and discussed the physical examinations required for southern Italians, who were considered to be less white than their northern countrymen.14 Although notions of whiteness shifted in the postwar era, racial concepts as discussed above definitely also applied to Jews, who were seen as a race apart and consequently faced different exclusionary provisions.

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UNITED STATES JEWISH ASSISTANCE AND THE ‘AUSTRALIAN IMMIGRATION PROJECT’ In 1948, a study of racial attitudes in Australia15 showed that although the Germans were ranked after the British and Americans in the most favourable light, the Jews were listed just above the Afro-Americans. These attitudes mirrored views that southern Europeans were inferior to Nordic types, which were prevalent in both the United States and Australia in the 1920s and 1930s based on eugenics and scientific racism developed by pseudoscientists such as Lombroso.16 In her research dealing with nonJewish German migration after 1945, Gisela Kaplan has demonstrated the close connection between community attitudes to different migrant groups and the percentage of government funding. Her conclusion was ‘the darker the skin colour, the hair and eyes, the lower the rate of assistance given to immigrants’. Thus, 87.0 per cent of British migrants were assisted; 76.5 per cent of North Europeans; 65.0 per cent of East Europeans; 24.5 per cent of South Europeans; and only 3.3 per cent of Asians and Oceanians (except New Zealanders). This last 3.3 per cent applied to Jewish immigrants, which placed an enormous financial burden on Australian Jewry. They could not assume this task on their own, and needed assistance from U.S. Jewish welfare organizations.17 To ensure that Jewish European refugees and survivors settled into their new land without becoming a financial burden on the Australian government, the Australian Jewish Welfare Society was formed in 1936, with branches emerging in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide. They directly sponsored some of the refugees and acted as a backup service for those who were sponsored privately but required assistance. Boats were met, and immigrants were helped with finding employment or setting up in business through interest-free loans. After 1945, buildings were purchased and converted into hostels for the newcomers: Melbourne had eleven hostels, Sydney had five and Brisbane, one.18 Only a very small percentage of Jewish immigrants were housed in government migrant camps, such as Bonegilla. After 1945, two different schemes were also revived to assist orphan survivors of the Holocaust. In the late 1930s, the Australian Jewish community had initiated a number of schemes to assist children affected by Nazi violence, including the ‘Rescue the Children’s Fund’, which aimed to assist young orphans, and the ‘Jewish Welfare Guardian Scheme’, for older children. In 1943, a further appeal was organized by the community in the hope of rescuing Jewish orphans from the European inferno. Although significant funds were raised, the situation was such that it was not possible to bring



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children to Australia during the war years.19 In 1945 there was yet one more appeal, for what had been renamed the ‘Save the Children’s Scheme’. Together with the Jewish Welfare Guardian Scheme, a total of 316 orphan Jewish children were sponsored to Australia in the period 1946–50. Although the community initially wished to sponsor only young children, very few children under the age of twelve survived the horrors of the Holocaust, so that those sponsored were already aged between sixteen and twenty-one by the time they arrived in Australia, with most being male.20 As Glenn Palmer has demonstrated with her research into the Jewish ‘Larino’ children who arrived before the war, the Jewish Australian approach was to house the boys in hostels rather than in foster homes, and this proved successful.21 It meant that the group lived together with other young people who had experienced the same traumas and difficulties during the Holocaust, and they could understand each other. At the same time, caring members of the Jewish community tried their best to provide them with assistance and support. Many fewer girls were sponsored, as fewer girls than boys had survived the difficult work conditions during the Holocaust. Those girls who were sponsored were usually placed in foster homes. Facing immense fiscal difficulties, Jewish leaders appealed to overseas Jewish communities, particularly in the United States, for assistance. By 1939, the American Jewish community had already agreed to provide funds for the Australian Jewish Welfare Society in Sydney. In the postwar era the absorption of Jewish immigrants became a joint enterprise between local and overseas Jewry, especially through three major U.S. welfare organizations: the U.S. Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the Refugee Economic Corporation and the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (HIAS). It was these three organizations that facilitated what the U.S. Jewish leadership called the ‘Australian Immigration Project’. These developments reflected a Jewish belief as set out in the Talmud that all Jews are responsible for each other (Kol yehudim aravim ze la’ze). Thus, if a Jew is in need, other Jews no matter where they live have an obligation to assist their religious and ethnic brethren. The immigration of Jewish refugees and survivors to Australia illustrated this central Jewish ethic. The U.S. Jewish organizations were directly involved at each level of the immigration process for those survivors who had received Australian landing permits. The JDC and HIAS booked passages to Australia for their clients, provided transport to the ports of embarkation from Europe (initially from Marseilles, France, and later from Italy) and hostel accommodation, and met all other needs while the survivors waited for their shipping to Australia. When Calwell introduced the 25 per cent quota for ships, the JDC chartered four planes to circumvent it, before Calwell extended the

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25 per cent to aeroplanes. In addition, substantial loans were given to the Jewish communities in Melbourne and Sydney to help with the purchase and maintenance of hostels, and to provide interest-free loans to assist the newcomers to establish themselves in business. This U.S. Jewish assistance for the Australian Immigration Project played a key role in the resettlement of Jewish survivors in Australia.22 Again, it was only through the opening of the archives for this period in New York and Jerusalem that the full extent of this assistance was revealed, because of the perceived need for secrecy – a need consistently stressed by the U.S. Jewish leadership.23 This applied particularly to the IRO refunding the JDC for its assistance with shipping fares, after Calwell had forbidden such funding.24 Despite the negative reactions of the Australian public and the secret discriminatory quotas, Australia accepted the second highest number, after Israel, of survivors of the Holocaust on a pro rata population basis. This influx more than doubled the size of Australian Jewry (which in 1933 had numbered a mere 23,553), from about 31,000 in 1945 to 48,436 in 1954 and 59,343 in 1961; however, many more could have benefited from the chance of a new life in a new country. In the immediate postwar years, departmental officials held the view that the proportion of Jews in Australia should not be increased radically and the effect of this attitude, intentional or otherwise, was that Australian Jewry continued to constitute only 0.5 per cent of the total population. Those refugees who did arrive made a substantial contribution to the development of postwar Australia, disproportionate to their small numbers, while also radically transforming every aspect of Jewish life in Australia. Their absorption into Australian society was facilitated by the work of the Australian Jewish Welfare Societies, with significant financial support being provided by U.S. Jewry, largely because U.S. quotas for Jewish DPs were even more discriminatory.

ACCLIMATIZATION TO AUSTRALIA Despite their total dispossession and loss of both immediate and extended families, most Jewish Holocaust survivors embraced their new life in Australia. For them Australia was the ‘lucky country’ – its greatest benefit being its free, democratic society. They no longer feared that someone would knock on the door in the middle of the night with a pair of handcuffs.25 This sense of security is attested to in numerous contemporary accounts. After the Chip Chase immigrant hostel was opened in Sydney’s Crows Nest by the Jewish Welfare Society in 1950, one survivor wrote:



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It is a very peculiar feeling. It is almost midnight. We are in the middle of a city with two million residents. We are in Sydney. We are in Australia. You who were born here or have been living here for many years, you might not understand these feelings. Though it is midnight, though it is just our second day in Sydney, we seem to be at home. Already we start to have the same sense of security as Australian citizens. We are beginning to share the confidence in their fellow citizens and in their country.26

Unlike many of the non-Jewish DPs who had escaped from countries behind the Iron Curtain, for Jewish survivors there was no thought of Australia as a temporary refuge. Most became loyal, grateful and permanent citizens of their new country. Most Jews who arrived after 1945 brought few material possessions. They did, however, bring new industrial skills, and most responded to the challenges of a new land with hard work, drive and enterprise. Australian Jewry is today a largely middle-class urban group, concentrated in Melbourne and Sydney. Whereas most newcomers enjoyed a moderate level of prosperity, there were some who were not able to re-establish themselves, and lived in poverty. At the other end of the spectrum, some Jewish Holocaust survivors enjoyed outstanding business success in Australia, and became well-known entrepreneurs. Like many other immigrant groups, the Jewish community encouraged their children to achieve academic success, resulting in higher educational standards than the general Australian population. Jewish survivors also contributed to the development of Australia’s multiethnic culture, as evidenced by well-known names in music, art, architecture and the theatre. The arts benefited at every level from the contribution of Jews – as performers and artists, as sponsors and financial donors, and as audiences. Non-Jewish actor and director Hayes Gordon acknowledged this contribution: It would seem that Australia has much to be thankful for in the dislocation of people as a result of Hitler’s war. While it was undoubtedly painful, perhaps beyond measure, to witness great cultures burnt with their books, yet so many Europeans were able somehow to salvage a measure of this cultural wealth, and bring it with them to their new home on this vast Pacific island. They came at a time when Australia was crying out to find itself. And coming with a fresh outlook, it was often the newcomer who saw what needed to be done, and how.27

Indeed, Jewish newcomers have played a key role in transforming Australian society from a cultural backwater to a cosmopolitan multicultural society. Thus, on arrival in Australia, the Jewish survivors sought to concentrate on the present and the future, building new lives in their country of adoption.

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They worked hard to re-establish themselves, and once they had achieved financial stability, many sought to give back to their new land. However, they also tried to put their unspeakable past behind them.

THE UNSPEAKABLE PAST For many survivors, the past was too painful to talk about. Jacob Rosenberg, a Melbourne Jewish survivor of the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz and other concentration camps, and an award-winning writer and poet, expressed this anguish in one of his poems, entitled ‘No Exit’: How do you describe it? What alphabet do you employ? What words? What language? What silence, what scream?28

[In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, survivors did relate their stories, many of which were recorded and published,29 but once they arrived in Australia, most Jewish survivors did not talk of their traumatic experiences of suffering and deprivation. Many believed that the best way to secure continuity of Jewish life was by having children to replace those who had died.30 They wished to shelter their children from the horrors they had experienced. In her book The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk, Ruth Wajnryb described her experience of growing up in Campbelltown, a Sydney suburb distant from the Jewish centre in the eastern suburbs: It was as if we’d arrived from another planet, with no records or recollections, no memory. We lived in the present and for the future. We were busy. We had plans. We had ambitions. We had this space in time that was now. And we were working hard toward what we could imagine ahead of us. But there was no past. The past was cordoned off, sealed out. There was a complete severance with what went before.31

She went on to describe the reluctance of her parents to talk about their experiences:



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The temptation to seal off the past so as not to allow its horrors to intrude into the present must have been overwhelming. I don’t know if they made a pact not to talk about where they came from, what they’d seen and experienced, what they’d lost. But it was as if they had. I am aware now of the enormous energy invested daily, yearly and across decades, in keeping the past to the past, preventing it from engulfing us.32

Mark Baker highlighted this sense of disconnection with the past in tracing his parents’ stories during the Holocaust, contrasting it with his experiences of growing up in Melbourne and attending Mount Scopus College, its largest Jewish day school. Although Baker himself was not permitted to speak about the Holocaust at home, his father’s regular nightmares were a constant reminder of a secret but threatening past.33 He wrote: ‘[L]ooking back over those days now, I am more aware of how Auschwitz cast its shadow on day-to-day life. Who can dissect why this one was depressed, or how deep was the lament that ran through a thousand sighs’.34 He referred to the way his mother had fed him as though this was ‘the last morsel’, and how she became worried that a common cold would prove to be tuberculosis; and he told of ‘the way they dreamed through you and devoured the dividends of every achievement’.35 In analysing Wajnryb’s book, Sophie Gelski and Jenny Wajsenberg (one of the founding figures in Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre) discussed three factors that accounted for survivors’ inability to discuss their trauma with their children: linguistic barriers due to inadequate English skills to explain their trauma; internal psychological problems, inhibiting the ability of survivors ‘to communicate their personal versions of hell – the pain, deprivation, abuse, humiliation, loss and guilt of having survived – to … the outsider, the one who was not there’;36 and external factors, including that many members of the outside community were not interested in listening to survivors tell their stories.37 The reluctance of survivors to speak of their experiences to outsiders in general, and often to their children in particular, was by no means unique to Australia. Many found it difficult to find the language to ‘express a trauma of such magnitude’.38 The code of silence about the Holocaust was seen in every aspect of Jewish life in Australia. In 1988, Wajsenberg noted that: The Holocaust is still a troubling subject for many of us, difficult to accept, hard to confront and easily relegated to the recess of the sub-conscience; [it] nevertheless has a unique place in the Melbourne Jewish community due to the high proportion of Holocaust survivors … The postwar Australian-born generation has, by and large, attempted to sweep under the carpet any links to this seminal

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topic, and overwhelming Jewish experience. In our quest for stability, we have tended to ignore our past.39

THE TURNING OF THE TIDE A realization of the need to speak about the Holocaust emerged in Australia in the late 1970s. Australian Jewry was being affected by a worldwide growth of Holocaust awareness, which had begun with the Eichmann trial of 1961 in Israel. These developments have been traced by a number of scholars, and the motivation for the emergence of greater Holocaust awareness continues to be a subject of significant academic debate. Scholars such as Peter Novick have argued that U.S. ‘political concerns’ drove these changes.40 In contrast, Wajnryb has stressed the effect of trauma in the shaping of the Holocaust narrative. The Australian survivor experience reinforces this latter explanation. My own family did not speak of their Holocaust experiences and I only learnt in the late 1990s of how Oscar Schindler saved members of my father’s Cracow-based Perlmann family. A natural progression towards greater Holocaust awareness occurred due to the convergence of a number of events. In Australia, as discussed in detail by Judith Berman, major changes began in the 1980s.41 In Sydney, in November 1979, the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies formed a Holocaust Committee, which was responsible for organizing the annual Holocaust commemorations. In 1981, the first World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors was held at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Jerusalem, with an Australian delegation participating; the first Australian exhibition about the Holocaust was launched in the same year in Sydney and Melbourne by the Jewish service organization, B’nai B’rith. Then, in 1982, the Australian Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Descendants was formed and held its first function in 1983. A major initiative and key turning point in Holocaust memory in Australia occurred in 1985 when the International Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors was held at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. The staging of exhibitions as part of these developments was significant, and led to the realization of the need for more permanent museums. In 1984, the Melbourne Jewish Holocaust Centre was opened. In Sydney it took more time because there were two competing projects, but the Sydney Jewish Museum was finally opened in 1992. Due to the vision of its founder and benefactor, Holocaust survivor John Saunders, it was dedicated to both recording and memorializing the Holocaust and also to documenting Australian Jewish history and the contributions of Jews to Australian society.



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Thus, in the 1980s, active participation in Holocaust memory had intensified in Australia, particularly through the emerging museum culture. This active memorialization and development of museums occurred because, compared with other parts of the Jewish world, Australian Jewry was much more aware of the Holocaust. A major factor in this was that such a large proportion of the community were Holocaust survivors or their descendants. Indeed, in the 1970s and 1980s it was rare to find a Jewish family in Australia that was not connected in some way at the family level, even if by marriage, to a person who actually survived to tell their story. However, in both Melbourne and Sydney these developments were fully funded by private benefactors without government assistance, unlike in some other parts of the world where governments were more directly involved, such as the United States and Germany. Melbourne Jewry, in particular, was at the forefront internationally in terms of the establishment of Holocaust memorial museums outside Israel, where the concept of establishing a museum was enshrined in the 1953 legislation that created Yad Vashem, opened in 1957. The concept of establishing such a museum in the United States began with President Jimmy Carter establishing a President’s Commission on the Holocaust in 1978, charged with recommending ways to commemorate the Holocaust. Chaired by Holocaust survivor and renowned novelist, Eli Wiesel, the commission submitted its report in 1979, recommending the establishment of a memorial museum with an educational function. Congress accepted this recommendation in 1980. The federal government donated land in the nation’s capital, Washington DC, but the building itself was to be paid for by private donations. However, it took thirteen years from the passage of this act until the building was completed and the project brought to fruition. During this period, an intensive effort was made to collect as many artefacts and as much documentation as possible.42 The opening of New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, called ‘A Living Memorial to the Holocaust’, was an even longer saga, beginning in 1948 and ending with completion of the building in 1997.43 Britain’s first Holocaust museum, Beth Shalom (the House of Peace), was opened in only 1995 – in the grounds of a former farmhouse in the village of Laxton, on the edge of Sherwood Forest in north Nottinghamshire – as a private initiative of brothers James and Stephen Smith and their family.44 Even in Europe, the opening of Holocaust memorial museums was slow in coming. In Berlin, where there are now at least seven museums, the first to be opened (in 1992) was in the Villa of Wannsee, where, on 20 January 1942, the infamous meeting of key bureaucrats had been held to plan what was referred to as ‘the final solution’ – the total annihilation of European Jewry.45 Thus, it took half a century

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for Germany’s capital, recently reunited after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, to openly commemorate the Holocaust and seek to educate the next generation through development of a museum culture. The problem of Holocaust denial in Australia was one of the many factors that motivated survivors in Australia to open up and tell their stories. For example, Marika Weinberger, who served as president of the Australian Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and vice-president of the Sydney Jewish Museum, admitted that for many years she was not able to speak about her Holocaust experiences. She was very reluctant to attend the association’s 1985 Holocaust gathering in Sydney, finding that she was not able to sit through all the sessions. Then in 1987 she became a volunteer guide of the Holocaust exhibition, ‘We Are Here’, at the Great Synagogue, and found that that she was able to speak to strangers about her experiences before she spoke to her own family. She came to believe that it was an obligation of all survivors to tell their story, as they were ‘the authentic voice of the Shoah’. One factor motivating her was Holocaust denial. Jewish survivors could say ‘I was there; I know’.46 Indeed, the Australian League of Rights, founded by Eric Butler in 1960, has been a persistent peddler of Holocaust denial. Butler began his career as a young journalist of the New Times, the Melbourne-based newspaper of the Social Credit movement, in 1938, and since then has consistently attacked the Jewish people and spread anti-Semitic calumnies. The league has been the most influential, and most substantially financed, racist organization in Australia. In 1991, Federal Race Discrimination Commissioner, Irene Moss, claimed that ‘[i]ts resources, influence, stability and professionalism far exceed any other racist organization in Australia, past or present. Its success is partly due to the relative subtlety with which its ideology is promoted’.47 Holocaust denial became a major plank of the league as a result of the increasing awareness of the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Second World War. In 1978, the television miniseries ‘Holocaust’, based on Gerald Green’s novel, brought the theme of the Holocaust into people’s living rooms for the first time. The league sought to minimize the influence of this series by circulating letters based on Arthur Butz’s book, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, published in 1976, which sought to stress what Butz called ‘the myth of the six million’. Butz, a professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University in Illinois, claimed that there was no evidence of gas chambers at Auschwitz. Although he was willing to admit that up to one million Jews may have died during the war, he claimed that there was no special Nazi programme against the Jews, who he believed invented the Holocaust story to further Zionist aims. The Australian civil libertarian,



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John Bennett, also disseminated Butz’s views and attracted much media attention in 1979. His views were strongly supported by Butler.48 The League of Rights also promoted the works of other Holocaust deniers, such as the American Fred Leuchter who claimed that no Zyklon B was used in Auschwitz and thus that the gassing was a hoax, Canadian Ernst Zundel, and the British freelance historian David Irving. In 1986, Butler affiliated with Irving’s European Alliance and also promoted his Australian tour to launch the paperback version of his book, Uprising, which was an anti-Semitic account of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. In 1987, the league promoted a second Irving tour of Australia following Veritas Press’s publication of Irving’s controversial biography of Winston Churchill. In 1993, when Irving was refused a visa to tour Australia, the league strongly opposed this decision. Veritas then attempted to screen, throughout Australia, Irving’s documentary video presentation, ironically entitled ‘The Search for Truth in History’. Eric Butler’s son, Philip Butler, was involved in promoting this video but, as a result of community opposition, the screenings did not go ahead. Through the Adelaide Institute and its website, founded in 1995, German-born Dr Fredrick Töben further propagated the narrative of these deniers in the 1990s by seeking to provide them with academic credibility.49 Other more extreme racist groups, such as Jack van Tongeren’s Australian National Front in Western Australia in the early 1990s, also peddled Holocaust denial.50 In the face of such activities, Holocaust survivors felt compelled to speak out against this libel.

CONCLUSIONS The story of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Australia was ‘unspeakable’ on a number of levels. First, Australian governments, both Labor and later Liberal, secretly introduced anti-Jewish policies to limit the number of Jewish DPs coming to Australia, but publicly denied that any discrimination was being practised on the basis of either race or religion. Equally, most Jewish survivors themselves were initially unable to speak about their traumatic experiences, and it took over thirty years before they began to openly address the issues, with the first major conference only taking place in Sydney in 1985. Many different factors contributed to this breaking of the silence, but the emergence of Holocaust denial was a major element. Survivors felt that it was important to educate the coming generations, and the way to do this was through the opening of museums, first in Melbourne, then Sydney and later in Perth. However, unlike in the United States and Germany, members of the Jewish community funded the erection of these museums without

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any direct government assistance. Jewish survivor experience shared much in common with that of the Jewish refugees and survivors in other parts of the world, both in terms of the discrimination being practised by most countries of the free world, and in terms of their reluctance to speak, the late emergence of memorialization and the sharing of stories. As such, theirs was a global story.

SUZANNE D. RUTLAND Suzanne D. Rutland (OAM) is professor emerita in the Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies, University of Sydney. She is the author of The Jews in Australia (2005), and has published widely on Australian Jewish history, including Jewish migration and Jewish women in Australia, as well as writing on the Holocaust, Israel and Jewish education. In 2015 she published Let My People Go: The Untold Story of Australia and Soviet Jews, 1959–1989 (with Sam Lipski). In 2008 she received the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to higher Jewish education and interfaith dialogue. NOTES   1. Suzanne D. Rutland, ‘“Returning to a Graveyard”: Australian Debates about March of the Living to Poland’, in Karen Auerbach (ed.), Aftermath: Genocide, Memory and History, Melbourne, Monash University Press, 2015, p. 140.  2. Glenda Sluga, Bonegilla: ‘A Place of No Hope’, Melbourne, University of Melbourne Press, 1988, p. 1.   3. Suzanne D. Rutland, ‘Postwar Anti-Jewish Refugee Hysteria: A Case of Racial or Religious Bigotry?’, Sojourners and Strangers, Journal of Australian Studies, a fully referred international journal published by University of Queensland Press on behalf of Australian Studies, Curtin University of Technology, in association with the International Australian Studies Association and the Australian Public Intellectual Network, no. 77, 2003, pp. 69–79.   4. Comment by David Lewis, of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, as quoted in Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933–1948, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1983, p. 275.   5. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, vol. 189, 27 November 1946, p. 661.   6. Rutland, ‘Postwar Anti-Jewish Refugee Hysteria’, p. 75.  7. Suzanne D. Rutland, ‘Subtle Exclusions: Postwar Jewish Emigration to Australia and the Impact of the IRO Scheme’, Journal of Holocaust Education, vol. 10, Summer 2001, pp. 50–66.



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 8. For details, see Mark Aarons, Sanctuary: Nazi Fugitives in Australia, Melbourne, Heinemann 1989; Mark Aarons, War Criminals Welcome: Australia a Sanctuary for Fugitive War Criminals since 1945, Melbourne, Black Inc., 2001.  9. National Archives of Australia (NAA): CRS A445, item 235/1/24, ‘Immigration of Jews’, No. 19/3/77, 24 October 1949, Department of Immigration. 10. Suzanne D. Rutland, ‘“The Unwanted”: The Story of Survivor Jewish Migration to Australia, 1945–1954’, in Johannes-Dieter Steinert and Inge Weber-Newth (eds), Beyond Camps and Forced Labour: Current International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution, Osnabrueck, Secolo, 2006, pp. 123–32. 11. See, for example, Tasman Heyes writing to Walter Brand, stating ‘there is no discrimination … between Jewish and non-Jewish displaced persons’, 10 June 1949, in Victorian Jewish Board of Deputies correspondence files, Box 6, La Trobe Library, Melbourne. 12. Suzanne D. Rutland, ‘Research in Transnational Archives: The Forgotten Story of the “Australian Immigration Project”’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, vol. 19, no.3, Winter 2013, pp. 105–30. 13. NAA: CRS A434, item 271/2/4, ‘Note for Minister’, 18 March 1950, Department of Immigration correspondence files. See also Suzanne D. Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia, New York, NJ, Holmes and Meier, 2001, pp. 249–51. 14. Joseph Pugliese, ‘Race as Category Crisis: Whiteness and the Topical Assignation of Race’, Social Semiotics, vol. 12, no.2, 2002, p. 159, DOI: 10.1080/10350330276021207. 15. O.A. Oeser and S.B. Hammond (eds), Social Structure and Personality in a City, New York, Macmillan 1954. The fieldwork for this study was done in 1948–49. 16. Pugliese, ‘Race as Category Crisis’, p. 159. 17. Gisela Kaplan, ‘From “Enemy Alien” to Assisted Immigrant: Australian Public Opinion of Germans and Germany in the Australian Print Media, 1945–1956’, in Manfred Juergensen (ed.), German–Australian Cultural Relations since 1945, Bern, Peter Lang, 1995, pp. 88–89. 18. Suzanne D. Rutland and Sol Encel, ‘Three “Rich Uncles in America”: The Australian Immigration Project and American Jewry’, American Jewish History, March 2009, pp. 79–115. 19. NAA: CRS A434, 49/3/3, Memo No. 43/2/216 and Memo from Walter Brand, General Secretary of the Australian Jewish Welfare Society, to the Minister for the Interior, 10 March 1943, ‘A.J.W.S. Scheme for Admission of 300 Refugee Children, Part I’, Department of Immigration. 20. A total of 1.5 million Jewish children were murdered during the Holocaust. Teenage boys had the best survival rate, if they lied about their age at the selections, because they had the physical strength to survive the terrible conditions in the concentration camps. 21. Glen Palmer, Reluctant Refuge: Unaccompanied Refugee and Evacuee Children in Australia, 1933–45, East Roseville, NSW, Kangaroo Press, 1997. 22. Rutland and Encel, ‘Three “Rich Uncles in America”’, pp. 79–115.

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23. Ibid., pp. 83–84. 24. For the details of this story, see Suzanne D. Rutland and Sol Encel, ‘No Room in the Inn: American Responses to Australian Immigration Policies, 1946–1954’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 43, no. 5, December 2009, pp. 511–15. 25. Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora, p. 257. 26. ‘On Coming Home’, Sydney Jewish News, 11 August 1950. 27. Viennese Theatre (pamphlet), Sydney, 1966, issue 12. Loaned to the author by the late Karl Bittman. 28. Jacob G. Rosenberg, My Father’s Silence, Melbourne, Focus, 1994, p. 5. 29. Recent research has highlighted this; see H.R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962, New York, NY, New York University Press, 2009; and David Cesarani (ed.), After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence, London, Routledge, 2012. 30. Suzanne D. Rutland and Sophie Caplan, With One Voice: A History of the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies, Sydney, Australian Jewish Historical Society, 1998, p. 318. 31. Ruth Wajnryb, The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2001, p. 6. 32. Ibid., p. 13. 33. Mark Raphael Baker, A Journey Through Memory: The Fiftieth Gate, Sydney, HarperCollins, 1997. 34. Mark Baker, ‘As If: Born Under the Sign of the Holocaust’, in Michael Fagenblat, Melanie Landau and Nathan Wolski (eds), New Under the Sun: Jewish Australians on Religion, Politics and Culture, Melbourne, Black Inc., 2006, p. 250. 35. Ibid. 36. Sophie Gelski and Jenny Wajsenberg, ‘Teaching the Holocaust Today’, in Konrad Kwiet and Jürgen Matthäus (eds), Contemporary Responses to the Holocaust, Westport, CT, Greenwood Publishing, 2005, p. 225. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., p. 224. 39. Jenny Wajsenberg, ‘Teaching a Lesson of Memory: Melbourne’s Holocaust Centre’, Australian Jewish News, 30 June 1988, p. 20. 40. Hasia Diner has recently written a strong response to Novick’s arguments, claiming that there is an overall silence in American history, and so the Holocaust silence cannot be proved to be for political reasons. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love. 41. Judith E. Berman, Holocaust Remembrance in Australian Jewish Communities, 1945– 2000, Perth, University of Western Australia Press, 2001. 42. ‘History of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’, http://www.ushmm. org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005782 (accessed 15 November 2013). 43. Rochelle G. Saidel, Never Too Late to Remember: The Politics behind New York City’s Holocaust Museum, New York and London, Lynne Rienner, 1996. 44. ‘Centre’s History’, http://holocaustcentre.net/?page_id=3 (accessed 14 November 2013).



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45. ‘House of the Wansee Conference: Memorial and Educational Site’, http://www. visitberlin.de/en/spot/house-of-the-wannsee-conference (accessed 15 November 2013). 46. Comment by Marika Weinberger, Sydney, March 1998, as cited in Rutland and Caplan, With one Voice, p. 319. 47. Address by Irene Moss, Race Discrimination Commissioner from 1986, speaking on ‘Incitement to Racial Hatred Legislation and the Racial Violence Report’, Minutes of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, Plenum, 18 June 1991, Sydney. 48. For a detailed discussion of early Holocaust denial in Australia, see Hilary L. Rubinstein, ‘Early Manifestations of Holocaust Denial in Australia’, Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal, vol. 14, no. 1, 1997, pp. 93–109. 49. See Danny Ben-Moshe, ‘Holocaust Denial in Australia’, Jerusalem, ACTA, Sasson International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, vol. 15, 2005, pp. 5–7; Robert S. Wistrich, ‘Holocaust Denial Down Under’, in Robert S. Wistrich (ed.), Holocaust Denial: The Politics of Perfidy, Jerusalem, The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2012, pp. 157–79; and Jeremy Jones, ‘Holocaust Denial: “Clear and Present” Racial Vilification’, Australian Journal of Human Rights, vol. 10, no. 1, 1994, p. 169. 50. Rutland and Caplan, With One Voice, p. 287.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aarons, Mark, Sanctuary: Nazi Fugitives in Australia, Melbourne, Heinemann 1989. ———. War Criminals Welcome: Australia a Sanctuary for Fugitive War Criminals since 1945, Melbourne, Black Inc, 2001. Abella, Irving, and Harold Troper, None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933–1948, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1983. Baker, Mark Raphael, A Journey Through Memory: The Fiftieth Gate, Sydney, HarperCollins, 1997. ———. ‘As If: Born Under the Sign of the Holocaust’, in Michael Fagenblat, Melanie Landau and Nathan Wolski (eds), New Under the Sun: Jewish Australians on Religion, Politics and Culture, Melbourne, Black Inc., 2006, pp. 249–61. Ben-Moshe, Danny, ‘Holocaust Denial in Australia’, Analysis of Current Trends in Antisemitism, vol. 15, Jerusalem, Sasson International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, 2005, pp. 5–7. Berman, Judith, E., Holocaust Remembrance in Australian Jewish Communities, 1945– 2000, Perth, University of Western Australia Press, 2001. Cesarani, David (ed.), After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence, London, Routledge, 2012. Diner, H.R., We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962, New York, NY, New York University Press, 2009.

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Gelski, Sophie, and Jenny Wajsenberg, ‘Teaching the Holocaust Today’, in Konrad Kwiet and Jürgen Matthäus (eds), Contemporary Responses to the Holocaust, Westport, CT, Greenwood Publishing, 2005. Jones, Jeremy, ‘Holocaust Denial: “Clear and Present” Racial Vilification’, Australian Journal of Human Rights, vol. 10, no. 1, 1994, pp. 169–84. Kaplan, Gisela, ‘From “Enemy Alien” to Assisted Immigrant: Australian Public Opinion of Germans and Germany in the Australian Print Media, 1945–1956’, in Manfred Juergensen (ed.), German–Australian Cultural Relations since 1945, Bern, Peter Lang, 1995. Oeser, O.A., and S.B. Hammond (eds), Social Structure and Personality in a City, New York, Macmillan, 1954. Palmer, Glen, Reluctant Refuge: Unaccompanied Refugee and Evacuee Children in Australia, 1933–45, East Roseville, NSW, Kangaroo Press, 1997. Pugliese, Joseph, ‘Race as Category Crisis: Whiteness and the Topical Assignation of Race’, Social Semiotics, vol. 12, no. 2, 2002, pp. 149–68. Rosenberg, Jacob, G., My Father’s Silence, Melbourne, Focus, 1994. Rubinstein, Hilary, L., ‘Early Manifestations of Holocaust Denial in Australia’, Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal, vol. 14, no. 1, 1997, pp. 93–109. Rutland, Suzanne D., Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia, New York, NJ, Holmes and Meier, 2001. ———. ‘Subtle Exclusions: Postwar Jewish Emigration to Australia and the Impact of the IRO Scheme’, Journal of Holocaust Education, vol. 10, Summer 2001, pp. 50–66. ———. ‘Postwar Anti-Jewish Refugee Hysteria: A Case of Racial or Religious Bigotry?’, Sojourners and Strangers, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 27, no. 77, 2003, pp. 69–79. ———. ‘“The Unwanted”: The Story of Survivor Jewish Migration to Australia, 1945– 1954’, in Steinert Johannes-Dieter and Inge Weber-Newth (eds), Beyond Camps and Forced Labour: Current International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution, Osnabrueck, Secolo, 2006, pp. 123–32. ———. ‘Research in Transnational Archives: The Forgotten Story of the “Australian Immigration Project”’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, vol. 19, no.3, Winter 2013, pp. 105–30. ———. ‘“Returning to a Graveyard”: Australian Debates about March of the Living to Poland’, in Karen Auerbach (ed.), Aftermath: Genocide, Memory and History, Melbourne, Monash University Press, 2015, pp. 141–66. Rutland, Suzanne D., and Sophie Caplan, With One Voice: A History of the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies, Sydney, Australian Jewish Historical Society, 1998. Rutland, Suzanne D., and Sol Encel, ‘No Room in the Inn: American Responses to Australian Immigration Policies, 1946–1954’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 43, no. 5, December 2009, pp. 511–15. ———. ‘Three “Rich Uncles in America”: The Australian Immigration Project and American Jewry’, American Jewish History, vol. 95, no. 1, 2009, pp. 79–115.



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Saidel, Rochelle G., Never Too Late to Remember: The Politics behind New York City’s Holocaust Museum, New York and London, Lynne Rienner, 1996. Sluga, Glenda, Bonegilla: ‘A Place of No Hope’, Melbourne, University of Melbourne Press, 1988. Wajnryb, Ruth, The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2001. Wajsenberg, Jenny, ‘Teaching a Lesson of Memory: Melbourne’s Holocaust Centre’, Australian Jewish News, 30 June 1988, p. 20. Wistrich, Robert S., ‘Holocaust Denial Down Under’, in Robert S. Wistrich (ed.), Holocaust Denial: The Politics of Perfidy, Jerusalem, The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2012.

Chapter 8

HIV/AIDS, Loss and the Australian Gay Community Robert Reynolds and Shirleene Robinson

KL The arrival of HIV/AIDS on Australian shores in the 1980s permanently altered gay life in the country, with few men unaffected. Many lives have been lost and many men confronted with the difficulties of losing partners, loved ones and having severely depleted friendship networks. This chapter uses oral history to explore the varied ways gay men experienced the emotional impact of HIV/AIDS in Australia during the first decade of the epidemic before the development of antiretroviral medications, which transformed the experience of HIV/AIDS for many gay men. It sets the Australian experience in a transnational context, noting commonalities between Australia, Great Britain and the United States. It considers the connectivity many in the community experienced as a result of the experiences and memories of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, but also the fractures and stresses it caused, and concludes that for many Australian gay men, analogies of war best capture the tenor of living through the early years of the epidemic. This chapter begins its investigation in 1983 with the first Australian death from HIV/AIDS, and ends in 1996 with the development of antiretroviral medications, which have greatly extended life expectancies for people living with HIV/AIDS. The Australian reaction to HIV/AIDS was one of the most effective in the world in terms of minimizing its spread, and a growing body of scholarship has explored the public policy response to this epidemic, most notably Paul Sendzuik’s monograph, Learning to Trust.1 The impact of the syndrome on gay community formation and sexuality has also been investigated by Graham Willett, Clive Moore and Garry Dowsett.2 162



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Less attention has been directed towards the complexities of emotional life for Australian gay men during the course of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Institutions and activism are shaped by emotions, and feelings should be embedded into studies of mentalities of the past. As historian Nicole Eustace reminds us, ‘shifting patterns in who expresses which emotions, when, and to whom provide a key index of power in every society. Every expression of emotion constitutes social communication and political negotiation’.3 Insights provided by the history of emotions have significantly influenced a range of international texts exploring the impact of HIV/AIDS. In the United States, Deborah B. Gould has investigated the mobilizing power of anger in HIV/AIDS activism. In An Archive of Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich suggests the intersections between public experience and emotion in the HIV/AIDS organization ACT UP. Historians who have examined the British response to HIV/AIDS have found that those who were closely associated with managing the response to the epidemic were subjected to stresses caused by the redefinition of the welfare state and proximity to the epidemic.4 As anthropologist Niko Besnier has pointed out, ‘many emotions are collectively constructed and crucially dependent on interaction with others for their development’.5 Australian histories of HIV/AIDS are yet to fully explore the realm of emotions. Michael Hurley has written a moving personal essay on the numbing effect of grief as he lost friends and co-workers to AIDS.6 Robert Ariss used his own experience as a person living with HIV/ AIDS to explore the impact of anger on activism.7 More recently, Jennifer Power’s 2011 study, Movement, Knowledge, Emotion: Gay Activism and HIV/AIDS in Australia, wove the emotions of fear and grief into a social movement analysis of HIV/AIDS activism and the gay community.8 However, a fuller history of the emotional impact of the epidemic on those affected in Australia might well reveal the presence of both trauma and resilience, as has been the case in international studies.9 The chapter will utilize oral history as the primary means of accessing the emotional lives of gay men who lived through the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Eugenia Lean has pointed out that language is used by historical subjects to mediate experiences and convey emotional states.10 Close study of interview recordings and transcripts thus allows access to a history of emotions. Oral history has also been recognized as a successful means of obtaining information about communities and individuals who have been marginalized from broader national narratives. This research method has been used very effectively internationally to map a gay and lesbian past that might otherwise have remained unrecorded.11 To date though, oral history has not been used as the primary means of exploring emotions responses to HIV/AIDS in an Australian context.

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International oral history collections such as the HIV/AIDS Testimonies collection of life story interviews held by the British Library and the ACT UP Oral History Video Tapes Project collection held by the New York Public Library provide detailed elucidation on the way HIV/AIDS was experienced by gay communities in the United Kingdom and the United States.12 The National Library of Australia holds the Australian Responses to AIDS oral history collection, which consists of eighty-two interviews gathered between 1992 and 2009, and has the potential to reveal similar insights. People interviewed in this collection include key government figures, community leaders, activists and people living with HIV/AIDS. This chapter utilizes material from this collection, alongside original interviews conducted by the authors. The interviews used are all with men who identified as gay, and include interviews with a number of people living with HIV/AIDS. Wendy Rickard, who was involved with the collection of the British Library’s collection of HIV/AIDS testimonies, has asserted that oral history ‘offers the possibility of both affirming and destabilising a personal narrative’, and this is particularly evident in traumatic oral histories.13 Although memory can be unreliable, it provides insight into the relationship between personal subjectivity and material facts.14 The meanings that interviewees place on the past are just as important as the reliability of content. Thus, oral history interviews provide crucial insight into the way gay Australian men experienced the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

BEGINNINGS The HIV/AIDS epidemic arrived on Australian shores at a time when the gay and lesbian liberation movement had made extraordinary gains. South Australia had become the first Australian state to decriminalize sex between men in 1975, inspiring lawmakers and activists in a range of other regions. Gay men had become adept at lobbying for political change, and a gay subculture with its own press and nightclubs was flourishing. Although New South Wales did not decriminalize male-to-male sex until 1984, Sydney’s Oxford Street had become the physical centre of Australian gay male life.15 This infrastructure, which allowed for the dissemination of information about safe sex, saved lives when HIV/AIDS arrived in Australia. Although very little was known about the mysterious new illness that was affecting gay men in the United States in the early 1980s, some Australian gay men were aware that an epidemic was approaching. In October 1982, immunologist Ron Penny diagnosed the first case of AIDS in Australia at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital. The man diagnosed was a gay



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man visiting Sydney from the U.S.16 In 1983, at least six cases were reported in Sydney and Melbourne, with all confirmed cases being men who had had sexual contact with American men, or with men who had visited the United States.17 In July 1983, the first Australian death as a result of HIV/AIDS occurred in Melbourne.18 This man was also gay and had spent several years living in the U.S.19 Jennifer Power points out that the gay male community in Australia was more affected by HIV/AIDS than any other population group. Between 1982 and 2009, 10,446 people were diagnosed with AIDS and 6,776 AIDSrelated deaths were recorded.20 More than 80 per cent of infections between 1982 and 2009 occurred through male-to-male sexual transmission.21 Gay men in the inner cities of Sydney and Melbourne were particularly exposed to the effects of the epidemic. In this sense, the experience of gay men in Australia was very similar to that of gay men in cities like San Francisco, New York and London. Although transnational communication and international travel in the early 1980s had alerted Australian gay men to the fact that an epidemic was unfolding in the United States, very little information was known about the mysterious new disease that was affecting gay men. Uncertainty surrounding the transmission of HIV/AIDS in the early years of the epidemic is a common motif in international oral histories. As Neil Broome, who resided in New York in 1983 recalls, ‘it was very hard to get a handle on what’s real and what’s not. You know, people were thinking you could get it from tears – crazy things’.22 Inner-city Sydney resident Lloyd Grosse remembers rumours and misinformation spreading rapidly throughout the gay community in that city as well. He recalled: I remember [hearing there was] some cancer that was being spread by amyl nitrite, and I remember, bizarrely, we started to drink cans. If we were drinking something like glass, we drank it with a straw, bizarrely, because no one actually knew how it was transmitted, and we thought it had something to do with amyl nitrite. In those days, the gay cancer they were referring to was probably Kaposi’s sarcoma.23

Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer that had previously been rare but frequently affected people living with HIV, was one of the first visible markers that an epidemic was unfolding in cities such as San Francisco, New York and London. As the home of Australia’s largest gay community, Sydney was the first Australian city to experience the full brunt of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Grosse recalls the tangible signs that a crisis was developing. Ox-

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ford Street, the epicentre of gay male life, was visually transformed by the emerging HIV/AIDS crisis. Grosse asserts: ‘The Golden Mile was an epicentre of a range of different things and you had people virtually living on Oxford Street as well … It was a really vibrant street, but as HIV started to hit, you actually started to see HIV infiltrate. You could see it start to get into the community right there’.24 Grosse’s account is uncannily similar to those describing the early physical impact of HIV/AIDS on the city of San Francisco. It is estimated that in the early 1980s, and before 1987, up to 50 per cent of the gay male population in that city was living with HIV/ AIDS.25 The Castro Street neighbourhood, which had been a core hub of gay male life in that city, was ravaged by the deaths of many men, while other men visibly struggled with poor health. Oral histories documenting the experiences of British men contain similar observations about the impact of the epidemic on gay communities in cities such as London and Manchester. Although the unfolding crisis in the United States, particularly in cities such as San Francisco and New York, provided Australian gay men with a model of what they might face, Grosse points out that the epidemic was initially incomprehensible to many Australian men: I don’t think we understood the tsunami was going to hit. I think it was a bit like, we were standing on the shore wondering why the water had receded, because we didn’t know what that meant. There’s something weird, why the water had gone out so far, what was going on? None of us really understood. We understood something was happening, but had no point of reference to understand what the tide going out meant.26

Grosse’s evocative description captures something of the bewilderment that marked the arrival of HIV/AIDS on Australian shores. There was simply no modern precedent for a deadly epidemic that would strike so quickly, and would so virulently affect a particular subgroup. Members of the gay community had to manage considerable uncertainty while dealing with the very real awareness that a major epidemic, which would unquestionably alter their lives, was imminent.

PREJUDICE AND FRACTURES Formulating an individual and community response to HIV/AIDS was complicated by the often virulent prejudices that the epidemic unleashed. In the first years of the epidemic, many segments of the broader Australian com-



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munity displayed the same intolerance towards people living with HIV that has been noted in the United States and United Kingdom. Australian public tensions were aggravated after an incident in Queensland in November 1984, when three babies died after receiving transfusions of blood containing the HIV virus. As Paul Sendziuk notes, homophobia was exacerbated by media reporting of the deaths of the Queensland babies, which saw a gang of angry men assault gay men on Sydney’s Oxford Street and kick in doors of gay bars.27 Oral histories illuminate fractures within the gay community as this time, a topic that has not yet received significant historical attention. Instead, Australian histories have tended to highlight the development of gay community responses to HIV/AIDS, which included the rapid formation of AIDS councils across Australia in the 1980s.28 Although the Australian gay community developed extremely effective methods of HIV/AIDS peer education and a world-leading response to the epidemic, it is clear that the stresses of the epidemic did cause divisions within the community. These strains were particularly evident in the earliest stages of the epidemic when comparatively little was known about HIV transmission, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s when large numbers of Australian gay men died from AIDS-related causes. It is understandable that the trauma of living through an unpredictable epidemic and subsequently navigating the terrain of loss would aggravate tensions. John Trigg, a gay man based in Sydney, recalls that his initial response to HIV/AIDS was one that involved discrimination against different sectors of the gay male community. He remembers thinking: ‘Who can I trust?’ and ‘What can you do?’ and ‘How is it transmitted?’ I guess was the big one, you know, because there were all those sort of theories that anyone who used poppers was going to get it, and anyone who took drugs was going to get it, or anyone who took it up the arse was going to get it, and all of those various things, that you’d only get it if you did such-and-such, or you’d only get it if you did something else, and there was a lot of that sort of going around, which created a lot of fear and discrimination within the community, I think, you know.29

Such a response, driven by panic and a lack of information, also occurred in other Australian cities and is a motif that runs through oral histories gathered from the United States and the United Kingdom. As Robert Cecci, founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis Centre in New York’s ombudsman programme recalled, in the early years of the epidemic in that city: ‘Nobody knew what to advise us so we were advised about everything. Things that

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were ludicrous. Don’t touch money. Don’t go into restaurants. Don’t go into grocery stores during the day when there are a lot of people in there … Don’t breathe the air – that was the big one’.30 Australian men who were living with HIV/AIDS recall a climate of prejudice and discrimination that made it difficult to be open about their status. Andrew Morgan recalls: ‘They were the days when it was very unsafe to be a public person with HIV, even within the gay community. And I think that that disempowered [those involved with] the people with [the] AIDS movement of that period to a great extent’.31 Such prejudice should be viewed as a predictable reaction to fear at a time when little was known about HIV transmission. It should also be emphasized that accounts of discrimination within the community are far from universal within Australian HIV/AIDS oral histories. Instead, the majority of gay male accounts emphasize support that was received from the community and its volunteers. Nonetheless, discrimination against men living with HIV/AIDS did occur, and such discrimination made it difficult for some individuals to seek the community support that was so urgently required. Morgan emphasizes that debates over treatments also caused fractures within the gay community. He asserts that in the 1980s ‘there was no treatment … that was effective … and it created big divisions in the gay community which I don’t think have been resolved’.32 It was not until 1984 that blood testing to detect HIV antibodies was developed, with the first antibody screening test for use on donated blood and plasma receiving approval in the United States in March 1985. As HIV testing became available from 1984 onwards, strident debates over the merits of being tested caused strains within the community. Those who did opt to take the test and who found out that they were HIV positive had to contend with the fact that they were living with a syndrome that was largely untreatable, apparently fatal and had already killed a significant number of gay men in the U.S. Stigma and discrimination within the community were also issues for some. Fraught and emotional fractures developed within HIV/AIDS activism and institutions as the death toll from the epidemic mounted in the early 1990s. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has written of the intense dread that was ‘the dominant tonality of those years for queer people’. She suggests that the ‘punishing stress of such dread, and the need of mobilizing powerful resources of resistance in the face of it, did imprint a paranoid structuration onto the theory and activism of the period, and no wonder’.33 The conservative political culture in the United States likely fanned this paranoia, but Australian HIV/AIDS activism was not immune to similar psychological dynamics. AIDS councils were periodically convulsed by deep personal and



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political animosities that could produce institutional trench warfare. In the early 1990s, bitter conflict flared as some HIV positive activists demanded the exclusion of HIV negative peers from certain political arenas.34 The growth of activism among people living with HIV/AIDS, coupled with changing medical treatments, meant that their life experiences changed significantly from the late 1980s in Australia.

LIVING WITH HIV/AIDS Medical treatment for HIV/AIDS has evolved and improved considerably since 1982 when the first case was diagnosed in Australia. In 1994 and 1995, there was a significant breakthrough with the success of combination therapies, resulting in the life expectancies of many people living with HIV being greatly extended. Many people who have been living with HIV since the 1980s have witnessed the syndrome transform from a fatal condition to one that is chronic but manageable. During the early years of the epidemic in Australia, prior to combination therapy breakthroughs, most of the men who received an HIV positive diagnosis did not expect to survive. Oral history provides a valuable window into the complex emotions attached to receiving a diagnosis that was considered fatal. David Lamb, who was living in Perth in Western Australia, provides a pragmatic account of receiving this information: I think I probably knew deep down all the time. I wasn’t shocked. In fact they actually had to perform the test twice. I went the first time and then when I went back for the results he said, ‘Well it doesn’t show positive or negative, so we’ve got to do it again’, and I knew then in myself that I was positive and that’s the way it turned out.35

Grosse, who received his diagnosis between 1984 and 1985 in Sydney, remembers feeling ‘so completely shattered, because it really was a death sentence’.36 Morgan’s reaction on receiving his diagnosis was similarly distraught. He recalled: So it was about, I don’t know, January, February ’85 that I took the test at the Albion Street Centre, and lo and behold, it came back positive. I was devastated actually back in those days. I was in a support group. I had counselling on tap available but I was still not quite prepared for the effect that would have. How old was I in ’85? Twenty-two, twenty-three.37

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Australian oral histories also provide insight into an aspect of the epidemic that received scant exploration internationally – the importance of sex as a coping mechanism. Grosse also recalls how crucial sexual contact was to him the night that he received his diagnosis. He remembered: My boyfriend at the time, who had gone for a test and had come back negative – and we’d had a lot of unsafe sex, and I remember his saying, that’s okay, and having sex that night with a condom. But that was the… most, there were lots of things about that night that would have been all right, that I could complain about. But that was incredibly important for me. It really allowed me to understand that perhaps life wasn’t over. Because it’s one of those things. You thought, no one is ever going to have sex with you again. You were going to be ostracised, you were going to die in a minute, you would have to wind up your life.38

The affirmative possibilities that sexual contact offered at a time of great emotional strain are important to consider. Personal testimonies indicate that the epidemic triggered a plethora of reactions among the gay community on both a personal and interpersonal level. Those who were diagnosed as HIV positive had to manage their own health difficulties and emotions while receiving varying levels of support and often being the subject of prejudice. The gay population as a whole also had to contend with the loss of a substantial number of community members while dealing with indifference and prejudice from the wider population.

COMMUNITY AND LOSS Sarah Schulman has assessed the broader impact of HIV/AIDS on the gay male community of the United States by asserting that ‘every gay person walking around who lived in New York or San Francisco in the 1980s and early 1990s is a survivor of devastation and carries with them the faces, fading names and corpses of the otherwise forgotten dead’.39 Although Schulman’s assertion was directed towards the U.S., it is equally applicable to Australian gay communities. Not only does Schulman capture the extent to which the epidemic devastated this population, but she notes that much of their grieving was conducted in isolation, without support from the mainstream community. Douglas Crimp has theorized that the AIDS crisis spawned an ‘incommensurability of experiences’ that was traumatic for affected individuals and communities: ‘certain people are experiencing the AIDS crisis while the society as a whole doesn’t appear to



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be experiencing it at all’.40 In the U.S. this lack of support was exacerbated by the indifference of the federal government to the impact of HIV/AIDS on marginalized communities. Such indifference was traumatizing, for ‘part of the traumatic experience itself is the relation to other people, others who are actively aggressive or simply don’t want to listen’.41 Further historical work is required to determine whether the generally sympathetic response of the federal Labor government in Australia softened traumatic responses to HIV/AIDS. The Australian partnership between government and gay communities in combating the HIV/AIDS crisis led the world in the 1980s and 1990s. Might this have produced a ‘holding environment’ that better contained the individual and collective terrors of HIV/AIDS?42 Despite the better Australian governmental response to HIV/AIDS, the epidemic struck at a time when homophobia still existed, often making it difficult for gay men to receive support from the mainstream community. Support from within the gay community was thus particularly vital to gay men living with HIV/AIDS. This placed considerable pressure on men who were often either living with HIV/AIDS themselves or were supporting others who were living with a positive diagnosis. Providing support for others could take a considerable emotional toll on individuals and could also interrupt the grieving process. Morgan recalls that the first deaths from HIV he encountered were through his paid employment at the New South Wales AIDS Council: but that started changing in about ’88, I guess, for me. That the people I was being sent round to care for, the people that I was seeing on the books that I was coordinating for home care, the people that were joining the support groups that I might have been coordinating, weren’t just clients off the street anymore. They were friends, they were lovers or past lovers, they were acquaintances. They were my chosen family members. Yeah. That’s when things started to change a bit for me, I think. When I started to get some sense of what the impact of this epidemic is going to have on us.43

In his oral history interview, Morgan described just how close he was to deaths of others during the course of the epidemic. He also outlined the isolation that many members of the gay community experienced. He remembers sitting with people you don’t know and holding their hand while they die, literally, until they stop breathing because, you know, they’d been rejected by their families, their friends. Maybe their lover’s already died. Maybe they don’t have a lover. There was a lot of hysteria in this period of time. A lot of hysteria.44

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In his oral history interview, Grosse points out that many of the gay men who provided much-needed support did so at an enormous personal cost: There’s something really fundamental about going and helping somebody that’s dying of the exact disease that you could die of tomorrow, and you know that there’s no cure. So, the fear and the terror that you went through back in those days, that just being involved in the movement and seeing that happen, it was terrifying. But what could we do? They were our friends.45

Being so intimately connected to the epidemic meant that many gay men did not have time to process their grief. Similar to gay men in other large urban centres, community-oriented gay men in Australia experienced continual waves of death. Grosse remembers the way his community involvement delayed his personal grieving process during the 1980s. He acknowledges that the pace of the epidemic and the scale of loss in Sydney were so severe that this process is still ongoing. While working for the Sydney AIDS charity, the Bobby Goldsmith Foundation in the 1980s, Grosse: lost five friends and seven clients in a week. So the grief – the grieving process – was somehow put on hold. I mean, the grieving process was a weird one, and in fact, I suppose what I’m finding now is that the grieving process still hasn’t happened properly. So there’s a whole bunch of things that… and all these really vital people who were involved in the movement back in those days are really isolated and wounded, deeply wounded, and not able to reconnect with the community on a high level.46

Morgan also acknowledged that the scale of the epidemic made it difficult to find time to heal from loss or even to reflect on his own HIVpositive status. He underlined that from his perspective, ‘there’s no time for the wounds to heal. There’s no grief. It’s ... there’s no time for the grief to be expressed, to be processed’.47 Further, Morgan drew attention to the difficulty of grieving as a gay man who did not draw solace from mainstream models of mourning. He asserted: We’re looking for frameworks. We’ve got to find another set of frameworks that are culturally appropriate to our community of, of how do we do this? How do we facilitate the grieving process? How do we celebrate this person’s life in honesty? We don’t have a tradition of that.48

For many Australian gay men in the 1980s and early 1990s, the rates of death from AIDS-related causes meant funerals were ubiquitous. Morgan asserted:



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They are becoming our new social function which I find absolutely terrifying. Our social function is a funeral. You know it’s weekly. It’s absolutely weekly these days that someone that you have had contact, whether in a professional context but more often than not these days it’s in a social context.49

Without exception, Australian gay men describe the loss of friends and lovers as the most difficult part of living through the epidemic. Lamb recalls: I mean, the other day I had a little weep because I thought of two friends who had died this year. There used to be three of us who were HIV positive. Now there is only one of us left, and I think, ‘Why, why is it me, why did they die?’ I thought, ‘Well, it’s just one of those questions you can’t answer it’, and that’s the same thing.

Similarly, Leslie Taylor recalls one of the hardest things to cope with as being: Over and above the virus, on a personal level, I’ve lost thirty-four friends probably in the last three or four years, and that’s one of the hardest things to cope with, seeing your mates get sick and die, some of them who were diagnosed long after me. And you just look at them and think ‘Am I next? Am I going to go that way?’ And it’s just sad. I’m a long-term survivor. I’m going to survive. But it gets tougher as time goes on.50

AT WAR Historian Ann Cvetkovich has argued that in the United States ‘AIDS has achieved the status of what I call national trauma, standing alongside the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, World War I, and other nation- and worlddefining events as having a profound impact on history and politics’.51 Although HIV/AIDS has certainly strongly shaped history and public policy, its emotional impact on gay men has received less attention. Gay men themselves frequently use the analogy of war to encapsulate the experience of living through the early years of the epidemic. The war motif suggests it is remembered as a highly traumatic, lifedefining event. It implies the scale of the epidemic and associated trauma is only comprehensible to gay men when expressed as a prolonged struggle waged by battle-scarred soldiers. Grosse encapsulates these sentiments when he asserts:

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Our little community on Oxford Street lost, by a factor, more people than were lost in the Vietnam War [across] the whole of Australia in a short time. It was weird to watch the Anzac Day march, because you think to yourself, we were warriors as well. There really was … it was like we were in the trenches. You’re watching your friends fall and, any minute, you could be hit. It really was like being in a war. We were fighting. We were fighting for our lives; we were fighting the government, we were fighting prejudice, we were fighting our families, we were fighting amongst ourselves. It was a war, and there’s not a single recognition of the fact that that war was waged. It was waged, and there’s not a monument.52

Taylor also likened the early years of the epidemic to a war, directly stressing: ‘It’s a war. And one day that war is going to be over, and the generation that’s coming through are going to say “Dad and Mum, what did you do in the war?” You know, it’s like the Vietnam War, but this is lasting longer’.53 Morgan also remembers: At this point in time my peer group was being, you know … I was developing a war mentality, I think. I could see my group, peer group, being picked off one by one. And you know, that’s still going on although it happens less regularly because we … I have less of a peer group now, quite frankly.54

The allusion to the Vietnam War is suggestive. Although the First and Second World Wars provided Australia with most of its military legends, the Vietnam War ended as the nation’s most unpopular conflict, with many service personnel returning to ostracism. Traumatized veterans found it difficult to speak of their experiences and share the depth of their emotional wounds. Grosse drew a direct comparison between the legacy of the early years of the epidemic and the legacy of the Vietnam War, asserting that the gay community that had been affected by HIV/AIDS was silent now. The things that we used to do, and I think that the community really did – it’s a bit like we came back from Vietnam, and no one spoke of it again, and so we’re veterans. The veterans are traumatized … It was a unique time and the new generation don’t understand.55

Grosse’s enduring trauma, coupled with isolation, show that the epidemic continues to be keenly felt among the gay community, more than thirty years after it reached Australian shores. The Vietnam War analogy has been deployed less in U.S. oral histories with gay men, although Cvetkovich certainly suggests that in terms of the epidemic’s emotional impact, the trauma it caused American society was



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equivalent to that unleashed by the Vietnam War. Marita Sturken, who has conducted important work on visual culture and HIV/AIDS in the United States, does see significant similarities between AIDS memorials and Vietnam memorials in that nation.56 She argues that the AIDS Quilt plays a similar role to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, indicating that the same sense of pain, futility and loss, which marks American collective memories of the Vietnam War, runs through U.S. gay male responses to the AIDS epidemic.

RESILIENCE Resilience has also been a major component in the way that the Australian gay community has responded to HIV/AIDS. This has been particularly evident in the political activism of people living with HIV/AIDS, who demanded representation and agency in Australian public forums from 1988 onwards. The National People Living with AIDS Coalition (NPLWAC) – an advocacy organization with the primary mission of increasing positive representation on a national level, and which was renamed NAPWA (now NAPWHA, the National Association of People with HIV Australia) in the early 1990s – has been a major force for this. The organization ACT UP, a presence in Australia from 1990 onwards, also gave increased voice to the needs of people living with HIV/AIDS.57 Resilience is also evident in the oral histories of Australian gay men. Lamb recalls that when he found out he was living with HIV his instant response was to fight for survival: I decided there and then, and I still have this credo to this day … ‘I’m not going to die’. And there is no way I am giving in. So I haven’t gone through a lot of the trauma that a lot of other people have gone through because I don’t believe that I am going to die and that’s how I live my life day to day, that I am not going to die. Even though some days I feel terrible [as] I have friends who are infected. I have friends who I have seen go from being healthy to being very ill to going to their funerals and, all right, I cry a lot when I think of them, but I just decided that’s life.58

Similarly, Taylor, who was also living with HIV/AIDS, asserted in 1992: I’ve got everything prepared. I’m not waiting to die, I’m waiting to get better. But it is the hardest thing, but you’ve got to keep fighting and hope for strength. I’m going to fight and I’ll fight right to the bitter end, and hope that they find a cure. Or hope that they find drugs that are going to be able to control it. I don’t

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mind if I’ve got to take a hundred drugs a day, or an hour, to stay alive. But you’ve got to keep fighting, and I’m going to fight.59

As oral histories reveal, the scale of despair and loss sometimes overwhelmed the ability to fight against the virus and the epidemic. However, continuing to fight for survival at times when the epidemic was waylaying friends and lovers was an act of radical bravery.

CONCLUSION Emotions are multifarious and the complexities of the HIV/AIDS epidemic provoked a range of feelings. This chapter has utilized oral history as a means of exploring the different ways Australian gay men experienced the emotional impact of HIV/AIDS during its first decade. The gay community was relatively small in size at the time, and gay men were only recent beneficiaries of the changes produced by the gay liberation movement. Like gay communities in the United States and the United Kingdom, it was disproportionately affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, with a generation of men dying, losing friends and loved ones, or living with HIV/AIDS. However, as other works have pointed out, the gay community still managed to mount a highly effective response to the epidemic, forming organizations and support groups, and embarking on programmes to educate others. While the broader response directed by the gay community was impressive, individual gay men were also required to navigate the difficult emotional terrain opened up by the arrival of the epidemic. Oral histories reveal that the HIV/AIDS epidemic caused fractures and tensions among members of the gay community, with the loss of friends and lovers resulting in stress and strain. The management of grief was complicated by the sheer scale of loss and its constancy. Furthermore, men who were supporting others were often struggling to deal with their own diagnosis or poor health. A lack of recognition from the broader community led many gay men to feel as though they were fighting in a silent war. Despite the difficulties of the era, it is evident that resilience also marked the response of individual gay men. Oral history provides a means of capturing the complex emotional impact of HIV/AIDS on the Australian gay community, revealing that a range of feelings were experienced and that, to varying degrees, these emotions marked the way Australian gay men remember the early years of the epidemic.



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ROBERT REYNOLDS Robert Reynolds is associate professor of history at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of Gay and Lesbian, Then and Now: Australian Voices from a Social Revolution (2016, with Shirleene Robinson), What Happened to Gay Life? (2007), and From Camp to Queer: Remaking the Australian Homosexual (2002). His research focuses on post-Second World War Australian history in general, but with a particular emphasis upon identity politics and sexuality.

SHIRLEENE ROBINSON Shirleene Robinson is Vice Chancellor’s Innovation Fellow in the discipline of modern history at Macquarie University. She is the co-author of Speaking Out: Stopping Homophobic and Transphobic Abuse in Queensland (2010, with Alan Berman), and the author of Something like Slavery? Queensland’s Aboriginal Child Workers (2008). She has also pursued broader research interests in HIV/AIDS histories, the history of childhood and broader LGBTIQ oral histories. NOTES   1. Paul Sendziuk, Learning to Trust: Australian Responses to AIDS, Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 2003.  2. Graham Willett, Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2000; Clive Moore, Sunshine and Rainbows: The Development of Gay and Lesbian Culture in Queensland, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 2001; Garry W. Dowsett, Practicing Desire: Homosexual Sex in the Era of AIDS, Redwood City, CA, Stanford University Press, 1996; Garry W. Dowsett, ‘Governing Queens: Gay Communities and the State in Contemporary Australia’, in Mitchell Dean and Barry Hindress (eds), Governing Australia: Studies in the Contemporary Rationalities of Government, Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 139–55.   3. Nicole Eustace et al., ‘AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions’, American Historical Review, vol. 117, no. 5, 2012, p. 1490.   4. Jeffrey Weeks, Austin Taylor-Laybourn and Peter Aggleton, ‘An Anatomy of the HIV/AIDS Voluntary Sector in Britain’, in Jeffrey Weeks, Austin Taylor-Labour and Peter Aggleton (eds), AIDS: Foundations for the Future, London, Taylor and Francis, 1994, pp. 1–18; Jeffrey Weeks and Janet Holland (eds), Sexual Cultures, Communities, Values and Intimacy, London, Palgrave Macmiillan, 1996; and Jeffrey Weeks, The World We Have Won: The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life, New York, NJ, Routledge, 2007.

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  5. Niko Besnier, ‘The Politics of Emotion in Nukulaelae Gossip’, in James A. Russell et al. (eds), Everyday Conceptions of Emotion: An Introduction to the Psychology, Anthropology and Linguistics of Emotion, Dordrecht, Kluwer Acacademic, 1995, p. 236.   6. Michael Hurley, ‘A Shopping Bag from Harrods’, in Allan Kellehear (ed.), Grief and Remembering: 25 Australians Tell It Like It Is, Melbourne, Rivoli, 2002, pp. 78–86.  7. Robert Ariss, ‘Performing Anger: Emotion in Strategic Responses to AIDS’, Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol. 4, no. 1, 1993, pp. 18–30.  8. Jennifer Power, Movement, Knowledge, Emotion: Gay Activism and HIV/AIDS in Australia, Canberra, ANU E Press, 2011.  9. J. Ramirez-Valles, ‘The Protective Effects of Community Involvement for HIV Risk Behavior: A Conceptual Framework’, Health Education Research, vol. 17, no. 4, 2002, pp. 389–403; and Jelke Boesten, ‘AIDS Activism, Stigma and Violence: A Literature Review’, ICPS Working Paper, vol. 5, 2007, pp. 1–32. 10. Eustace et al., ‘AHR Conversation’, p. 1490. 11. See particularly Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque Ramirez, Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History, New York, NJ, Oxford University Press, 2012; Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community, New York, NJ, Routledge, 2003; and Nan Alamilla Boyd, ‘Who is the Subject? Queer Theory Meets Oral History’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 17, no. 2 , May 2008, pp. 177–89. 12. HIV/AIDS Testimonies, C743, British Library Sound Archive and ACT UP Oral History Video Tapes Project, Mss Col 6148, New York Public Library. 13. Wendy Rickard, ‘More Dangerous than Therapy?: Interviewees’ Reflections on Recording Traumatic or Taboo Issues’, Oral History, vol. 26, no. 2, Autumn 1998, p. 35. 14. Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory, London, Routledge, 2010, p. 81. 15. Clive Faro with Garry Wotherspoon, Street Scene: A History of Oxford Street, Carlton South, Vic., Melbourne University Press, 2000. 16. National Health and Medical Research Council Working Party, ‘Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS): Report of the NHMRC Working Party’, Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 141, no. 9, 1984, p. 566. 17. Shirleene Robinson and Emily Wilson, ‘Working Together? Medical Professionals, Gay Community Organisations and the Response to HIV/AIDS in Australia, 1983–1985’, Social History of Medicine, vol. 25, no. 3, March 2012, pp. 701–18. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Power, Movement, Knowledge, Emotion, pp. 1–2. 21. Ibid. 22. Neil Broome, interview with Sarah Schulman, 25 April 2004, Interview No. 55, ACT UP Oral History Project, New York Public Library, New York. 23. Lloyd Grosse, interview with Shirleene Robinson, 3 October 2012, Newtown, Sydney Pride History Group Oral History Collection.



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24. Ibid. 25. George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman (eds.), Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures, New York, NJ, Columbia University Press, 2005, p. 38. 26. Grosse interview with Robinson, 3 October 2012. 27. Sendziuk, Learning to Trust, p. 58. 28. See particularly Power, Movement, Knowledge, Emotion; Willett, Living Out Loud; Dennis Altman, Power and Community: Organisational and Cultural Responses to AIDS, London, Falmer, 1994; Dennis Altman, ‘Representation, Public Policy and AIDS’, in M. Sawer and G. Zappala (eds), Speaking for the People, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2001, pp. 208–24; Shirleene Robinson, ‘Responding to Homophobia: HIV/AIDS, Homosexual Community Formation and Identity in Queensland, 1983–1990’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 41, no. 2, June 2010, pp. 181–97. 29. John Trigg interview with James Waites, 23 November 1992, Darling Harbour, The Australian Response to AIDS, TRC 2815/12, National Library of Australia. 30. Susan M. Chambre, Fighting for Our Lives: New York’s AIDS Community and the Politics of Disease, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 2006, p. 32. 31. Morgan interview with Waites, 24 November 1992. 32. Ibid. 33. Eve Kosofsky, ‘Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes’, South Atlantic Quarterly, no. 106, Summer 2007, p. 639. 34. Willett, Living Out Loud, p. 188. 35. David William Lamb interview with Stuart Reid, 10 and 12 November 1993, West Perth, The Australian Response to AIDS, TRC 2815/76, National Library of Australia. 36. Grosse interview with Robinson, 3 October 2012. 37. Morgan interview with Waites, 24 November 1992. 38. Grosse interview with Robinson, 3 October 2012. 39. Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2012, p. 45. 40. Cathy Caruth and Thomas Keenan, ‘The AIDS Crisis Is Not Over: A Conversation With Gregg Borowitz, Douglas Crimp and Laura Pinsky’, in C. Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD, John Hopkins University, 1995, p. 256. 41. Ibid., p. 257. 42. Donald W. Winnicott, The Spontaneous Gesture, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987, p. 145. 43. Morgan interview with Waites, Darling Harbour, 24 November 1992, The Australian Response to AIDS, TRC 2815/14, National Library of Australia. 44. Morgan interview with Waites, 24 November 1992. 45. Grosse interview with Robinson, 3 October 2012. 46. Ibid. 47. Morgan interview with Waites, 24 November 1992. 48. Ibid.

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49. Ibid. 50. Leslie Taylor interview with Waites, 23 November 1992, Darling Harbour, The Australian Response to AIDS, TRC 2815/11, National Library of Australia. 51. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feeling, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2003, p. 160. 52. Grosse interview with Robinson, 3 October 2012. 53. Taylor interview with Waites, 23 November 1992. 54. Morgan interview with Waites, 24 November 1992. 55. Grosse interview with Robinson, 3 October 2012. 56. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1997. 57. Shirleene Robinson, ‘HIV/AIDS in Transnational Context: The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in Australia’, in Yorick Smaal and Graham Willett (eds), Intimacy, Violence and Activism: Gay and Lesbian Perspectives on Australasian History and Society, Melbourne, Monash University Publishing, 2013, pp. 177–92. 58. Lamb interview with Reid, 10 and 12 November 1993. 59. Taylor interview with Waites, 23 November 1992.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abrams, Lynn, Oral History Theory, London, Routledge, 2010. Alamilla Boyd, Nan, ‘Who is the Subject? Queer Theory Meets Oral History’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 17, no. 2 , May 2008, pp. 177–89. Alamilla Boyd, Nan, and Horacio N. Roque Ramirez, Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History, New York, NJ, Oxford University Press, 2012. Altman, Dennis, Power and Community: Organisational and Cultural Responses to AIDS, London, Falmer, 1994. ———. ‘Representation, Public Policy and AIDS’, in M. Sawer and G. Zappala (eds), Speaking for the People, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2001, pp. 208–24. Ariss, Robert, ‘Performing Anger: Emotion in Strategic Responses to AIDS’, Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol. 4, no. 1, 1993, pp. 18–30. Besnier, Niko, ‘The Politics of Emotion in Nukulaelae Gossip’, in James A. Russell et al. (eds), Everyday Conceptions of Emotion: An Introduction to the Psychology, Anthropology and Linguistics of Emotion, Dordrecht, Kluwer Acacademic, 1995, pp. 221–40. Boesten, Jelke, ‘AIDS Activism, Stigma and Violence: A Literature Review’, ICPS Working Paper, vol. 5, 2007, pp. 1–32. Caruth, Cathy, and Thomas Keenan, ‘The AIDS Crisis Is Not Over: A Conversation With Gregg Borowitz, Douglas Crimp and Laura Pinsky’, in C. Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD, John Hopkins University, 1995, pp. 256–72. Chambre, Susan M., Fighting for Our Lives: New York’s AIDS Community and the Politics of Disease, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 2000.



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Cvetkovich, Ann, An Archive of Feeling, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2003. Dowsett, Garry W., Practicing Desire: Homosexual Sex in the Era of AIDS, Redwood City, CA, Stanford University Press, 1996. ———. ‘Governing Queens: Gay Communities and the State in Contemporary Australia’, in Dean Mitchell and Barry Hindress (eds), Governing Australia: Studies in the Contemporary Rationalities of Government, Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 139–55. Eustace, Nicole, et al., ‘AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions’, American Historical Review, vol. 117, no. 5, 2012, pp. 1487–1531. Faro, Clive, with Garry Wotherspoon, Street Scene: A History of Oxford Street, Carlton South, Vic., Melbourne University Press, 2000. Haggerty, George E., and Bonnie Zimmerman (eds), Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures, New York, NJ, Columbia University Press, 2005. Hurley, Michael, ‘A Shopping Bag from Harrods’, in Allan Kellehear (ed.), Grief and Remembering: 25 Australians Tell It Like It Is, Melbourne, Rivoli, 2002, pp. 78–86. Kosofsky, Eve, ‘Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 106, no. 3, 2007, pp. 625–42. Lapovsky Kennedy, Elizabeth, and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community, New York, NJ, Routledge, 2003. Moore, Clive, Sunshine and Rainbows: The Development of Gay and Lesbian Culture in Queensland, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 2001. National Health and Medical Research Council Working Party, ‘Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS): Report of the NHMRC Working Party’, Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 141, no. 9, 1984, pp. 561–68. Power, Jennifer, Movement, Knowledge, Emotion: Gay Activism and HIV/AIDS in Australia, Canberra, ANU E Press, 2011. Ramirez-Valles, J., ‘The Protective Effects of Community Involvement for HIV Risk Behavior: A Conceptual Framework’, Health Education Research, vol. 17, no. 4, 2002, pp. 389–403. Rickard, Wendy, ‘More Dangerous than Therapy?: Interviewees’ Reflections on Recording Traumatic or Taboo Issues’, Oral History, vol. 26, no. 2, Autumn 1998, pp. 34–48. Robinson, Shirleene, ‘Responding to Homophobia: HIV/AIDS, Homosexual Community Formation and Identity in Queensland, 1983–1990’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 41, no. 2, June 2010, pp. 181–97. ———. ‘HIV/AIDS in Transnational Context: The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in Australia’, in Yorick Smaal and Graham Willett (eds), Intimacy, Violence and Activism: Gay and Lesbian Perspectives on Australasian History and Society, Melbourne, Monash University Publishing, 2013, pp. 177–92. Robinson, Shirleene, and Emily Wilson, ‘Working Together? Medical Professionals, Gay Community Organisations and the Response to HIV/AIDS in Australia, 1983–1985’, Social History of Medicine, vol. 25, no. 3, March 2012, pp. 701–18. Schulman, Sarah, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2012.

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Sendziuk, Paul, Learning to Trust: Australian Responses to AIDS, Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 2003. Sturken, Marita, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1997. Weeks, Jeffrey, The World We Have Won: The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life, New York, Routledge, 2007. Weeks, Jeffrey, and Janet Holland (eds), Sexual Cultures, Communities, Values and Intimacy, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1996. Weeks, Jeffrey, Austin Taylor-Laybourn and Peter Aggleton, ‘An Anatomy of the HIV/AIDS Voluntary Sector in Britain’, in Jeffrey Weeks, Austin TaylorLaybourn and Peter Aggleton (eds), AIDS: Foundations for the Future, London, Taylor and Francis, 1994, pp. 1–18. Willett, Graham, Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2000. Winnicott, Donald W., The Spontaneous Gesture, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987.

Part III

KL Sanctioned Violence

Chapter 9

The RSL and Post-First World War Returned Soldier Violence in Australia Martin Crotty

KL In the history of the Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia (usually known as the RSL, and hereinafter referred to as such), a key question confronting the historian is how the organization came to possess such power and wield such influence. From its inception in June 1916 and throughout the interwar period (and beyond, although this is outside the scope of the current chapter), the RSL repeatedly forced federal, state and local governments, along with a variety of non-government bodies, to change their policies, behaviour and actions to bring them more into line with the interests, ideology and preferences of the organized returned soldiery. RSL leaders had little difficulty obtaining an audience with a succession of Australian prime ministers, state premiers, federal and state ministers, high-ranking officials from the state and federal public services, and other community leaders. Their influence was responsible for such measures as the development of a relatively generous repatriation system, widespread public memorialization, and the establishment of a public holiday on 25 April to commemorate and celebrate the achievements of Australian servicemen.1 Returned soldiers in the age of total war and mass citizen armies have, the world over, claimed special entitlements after their respective conflicts have ceased. On the basis of the miseries they endured, the feats they performed and the life opportunities they sacrificed, they have claimed 185

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special and particular rights, from war pensions to preference in employment and concessional access to educational opportunities. However, as Mark Edele and I have argued elsewhere, such widespread claims to a particular set of entitlements have translated unevenly into heightened civic status and the granting of those entitlements. Translating claims into entitlements depends on a range of factors, such as the perceived moral debt owed to soldiers by their society, the volunteer or conscript status of the soldiers, the existence of powerful veterans’ organizations, the democratic or nondemocratic nature of the returned soldiers’ government, and the state’s level of fear of veterans and their potential for violence.2 For Australian veterans of the First World War, the stars aligned nicely in that most factors worked in their favour. The RSL was established, in an impressive feat of organization, as a federated organization in mid-1916, and was never seriously challenged as the legitimate voice of the veteran community. Although its membership numbers fluctuated wildly, it has never dropped below twenty thousand nationally, and it was initially led by a skilled and respected organizer, campaigner and negotiator in the form of Gilbert Dyett, who served as its president from 1919 through to 1946.3 In the stories the RSL told about itself, it was an effective organization because it acted firmly and resolutely, but responsibly and fairly, in its dealings with governments – never claiming for ex-servicemen more than was their due, and never resorting to or endorsing ‘unconstitutional’ methods.4 Dyett was of the view that the ‘prestige and influence’ of the league, as he often phrased it, would be far greater and more effective in winning concessions for exservicemen if violent tactics were eschewed, and if the league was viewed as determined and resolute, but responsible and restrained.5 And yet there was a less seemly side to the RSL’s quest for influence. Much as it dropped out of the RSL’s corporate memory as to how it came to occupy such a position of prestige and influence, the strategic use of returned soldier violence – actual or threatened – was an important element of the RSL’s rise, particularly so in late 1918 and 1919 when soldiers were flooding home in huge numbers, the repatriation system was fraying at the edges, and the RSL was exerting its influence most powerfully. This chapter argues that, far from the RSL restraining returned soldier violence in return for government concessions, it strategically used violence to gain those concessions, and at other times appears to have deployed violence against ‘outsider’ or disloyal elements of Australian society with the tacit approval of the authorities. By the conclusion of the war, Australian authorities had well-grounded fears about returned soldier violence. Australian troops were well known for poor discipline and misbehaviour, often in training camps in Australia



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prior to departure, on ships carrying them to war, in Cairo, in France, and on ships on the way home, thus acquiring a well-deserved reputation for potential unruliness.6 This violence flowed back to the home front with the growing streams of returning soldiers. Fiona Skyring has documented at least twenty occasions of returned soldiers rioting in Australia in the immediate postwar years, and most Australian cities saw some unrest.7 The best-known examples are the Adelaide peace celebration riots in November 1918, the waterfront riots in Fremantle in February 1919, the Red Flag riots in Brisbane in March 1919, the Peace Day riots in Melbourne in July 1919, and the Domain riots in Sydney in 1921 – the last major episode of what one historian has called ‘digger violence’.8 The targets of such violence ranged from ethnic minorities to state authorities. This returned soldier violence is often seen as central to the rise of the RSL to a position of prominence and influence. The government knew that the soldiers were prone to violence and, to overcome the potential for disorder in Australia, reached an understanding with the RSL whereby the RSL was given official recognition and a range of concessions in return for pressing only moderate demands, for acting responsibly and non-violently, and for keeping its membership orderly. In this way the returned soldiery was tamed, the government achieved some peace, the RSL was entrenched as the supreme body representing returned servicemen, and the returned soldiers were given generous pensions, soldier settlement schemes, preference in public service employment and other entitlements.9 There is at least some truth in this interpretation. Soldiers were violent, the authorities were concerned and did make concessions, and the RSL leadership, particularly at a federal level, did attempt to douse the violence when it erupted. However, this is a rather too simplistic explanation that overlooks many of the complexities of returned soldier violence and the response to it by governments and the RSL. It overlooks the fact that violence by returned soldiers was at times implicitly endorsed by authorities and by elements of the RSL itself. Australian civil authorities and political leaders were much more concerned about some forms and targets of violence than others. It was one thing for returned soldiers to be threatening the authorities themselves as a result of discontent over, for example, the scarcity of employment opportunities; its targets naturally regarded such violence as problematic. However, if the returned soldiers took out their frustrations on foreign nationals or other groups, such as socialists, which were not regarded as part of the loyalist Australian mainstream, the reaction was much more muted, and at times was even positive. Here we need to recognize that the

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type, degree and, most importantly, the targets of the violence varied – so returned soldier violence cannot be treated as a unitary phenomenon. Some of the main target groups of returned soldier violence were those the returned soldiers regarded as unpatriotic, disloyal or otherwise on the margins of the national civic body. These were Russians, Germans, anticonscriptionists, Bolsheviks and much of the labour movement. Such violence often spilled over into battles with the authorities, but in these riots it was those constructed as enemies of the state who were the principal targets and who bore the brunt of the violence; the government, the press and even the courts seem to have regarded such outbreaks with a surprising degree of equanimity. The Red Flag riots in Brisbane are a classic example. In these riots of late March 1919, the main targets were Russians living in South Brisbane, Bolsheviks marching under the red flag in a street procession, and the Australian Labor Party, in particular the offices of its newspaper, the Daily Standard. This was serious rioting resulting in considerable property damage, with firearms being discharged and a number of police injured. However, the Brisbane Courier allotted more space to denouncing the Bolsheviks than the returned soldiers, who had all but incited further violence, and the newspaper’s strongest condemnation of the riots was that they were ‘somewhat foolish’ – and this came only once the riots were all over.10 Some Protestant clergy and the governor of Queensland also lent their support in various ways, and Ted Theodore, acting premier of Queensland while T.J. Ryan was overseas, spent more time criticizing Bolsheviks than he did the RSL or the returned soldiers.11 The military and civil authorities prosecuted the case against red flag carriers, using the notorious War Precautions Act 1914, with more determination and much more widely than they did cases against returned soldiers who had fired pistols or wielded other weapons against police. Fifteen of the former received prison terms of six months, and a number of others were interned or deported. Of the rioting soldiers, however, only three were prosecuted, and they received only fines. Such an obvious imbalance in the sentences testifies both to where the sympathies of the authorities lay and to the fear of the returned soldiers and the RSL, for harsher treatment of the soldiers would undoubtedly have inspired a hostile reaction.12 A similar but much less well known incident illustrates the same point. In October 1919, when a crowd of forty thousand was welcoming Prime Minister Billy Hughes in Brisbane’s Albert Square, a blackboard was displayed from a window of the third floor offices of the Trade Industry Employees’ Union. Messages such as ‘Vote for Labor’ and ‘The Next Prime Minister, T.J. Ryan’ were displayed then withdrawn in what should have



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been a bit of light-hearted political theatre. While Hughes looked on without objecting, returned soldiers entered the offices, removed the blackboard, and began throwing papers and books, then office furniture, indeed ‘practically everything’ in the office out the window. When the blackboard reappeared it was adorned with messages such as ‘Good Old Billy’ and ‘Vote for Hughes’. This act of trespass and destruction was reported in a lighthearted fashion by the Argus, Melbourne’s leading daily newspaper, and Hughes later referred to the incident humorously and approvingly.13 Had the incident been one with roles reversed, with trade unionists invading and damaging the offices of the RSL, it is inconceivable that Hughes or the police would have stood by. Because the returned soldiers were attacking Hughes’ political opponents, including the trade unionists whose loyalty had been repeatedly called into question during the war years, the violence was regarded as relatively unproblematic. Much more concern was expressed when the soldiers rioted directly against the authorities, as took place in the Melbourne Peace Day Celebration Riots in July 1919. The main disturbances had begun on the night of Saturday 19 July. According to the RSL’s Victorian newspaper, the Bayonet, the trouble started when a revolver was fired. In response, large numbers of mounted police entered the streets where they were pelted with missiles, and responded in similarly belligerent fashion: ‘[U]sing their batons freely, [the police] charged through the crowd in an endeavour to disperse it’.14 Argus reports make it clear that affrays between police and members of the crowd, which included returned soldiers, continued for several hours, and included several baton charges, stones and other missiles being thrown at the police, and the hijacking of several trams, at least one of which was derailed.15 Some elements of the behaviour were probably due to drunkenness and high-spirited revelry, but other elements were considerably more sinister, and point to serious contestation of the right of the civic authorities to control the actions of returned soldiers. Particular exception seems to have been taken to the police actions when they involved the arrest of a soldier, who the returned soldiers then tried to release by storming the detention area of the Town Hall.16 Even more seriously, between sixty and seventy returned soldiers, mainly in uniform, attempted to break into the armoury at Victoria Barracks on St Kilda Road, presumably to obtain weapons with which to contest police control of the returned men, thus effectively taking up arms against the authorities. The men were mainly in uniform, and some waved naval ensigns, emphasizing their military identity.17 An attempt was made to disarm one of the sentries, shots were fired, one returned soldier was shot and later died, and the crown had to be dispersed by mounted troopers.18

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Disturbances continued over the next few days and included crowds several thousand strong, according to press reports of the time, marching on state government offices and making demands of the premier; when those demands were not adequately met, the crowd invaded the offices, where one rioter threw an ink stand at the premier, striking him on the head. A crowd of several thousand also gathered outside the Russell Street police station where the clashes that followed were so severe that fourteen rioters required hospital treatment, and several police also needed medical attention.19 This was a series of riots directed squarely at the military and civil authorities, which were blamed for inadequate repatriation measures and for high levels of unemployment among the soldiers. Condemnation of the rioting was all but universal, and considerable effort was put into damping down the resentment of the returned soldier – certainly far greater efforts than appear to have been taken after the Red Flag riots. A mass meeting of soldiers was held at the Domain on Wednesday 23 July, where various league leaders and other respected dignitaries of the Australian Imperial Force, such as Brigadier General Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliot, impressed upon the soldiers the need to ‘support properly constituted authority’.20 The meeting had been called at the invitation of the state commandant, Brigadier General Brand, and around four thousand soldiers attended. The crowd cheered a succession of speakers, and at Dyett’s request unanimously expressed a desire to uphold law and order as they were encouraged to ‘dissociate themselves from the hoodlums and revolutionaries who were using them’.21 The military and civil authorities, the courts and the conservative press thus nudged and winked when it came to violence against those considered disloyal or on the margins of civil society – such as Russians suspected of Bolshevik sympathies, and trade unionists – but reacted much more seriously when it was directed against them. Returned soldier violence was only problematic in some senses, depending primarily on the status of those targeted. The second element that questions the usual interpretation of the RSL restraining the returned soldiery as part of its compact with the government is that RSL leaders did not act to discipline their members or to renounce violence as much as is often supposed, and as the traditional interpretation suggests. Often, the RSL leadership spoke to authorities with a voice of restraint and reason, but to their members with another. In March 1919, for example, the Queensland branch of the RSL organized a mass meeting of one thousand returned soldiers in Brisbane, at which the various woes of the repatriation system were discussed. Afterwards, the president of the



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Queensland branch, P. Douglas, who chaired the meeting, spoke in strident terms about the problems the returned men were experiencing with the repatriation authorities. As the Courier reported: He thought it was a disgrace that a meeting such as this was necessary. He urged the soldiers to remain united and, if they could not get justice by peaceable means, they would get it by force and direct action. He himself would lead the soldiers into action … and be the first man to fall if necessary.22

These kinds of mass meetings organized by the RSL, frequently called ‘indignation meetings’, were often the precursor to outbreaks of violence. Speakers often alluded to direct or violent action if not necessarily urging it, and emotions, passions and a sense of injustice were all inflamed. RSL leaders rarely explicitly suggested violence at such meetings, but they often did everything but. While assuring the authorities that they sought to resolve their grievances peacefully, some RSL leaders rallied their members through ‘rabble rousing’ rhetoric and dramatic posturing. Moreover, when violence did break out, there was a tendency to avoid accepting responsibility, and to blame it on Bolsheviks or others. After the Red Flag riots in Brisbane, for example, various other branches made statements supporting Brisbane’s returned soldiers and their actions, and blaming others for the trouble. The committee of the Victorian branch, for example, passed a motion reading: That the Executive of this state Branch pledges itself to strongly support the Queensland branch in any action it may take to urge the State and Federal Governments to deal with the persons responsible for the disgraceful demonstration of disloyalty and Bolshevism in Brisbane on Sunday last; and to further urge that immediate steps be taken to prevent the possibility of a recurrence of a demonstration of a similar character.23

In one motion the committee blamed the Bolsheviks for the trouble, associated itself with the forces of law and order, and urged the repression of the dissident Bolsheviks. Similarly, it was suggested by some of the Victorian branch’s committee members following the Melbourne Peace Day riots in July 1919 that the main agitators were not returned soldiers but ‘hoodlums and hysterical women’, and suggested that among the rioting returned soldiers there were in fact many men who were not returned soldiers at all – they were agitators and subversives posing as returned soldiers. Again, the blame was shifted to the antitheses of the brave, disciplined and loyal soldier – women, shirkers and socialists.24

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In a similar vein, the Bayonet attempted to deflect blame. It highlighted all that soldiers had to contend with and the forces that were damaging the country they loved, and argued that in the circumstances it was surprising that there had not been violent outbreaks much earlier: There is unemployment, repatriation delay, idleness, the triumph of the eligible in civil occupation … the scum, the whispering Bolshevic with no money, no land, no job … With him are the sectarian bigots, the disloyalists … the Sinn Feiner, with his imaginary woes; the German and the enemy alien stalking unmolested in our midst, but spreading disaffection and sedition through the media of the Lutheran Church and school … With all this mixture simmering and the scum slopping over the National pot, the future success of the stew is problematic.25

The solution advocated by the Bayonet was not surprising: ‘Let us take this scum off’, said the paper, for ‘nearly all our industrial trouble is commenced by imported agitators’.26 Foreigners and the failures of government – not the returned soldiers – were again the alleged cause of returned soldier violence. In contrast to the usual image of the RSL stamping out returned soldier violence, therefore, the RSL in fact often incited and encouraged it, apparently only regretting it once the heat of the moment had passed, and passions and tempers had cooled. When that point came, the blame was deflected onto others, either for conducting the violence or for provoking returned men through unfair and disloyal actions, while the RSL leadership presented itself as a restraining influence. Why did the RSL not renounce and discourage violence on the part of returned soldiers completely, as it professed to? How can we explain the actions of the RSL leaders and members in apparently inciting violence one day and either regretting or disowning it the next? To make sense of the organization’s attitude towards violence we need to understand the RSL not as a unitary body, speaking with one voice and advocating peaceful measures to achieve its goals (which is how the RSL leaders publicly positioned themselves) but as an often divided and fractious organization that, nonetheless, pursued its goals with a considerable element of ruthlessness, deploying – when its leaders felt they needed to – tactics that perhaps are best described as ethically doubtful. The RSL membership and much of its leadership was deeply divided over the issue of violence and the broader issues of forcing the authorities to bend to their will on one hand, or persuading them as to the rightness of the causes of the RSL on the other. This was a question that dogged the RSL



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for much of its early history – certainly for the first twenty years or so. Dyett, president from 1919 to 1946, always counselled restraint, and he appears to have been of the majority view.27 He sought to work behind the scenes, doggedly and persistently, taking advantage of the access he had to Australian ministers and prime ministers, but with little in the way of dramatics, and certainly without violence. He spoke often of the ‘prestige and influence’ of the league, and believed that this would be undermined by noisy public campaigns.28 However, there were always others who wanted to act more forcefully to pressure the government into accepting returned soldier demands, particularly in the immediate postwar years. At the mass meeting that preceded the Melbourne Peace Day riots, for example, most of the speakers, who were all committee members of the Victorian branch of the RSL, urged calm. But George Roberts, also a committee member and thus one of the leaders of the organization, undid their work when he stated, according to the Bayonet: While the returned soldiers stood for law and order, they did not (he insisted) stand for law and order ‘run riot’, and they certainly strongly objected to the emissaries of the law batoning men, women and children. They also wanted an undertaking from Sir George Steward that in no circumstances should a policeman use a baton on a returned soldier. (Loud applause). ‘While I am asking you to pin your faith in the League’, he observed in conclusion, ‘if the time ever comes when the Government refuses to recognise the authority exerted by our association, I will be one to shoulder a rifle and blow the blighters off the earth – if constitutional means fail’.29

Roberts’ statement was greeted with ‘tremendous applause’ and the soldiers immediately began forming themselves up to march off to the Victorian government offices.30 Thus, although the majority of the RSL leadership advocated restraint, there was an element promoting more extreme measures that was sufficient in strength to turn returned soldier anger into violent action. Following the riots, the Victorian branch held an inquiry into the statements made by Roberts at the meeting preceding the riots. Roberts was unrepentant, and claimed that he had considerable support from various sub-branches. He also appears to have enjoyed significant levels of support on the Victorian branch committee: although he was called on to resign, it was only by a majority of around two-thirds. He continued to serve on the committee and to antagonize many of his colleagues. At a committee meeting on 31 December 1919, for example, Eric Turnbull, later the president of the Victorian branch, became so incensed by Roberts that he called him a

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‘damned old reprobate’, grabbed him by the collar, threatened to knock his block off, and then invited him to ‘come outside’.31 A further reason for RSL violence, and the fourth and final proposition that queries the traditional explanation of the role of the RSL as a restrainer of violence, is that the RSL, in a sense, needed returned soldier violence, or at the least the threat of it, as a bargaining chip. In negotiations with Hughes and state premiers, for example, the RSL often argued that the best way to ensure that the returned men acted in a restrained fashion was to grant them what they wanted in terms of employment preference, pensions, soldier settlement and the like. The Bayonet used this rhetoric on many occasions, the following example coming from February 1919: It seems incredible that the employing class have not as yet realized the danger of neglecting to give preference to returned men. Every returned man turned down means one more argument in favour of turning upside down the lip patriots, who imagine that money and position give them power to rule, snub and neglect the men who beat the flower of the Prussian Guard. Merest prudence directs that returned men should be placed in positions that will prevent them grumbling … The shirker, the waster who would not fight, the exploiter, who improved his position while the fighter was away, are hardly the material to defend the State against an exasperated returned soldiery.32

Although this is not an explicit threat, the implications are clear, and statements such as this were commonly made in RSL publications and in the talk of many of its leaders. The RSL leadership appears to have been well aware in the immediate postwar years that the authorities were justifiably fearful of the potential for returned soldier violence. Such fear was one of the weapons in the RSL’s negotiating armoury. If polite requests and moral suasion failed, then an element of intimidation could follow, often involving veiled references to, and reminders of, the potential for ‘digger violence’. The conventional explanation of the government and the RSL reaching a compact whereby the RSL gained concessions in return for restraining violence is therefore partly true, but also flawed and simplistic. The violence itself was not a unitary phenomenon in that it was of varying types and directed against a range of targets; the government and other authorities were only sporadically concerned about it, and the RSL itself was ambivalent, partly because of its own internal divisions over the issue, and partly because of the value of violence, or the threat of violence, in its negotiations for better entitlements for returned servicemen. Violence was thus not the enemy of the RSL. It was a means by which it intimidated its



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enemies in the Australian body politic, and thus curried a degree of favour with rulers by indicating, in dramatic fashion, that it was a body of loyalists. Violent demonstrations against the authorities served a purpose, even when denounced by leaders, for the acts of violence subjected the authorities to pressure and won considerable publicity. RSL leaders could then shift the blame to others, thus presenting themselves as constitutionalists and on the side of the authorities, but subtly reminding those same authorities of the possible consequences should returned soldier claims be denied – reminders that carried all the more force because of the rioting that had in fact taken place.

MARTIN CROTTY Associate Professor Martin Crotty is the Head of the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He has written extensively on Australian masculinity and the Australian experience of the First World War. He is the author or editor of five monographs and edited collections, including Anzac Legacies: Australians and the Aftermath of War (2010). NOTES   1. The term ‘servicemen’ is generic and includes servicewomen. For the best overviews of Australian repatriation and the benefits won for ex-servicemen by the RSL, see Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1996; and for the Australian repatriation system, see Clem Lloyd and Jacqui Rees, The Last Shilling: A History of Repatriation in Australia, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1994.  2. Martin Crotty and Mark Edele, ‘Total War and Entitlement: Towards a Global History of Veteran Privilege’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 59, no. 1, 2013, p. 19.   3. For overviews of the RSL’s history, see G.L. Kristianson, The Politics of Patriotism: The Pressure Group Activities of the Returned Servicemen’s League, Canberra, ANU Press, 1966; and Martin Crotty, ‘The Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia, 1916–1946’, in Martin Crotty and Marina Larsson (eds), Anzac Legacies: Australians and the Aftermath of War, Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010, pp. 166–86. There is also useful contextual information in Marilyn Lake, ‘The Power of Anzac’, in M. McKernan and M. Browne (eds), Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace, Canberra, Australian War Memorial in association with Allen and Unwin, 1988, pp. 194–222.

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  4. See, for example, Federal Executive, Minutes 3 December 1918, p. 1. National Library of Australia (NLA) MS6609/624/95, and Bayonet, no. 29, 25 July 1919, p. 1. The Bayonet was the newspaper issued by the Victorian branch of the RSL.   5. See, for example, a statement by Dyett along these lines in response to more direct pressure tactics advocated by the New South Wales branch; Arundel Dene, The History of the Returned Sailors and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia, Part II: 1926–1936, Melbourne, Southland Press, 1938, pp. 82–83.   6. See, for example, Peter Stanley, Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force, Sydney, Pier 9, 2010; Bill Gammage, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War, Melbourne, Melbourne University Publishing, 2010, pp. 234–48; K.S. Inglis, ‘Returned Soldiers in Australia, 1918–1939’, Collected Seminar Papers on the Dominions Between the Wars, vol. 13, 1970–71, p. 58.  7. Fiona Skyring, ‘Taking Matters into Their Own Hands: Riots against Disloyalty’, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1997.  8. For descriptions and analyses of some of these riots, see David Hood, ‘Adelaide’s “First Taste of Bolshevism”: Returned Soldiers and the 1918 Peace Day Riots’, Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, no. 15, 1987, pp. 42–51; K. De Garis, ‘An Incident at Fremantle’, Labour History, vol. 10, May 1966, pp. 32–35; Raymond Evans, The Red Flag Riots: A Study of Intolerance, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press, 1988; Lake, ‘The Power of Anzac’, pp. 210–11; D.W. Rawson, ‘Political Violence in Australia’, Dissent, Autumn 1968, p. 24.  9. This is the key argument advanced by Lake in ‘The Power of Anzac’, most explicitly on p. 206. 10. Rawson, ‘Political Violence in Australia’, p. 21. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid.; and Evans, The Red Flag Riots, pp. 151–82. 13. Argus, 22 October 1919, p. 15. 14. Bayonet, no. 29, 25 July 1919, p. 1. 15. Argus, 21 July 1919, p. 6. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Argus, 22 July 1919, p. 5. 20. Bayonet, no. 28, 18 July 1919, p. 1. 21. Argus, 24 July 1919, p. 7. 22. Courier (Brisbane), 6 March 1919, RSL Newspaper Cuttings file, NLA MS6609/519. 23. Vic Branch, Committee Meeting, 25 March 1919, RSL Vic Branch Minutes, Anzac House. 24. Vic Branch, Committee Meeting, 22 July 1919, RSL Vic Branch Minutes, Anzac House.



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25. Bayonet, no. 30, 1 August 1919, p. 2. 26. Ibid. 27. See Kristianson, The Politics of Patriotism, in which the entire 1964 history of the organization is themed around the battle between advocates of ‘direct pressure’ and ‘indirect pressure’. 28. Inglis, ‘Returned Soldiers in Australia, 1918–1939’, pp. 60–61. 29. Bayonet, no. 29, 25 July 1919, p. 1. 30. Ibid. 31. Bayonet, 2 January 1920. 32. Bayonet, 21 February 1919, p. 19.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Crotty, Martin, ‘The Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia, 1916–1946’, in Martin Crotty and Marina Larsson (eds), Anzac Legacies: Australians and the Aftermath of War, Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010, pp. 166–86. Crotty, Martin, and Mark Edele, ‘Total War and Entitlement: Towards a Global History of Veteran Privilege’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 59, no. 1, 2013, pp. 15–32. De Garis, K., ‘An Incident at Fremantle’, Labour History, vol. 10, May 1966, pp. 32–35. Dene, Arundel, The History of the Returned Sailors and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia, Part II: 1926–1936, Melbourne, Southland Press, 1938. Evans, Raymond, The Red Flag Riots: A Study of Intolerance, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press, 1988. Gammage, Bill, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War, Melbourne, Melbourne University Publishing, 2010. Garton, Stephen, The Cost of War: Australians Return, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1996. Hood, David, ‘Adelaide’s “First Taste of Bolshevism”: Returned Soldiers and the 1918 Peace Day Riots’, Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, no. 15, 1987, pp. 42–51. Inglis, K.S., ‘Returned Soldiers in Australia, 1918–1939’, Collected Seminar Papers on the Dominions Between the Wars, vol. 13, 1970–71, p. 58. Kristianson, G.L., The Politics of Patriotism: The Pressure Group Activities of the Returned Servicemen’s League, Canberra, ANU Press, 1966. Lake, Marilyn, ‘The Power of Anzac’, in M. McKernan and M. Browne (eds), Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace, Canberra, Australian War Memorial in association with Allen and Unwin, 1988, pp. 194–222. Lloyd, Clem, and Jacqui Rees, The Last Shilling: A History of Repatriation in Australia, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1994. Rawson, D.W., ‘Political Violence in Australia’, Dissent, Autumn 1968, pp. 21–24.

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Skyring, Fiona, ‘Taking Matters into Their Own Hands: Riots against Disloyalty’, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1997. Stanley, Peter, Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force, Sydney, Pier 9, 2010.

Chapter 10

Service Personnel Australian Experiences of Interculturality and Violence in British India Richard Gehrmann

KL During the Bengal famine of 1943–44, Major William Nugent Fitzmaurice Parry-Okeden, using his nightly diary entry to vent his feelings on India’s social conditions, expressed that: Everywhere I have been in India I have been thoroughly disgusted by the poverty & the way in which the majority of people exist. The country is full of fat profiteers, both British & Indian, who want lining up against a wall & shot. The poorer-class Indian generally appears to hate the British, & I don’t blame him. They appear to be a hopeless & downtrodden race, which is only natural [given] the way in which they have been allowed to exist over the past centuries.1

Despite the tone of his criticism he was no radical and, despite his name, he was not even British. He was an Australian Army officer working in India, raised as a wealthy member of the pastoral establishment of western Queensland.2 Australian journalist and author Frank Clune also recorded his observations of wartime poverty in what was labelled the wealthiest street in India, Calcutta’s Chowringhi Road, writing of ‘beggars and paupers pawing over rubbish bins’ while dogs and vultures fed on nearby corpses.3 Clune and Parry-Okeden were just two of the many Australians who observed colonial Indian poverty. A shared sense of British identity encouraged a number of Australians to join the imperial service in both military and non-military 199

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spheres. Accounts such as those of Parry-Okeden and Clune illustrate the links between Australia and colonial India, and invite questions about what Australians recorded and how they remembered these experiences of an environment where poverty rather than military action brought violence into people’s lives. Australia is often represented as a place that was distinct and apart from Asia, with a history that should be read through a framework that emphasizes its experience as a white settler society. There is a sense that Australia did not understand or relate to Asia, and that a genuine engagement with Asia only became significant under reforming Prime Minister Gough Whitlam (1972–75).4 Despite Australia’s role as colonizer in Papua New Guinea there is also a tendency to portray Australian history as only marginally connected to debates of imperialism and the countervailing force of nationalism in the Asia–Pacific. Such readings of history have their place but risk a presumption that Australians, like Indians, were fellow subjects in a British-dominated imperial project. However, Australians were bound to the locales and debates of British imperialism as rulers rather than as ruled. As one future Australian prime minister, John Christian Watson, stated in 1901, there was ‘a wide distinction’ between Australians, who were subjects and citizens of empire, and Indians, who were subjects only.5 This distinction set the conditions that allowed thousands of Australian military personnel to live and work in India in the years before independence in 1947. The experience of India shaped different perceptions of Asia, for while the restrictions of white Australia were intended to insulate Australians from the perceived dangers of Asia, these restrictions did not serve to insulate those who left the safety of Australia. This chapter examines the experiences of Australian service personnel through an analysis of letters, diaries and memoirs of Australian soldiers, nurses and airmen. The record of these experiences was formative in marking Australia’s changing place in the world, as a country that was only gradually accepting its Asia–Pacific geographical location and identity. The India that Australians experienced was demarcated by geographical and military structures that differentiate it from India today. Before Indian independence, the British–Indian world encompassed what is now South Asia: the physical spaces of modern-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma (Myanmar), Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Nepal and at times Afghanistan. India also underwent internal transformations, and after the First World War, Britain responded to the forces of nationalism by preparing for eventual Indian independence with the Government of India Act 1919, which provided some internal self-government by elected Indian officials.



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This multilingual and multiethnic society was guarded by both British and Indian military forces. British units rotated between India and the United Kingdom, whereas the Indian Army was permanently stationed in India. The Indian Army consisted of Indian soldiers led by British and Indian officers. Political devolution was accompanied by military reforms; the gradual replacement of British officers by Indians began in 1923, and was given increased impetus with the establishment of an officer training academy in India in 1933.6 Australians had the opportunity to develop connections to India and Indians at a time when the imperial system was being challenged by Asian nationalism, a movement about which many Australians knew little. Australians’ worldviews were conditioned by their relationship to empire and their sense of a racially based Australian–British national identity. Despite some diversity in the post-Federation era, Australia was a country with a monocultural ideology, and Australians were conditioned by popular literature and society to believe they were racially superior to Asians.7 Australia’s imagined place in the world was as an independent white dominion within the British Empire. White Australians shared the physical attributes of white British people, and thus when in Asia would claim the privilege of being regarded as British. Some Australians found India a place of violence, threats and danger, whereas others encountered India as a place of fascination and desire.8 Yet regardless of how they experienced India, Australians were also implicated in the exploitative and violent nature of the British imperial project. The violence of India included the physical violence of intercommunal conflict and imperial repression of dissent, as well as the violence of Indian poverty – social conditions associated with dependent imperial relationships. The memories and experiences from these sites of violence were taken home to Australia, where they would become part of the collective experience of many Australian families and communities.

AUSTRALIAN SOLDIERS IN INDIA The Australian service personnel who lived in imperial India can be categorized into three broad groups based on the duration and depth of their experience. Some joined the British forces in India for a decade or more as partners in the imperial service, others were sent to India for periods of one to two years through a formal exchange system, and a much larger group served in India for shorter periods in wartime. This latter group’s encounter with India may have been brief, but it was of great significance given the

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thousands who experienced it and the many more with whom they shared their experiences upon their return to Australia. In the late nineteenth century small numbers of young Australians who possessed the right social connections became officers in British India. Some, such as Second Lieutenant Walter Olivey, were from families who had easily crossed and recrossed the boundaries between Australia and Britain. For them, service in India was the natural birthright of those whose identity was fixed as neither an Anglo-Australian nor an Englishman born in Australia. In the twentieth century, other middle-class Australians undertook military service in India to access professional and social opportunities. Some transferred to the British Indian Army during the First World War, escaping further carnage in the trenches and gaining a comfortable middleclass status. Others, such as John Wilton, Godfrey Robinson and the Chauvel brothers, joined the British military in India in the 1930s, when the exigencies of the Great Depression denied them comfortable middle-class employment in Australia.10 The establishment of an exchange system allowed a larger group of Australian officers to undertake short-term military service in India for up to two years. In the late Victorian era, officers of the volunteer and militia forces, such as James MacArthur-Onslow, travelled to India to experience a real war on the frontier at Chitral in 1894–95.11 Following the establishment of a unified Australian Army after Federation in 1901,12 formal exchange agreements were established to send a select group of Australians to study at the Indian Army Staff College in Quetta to prepare them for leadership roles. A number of officers who would later achieve higher rank shared this two-year experience,13 including a future field marshal, Sir Thomas Blamey. In another programme, several hundred junior Australian Army officers were sent to India for between one and two years’ service through what would today be described as a bilateral defence cooperation programme. During the interwar period the Australian Army consisted of a small fulltime cadre staff and a large semi-trained militia; following the completion of their training at the Duntroon Royal Military College, the new officer graduates needed the valuable practical experience the British Army in India could offer. The third and largest group of Australian military personnel encountered India during wartime. The two world wars resulted in the unexpected temporary migration of hundreds of thousands of Australians across the globe, and as Richard White notes, war provided the only large-scale Australian travel experience until the era of mass tourism in the 1970s.14 During the First World War, at least 560 Australian nurses were stationed in India, mostly in the western province of Bombay. Australians nursed British



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and Indian soldiers as well as their Turkish enemies, both in the hospitals in India and on the troop ships sailing between Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) and Bombay. White women did not usually undertake such work, and their experiences as women in a gendered and hierarchical colonial system created distinctive challenges, as well as providing them with unique experiences.15 The thousands of Australians of all ranks who served in British India in the Second World War represented a typical cross-section of the Australian population. Following the 1941 Japanese attacks in the Pacific, Australian troops fighting in the Middle East were redeployed to face this new threat. Homeward-bound Australian troops of the 6th Division were diverted to defend Ceylon for up to four months. Although their experience of India was generally measured in months rather than years, it was the first experience of India for many working-class Australians. Wartime needs also brought short-term army instructors and Royal Australian Air Force aircrew to India. Tensions could develop when such a large group of Australians was confronted with the hierarchical norms of imperial behaviour.16 Australians in imperial India had to make a transition from a white settler society in which non-whites were marginalized to the point of invisibility, to a colonial society where there were clearly demarcated differences between a tiny minority of white rulers and a large majority of highly visible non-white subjects. The experience of India could be marked by fear and bewilderment. It could also reveal a neutral indifference to their Indian environment, and reinforce a sense of white superiority and privilege that did little to engender a sense of empathy or connection with India. It is not surprising that so many Australians in India accepted British imperialism and saw the unequal relationship between whites and nonwhites in India as a natural one. Whites in India were accorded high status regardless of their military rank, and even common soldiers in India were incorporated into the world of the rulers. One British soldier would recall of his eight years’ service in India: ‘Everything tended to reinforce the feelings of being a member of [a] superior race’.17 Most Australians felt comfortable with the concept of being part of an imperial master race, and assumptions of racial superiority drew on the British imperial hierarchy as well as Australian nationalist values. Australians often had such viewpoints reinforced while in India, which helped to perpetuate Australian ideas about racial hierarchy on their return home. For them, the vulnerability and suffering of the world outside Australia was something to be guarded against. Yet other military Australians were attracted to India, often through a fascination with its exotic nature or a sense of empathy with its people in their plight. The stark distinctions between rich and poor, and the

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exploitative position of both British rulers and Indian elites were obvious to concerned Australian observers, as they were to British observers who bore witness to the dispossession and violence that existed in British colonial India. Such feelings enhanced understanding and expanded cultural worldviews. However, confrontation with the poverty and violence of India could also engender a sense of transgression and confusion. In exploring Australian soldiers’ reactions to the violence in Indian society, all three responses are revealed and, when brought back to Australia, would help to shape Australian attitudes into the 1950s and 1960s.

THE EXPERIENCE OF INDIA Captain Tom Blamey arrived in India for two years’ study at the Indian Army Staff College in 1911. The 27-year-old’s letters reveal an awareness of Indian poverty, but no great empathy. He enjoyed the opportunity to work and travel in India, and felt as an Australian he was privileged to see this part of the world. In a letter home he wrote of India: I am very glad to have had the opportunity of seeing it & of spending a year or two in it … It is full of marvels & wonders & of beauty unknown in any other part of the world. But its people are utterly & entirely different in all their habits of life, outlook & standards, both physical & moral. From our point of view they are inexplicable. Gratitude is not understood. Their first rule of life is to get everything they can by any means, each for himself. There is no differentiation in their minds between honest and dishonest. So even if you treat an Indian generously, he doesn’t feel that he should show gratitude. Not a bit of it. He thinks ‘Here’s a fool he has done so much for me, I can surely induce him to do more!’18

His awareness of India’s complexity and long history of past glory did nothing to temper his racialized depiction of manipulative criminality. Three decades later, fellow Australian Staff College student John Wyett came to a similar conclusion after he was openly defrauded by his own servant,19 yet Wyatt also enjoyed India, and tempered this criticism with praise for Indians. For Wyett, the changes stemming from the Indianization policy allowed him the chance to interact with Indians as his fellow officers. He encountered them as peers and friends, rather than just as subordinates. Experiences of India between 1915 and 1926 were recorded by Gippsland Nurse Effie Elizabeth Campbell. On first experiencing Colombo in 1915, her diary notes of everyday events revealed the sense of distance one would expect from a white woman of this era: she notes that she ‘drove



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all round native quarters – very dirty’. She continued, ‘we drove to the moneychangers, where there were only natives – terrible place for dirt and beggars’. Yet she was also extremely positive about a hospital for Indian soldiers that she had just visited, and which she described in racially neutral terms.20 After nursing in Gallipoli, the Mediterranean and Egypt, Campbell returned to India in early 1917, and spent the rest of the war nursing and travelling from Basra or Suez to Bombay (Mumbai) with wounded Indian soldiers. She married in India in 1918, and although she visited Australia at the end of the war, she returned to India with her engineer husband. Her diary does not register concern for social or political issues, and she describes everyday life in a dispassionate manner. Her comments reveal her status as a well-seasoned expatriate: ‘Agra City – all old native shops, narrow streets, not unlike Basra’. She was aware of the growing movement for selfrule and non-cooperation (‘Gandhi followers and banners prevalent’)21 at a time when Indian police were burnt alive during rioting, but it was not a major concern to be noted in her diary. Despite his earlier letters, which reveal a strong sense of Australian pride and nationalism, many of Walter Crooke’s responses to India aligned with the attitudes of the white majority. Such views are particularly evident where he expresses his reactions to the Indian nationalist movement at the time of the 1919 Amritsar Massacre: We’ve been having a hell of a shindy in most of the big cities in India just recently. No doubt you may see a little about it in the papers. The black scum have been rioting, looting, burning, & murdering Europeans. They had a little in Bombay & Calcutta, but the very serious trouble occurred in the Punjab; in Lahore & Amritsar, both of which places are now under Martial Law. Delhi also is disturbed. It was in Amritsar that they smashed the place up & murdered several Europeans. However, after the first stunt they got the troops out & they gave ’em hell & the General johnnie who is commanding there now is twisting their tails properly. Pukka Swine they are! It was all caused by some of these seditious black politicians who want home rule, and the weakness of the Govt. of India who are a lot of ruddy old women, who think they can make decent white men out of these black swine.22

Notwithstanding the differences between Australians and British, their position as white men created powerful and enduring links. Crooke’s approval of the shooting of demonstrators by Brigadier General Dyer in what was to become known as the Amritsar Massacre was echoed by thousands throughout the British world, including Australia where blame was placed on mischief-making agitators and English sentimentalists ‘who know nothing of India’, while the ‘unjust treatment’ of Dyer was deprecated.23

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Yet attitudes could change, and Australian officer Godfrey Robinson was very aware of the need to avoid a repeat of the Amritsar Massacre when undertaking internal security duties in the face of likely Hindu–Muslim rioting in the 1930s.24 The immensity of India and the challenge of Indian poverty had a tremendous effect on Robinson, who spent seventeen years serving in India with the British and Indian armies.25 He had transferred from the Australian Army during the Great Depression, attracted by the exoticism of Asia, the economic opportunities and the chance to follow a professional military career in a full-time army. His longer period of service gave him the chance to see Indian life objectively. Although he recalled appalling conditions (‘dreadful, hideously mutilated human beings, displayed to attract sympathetic alms: one was a double-headed child … truly the stuff of nightmares’),26 he felt that onlookers accepted these as part of life. Robinson was also fascinated by the beauties of India, and developed a higher level of empathy for the country and its people. Corporal Ken Clift was an experienced soldier when he arrived in Ceylon in 1942. Clift had been awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for gallantry in North Africa, and had survived the Greece and Crete campaigns. He had also undertaken garrison duty in Palestine and Syria, and these experiences informed his perspectives of non-Europeans. The record of his experience in Ceylon reveals how racial hierarchies were seen as the natural order of things for an Australia in Asia. Upon arrival in Colombo, he and his companions were sent to an improvised camp with poor facilities. Even though he and his fellow soldiers were lowly Other Ranks, they still had the economic capacity to rectify this without recourse to the official chain of command: ‘We all pitched in a few rupees and had the local Wogs build grass huts under the rubber trees’.27 Training and route marches were also made easier by virtue of economic imbalances between wealthy white men and poor Asians, and he recollected that ‘we would stop and, for a rupee or two, the Sinhalese would provide the whole section with scalding cups of tea’.28 Women’s particular vulnerability to poverty was viewed through the twin prisms of imperial and patriarchal hierarchies. When Sydney-born veteran of Gallipoli and France, Lieutenant Warren Crooke, was transferring to the Indian Army towards the end of the First World War, soldiering was not all he was thinking of. When writing to his friend Harry Devlin, he wrote: The Burman girls, I’m told, are quite fair, very pretty and quite pally. You can buy one for all time for about two pounds and take her home with you and



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she’ll live with you and look after you like a wife. You don’t have to hide her either, or keep her out of sight, because every unmarried white chap has one or two and no one takes any notice.29

That economic inequality was a contributory factor in this exploitative sex trade did not influence his writing. Clift was also conditioned by the values expected of an Australian soldier of this era, but when visiting the Colombo brothel district his recollections reveal he felt pity, as well as a fear of genuine contamination in Asia: They were simply horrible – poor creatures in little cages, row upon row, mostly ugly with betel stained mouths and teeth. There was a rattan blind to draw down when entertaining the customer thus giving [a] modicum of privacy. After a brief look see, Blue and I decided to remain as chaste as Trappist monks during our sojourn in Ceylon, unless of course, something very unusual cropped up. It was enough, Blue reckoned, ‘to turn you off sheilas [women] for good’.30

The economic imbalance between the local Asians and the relatively wealthy Australian soldiers created conditions that exacerbated the sex trade. Even his unit in the countryside was visited by a pimp whose taxi would ferry troops to waiting prostitutes. What is telling about Clift’s reminiscences is that such an occurrence was considered to be normal behaviour expected of poor Asians and wealthy Australian soldiers in Asia.31 Not all Australian military recollections of the Indian subcontinent presented Asians as poor and backward. Private Charles Kelly of the 2/7th Infantry Battalion was impressed with the people of Ceylon when stationed there between March and July 1942. Kelly had previously fought on the Greek mainland and in Crete, been captured and then escaped, and he had a positive view of humanity. He found the Buddhist faith of Ceylon attractive, seeing it as similar to Christianity in terms of ethics.32 He was very impressed with the local inhabitants, comparing them favourably to other non-Europeans he had encountered: ‘This is an entirely new experience for us … the natives giving us something for nothing. How different they are from the Palestinian Wogs with their eternal cries for backsheesh [sic], and their thieving habits’.33 On the surface, this might seem like the prejudiced comparison of two lesser groups of non-Europeans, but this is not the case. Kelly admired the local people and was concerned that some Australian soldiers treated them as coolies, which he felt was inappropriate given that in his opinion the character of the average Sinhalese was higher and finer than that of the ordinary Australian soldier.34 Kelly’s positive attitude towards Ceylon was shared

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by future member of parliament and ambassador, Major ‘Jo’ Gullett, who described it as ‘one of the happiest countries in Asia’.35 Australian troops were cautioned by their brigade headquarters for their casual and friendly interactions with the local population. Australians were behaving to local inhabitants in a familiar manner and had followed their Middle Eastern practice of referring to them as ‘George’, with the term of greeting being reciprocated. This caused a problem for the local police who ‘remonstrated with natives who applied this form of salutation as it was considered by them it [sic] was not exactly a greeting but erred on the side of insolence’.36 Indeed, Australian commanders were under pressure from civilian authorities to maintain the status quo of white superiority, which was being undermined by egalitarian Australian interactions. Kelly’s positive view of the inhabitants of the Indian Empire when compared to those of the Middle East was not shared by Royal Australian Air Force warrant officer Stuart Black. Black was unimpressed by India on his arrival in late 1943, finding it far less attractive than the Middle East. He was repelled by the stench and was not attracted to the people, ‘as the natives will rob you right and left unless you are used to bargaining with them. Only about half the population seem to have homes, the rest sleep in the gutter, on the footpath or wherever they happen to be when they feel tired’.37 Black’s writing does not reveal an empathy with Indian people, and his series of letters to his mother do not record an interest in India or Indians, or any particularly positive attitudes. Beggars who filled the streets in Bombay also appalled Gullett, who felt unable to help, and while admitting his hypocrisy, he eventually just avoided the problem: ‘I came to loathe the streets with their soaking, tattered, begging figures. Like others, I took refuge in the mess and the clubs. We simply shut them out and filled up our well-nourished bodies’.38 One of the greatest humanitarian disasters of the war was the 1943–44 Bengal famine, which resulted in over a million deaths. These deaths were made more appalling because the suffering did not occur in remote locations but was very public and was witnessed by so many. One Royal Air Force witness noted that, ‘[i]n Chowringee, the Calcutta West End, the dead were lying on the pavement and road. No attempt seemed to be made to remove the bodies … It was all heartbreaking and terrible, and for the moment the civil authorities could do little’.39 Australian journalist George Johnson visited Calcutta (which he described as the cesspool of the Orient) during the famine. He recalled eating five-course hotel meals and ‘stepping over the corpses on the hot pavements outside and walking through sights that were an indictment of humanity



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– the naked women and skeletonic children dying in the gutters; the bony men crawling on their bellies to the refuse heaps and nuzzling like pigs into overturned garbage cans’.40 Sent to India to provide advice and training on jungle warfare, Major William Parry-Okeden was shocked by the inequality and poverty he encountered. Reflecting on the hundreds that were reported to be dying of famine every day, he launched his most trenchant criticism: It really makes me ashamed of my Empire when I think that this is the 20th century & she is ruling a country like India, or should I say her lordly profiteers in England are reaping handsome profits from India, while much of the population are poverty stricken & live among filth & diseases not fit for dogs & pigs to live in, let alone human beings. Something can be done surely to educate these people & make them more civilised. But it seems to me that so long as England’s profiteers & Indian profiteers are reaping the harvests through this cheap labour the capitalistic Govt. doesn’t care for the people of India. My God – the ‘Jewel of the Empire’ and yet the biggest slave-driven country in the world – no wonder they hate us and our Quisling Indian Princes.41

British servicemen visiting India echoed his words. In a 1943 letter to his mother, Lieutenant Hooper wrote: ‘If you are thinking of taking up politics, devote your endeavours, for the sake of the white population of this country, to the independence of India and Asia for the Asiatics, and God stand up for Mr Jinnah and the Congress Party!’42 Such comments reveal Australians’ difficult position within India. They were complicit in the imperial endeavour, and accorded the status of white Britons. They were also subalterns within the empire, however, and their home country was vulnerable to events in an unstable Asia.

LEGACIES OF THE INDIAN EMPIRE The memory of India lived on for many Australian soldiers on their return to Australia. For some, the memories took the form of practical knowledge. General Sir John Wilton, for example, retained linguistic skills that he used to good effect when visiting South Asia during the Cold War, and Robinson reflected on the beauties of Urdu calligraphy and writing that he remembered even in his old age.43 For others, such as John Wyett, there was awareness that their experiences had given them an insight into a changing world: ‘They were to be the last days of the British Raj in India, and I was very privileged that the varied fortunes of war had allowed me an insight into a way of life that was soon to be gone forever’.44

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Despite his enjoyment of life in India, Robinson remained conservative on racial issues, particularly regarding white-dominated governments in Africa. Gullett’s memories of the horrors of Indian poverty were unambiguous: ‘Personally I found the sheer weight of wretchedness extremely oppressive. I suppose there are worse areas of misery in the world than Bombay. Calcutta, for example. But I had not seen masses of people homeless, starving, hopeless before. They were parodies of human beings and their existence was a mockery of life’.45 Yet in a decade of parliamentary speeches, there is no indication that such memories led him to engage with Indian issues. Rather, they reassured him that continued support for the maintenance of White Australia was essential. The experience of colonial India resonated with those military Australians who served there. However, awareness of India was also informed by others who left the country after independence in 1947. Longserving India-based British colonial officials, soldiers, business executives and their families were repatriated to the United Kingdom, but often felt that they had no roots there.46 Others saw no future in returning to a cold socialist Britain and so dispersed throughout the empire, some to whiteruled Africa47 and others to Australia.48 They were conditioned by their status within the colonial structures, and their view of India as a place of trauma was heavily influenced by ‘that catastrophic and life-destroying mass movement’49 of violence and massacres that characterized Partition in 1947. Despite the White Australia Policy, Eurasians or Anglo-Indians with an appropriate degree of European ancestry were also allowed to migrate to Australia, and brought their memories of violence and intercultural relationships. Their memories were also shaped by their position in the hierarchy of empire, one that usually placed them lower than Europeans but far higher than most Indians. Dr John Dique and his family left India for Australia, where he enjoyed a prominent medical career. He also became strongly engaged in anti-immigration politics through the League of Rights and the Immigration Control Association, and his ultraconservative political views opposing multiculturalism were significantly influenced by his personal experience of the tragedy of Partition.50 In the post-1947 era, independent India became non-aligned, whereas Australia clearly identified with the West during the Cold War. Relations between Australia and India stagnated as Australia focused on security and communism in South East Asia and on trade with Japan. Much of the considerable expertise regarding India had become less relevant, and the Australian experience of India became marginal in the national consciousness. These remained memories at the fringes, but the experiences retained



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significance as a legacy for them as individuals, and for their families and their local community networks.

CONCLUSION Thousands of Australian military personnel lived and worked in India in the years before 1947, when Australia and India were linked through their common position within the British Empire. Although the restrictions of White Australia were intended to insulate Australians from the perceived dangers of Asia, these restrictions did not insulate those who left Australia’s shores. Preconditioned by imperial visions of India as a place of violence, some Australians found India to be a place of fascination and desire, whereas others found their preconceptions to be confirmed by experience. The violence of India included both the physical violence of intercommunal conflict and the violence of Indian poverty. The memories and experiences of these spaces of violence were brought home to Australia and became part of the collective experience of Australians who had served in the Raj. These experiences were formative to the individual’s sense of self in an Australia that was increasingly aware of its Asia–Pacific geographical location and identity.

RICHARD GEHRMANN Richard Gehrmann is a senior lecturer in International Studies at the University of Southern Queensland. He is interested in the human dimensions of military history and in settler colonial identity, and his recent publications address the Australian experience of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is currently co-editing Contemporary War and Representation: Outsider Perspectives on the Wars on Terror. NOTES The author wishes to acknowledge the valuable assistance provided by archive staff at the Australian War Memorial Canberra and the Imperial War Museum London, as well as Dr Kevin Greenbank and Rachel Rowe at the University of Cambridge’s Centre of South Asian Studies.   1. William Parry-Okeden Diary, AWM Ref. PR00321, 18 August 1943.  2. Garth Pratten, ‘Parry-Okeden, William Nugent Fitzmaurice’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/parry-okeden-william-

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nugent-fitzmaurice-15834 (accessed 1 March 2015); Erik Jensen, ‘A Quiet American is Australia’s Richest Person’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 March 2009, http://www.smh.com.au/national/a-quiet-american-is-australias-richest-person20090312-8wgv.html (accessed 1 March 2015). Frank Clune, Song of India, Sydney, Invincible Press, 1946, p. 265. See Jennifer Cushman, ‘An Australian “Tales from the South China Seas”?’, Asian Studies Review, vol. 9, no. 3, 1986; Jennifer Cushman, ‘Dazzled by Distant Fields: The Australian Economic Presence in Southeast Asia’, Asian Studies Review, vol. 12, no. 1, 1988. The wider Australian encounter with Asia is analysed in David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1999; David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska, ‘Introduction: Australia’s Asia’, in David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska (eds), Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century, Perth, University of Western Australia Press, 2012, pp. 1–23. There is much debate over when Australia ‘discovered’ Asia, and the role of Labor and Conservative politicians in this engagement. See, for example, Frank Bongiorno, ‘The Price of Nostalgia: Menzies, the “Liberal” Tradition and Australian Foreign Policy’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 51, no. 3, 2005, pp. 400–7; David Martin Jones and Andrea Benvenuti, ‘Menzies’ Asia Policy and the Anachronistic Fallacy’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, vol. 66, no. 2, 2012, pp. 206–22; James Cotton, ‘Rejoinder to “Menzies’ Asia Policy and the Anachronistic Fallacy”’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, vol. 67, no. 2, 2013, pp. 235–42; David Jones and Andrea Benvenuti, ‘Anachronism Refuted or Irrefutable? A Reply to James Cotton’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, vol. 67, no. 2, 2013, pp. 243–46. Australian House of Representatives Debates 4 (5 September 1901), p. 4634. Donovan Jackson, India’s Army, London, Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1940, pp. 6–7. See, for example, Agnieszka Sobocinska, ‘“The Language of Scars”: Australian Prisoners of War and the Colonial Order’, History Australia, vol. 7, no. 3, 2010. For studies of the links of imperial ideologies on Australians, see Walker, Anxious Nation; Robert Dixon, Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-Australian Popular Fiction, 1875–1914, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995. Walker, Anxious Nation. On gaining his commission in the Indian Army in February 1918, Australian soldier Walter Crooke noted the financial and social benefits of a transfer, and wrote he was ‘finished with the rotten Western Front’ and that war in India would be ‘mere play compared to the slaughter in France’; Frederick Montague Warren Crooke to Harry Devlin, 7 February 1918, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, AWM PR 84/114. Wilton Diary; Godfrey Robinson, Decades of a Duntroon Bastard, Belmont, Vic., Neptune Press, 1980. The Chauvel brothers were the sons of First World War national hero, Light Horse commander General Sir Harry Chauvel.



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11. ‘Gen. Macarthur-Onslow Dead’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 November 1946, p. 4. 12. John Mordike, An Army for a Nation: A History of Australian Military Developments 1880–1914, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1992. 13. At least sixteen of those students reached the rank of one-star general. Personal communication, 9 April 2013, Colonel Graeme Sligo, Australian Defence Adviser, Pakistan. 14. This argument is presented by Richard White, ‘The Soldier as Tourist: The Australian Experience of the Great War’, War and Society, vol. 5, no. 1, 1987, pp. 65–66. Reid also raises this in relation to Australian soldiers in Indonesia in 1945. See Anthony Reid, ‘Australia’s Hundred Days in South Sulawesi’, in D. Chandler and M.C. Rickleffs (eds), Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Indonesia, Melbourne, Monash University, 1986. 15. Ruth Rae, ‘Reading between Unwritten Lines: Australian Army Nurses in India, 1916–19’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, May 2002, pp. 1–10. 16. There is an interesting similar tension discussed in relation to the Australian occupation force in Japan after the Second World War. See Agnieszka Sobocinska, ‘Heart of Darkness, Hearts of Gold’, in David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska (eds), Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century, Perth, University of Western Australia Press, 2012, pp. 173–85. 17. P.J. Warren, ‘With a Mountain Battery in India: 1926–1933’, Centre of South Asian Studies Archive, University of Cambridge, 1979, p. 45. 18. T. Blamey, Letter to mother, 26 January 1914, PR 85/355 (1); Papers of Field Marshal Sir Thomas Albert Blamey, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 3DRL/6643. 19. John Wyett, Staff Wallah at the Fall of Singapore, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1996, p. 31. 20. PP of Miss E. Campbell, Diary, Miss E Campbell Documents 947, Imperial War Museum, 37. 21. Ibid., 31 October 1921. 22. Frederick Montague Warren Crooke to Devlin, 24 April 1919, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, AWM PR 84/114. 23. ‘Indian Unrest’, Mercury, Hobart, 4 January 1920, p. 4. Dyer was condemned by the House of Commons and dismissed from the Army following a British commission of enquiry, but benefited from a £26,000 public subscription promoted by the pro-imperialist Morning Post newspaper. 24. Robinson, Decades of a Duntroon Bastard, pp. 96–97. 25. For a more detailed account of Robinson’s experiences, see Richard Gehrmann, ‘Colonial Subalterns of Empire: Australians in India during the Movement for Swaraj, 1920–1939’, in Religion, Memory, Culture and Society: Proceedings of the British World Conference, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, 2012, pp. 273–87. 26. Robinson, The Decades of a Duntroon Bastard, p. 91. 27. Ken Clift, Saga of a Sig, Randwick, NSW, KCD Publications, 1972, p. 118. Although use of the term ‘wog’ is highly offensive racist language today, at this

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time it was a common derogatory term for a foreigner. See Amanda Laugesen, Diggerspeak: The Language of Australians at War, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 202. 28. Clift, Saga of a Sig, p. 124. 29. Frederick Montague Warren Crooke to Devlin, 28 May 1918, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, AWM PR 84/114. 30. Ibid., pp. 122–23. 31. Ibid., p. 128. Such behaviour would today be completely at odds with the Australian Defence Force fraternization policy. 32. C. Kelly, Diary, 1 April 1942, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, POR2043. 33. Ibid., 30 March 1942. 34. Ibid., 6 April 1942. 35. Henry Gullett, Not as Duty Only: An Infantryman’s War, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1976, p. 86. 36. 2/2 Battalion War Diary, 12 May 1942, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 8/3/2. 37. S. Black, Letter to Mary Black, 2 November 1943, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, PRO1808. 38. Gullett, Not as Duty Only, p. 89. 39. Lt Col Donald Rule, Letter to Miss Thatcher, n.d., Rule Papers, Centre of South Asian Studies Archives, University of Cambridge. 40. George Johnston, Journey through Tomorrow, Melbourne, W.F. Cheshire, 1947, pp. 74–75. 41. William Parry-Okeden, Diary, 18 August 1943, Australian War Memorial, Canberra PR00321. 42. H.F. Hooper, Letter to Mrs M. Hooper, 18 November 1943, Hooper Papers, Imperial War Museum, London, 95/5/1. 43. Wilton Diary; Robinson, Decades of a Duntroon Bastard. 44. Wyett, Staff Wallah at the Fall of Singapore, p. 28. 45. Gullett, Not as Duty Only, pp. 88–89. 46. After an idyllic upbringing in Ceylon, Turner was to migrate to New Zealand. Beatrice Turner, ‘Life was Like That’, Turner Papers, Centre of South Asian Studies Archives, University of Cambridge, 1981, p. 140. 47. Robinson, Decades of a Duntroon Bastard, p. 166. 48. ‘Migrants from India’, West Australian, 14 April 1947, p. 6; ‘Anglo-Indians Coming Here’, Townsville Bulletin, 31 July 1947, p. 9. 49. Robinson, Decades of a Duntroon Bastard, p. 170. 50. J. Dique, ‘Changing Australia’s Racial Composition through Immigration’, New Times (The Australian League of Rights), October 1990, p. 7.



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BIBLIOGRAPHY Bongiorno, Frank, ‘The Price of Nostalgia: Menzies, the “Liberal” Tradition and Australian Foreign Policy’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 51, no. 3, 2005, pp. 400–7. Clift, Ken, Saga of a Sig, Randwick, NSW, KCD Publications, 1972. Clune, Frank, Song of India, Sydney, Invincible Press, 1946. Cotton, James, ‘Rejoinder to “Menzies’ Asia Policy and the Anachronistic Fallacy”’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, vol. 67, no. 2, 2013, pp. 235–42. Cushman, Jennifer, ‘An Australian “Tales from the South China Seas”?’, Asian Studies Review, vol. 9, no. 3, 1986. ———. ‘Dazzled by Distant Fields: The Australian Economic Presence in Southeast Asia’, Asian Studies Review, vol. 12, no. 1, 1988. Dique, J., ‘Changing Australia’s Racial Composition through Immigration’, New Times (The Australian League of Rights), October 1990, p. 7. Dixon, Robert, Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-Australian Popular Fiction, 1875–1914, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995. Gehrmann, Richard, ‘Colonial Subalterns of Empire: Australians in India during the Movement for Swaraj, 1920–1939’, in Religion, Memory, Culture and Society: Proceedings of the British World Conference, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, 2012, pp. 273–87. Gullett, Henry, Not as Duty Only: An Infantryman’s War, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1976. Jackson, Donovan, India’s Army, London, Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1940. Jensen, Erik, ‘A Quiet American is Australia’s Richest Person’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 March 2009, http://www.smh.com.au/national/a-quiet-american-isaustralias-richest-person-20090312-8wgv.html (accessed 1 March 2015). Johnston, George, Journey through Tomorrow, Melbourne, W.F. Cheshire, 1947. Jones, David, and Andrea Benvenuti, ‘Menzies’ Asia Policy and the Anachronistic Fallacy’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, vol. 66, no. 2, 2012, pp. 206–22. ———. ‘Anachronism Refuted or Irrefutable? A Reply to James Cotton’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, vol. 67, no. 2, 2013, pp. 243–46. Laugesen, Amanda, Diggerspeak: The Language of Australians at War, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2005. Mordike, John, An Army for a Nation: A History of Australian Military Developments 1880– 1914, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1992. Pratten ,Garth, ‘Parry-Okeden, William Nugent Fitzmaurice’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/parry-okeden-william-nugentfitzmaurice-15834 (accessed 1 March 2015). Rae, Ruth, ‘Reading between Unwritten Lines: Australian Army Nurses in India, 1916–19’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, May 2002, pp. 1–10. Reid, Anthony, ‘Australia’s Hundred Days in South Sulawesi’, in D. Chandler and M.C. Rickleffs (eds), Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Indonesia, Melbourne, Monash University, 1986.

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Robinson, Godfrey, Decades of a Duntroon Bastard, Belmont, Vic., Neptune Press, 1980. Sobocinska, Agnieszka, ‘“The Language of Scars”: Australian Prisoners of War and the Colonial Order’, History Australia, vol. 7, no. 3, 2010, pp. 58.1–58.19. ———. ‘Heart of Darkness, Hearts of Gold’, in David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska (eds), Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century, Perth, University of Western Australia Press, 2012, pp. 173–85. Walker, David, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1999. Walker, David, and Agnieszka Sobocinska, ‘Introduction: Australia’s Asia’, in David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska (eds), Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century, Perth, University of Western Australia Press, 2012, pp. 1–23. White, Richard, ‘The Soldier as Tourist: The Australian Experience of the Great War’, War and Society, vol. 5, no. 1, 1987, pp. 65–66. Wyett, John, Staff Wallah at the Fall of Singapore, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1996.

Chapter 11

Race and Ethnicity in Sex Crimes Trials from 1950s Australia Andy Kaladelfos and Lisa Featherstone

KL In April 1952, Inspector Stanley Crothers, the head of the Sydney police vice squad, was called to give evidence at the sentencing of four men for homosexual sex. He testified at the request of Judge Berne of the quarter sessions, who wanted to hear an official appraisal of the state of sexual crime before sentencing the four men. The courtroom discussion between Crothers and Berne revealed intimate details about the sexual practices of homosexuals and their social worlds. Crothers described a city increasingly overrun with homosexual activity. In the 1930s, he claimed, there were a few homosexuals but they kept mainly to themselves and were easily identifiable. Since the end of the Second World War and following mass immigration, he had seen a sharp increase. As Crothers explained, the increase was in the ‘malicious homo-sexual’. These men, he said, had contaminated ‘a number of our own youth, of our own country boys’. Crothers testified that homosexuality was very frequent in Sydney, especially among ‘New Australians’, a term used to describe European immigrants not of British descent. Judge Berne, summarizing Crothers’ evidence, stated that it was no mere coincidence that homosexual crimes started to increase after mass immigration and the ‘introduction of a certain type of foreigner who is a menace to the community’.1 Ironically, the actual trial in question does not appear to have involved any New Australians, but this did not preclude the judge from further commenting on the loss of Australian values and national virility at the hands of foreign sexual criminals. This discussion between Crothers and Berne, two state officials in the justice system, is illustrative 217

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of the social and political consternation about immigrants and criminal offending, which was in turn grounded in the wider historical context of the time. The 1950s saw the largest mass immigration in Australia’s history, with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of non-English-speaking people. During the 1950s, one of the sites of political scrutiny at the behaviour of immigrants and their ability to adhere to the federal government’s policy of ‘assimilation’ became their supposedly criminal (or violent) tendencies. State and federal officials from police and immigration departments accumulated huge volumes of information on immigrants’ criminal charges to demonstrate whether they were violent in ways that Australian citizens of British descent were not.2 At the same time, Australian criminal courts were dealing with the appearance of a greater number of Europeans than ever before (simply a consequence of the country’s changing population). This gave rise to new challenges for prosecutors, police and judges in dealing with these cases. Such challenges included inadequate language interpretation, the after effects of war trauma, and the various cultural explanations for offending and victimization that were told in court. Throughout the 1950s, the state developed criminal procedures and bureaucratic capacities to monitor, analyse and negotiate perceived and real social changes brought about by mass immigration. To fully understand the extent of Judge Berne’s and Inspector Crothers’ alarm at the rates of homosexuality we need to consider a second and related context. Mass immigration coincided with a new dawn of social conservatism, a cultural phenomenon of the postwar period found in Australia, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, among others. Historians of sexuality recognize the United States as having had the most stringent policy, and administrative and legal apparatuses – including purges of homosexuals in the U.S. civil service – set up to ensure that sexual morality was upheld.3 Although these policies were pursued to a lesser degree in Australia, homosexuality was still considered a significant challenge in public order policing and security.4 The increasing fears over homosexuality were part of a greater scrutiny of sexual offending overall; the 1950s saw a substantial increase in the policing of sexual offences (including child sexual assault), greater than at any other time in Australia’s history.5 Those contexts briefly outlined here – the political preoccupation with immigrants’ criminality and the growing impetus to prosecute sexual offences – provide the background to understanding the ways that discourses of immigration, violence, gender and sexuality intertwined. In this chapter, we outline the history of political debates and federal inquiries into immi-



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grants and criminal offending. We show that for some prominent politicians and media outlets the racialization of crime and violence was central to the way they interpreted the value of immigration for Australian society. Federal politicians and bureaucrats began to enquire into this issue by conducting detailed analyses of immigrants’ offending and the effects of immigration on trends in violent crime. After examining these inquiries, we analyse a hitherto unexplored side of the history of immigration, revealed by examining immigrants’ appearances in court as either victims or offenders of sexual crimes. By examining criminal trial transcripts, we analyse how the state negotiated culturally contested meanings over gender and violence. In these cases, defence counsel regularly used war and immigration experiences to explain or justify criminal acts on the basis of previous trauma or cultural misunderstandings. Overall, our chapter uncovers the intersections between concepts of violence, sexuality and ethnicity, offering new avenues of enquiry into the legacy of Australia’s historical racialization of criminality and criminalization of immigration.

POSTWAR IMMIGRATION AND THE RACIALIZATION OF CRIME In the postwar period, the federal government gradually relaxed the White Australia Policy to allow for the assimilation of non-British immigrants. The logic of assimilation policy was that European immigrants would be forced to shed the cultural values of their homelands and replace them with so-called Australian values.6 By doing this, they would gradually be assimilated into the community, becoming indistinguishable from the local white population. The federal government’s assimilation policy saw the arrival of hundreds of thousands of non-English-speaking European immigrants to a country whose population before the Second World War had been overwhelmingly of British and Irish heritage. Although the Australian federal government supported and sought out mass European immigration, they saw some nationalities as more desirable than others. The federal government actively encouraged British and other North European immigration. Less encouraged, but increasingly seen as necessary to meet labour needs, was immigration from the eastern (Poland, Czechoslovakia) and southern (Italy, Greece and Malta) regions of Europe.7 Social beliefs about race and ethnicity infused immigration policy and perceptions of immigrants. South and East Europeans were viewed as less able to assimilate because of their different religious, familial and cultural beliefs and practices.8

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Concerns about the links between mass immigration and crime waves were not unique to the postwar period. We see these links in nineteenthcentury concerns over Chinese opium dens and early twentieth-century investigations of the Italian ‘Black Hand’ in Queensland.9 Before the Second World War, the surveillance of criminally offending immigrants had been the domain of state police. After the war, this role was taken over by federal immigration officials, much to the chagrin of state police commissioners, who believed they should continue to play a central role in the management of immigrants.10 The late 1940s saw the growth of dedicated interest from federal officials to investigate the extent of immigrants’ crimes. In this period, Australian public officials sought to determine whether European immigrants committed more crimes than the Australian-born population. They wanted to do so because of growing political, social and media concern that insisted that European immigrants – particularly South Europeans – were responsible for crime waves and that the federal government’s security screenings were unreliable, granting entry to immigrants with prior criminal records or with previous mental health problems.11 Immigrants’ supposed criminality became an area of public and political debate over the prospects of assimilation policy success. How could these European immigrants, depicted by their detractors as men with essentially violent characters, assimilate to the ‘Australian way of life’, a way that was, by contrast, purported to be non-violent? Postwar debates over crime and immigration have not been analysed by historians beyond noting the existence of such concerns. Much of what we know about discursive and structural intersections between crime and immigration has come from international and Australian sociological and criminological studies. Researchers in these fields have examined the ways that race and crime were (and are) connected in public policy. Criminologists have demonstrated that the racialization of crime remains a major factor in the overpolicing of non-white communities and their correspondingly disproportionate rates of incarceration. In the Australian context, scholars have highlighted the effect of racialization and racial profiling on the incarceration and policing of Aboriginal, Middle Eastern and, more recently, African communities.12 Further, criminologists and political scientists have demonstrated the corresponding criminalization of immigration itself. In contemporary Australia, criminalization of refugees has become a foundational element of federal politics and policy.13 The contexts of crime’s racialization changed shape over time, but its existence remained a persistent feature. Examining early debates over immigration and crime allows us to better understand the legacy of this historical context on contemporary political and social thinking.



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Throughout the 1950s, public officials supported, analysed and sometimes countered racialized assumptions about how ethnic and cultural differences manifested in violence. One significant moment of public discussion on immigration and crime occurred in 1951, when Clarence E. Martin, the New South Wales (NSW) Labor Party’s attorney general, made inflammatory assertions about the rate of criminal offending among immigrants. Martin’s department had spent a year collecting newspaper clippings detailing hundreds of criminal offences committed by immigrants, and had ordered the NSW police to provide figures on immigrants’ criminal offending, which had been sorted by nationality and offence type.14 The greatest concern for the attorney general’s department was knife fighting, especially among South Europeans, and his office drafted a new statute to criminalize the carrying of knives. Concern over knife fighting has perhaps been the best-remembered episode of public outcry over crime and postwar immigration. In this instance, ethnicity was linked not only to criminality but to a particular expression of violence said to have been previously unknown in Australia. Presenting the findings of his department’s inquiry in a ministerial statement, Martin told the NSW parliament that not a day went past when immigrants were not committing crime. Not only was the number high, he said, but the ‘nature of many of the offences [was] appalling’. Judges had commented on murders of a ‘foul and savage character’, Martin reported. And ‘amongst the list of offences’, he told the NSW parliament, were ‘those of rape and homosexuality, of stabbings and hysterical violence. In one case a man forced his wife into the street as a prostitute in order to live on her wretched earnings’.15 Gender-based violence featured prominently in Martin’s statements about the threat that immigrants posed to public safety. His image of hysterical ethnic violence, highlighting sexual crime and the controlling behaviour of immigrant men, tapped into existing stereotypes of European immigrants’ beliefs about gender roles, marriage and sexuality. Running alongside the outcry over knife fighting was a simultaneous thread of public discourse that suggested that male European immigrants were prone to gender-based violence. Such perceptions have been all but forgotten, but they were arguably an equally significant concern for federal and state officials at the time. The attorney general’s comments and investigations prompted a rebuke from Harold Holt, the federal immigration minister from the Liberal Party, who made it clear that immigrants were not committing more crimes than the white local population.16 Partly in response to Martin’s comments, and to the ensuing press coverage of immigrants’ crimes, Holt convened

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a federal committee (the ‘Dovey Committee’), which sat throughout the 1950s, to investigate immigrants’ criminality. The three reports produced by the Dovey Committee were the first federal inquiries into the postwar immigration experience.17 These inquiries, as Andrew Markus has pointed out, examined problems caused by immigrants rather than the many social and economic issues that immigrants themselves were experiencing.18 In the 1950s, immigration committee members met with police commissioners from around Australia and asked them to provide highly detailed statistics on immigrants’ criminal offending, sorted by nationality. The federal committee then collated the voluminous records on offending, including details of British immigrants’ offending alongside that of nonEnglish-speaking immigrants. The surviving correspondence shows how large this undertaking was: the federal committee itemized, tabulated and analysed thousands of arrests. In the 1960s and 1970s, the immigration department convened other committees to report on aspects of security, including delinquency rates of immigrant children, and the mental health of immigrants (related to the security screening process), and bureaucrats at the state level reported on immigrants’ reform prospects once paroled. In their reports, the federal committee members and the immigration department were eager to dispel myths about the ‘quality’ of European immigrants. The Dovey Committee was critical of views like those of Martin, pointing out that immigrants committed crime at half the rate of the Australian population. And they noted that South Europeans, the group maligned in concern over knife crime, committed much less crime than any other immigrant group.19 The first report of the Dovey Committee did identify one area of concern. The committee found that non-British immigrants committed fewer serious sexual offences (such as rape) than the local population, but more minor sexual offences (such as indecent assault).20 This same concern was voiced in other state government reports. A South Australian report on sexual offences, for example, argued that it would be unwise to relax penalties for sexual crimes in light of the ‘recent influx of immigrants’, these being people, the report said, ‘whose ideas and outlook toward sexual matters will be different to our own’, which may lead to increases in violent sexual crime.21 Even when sexual crime was not specifically mentioned (as in the Dovey Committee’s later reports), recommendations continued to suggest gendered solutions, especially that officials should encourage female immigrants to balance the sexes. The implicit assumption in these reports was that marriage would be a factor in fostering a less violent immigrant community, and that marriage should necessarily be to another immigrant



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person.22 Concerns over immigrant men’s sexual pursuit of local white women were raised in at least one official meeting between the immigration committee members and the Queensland police commissioner. Here, committee members gave the commissioner an example of the type of cases they were interested in cataloguing, noting that an assault might arise from the rebuke of an immigrant man by an Australian girl who ‘naturally’ would reject his advances.23 In understanding the racialization of violence and criminality we need to critically analyse the creation of types of ethnic masculinities. Such masculine stereotypes have influenced the depiction of immigrants’ criminal offending, from South European in the postwar period, to Vietnamese and Lebanese male youth in later decades, and to contemporary racial profiling of Middle Eastern men after instances of radical Islamic terrorism. Yet such links between ethnicity and expressions of violence were not made for white Australian-born offenders. However, there has been minimal historical engagement with the gendered nature of postwar debates over immigration and assimilation policy. Australian historical scholarship on immigration has been dominated by an interest in labour history and investigations of the social and personal experiences of diaspora. These two aspects are central to understanding the sociocultural and economic impact of immigration. Yet recent scholarship from outside the area of immigration studies, especially Margot Canaday’s U.S. study The Straight State, has demonstrated the critical importance of sexuality and gender to understanding the state’s bureaucratic apparatus governing immigration and deportation.24 The edited collection, Migrant Men, has begun to theorize how experiences and discourses of masculinity relate to the process of immigration. In this collection, Scott Poynting and colleagues highlight the links between ethnicity and sexual violence, demonstrating that when white men sexually offend, Australian society does not seek an ‘ethnic’ explanation as media and politicians have done in the case of Lebanese–Australian male offenders.25 In contemporary discourse, the perception that Muslim men are controlling and patriarchal has been used as a touchstone to galvanize public concern over the effect of immigration on Australian society.26 Such beliefs often masquerade, as they did in the postwar period, as concern for women’s position in society, yet they offer little critique of the incidence of sexual violence in the wider community. When we examine the gendered nature of conceptions of ethnicity, immigration and violence, we can see how ideas of masculinity, femininity, sexuality and marriage were infused with racialized inflections.

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IMMIGRANTS’ EXPERIENCES IN SEX CRIMES TRIALS Outside the political context, when immigrants interacted with the criminal justice system their status as cultural outsiders governed social and legal understandings of their crimes. We see that immigrants themselves called upon their own different cultural circumstances or experiences to explain their violent or criminal actions. They negotiated their immigrant status through interactions with the justice system, and spoke in gendered tones about their cultural position. To uncover immigrants’ responses, we examined the verbatim transcripts of forty-two criminal trials and sentencing hearings during the 1950s where recently arrived European immigrants had appeared in court as victims or offenders. These forty-two cases were a little less than 10 per cent of the trials examined in our larger study on the prosecution of sexual crime in the postwar period. These records cover a range of sex crimes, from acts of indecency against men, women and children, through to the most serious charges such as rape and carnal knowledge of young girls. At trial, the Australian legal system struggled to deal with those from culturally diverse backgrounds. Miscommunication in language was the most common cause of contention in criminal cases involving immigrants. Interpretation of language was important in trials where police alleged the immigrant offender had confessed. The most disturbing instance of this was the trial of Alfons Adamczak for the rape of a young immigrant girl at knifepoint, an event that took place in an immigration hostel in which recent arrivals were first housed when they came to Australia. Language and interpretation became the heart of the defence’s claim to reasonable doubt in this case. The police had given the offender a Russian interpreter. However, it was later revealed that the defendant spoke a mix of Ukrainian and Russian. Reasonable doubt centred on the use of the word ‘rape’ in his confession. The court heard evidence that the Ukrainian word for rape had two meanings: one was the English meaning, the other meant indecent touching. Here, the dispute was over which word the accused man had originally used and whether this was the same word as was recorded in his confession. His defence counsel called Ukrainian and Russian interpreters to give expert evidence about linguistic particularities.27 The offender was convicted in this case, but the problem of interpretation remained unresolved. The inability of state apparatus to manage evidence from multiple language groups created circumstances where otherwise-strong prosecutions for sexual violence were put in jeopardy. Broken English too could cause problems. In the case of Jarek Andrysiak, a Polish man accused of consensual homosexual sex, his defence



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contended that the police had erred in taking his confession in English. The defence argued that the words used in his deposition were not words that a recent immigrant would understand – therefore, his client could not have confessed. During trial, the defence asked the police constable a number of questions about the written confession: did he think the word ‘statement’ was ‘a pretty good English word for a New Australian?’ Or would ‘of your own free will’ be ‘quite a mouthful’? Was not ‘inducement … quite a word’ for an immigrant? Eventually the constable conceded that those words were difficult to understand. He said that the accused had appeared to follow during the interview, speaking with an accent but not in broken English.28 What immigrants said in their confessions could be even more problematic. Here, war and its after effects filtered into the courtroom. In a number of cases, offenders said they had given false confessions because of violent war experiences. We find this in the case of Vinnie Abravanel, a Jewish displaced person charged with the indecent assault of a young girl. In court, Abravanel told the jury that when the police began to question him, he had flashbacks to being questioned by the Gestapo as a child. He testified that the Australian police officers’ ‘faces changed to the so-well remembered faces of the … Nazis’. He said he made up his mind to agree to anything the police officers wanted, so that they would not beat him like the Nazis did. The entire prosecution of this case rested on the alleged confession, as the child victim was too young to testify.29 Confessions were, and remain, a problematic area of law. Juries generally place great weight on a confession; however, they might be offered or induced under a range of coercive circumstances, and had already been the subject of a number of inquiries into police practices.30 The jury in the Abravanel case returned a verdict of not guilty. In dealing with postwar communities, the state had little in place to tackle war trauma. Past violence enacted upon these communities continued to affect their relations with the state and their experiences in new countries. Both miscommunications in language and experience of war trauma significantly complicated prosecution of crimes. Although the examples given here are sexual crimes, we can infer that these problems occurred right across the board of offending. In other ways, sexual offending and victimization were more specifically linked to ethnicity and the individual’s immigrant status. Transcripts from the 1950s reveal how cultural perceptions of immigrants’ beliefs on sexuality, gender and marriage affected criminal trial outcomes. Here, defence counsel could use the immigration experience to mitigate the sexual crime, discredit the victim, or provide a ‘cultural’ explanation for sexual offending.

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We see the last point in the case of Cristian Sorci, a 21-year-old Italian man charged with having sexual relations with an underage girl. Sorci pled guilty to the charge, and in an attempt to mitigate his sentence, his defence told the court that his background should be taken into consideration. His defence outlined Sorci’s experience of war: his father had come to Australia to earn money and bring his family out, but the war intervened. Sorci had grown up in Italy without any parental advice, which, he said, had had a detrimental effect on his approach to young girls. The defence pointed out that his client had witnessed scenes in northern Italy ‘conductive to immorality’, where the conditions of war meant that Italian women gave themselves to men sexually in exchange for food. The atmosphere in which he grew up, said Sorci’s defence, was ‘entirely different from the atmosphere that a normal Australian lad would grow up in’, offering a reason to mitigate his sentence.31 A similar example is found in the case of Tommaso Manuel, an Italian immigrant who pleaded guilty to having consensual sex with another man. At sentencing, an Australian friend gave evidence explaining that the offender was the ‘best type of Italian migrant’, who had shown his good character by working tirelessly to bring his family to Australia. He went on to suggest that Manuel’s family disconnection had played a part in his criminality. The judge, also feeling that his cultural background was relevant, wanted to know whether sodomy was a crime in Italy – a question that implied that homosexuality may be part and parcel of the offender’s cultural heritage.32 In the cases of both Sorci and Manuel, the defence counsels used the fact that their clients were immigrants to defend against allegations of sexual crimes, pointing out that their sex offences would not have occurred had they had a ‘normal’ life. Here, lawyers were attempting to use the stereotypes of immigrants’ sexual offending to their advantage. Cultural explanations for offending were revealed in different ways in cases in which both victim and offender were immigrants. We see this, for example, in the case of Alex Papadopoulos, a 23-year-old Greek immigrant accused of having sex with a teenage Russian girl who was now pregnant. The victim gave evidence that she had rejected his advances. The offender told the court that he wanted to marry her. In this case, the presiding judge expressed concern that the jury’s perceptions of immigrant marriages and gender relations would influence their verdict. They should be mindful, the judge pointed out, of different cultural beliefs around marriage. It might ‘strike you as strange’, he said, that immigrants regarded it normal to marry so young, and that a man ‘immediately upon meeting the girl’ would consider her a ‘prospective wife’. But, said the judge instructively, marriages in other countries were ‘according to the wishes of the adult members of the



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family … with or without the concurrence of the girl … Whether it is a good or bad idea’ was not the concern of the court.33 The jury in this instance found Papadopoulos guilty of the minor offence of indecent assault, rather than the original charge of carnal knowledge. Arguably, the way that the all-male jury saw this representation of cultural beliefs about marriage and gender roles meant that they were able to overlook evidence that the girl had rejected Papadopoulos’s advances and was now pregnant (indicating that carnal knowledge or rape should have been the charge), and instead found the offender guilty of a minor sex offence only. Adult female victim’s immigrant status became the object of inquiry in the few cases that came to light. One particularly troubling instance was when an adult immigrant woman of Cypriot background accused a Yugoslav man of attempted rape and grievous bodily harm. The victim and offender lived in Sydney in a close-knit immigrant community, and most of the trial was conducted via interpreters. The court heard that the victim had sustained serious physical injuries, that she had reported the crime immediately to her neighbour, and that medical evidence supported her testimony. These factors would normally make for a very strong case but the jury acquitted the offender of all charges. We can never know for certain why the jury decided this, but from the evidence presented it seems that they may have been influenced by the presentation of evidence about the victim’s views on marital relations. The defence in this case proposed that the victim had made up her story because she had a jealous and controlling Cypriot husband. The defence counsel’s questioning centred on the victim’s cultural beliefs about male and female behaviour. We can see this in the defence counsel’s crossexamination of the victim: Q: Your husband is a jealous man? A. No. Q. It is a custom where you come from, where you and your husband come from, for the women not to speak to strange men? A. To people that I have not been introduced to or do not know, naturally I would not talk. Q. And if you did, your husband naturally would be annoyed if he found out? A. I would not speak to strangers and naturally my husband would be upset or annoyed. Q. Especially if the man was alone in the house with you? A. He would be annoyed and I personally would not have spoken to any stranger while I am alone in the house. Q. Your husband would be annoyed, and if your husband knew that you had been alone in your room with a man he would want an explanation? A. Yes, it is so.34

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The accused then gave evidence that the victim had told him she was in an unhappy marriage and wanted to go away with him (he gave this evidence despite the fact they had only just met that day). Given the victim’s injuries and the corroborating evidence in this case, there is the strong suspicion that a jury would never have taken the accused’s defence seriously if her marriage had not been portrayed in that way.

CONCLUSION This chapter has explored multiple intersections between immigrants, gender, violence and criminality. It has shown that, in the 1950s, some Australian politicians insisted that there was an association between nonBritish immigration and criminal acts, constructing a moral panic over the involvement of New Australians in violent acts. Both federal and state governments instigated numerous studies into criminality and migration, with findings showing that non-British immigrants were involved in fewer criminal acts than other immigrant groups. Yet there remained a persistent anxiety around New Australians, and even inquiries that dismissed the relationship between immigration and crime pointed to sexual crime as a particular object of concern. Within the popular imagination, New Australians continued to be seen as perpetrators of violence. Wider views on the criminality of recent immigrants affected every aspect of immigrants’ lives, but never more so than in court. At criminal trial, immigrants were treated differently precisely because they were immigrants. Evidence – both for and against a conviction – appeared in their cases in ways that could never have applied to white Australian-born men. Recent migrants experienced a number of profound problems at trial, including the lack of adequate provisions for interpreters. Yet the different treatment of New Australians went far deeper than this, as ideas about immigrants’ potential for sexual and gendered violence shaped prosecution and defence tactics in these cases. Some defendants and their legal representatives argued that their upbringing outside of Australia had explained their sexual crime. In cases of consensual homosexuality, a defendant’s ethnicity was portrayed as part of the problem, in a way that did not occur in trials where both men were white Australians. In cases of sexual assault against women, cultural assumptions about ethnicity, in particular attitudes towards early marriage and extramarital sex, offered female victims little protection at trial, rendering their testimony less believable. Thus for immigrants, ideas of crime, gender and ethnicity operated in complex ways. A close reading of the 1950s court cases opens new avenues



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for inquiry into the gendered operation of discourses of cultural difference in the treatment of postwar immigrants. The approach of the justice system to these cases reveals a profound inability to account for cultural difference or to counter stereotypical views on gender, race and ethnicity. Most importantly, violence was seen as a condition of recent immigrants: despite all statistical evidence to the contrary, the New Australian was repeatedly portrayed as someone with a propensity for violence.

ANDY KALADELFOS Dr Andy Kaladelfos is senior research fellow on ‘The Prosecution Project’ at the Griffith Criminology Institute, Griffith University. Andy is co-author with Lisa Featherstone of Sex Crimes in the Fifties (2016) and co-editor, with Yorick Smaal and Mark Finnane, of The Sexual Abuse of Children: Recognition and Redress (2016). Andy is Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project DP150101798, which has supported this chapter.

LISA FEATHERSTONE Dr Lisa Featherstone is senior lecturer in Australian History at the University of Queensland. Lisa has pubwidely on sexuality, sexual crime and violence, and histories of masculinity. Lisa is the author of Let’s Talk About Sex (2011) and is co-author with Andy Kaladelfos of Sex Crimes in the Fifties (2016). Lisa is a Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project DP150101798, which has supported this chapter. NOTES   1. State Records New South Wales (NSW): Court Reporting Branch; NRS 2713, Criminal Transcripts, R v. Elliot, Guthrie, Seymour and Sallis, 1952, 6/2632 (hereinafter ‘Criminal Transcripts’). All names of defendants and complainants have been given pseudonyms. The year given is correct.  2. On these inquiries, see R. Francis, Migrant Crime in Australia, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1981, pp. 54–58; S. Mukerjee, ‘Ethnicity and Crime’, Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, Canberra, Australian Institute of Criminology, 1999, pp. 1–6.   3. D. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2004; see also M.

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  4.

  5.   6.  7.

 8.  9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

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Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2009. R. French, ‘Persons with Serious Character Defects: Homosexuals in the Commonwealth Public Service, 1953–1974’, in G. Willett and Y. Smaal (eds), Intimacy, Violence, and Activism: Gay and Lesbian Perspectives, Clayton, Vic., Monash University Press, 2013, pp. 119–32 . L. Featherstone and A. Kaladelfos, Sex Crimes in the Fifties, Melbourne, Melbourne University Publishing, 2016. G. Tavan, The Long Slow Death of White Australia, Carlton North, Vic., Scribe, 2005, p. 68. A. Markus, Australian Race Relations, 1788–1993, St Leonards, NSW, Allen and Unwin, 1994, pp. 156–63; E. Richards, Destination Australia: Migration to Australia since 1901, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008, p. 191. A. Markus, ‘Labour and Immigration 1946–9: The Displaced Persons Program’, Labour History, vol. 47, 1984, p. 80. S. Poynting, ‘Ethnic Minority Immigrants, Crime and the State’, in T. Anthony and C. Cunneen (eds), The Critical Criminology Companion, Annandale, NSW, Hawkins Press, 2008, pp. 118–28; L. Henderson, ‘The Truth in Stereotype? Italians and Criminality in North Queensland between the Wars’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 19, no. 45, 1995, pp. 32–40. M. Finnane, ‘Controlling the “Alien” in Mid Twentieth-Century Australia: The Origins and Fate of a Policing Role’, Policing and Society: An International Journal of Research and Policy, vol. 19, no. 4, 2009, pp. 442–67. State Records NSW: NRS 302–3, Attorney General Department, Special Bundle, ‘New Australians’, 7/7235.2, media clippings. C. Cunneen, Conflict, Politics, and Crime: Aboriginal Communities and the Police, Crows Nest, NSW, Allen and Unwin, 2001; Greg Noble, Scott Poynting and Paul Tabar, Kids, Kebabs, Cops and Crime, Annandale, NSW, Pluto Press, 2000; Scott Poynting et al., Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other, Sydney, Sydney Institute of Criminology, 2004; Poynting, ‘Ethnic Minority Immigrants, Crime and the State’; see also, reports by the Flemington Community Legal Centre in relation to the Victorian Policy Inquiry into Racial Profiling (2013) http:// www.communitylaw.org.au/flemingtonkensington/cb_pages/racialprofiling.php (accessed 1 March 2015). S. Pickering, ‘The New Criminals: Refugees and Asylum Seekers’, in T. Anthony and C. Cunneen (eds), The Critical Criminology Companion, Sydney, Hawkins Press, 2008, pp. 169–79. State Records NSW: NRS 302–3, Attorney General Department, Special Bundle, ‘New Australians’, 7/7235.2, clippings and police returns. State Records NSW: NRS 302–3, Attorney General Department, Special Bundle, New Australians, 7/7235.2, Attorney General C.E. Martin, Ministerial Statement, ‘Murders: New South Wales’, NSW Legislative Assembly, 11 December 1951. SRNSW: NRS 302–3, Attorney General Department, Special Bundle, ‘New Australians’, 7/7235.2, clippings.



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17. Commonwealth Immigration Advisory Council, Report of Committee Established to Investigate Conduct of Migrants, 1952, NAA J25, 1956/2544; Commonwealth Immigration Advisory Council, Second Report of the Committee Established to Investigate Conduct of Migrants, Canberra, Commonwealth Government Printer, 1955; Commonwealth Immigration Advisory Council, Third Report of the Committee Established to Investigate the Conduct of Migrants, Canberra, Commonwealth Government Printer, 1957. 18. Markus, ‘Labour and Immigration’, p. 89. 19. Commonwealth Immigration Advisory Council, Report, pp. 2, 14. 20. Commonwealth Immigration Advisory Council, Report, p. 3. 21. South Australia Legislative Assembly, Report of the Committee on Treatment of Sexual Offenders, Adelaide, Government Printer, 1952, p. 5. 22. Commonwealth Immigration Advisory Committee, Third Report, p. 6. 23. National Archives of Australia, A445, 140/5/12, Conference held at the Office of the Commissioner of Police, Brisbane, 10 January 1952. 24. Canaday, The Straight State. 25. S. Poynting, P. Tabar and G. Noble, ‘Looking for Respect: Lebanese Immigrant Young Men in Australia’, in M. Donaldson et al. (eds), Migrant Men: Critical Studies of Masculinities and the Migration Experience, New York, NJ, Routledge, 2009, pp. 145–46. 26. C. Ho, ‘Muslim Women’s New Defenders: Women’s Rights, Nationalism and Islamophobia in Contemporary Australia’, Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 30, 2007, pp. 290–98. 27. Criminal Transcripts, R v. Adamczak, 1951, 6/2579 28. Criminal Transcripts, R v. Andrysiak, 1958, 3/462. 29. Criminal Transcripts, R v. Abravanel, 1952, 6/2638. 30. Mark Finnane, When Police Unionise: The Politics of Law and Order in Australia, Sydney, Sydney Institute of Criminology, 2002. 31. Criminal Transcripts, R v. Sorci, 1952, 6/2631. 32. Criminal Transcripts, R v.Manuel, 1957, 3/366. 33. Criminal Transcripts, R v. Papadopoulos, 1953, 3/38. 34. Criminal Transcripts, R v. Ateljevic, 1959, 3/592.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Canaday, M., The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2009. Cunneen, C., Conflict, Politics, and Crime: Aboriginal Communities and the Police, Crows Nest, NSW, Allen and Unwin, 2001. Featherstone, L., and A. Kaladelfos, Sex Crimes in the Fifties, Melbourne, Melbourne University Publishing, 2016. Finnane, Mark, When Police Unionise: The Politics of Law and Order in Australia, Sydney, Sydney Institute of Criminology, 2002.

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———. ‘Controlling the “Alien” in Mid Twentieth-Century Australia: The Origins and Fate of a Policing Role’, Policing and Society: An International Journal of Research and Policy, vol. 19, no. 4, 2009, pp. 442–67. Francis, R., Migrant Crime in Australia, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1981. French, R., ‘Persons with Serious Character Defects: Homosexuals in the Commonwealth Public Service, 1953–1974’, in G. Willett and Y. Smaal (eds), Intimacy, Violence, and Activism: Gay and Lesbian Perspectives, Clayton, Vic., Monash University Press, 2013, pp. 119–32. Henderson, L., ‘The Truth in Stereotype? Italians and Criminality in North Queensland between the Wars’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 19, no. 45, 1995, pp. 32–40. Ho, C., ‘Muslim Women’s New Defenders: Women’s Rights, Nationalism and Islamophobia in Contemporary Australia’, Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 30, 2007, pp. 290–98. Johnson, D., The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2004. Markus, A., ‘Labour and Immigration 1946–9: The Displaced Persons Program’, Labour History, vol. 47, 1984, pp. 73–90. ———. Australian Race Relations, 1788–1993, St Leonards, NSW, Allen and Unwin, 1994. Mukerjee, S., ‘Ethnicity and Crime’, Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, Canberra, Australian Institute of Criminology, 1999, pp. 1–6. Noble, Greg, Scott Poynting and Paul Tabar, Kids, Kebabs, Cops and Crime: Youth, Ethnicity and Crime, Annandale, NSW, Pluto Press, 2000. Pickering, S., ‘The New Criminals: Refugees and Asylum Seekers’, in T. Anthony and C. Cunneen (eds), The Critical Criminology Companion, Sydney, Hawkins Press, 2008, pp. 169–79. Poynting, S., ‘Ethnic Minority Immigrants, Crime and the State’, in T. Anthony and C. Cunneen (eds), The Critical Criminology Companion, Annandale, NSW, Hawkins Press, 2008, pp. 118–28. Poynting, Scott, et al., Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other, Sydney: Sydney Institute of Criminology, 2004. Poynting, S., P. Tabar and G. Noble, ‘Looking for Respect: Lebanese Immigrant Young Men in Australia’, in M. Donaldson et al. (eds), Migrant Men: Critical Studies of Masculinities and the Migration Experience, New York, NJ, Routledge, 2009, pp. 145–46. Richards, E., Destination Australia: Migration to Australia since 1901, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008. Tavan, G., The Long Slow Death of White Australia, Carlton North, Vic., Scribe, 2005.

Chapter 12

The Violence of Exclusion Australia’s Migration Zone Excision and the State of Exception Farida Fozdar

KL Much has been written about the liminality of the refugee/asylum seeker in their transition to a safe haven, particularly their sojourn in camps and detention. Here I consider the effect of Australia’s decision to excise its entire geographical territory from its migration zone, leaving asylum seekers in a much more permanent state of limbo, where their very humanity is in question. This chapter tracks this master stroke in Australia’s ‘legislative convulsions and contortions’ in regard to migration policy relating to asylum seekers.1 It considers a passive form of violence – namely restrictions on human rights – that these policies demonstrate. While not wishing to diminish the effects of active physical violence enacted by states and individuals, the chapter explores the ways in which the exclusion of certain categories of people from consideration as ‘human’ functions as a form of state-sanctioned violence. The trick of excising parts of Australia (Ashmore, Christmas and Cocos islands), and most recently, the whole of the Australian mainland, from its own migration zone, cleverly avoids the state’s obligations to people under United Nations (UN) provisions. The work of Agamben on the ‘state of exception’, exploring the figure of the individual dehumanized through exclusion in the ‘camp’, is used to consider how asylum seekers become ‘homo sacer’, reduced to ‘bare life’, deprived of the rights that any human in Australia should legally have access to. The link between sovereignty, the politics of crisis, territory and violence is considered. 233

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THE STATE, SOVEREIGNTY AND VIOLENCE The classic definition of the state is a human community that successfully claims an absolute monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within its territory.2 The notion of physical force is sometimes abbreviated as violence – the state or sovereign is that which can legitimately enact violence, generally to enforce its laws. Thus violence is at the foundation of the state. The chapters in this volume track the various more or less legitimate uses of such violence by the state and others over Australia’s hundred-plus year history – against indigenous people, migrant groups, children, and so on. These legacies of violence bind Australians to each other, in various forms of collective memory as co-nationals, and more generally to events and debates globally. At the global level, Australia sees itself as connected to or part of the West, given its colonial history.3 The keystone of the state structure in the West since the Enlightenment, one that Australia has adopted and that has become a key tenet of ‘Australian values’, is the idea of ‘the rule of law’.4 Palan argues that sovereignty is ‘the right to write the law’,5 and this feature is often celebrated as what distinguishes the West from nations of the East. The state generally uses a number of ultimately violent means to enforce its rule, including the police and the military. The judiciary legislates and makes decisions that enable the operation of this ‘rule of law’, identifying the limits to this right to violence. Although, historically, nation states established this right through demonstrations of violence against their people, in the contemporary world, for most nation states, the simple threat of violence against members is enough to maintain the rule of law, and actual violence is seldom needed. However, in this chapter I consider how the state’s violence is being enacted against non-members (who ironically are seeking membership) through a legal fiction that has seen the state remove its legal territory from access to those arriving by sea without a visa, cleverly subverting its legal commitments as a signatory to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other human rights conventions. The politics of emergency and crisis that has characterized discourses around migration in the West for much of the last three decades has enabled states to take unprecedented action to ‘fortify’6 themselves through processes of securitization.7 A hallmark of this phenomenon in the field of refugee law is the attempt by many states to exclude asylum seekers from the international rule of law, namely protection under UN conventions for refugees and various human rights instruments. This has been achieved through a range of measures including: interdiction at sea and/or at airports; removal to



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‘safe third countries’; and the use of ‘accelerated’ processes that have fewer procedural safeguards, and may include requirements for obtaining leave to apply and restricting access to, or the grounds for appeal through, the courts.8 A key strategy has been to creatively designate certain areas within a state’s territory as ‘zones of exception’, whereby a country’s normal rules of engagement with non-nationals are suspended in various ways.

THE AUSTRALIAN CASE Australia has a proud history of successfully settling UNHCR-sanctioned refugees, welcoming European displaced persons after the Second World War, as well as Vietnamese refugees fleeing the communist regime in the 1970s and 1980s. However, those who arrive in Australia by boat without visas have, for the last fifteen years, been the target of much public concern. So negative has been public opinion that such asylum seekers have become a political football, with the main political parties vying with each other to develop the most repressive policies in relation to this group. Despite Australia’s successful integration of Vietnamese ‘boat people’ who arrived in the 1980s,9 arrivals in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century have been the subject of suspicion, with concerns as benign as issues around the fairness of their ‘queue jumping’ to more extreme fears that they may harbour Muslim terrorists.10 The discursive construction of illegality has been a strong theme, best dressed up as concern over potential drownings of ‘innocents’ at sea at the hands of ruthless ‘people smugglers’, but more commonly in the criminalization of asylum seekers themselves. There is widespread suspicion that those who come by boat are undeserving of refuge in Australia – indeed that they pose a potential threat to ‘the Australian way of life’.11 This concern is the most recent manifestation of a deep strain of xenophobia that has permeated much of Australia’s history, from its infamous White Australia Policy that saw non-whites excluded for much of the twentieth century, to these current concerns about asylum seekers and Muslims. The creation of a sense of crisis and emergency around this phenomenon has been well documented.12 Various governments of both the ostensible left and the right have attempted different strategies for dealing with this ‘problem’. These have included interception, repulsion and detention, as well as the construction of complex legal fictions. Specifically, policies and practices have included: boarding and towing back Indonesian fishing boats carrying suspected asylum seekers (and where their boats prove unseaworthy, transferring passengers to lifeboats and sending them back in

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the direction of Indonesia); mandatory detention either within Australia or offshore within Australian territory on Pacific islands; restricting successful applicants to temporary protection (three-year visas with no right to family reunion); plans to swap asylum seekers with UNHCR-determined refugees living in Malaysia; and a range of other actions designed to deny rights to this particular group. It has also involved the exclusion of the media and the public from access to asylum seekers in detention, to restrict information about applicants and their conditions from reaching the general public (‘out of sight, out of mind’). For example, the Australian human rights commissioner has no right to enter offshore processing centres, and when she reported on abuses of children in detention she was publicly vilified by the sitting government. Australia has no bill of rights or other statutory measures designed to ensure the implementation of its international legal human rights obligations.13 The expectation has always been that it is a civilized country that follows the rule of law and protects people’s rights, and thus that a bill of rights is unnecessary.14 Although Australia does very well in terms of supporting the human rights of those offshore determined to be refugees, and provides some of the best services among receiving countries for those who have come under official UNHCR programmes, its fixation on denying those who arrive without visas any rights whatsoever has seen the country adopt a range of strategies devised elsewhere to deter irregular migration. These include ‘interdiction and deflection programs through to the adoption of exclusionary provisions in its migration laws that limit access to domestic protection’.15 It broke new ground, however, according to Crock, in enacting legislation to deny ‘unauthorised maritime arrivals’ the right to apply for any form of visa in Australia, including the right to seek asylum. Mandatory detention of such arrivals was introduced in 1992. Ostensibly it applies to anyone arriving in Australia without a visa but its effect has been to penalize ‘unauthorized arrivals’ by boat who claim asylum. This legislation set the precedent for differential treatment depending on mode of arrival – those arriving through official entry points such as airports with visas of one kind or another are able to access bridging visas once they claim asylum. One of the more bizarre strategies was to excise some of the islands that were part of Australian territory from Australia’s ‘migration zone’, and thus making Australian law not applicable there. These included Christmas Island, Ashmore Reef and Cocos Island, all common landing places for Indonesian fishing boats carrying asylum seekers due to their proximity to Indonesia, from whence the boats were departing. In an excised area, no one has the right to apply for a visa. This action was prompted by ‘the



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Tampa crisis’, where Australian authorities requested a Norwegian ship (the Tampa) to rescue people from a sinking vessel, but then refused to accept these people onto Australian territory, asking that they be returned to Indonesia.16 The Australian government’s desire to stop these people from claiming asylum on Australian territory, epitomized in Conservative Prime Minister John Howard’s statement, ‘We will decide who comes to our county, and the circumstances in which they come’, prompted the ‘Pacific Solution’, six pieces of legislation that resulted in the transfer of asylum seekers to small Pacific nations for processing, outside of the reach of much of Australia’s appeals process. Two mutually supporting features of this policy were excision and exile. Foster and Pobjoy track the legal development and implications of subsequent moves to extend this policy,17 noting that original attempts to excise 4,891 places failed several times. Once it was eventually passed by Parliament in 2005, this legislation was challenged and overturned by the judiciary. However, it remained on the policy agenda of both major political parties. A Labor government was elected in 2007 on a platform that argued that many of these policies were inhumane and had brought great shame on Australia, tarnishing its international reputation through demonizing refugees for domestic political purposes.18 However, although the new government initially softened the exile aspect, detaining and processing asylum seekers onshore after closing the Nauru and Papua New Guinea detention centres in 2008, their policies eventually proved harsher. Asylum seekers were left in ‘legal limbo’ because the excisions remained in place – people could not apply for protection visas, and thus had ‘no clear statutory means of seeking protection in Australia under the Refugee Convention’.19 In 2010, this government also suspended the processing of all asylum applications from two countries from which increasing numbers of boat arrivals were originating, namely Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, due to supposedly improved security circumstances there.20 As part of its 2010 election campaign, the Labor government promised a return to regional processing, saying it would build a processing centre, perhaps in East Timor.21 It also developed a policy of regional exchange of asylum seekers for refugees whose status had been determined (the ‘Malaysia solution’). This proposal encountered a range of problems, including the lack of an assurance of the human rights of those to be sent to Malaysia (and therefore a failure of Australia’s own obligations under the UN Convention and human rights treaties). This proposal was ultimately overruled by the Australian High Court. The government of the time also moved to transfer asylum seekers to detention on Christmas Island where they would be processed in a way that did not allow judicial review but remained more or less compliant

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with Australia’s international legal obligations. It has been argued that this process was ‘explicitly designed to operate outside the framework of Australian law, and without the legal safeguards built into that framework’.22 The process was criticized for the poor quality of the decision making, and its discretionary nature. In 2011 a successful amendment to the Migration Act 1958 was made with the insertion of the following clause that effectively excised these territories from the ‘migration zone’: ‘A person shall not, for the purposes of this Act, be deemed to have entered Australia by reason only of his having been taken from a proclaimed airport for the purpose of being kept in custody at a place outside a proclaimed airport in pursuance of sub-section (1), (2) or (3)’.23 This meant that Australian territory was no longer ‘Australian’ for these people. In their analysis of the effects of these amendments, Foster and Pobjoy make the point that the laws do not technically excise these territories from Australia’s migration zone, although this is an easy shorthand for their effect.24 The major function of the laws is to ensure that asylum seekers do not have access to the Australian judicial appeals system, and make whether or not they are allowed to apply for a protection visa entirely dependent on the minister’s discretion (based on a vague ‘public interest’ criterion).25 With the ongoing concern that boat arrivals constitute a threat to the sovereignty and integrity of Australia and its values – indeed to the Australian ‘way of life’ – and that asylum seekers are linked to international crime and terrorism,26 in March 2013 Australia’s Migration Act 1958 was amended so that no boat arrival (arriving anywhere without a visa) could lodge an asylum claim in Australia.27 This was done by extending the earlier edict that excised certain places from Australia’s migration zone (Christmas, Cocos and Ashmore islands). It meant all arrivals would be processed offshore, and, more importantly, that their rights to appeal within the Australian legal system, a right that had seen a large majority of denials of refugee status overturned,28 no longer existed. It meant asylum seekers arriving by boat would no longer have a statutory ‘right’ to ask for protection, and the grant of protection was reduced to a matter of executive discretion. With a new Conservative government elected in late 2013, the relevant government department was renamed the Department for Immigration and Border Protection, therefore the minister charged with this discretion was the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection (since then a new ‘Border Force’ has been established within this department, with much stronger powers than customs or immigration officials). At this time public servants were also mandated to refer to onshore asylum seekers as ‘illegals’. This criminalization reinforced the public perception that such people are undeserving of human rights. It was also announced that even with the minister’s discretion, a positive determination will not result in the



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right to live in Australia – such arrivals will never be able to settle in Australia. A publicity campaign was launched in originating countries, and among communities within Australia, with the tag line ‘You will never make Australia home’. Simultaneously a ‘push back’ policy was implemented, whereby those on boats are turned around, and if the boats are unseaworthy, passengers are transferred to lifeboats that will return them to Indonesia.29 The use of the navy to enforce these policies reinforces that this is the state exerting its power through violence. Additionally the new government, within weeks of coming to power and after years of daily commentary in opposition on the ‘crisis’ that asylum seekers represent, announced that it would not provide the public with information about arrivals or other matters, merely offering a highly controlled weekly briefing to the press (consisting of the minister, flanked by military personnel). In January 2014 it was announced that even these would cease. Media questions about boat turn backs and reported abuses, and even payments to skippers to turn the boats around, are met with the phrase that these are ‘on-water matters’ and therefore cannot be discussed. Thus, as well as removing the protections of the state and therefore the UN Convention for certain categories of arrivals, the government shut down information about the issue. These decisions have been made under a policy called ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’, the very name signalling the security emphasis in policy dealing with asylum seekers. In January 2014, asylum seekers in Indonesia filed claims with local police that Australian navy personnel had forced them to hold on to engine pipes, causing serious burns to their hands. Another said his hand was burnt after having mace sprayed in his eyes, as he groped for something to hold on to. Although these claims have been dismissed as self-interested and without basis by the Conservative Abbott government, one might have cause for suspicion given that less than a month previously the chief of the defence force, General David Hurley, had exempted navy sailors engaged in boat turn backs from their obligation to take ‘reasonable care’ to ensure their own safety and the safety of others, including asylum seekers. This change, basically the standard of care allowable under a war footing, as opposed to peacetime operations, was designed to provide sailors with legal protection such that they would ‘not face individual criminal sanctions under the Act for giving effect to Government policy’.30 These policies appear extremely harsh, but a poll from January 2014 suggests that the majority of the Australian people see them as not harsh enough, with 60 per cent of a representative sample of one thousand wanting the government to ‘increase the severity of the treatment of asylum seekers’.31 It is relevant to note that the practices outlined are designed to exclude particular categories of person – those who seek asylum on boats tend to

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be from Middle Eastern countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq,32 and are presumed to be Muslim. Much of the negativity towards asylum seekers arriving by boat stems from widespread antipathy towards Muslims.33 Crock and Martin argue that the excision of the entire country from its migration zone ‘is the most recent in a series of attempts to wipe clean the asylum law slate in Australia, to reduce the law to a tabula rasa with as few enforceable rights or standards as possible’.34 As a result, Australia has done serious damage to its reputation as an effective multicultural, humane liberal democracy that had previously pioneered positive settlement experiences for refugees. A final point, in terms of describing the actions of the Australian government, is that the excision has occurred within a rhetoric of the need for a ‘regional solution’ to the asylum seeker ‘crisis’. The Australian government has held ongoing high-level talks with its regional neighbours to insist on ‘cooperation’ according to its agenda. One example is the request to Indonesia and Malaysia that they restrict access to their countries for those, from certain Middle Eastern countries such as Iran, who might use Australia’s northern neighbours as a stepping stone to Australia. This mirrors in many ways the European Union’s (EU) approach to asylum and migration policy,35 which has seen concentric circles of control drawn around fortress Europe. The first circle is Europe, which attempts to keep asylum seekers out. The second circle includes states aspiring to EU membership (Central and Eastern Europe), and the third circle includes countries of the former Soviet Union, Turkey and North Africa. These states are expected to enforce EU border laws at their own borders – effectively an imposition of EU sovereignty on non-member nations. The fourth circle consists of the Middle East, China and ‘Black Africa’ – EU policy here is to contain the flows through interventions to control ‘push factors’, including offering development aid in exchange for countries in the region preventing migration and accepting returned failed asylum seekers. Military interventions in source countries have been another means by which Europe and the Global North have acted to contain such flows, producing what Humphrey calls the ‘military humanitarian option’ used when tied aid fails.36 Australia has been involved in multilateral forums developing such policies, and has clearly adopted similar strategies, including both attempts at ‘regional solutions’ and military interventions in refugeeproducing countries such as Afghanistan. These are both examples of what Humphrey calls ‘defending one’s borders at a distance’. But excision goes one step further – removing the borders completely, though not to open them, but to more securely keep them shut.37 Before discussing Agamben’s ‘state of exception’, I want to note resonances between the practices described and the phenomenon of ‘offshoring’.



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OFFSHORING Offshoring, the use of non- or extra-sovereign spaces to do business and avoid taxes, has lately attracted the attention of researchers – a monograph on the topic from Mobilities author and guru John Urry has recently been published.38 Offshoring in the business world has rapidly expanded, as ‘states use their sovereignty, or their right to write law … to create special territorial or juridical enclaves characterised by a reduction in regulations, including taxation’.39 Urry notes that offshoring has been part of a global class warfare waged by the rich that has seen the rapid and increasingly unregulated movement of money, people, information and objects – a growing borderlessness that has been generally thought of, even promoted, as economically, politically and culturally beneficial to all.40 The obvious downside to open borders is that risk also moves across them – terrorists, pollution, trafficked women, drugs, international crime and, of course, asylum seekers. Urry suggests that the offshoring of work, waste, torture, leisure, pollution and taxation involves moving resources, practices, peoples and monies from one national territory to another, but hiding them within secrecy jurisdictions as they move through routes wholly or partly hidden from view. Offshoring involves evading rules, laws, taxes, regulations or norms. It is all about rule-breaking, getting around rules in ways that are illegal or go against the spirit of the law, or [that] use laws in one jurisdiction to undermine laws in another.41

The phenomenon currently under study is a form of offshoring that allows getting around the law through the removal of sovereign territory. Indeed it is not so different from offshoring, as Palan has argued that rather than being beyond the state system, offshoring is intimately bound up with it and that the notion of sovereignty is implicated in all offshoring practices. He concludes that ‘offshore … is not a diminution of state sovereignty but a legally defined realm marking differential levels of intensity by which states propose to apply their regulation. Such a bifurcation of juridical space represents a process by which the state is reimagining its relationship to its territory’.42 Thus, it is the state that is manipulating the jurisdiction of its own laws through the creation of territorial fictions. He argues that the state provides the economic sector with areas where government interference is less stringent, and simultaneously, by allowing this, enables the state to maintain its own structures of power and authority internally. Thus, rather than demonstrating the erosion of the state and its sovereignty, offshoring represents an evolution and buttressing of sovereignty.

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Interestingly, in relation to the phenomenon under study – the movement of people by sea to attempt to reach safety literally in a new land – Urry notes, in a chapter appropriately entitled ‘Out to Sea and Out of Sight’, that most offshoring involves water: The sea is an unruly space not really owned and governed by states, mostly risky, free and unregulated … It is a neo-liberal paradise for the rich class, a vision of the world almost without government, taxes, laws, and where only the powerful ships and their companies survive, with the rest sinking, sometimes literally, to the bottom. It is a frontier-land but where the frontier covers most of the earth’s surface.43

The term ‘offshore’ implies boundedness by water, and signals the traditional lack of law on the sea.44 The legal precedents and principles that constitute ‘the Law of the Sea’ establish two principles, Palan suggests: the discontinuity between legal and physical boundaries (i.e. sovereignty is territorial but need not correspond to the physical space of land); and because of this (the existence of non-physical ‘shores’) ‘sovereignty [and therefore the rights of man] was not indivisible, inalterable [or] imprescriptible. On the contrary it is divisible and potentially relative’.45 Thus, offshoring allows states to simply decree that certain transactions or objects are to be considered ‘offshore’, without them having to be ‘on’ another shore. The resonance with the current phenomenon is clear: those arriving in Australia by boat without a visa are effectively offshored, even when they are onshore, so that their rights – rights Australia is obliged to uphold – are not legally enforceable. This is where the work of Agamben is useful.

HOW IS THIS VIOLENCE? Although the more obvious instances of ‘violence’ are in Australia’s policies of detention and ‘turning back the boats’, as well as the occasioning of ‘assault’ – which is now legally acceptable to remove asylum seekers46 – here I want to explore the various ways in which the legal excision of Australia from its own migration zone for certain categories of people constitutes violence. I began this chapter with Weber’s definition of sovereignty as the right to use force, generally in the enforcement of the law. In a corollary, Carl Schmitt defined the sovereign as ‘he who decides on the state of exception’,47 that is, on when/where the law will be suspended (the right to ‘unwrite’ law, so to speak). Agamben used the term ‘states of exception’ to describe the ways in which individuals are rendered dehumanized through the



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withdrawal of their human rights, within particular political spaces, most notably ‘the camp’, for instance Guantanamo Bay. It involves the theory of exception whereby a ‘particular case is released from the obligation to observe the law’.48 The state of exception is thus simultaneously illegal, because it ignores the state’s laws, and juridical and constitutional, resulting in the production of new norms.49 The state of exception is generally called into play during times of civil war, having its origins during the French Revolution, though Agamben notes that the entire Third Reich operated under a state of exception for twelve years (as indeed did the majority of warring countries during the First World War). However, he notes, many contemporary states have voluntarily created a permanent state of emergency as part of the ‘global war on terror’, and the state of exception has become a technique of government whereby ‘law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension’.50 The idea that this is a necessary intervention due to extraordinary circumstances is one of the features of the use of the state of exception. The U.S. Patriot Act 2001, for example, ensures that those taken into custody have neither the rights of the Geneva Convention nor the rights of the U.S. Constitution, which is justified due to the extraordinary circumstances of the post-9/11 world. The result is war prisons like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, ‘a dispersed series of sites where sovereign power and bio-power coincide’.51 In the state of exception ‘the state continues to exist while the law recedes’.52 The state of exception defines the law’s threshold – where the distinction between legislative, executive and judicial arms dissolves. This is the flip side of the protection offered by the nation state to its subjects – the exclusion from protection, and redefinition of the individual to be excluded. The state defends itself from potential ‘pollution’ by these marginal individuals through detention, physical exclusion through voluntary or forced deportation, and other control measures such as limitations on access to rights such as healthcare, work, freedom of movement, and so on. In Australia’s case it has defended itself by creating a state of exception for the whole nation state in regard to certain categories of people. Agamben uses the notion of homo sacer (sacred man, a figure of Roman law), who is subjected to ‘bare life’ through exclusion from the juridical order, to discuss the refugee as the test case for human rights, noting that rather than embodying these rights, the refugee demonstrates how they are in crisis. Agamben uses Foucault to argue that spaces of exception offer evidence of the ways in which sovereign power orders both territory and people.53 Agamben’s point is that the outside and inside enter into complex topological relations.54 In trying to determine whether the state of exception is inside or outside the juridical order, Agamben suggests ‘the state of exception is

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neither external nor internal to juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifferences, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other’.55 This is the point of intersection where the state of exception is inscribed on the individual, where the juridical–institutional and biopolitical models of power merge.56 Actions such as those of the Australian government are topological processes involving techniques of power to exclude, producing thresholds between sovereign and non-sovereign territory that are enacted on individual bodies. As Mountz notes: ‘Their detachment from sovereign territory and the rights their landing would accrue lies at the center of the discursive and material violence that haunts potential asylum seekers in detention facilities, whether open or closed, dedicated or mainstream sites of incarceration’.57 The original excision of some of Australia’s small offshore islands perhaps made some sense because islands, being separate geographically from the mainland, are often recognized by larger continental states as separate jurisdictional spaces.58 This has been a common offshoring practice: Baldacchino notes that states creatively use ‘small, far-flung and remote, island jurisdictions within their orbit, facilitating activities that could be anathema on home ground’.59 Thus, different systems of law can and do legitimately exist within sovereign territories. The idea that a state of exception should be applied across an entire nation, and to only one category of people, is what is unusual about the current situation in Australia. In these changes to the rights of those seeking asylum we see a collision between the protection of the interests of the individual and of the state.60 As Hannah Arendt argued, rights are only enforceable within the context of the nation state, and citizenship within it. Despite the trend towards a more globalized world, and ‘universal’ declarations about human rights, the nation state remains the domain wherein these rights can be enforced.61 So, while Sassen suggests the international human rights regime signals, along with other processes of globalization, the loss of the territorial power of the nation state, currently no other institutional structure has the ability to enforce such rights.62 Therefore, while arguments for ‘human rights’ and the ‘rights of refugees’ as general universal principles are useful in so far as they insist on a set of inviolable rights that apply to all, regardless of their membership of a particular nation state, it is this membership that affords the institutional structure from within which such rights can be demanded, and breaches of them redressed.63 Such rights are thus a reflection of state power, not international power.64 In her analysis of the relationship between international and national structures, Soysal noted that the two global principles of national sover-



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eignty and universal human rights are often in conflict.65 This is clearly the case where the individual being considered is not a member of the nation state, and the nation state has managed to remove itself from existence in relation to that particular individual. This is what Agamben is talking about when he identifies the refugee as representing ‘bare life’, the one who exists within the space of exception decreed by the state as part of a crisis politics of exclusion. As noted, Humphrey has argued that the shifts in Australian asylum policy are part of a wider regime of containment orchestrated by countries of the Global North that involves ‘the erection of a transnational border based on harmonized asylum and migration policy. These policies include asylum legislation (border protection), politicized aid tied to commitments to detain and process asylum seekers, and, political and even military interventions to resolve long-term conflicts, and thereby eliminate the “push-factors” for migration’.66 What Australia has done with its excision legislation is to excise the border, removing itself from the map completely in terms of obligations to a certain category of people. It literally prevents people from accessing the legal identity of the nation state. As with a magic cloak of invisibility, the fact of the object (the territory of the nation state) remains – it is the legal status that has disappeared. Like an ever-receding shoreline, it says to the asylum seeker, ‘you cannot reach safety’. Although Agamben’s focus was on how states of exception redefine humans, here we have the nation state redefining itself in relation to certain categories of person. Prevention of access to Australia has been done within a discourse of national security where refugees are talked about less in terms of human rights and more in terms of border protection, international crime (people smuggling) and terrorism.67 These processes of securitization are linked to the construction of a state of emergency that produces a negative and exclusionary logic around decision making that is fundamentally antidemocratic. Thus decisions are made by elites within a rhetoric of urgency, and often in secrecy.68 Humphrey talks about the criminalization of refugees as ‘a Western biopolitics which excludes non-citizens from the legal protection provided by international humanitarian law’.69 The excision of Australia from its migration zone is a further example of this process.

CONCLUSION The actions of the Australian government are similar to those occurring in other states attempting to restrict their obligations to people seeking safety, although the effective ‘offshoring’ of the entire Australian territory is appar-

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ently unique. Through complex legal processes, in a context of significant public hostility, the state has limited its responsibility to vulnerable people without access to the protection of an alternative sovereign. Unlike its (limited) welcome of displaced persons after the Second World War, and even Vietnamese refugees fleeing the communist regime in the 1970s and 1980s, Australia has shut down its borders by effectively eliminating them. This action, a form of passive violence in the way it denies people their legislated human rights, allows Australia to ignore its obligations to refugees under the UN Convention, placing the country, and those who seek asylum in it, in a state of liminality where certain legal rights are suspended.70 Such examples demonstrate the limits of international obligations, as Arendt has pointed out.71 Ironically, although this is evidence of a move towards a borderless world, it is also a simultaneous reinforcement of the power of the nation state as sovereign.

FARIDA FOZDAR Farida Fozdar is associate professor in Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Western Australia. She is the recipient of a prestigious Australian Research Council Future Fellowship investigating refugee inclusion programmes. She has previously been the recipient of multiple Australian Research Council grants, and has published over thirty articles and chapters on Australian refugee inclusion since 2000. She is also the author and editor of three books on Australian migration and multiculturalism. NOTES   1. M. Crock and H. Martin, ‘Refugee Rights and the Merits of Appeals’, University of Queensland Law Journal, vol. 32, no. 1, 2013, p. 137.  2. M. Weber, Politics as Vocation, 1919, www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/ethos/Webervocation (accessed 1 March 2015).   3. M. Crock, ‘Shadow Plays, Shifting Sands and International Refugee Law: Convergences in the Asia–Pacific’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 2, 2014, pp. 247–80; D. Hollinsworth, Race and Racism in Australia, South Melbourne, Thomson/Social Science Press, 2006.   4. C. Johnson, ‘Howard’s Values and Australian Identity’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 2, no. 2, 2007, pp. 195–210; J.W. Tate, ‘John Howard’s “Nation”: Multiculturalism, Citizenship, and Identity’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 55, no. 1, 2009, pp. 97–120.



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  5. R. Palan, ‘Trying to Have your Cake and Eating It: How and Why the State System has Created Offshore’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4, 1998, p. 628.   6. Derek Gregory and Allan Pred (eds), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence, New York, NJ, Routledge, 2007; S. Mezzadra and B. Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2013.  7. See Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Boulder, CO, Lynne Rienner, 1998; Matt McDonald, ‘Deliberation and Resecuritization: Australia, Asylum Seekers and the Normative Limits of the Copenhagen School’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 46, no. 2, 2011, pp. 281–95.  8. M. Foster and J. Pobjoy, ‘A Failed Case of Legal Exceptionalism? Refugee Status Determination in Australia’s “Excised” Territory’, International Journal of Refugee Law, vol. 23, no. 4, 2011, p. 585.  9. K. Neumann, Across the Seas: Australia’s Response to Refugees, A History, Collingwood, Vic., Black Inc. Books, 2015. 10. McDonald, ‘Deliberation and Resecuritization’. 11. Crock and Martin, ‘Refugee Rights and the Merits of Appeals’. 12. McDonald, ‘Deliberation and Resecuritization’. 13. Crock, ‘Shadow Plays, Shifting Sands’, pp. 247–80. 14. However, there is a growing movement to design and enact a Bill of Rights – see G. Williams, A Bill of Rights for Australia, Sydney, UNSW Press, 2000; G. McKinnon, ‘Social Cohesion and Human Rights: Would a Bill of Rights Enhance Social Cohesion in Australia?’, Social Compass, vol. 60, no. 4, December 2013, pp. 579–90. 15. Crock, ‘Shadow Plays, Shifting Sands’, p. 249. 16. David Marr and Marian Wilkinson, Dark Victory, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2004. 17. Foster and Pobjoy, ‘A Failed Case of Legal Exceptionalism?’ 18. Ibid.; McDonald, ‘Deliberation and Resecuritization’. 19. Foster and Pobjoy, ‘A Failed Case of Legal Exceptionalism?’, p. 8. 20. McDonald, ‘Deliberation and Resecuritization’. 21. The massive costs of these measures have been concealed within Australia’s official aid budget. 22. Foster and Pobjoy, ‘A Failed Case of Legal Exceptionalism?’, p. 9. 23. Quoted in Crock and Martin, ‘Refugee Rights and the Merits of Appeals’, p. 142. 24. Foster and Pobjoy, ‘A Failed Case of Legal Exceptionalism?’ 25. There is some question of whether these practices breach (a) the ‘nonrefoulement’ clause that prohibits the expulsion and return of refugees (without adequate means to determine refugee status, it could be argued that this right is removed); (b) the provision that states should not impose penalties as a result of asylum seekers’ illegal entry (since the inferior access and processing regime for boat arrivals could amount to penalty); and (c) the non-discrimination principle (in terms of offering a two-tiered system).

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26. McDonald, ‘Deliberation and Resecuritization’. 27. Crock and Martin, ‘Refugee Rights and the Merits of Appeals’. 28. P. Maley, ‘Asylum Claim Decisions in a State of Chaos’, The Australian, 2 May 2011, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/asylum-claim-decisionsin-a-state-of-chaos/story-fn59niix-1226048039242 (accessed 1 March 2015). 29. Philip Dorling, ‘Australians Want Boat Arrivals Treated More Harshly: Poll’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 January 2014, http://www.smh.com.au/federalpolitics/political-news/australians-want-boat-arrivals-treated-more-harshly-poll20140108-30g97.html (accessed 1 March 2015). 30. D. Wroe, ‘Navy Sailors now on War Footing to Turn Back Boats’, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 January 2014, http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/politicalnews/navy-sailors-now-on-war-footing-to-turn-back-boats-20140114-30t47.html (accessed 1 March 2015). 31. Dorling, ‘Australians Want Boat Arrivals Treated More Harshly’. 32. M. Humphrey, ‘Humanitarianism, Terrorism and the Transnational Border’, Social Analysis: International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, vol. 46, no. 1, 2002, pp. 117–22. 33. N.A. Kabir, Muslims in Australia: Immigration, Race Relations and Cultural History, London, Routledge, 2005. 34. Crock and Martin, ‘Refugee Rights and the Merits of Appeals’, p. 137. The decisions have been made under the ‘no advantage’ rationale, which argues that there should be no advantage to those who arrive by boat compared to those lodging and awaiting determination of their claims outside of Australia, for example in a country of first asylum such as Malaysia or Indonesia. This is supposed to deter asylum seekers from taking risky boat journeys, but it also effectively reinforces the distinction between ‘good’ patient refugees and ‘bad’ impatient ones who ‘queue jump’ to access asylum in Australia. 35. See Humphrey, ‘Humanitarianism, Terrorism’; Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method. 36. Humphrey, ‘Humanitarianism, Terrorism’, p. 122. 37. Interestingly, legal theorist Mary Crock has argued that the opposite has occurred: that rather than Australia imposing its will on its close neighbours to effectively extend its asylum policy beyond its borders, the degradation of terms and conditions for asylum seekers on boats is evidence of an alignment of Australia’s policies, and as a corollary, of culture and attitudes, with the states of Malaysia and Indonesia – in effect, an adoption of their policies. Crock, ‘Shadow Plays, Shifting Sands’. 38. J. Urry, Offshoring, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2014. 39. Palan, ‘Trying to Have your Cake and Eating It’, p. 626. 40. Urry, Offshoring. 41. J. Urry, ‘The Rich Class and Offshore Worlds’, 2014, http://www.discoversociety. org/the-rich-class-and-offshore-worlds/ (accessed 1 March 2015). 42. Palan, ‘Trying to Have your Cake and Eating It’, p. 625. 43. Urry, ‘The Rich Class and Offshore Worlds’.



44. 45. 46. 47.

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Palan, ‘Trying to Have your Cake and Eating It’. Ibid., p. 636. Foster and Pobjoy, ‘A Failed Case of Legal Exceptionalism?’, p. 6. Schmitt cited in G. Agamben, State of Exception (trans. K. Attell), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005, p. 1. 48. Agamben, State of Exception, p. 25. 49. Ibid., p. 28. 50. Ibid., p. 3. 51. D. Gregory, ‘Vanishing Points: Law, Violence and Exception in the Global War Prison’, in D. Gregory and A. Pred (eds), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror and Political Violence, London, Routledge, 2007, p. 206. 52. Schmitt, quoted in Agamben, State of Exception, p. 31. 53. A. Mountz, ‘Where Asylum Seekers Wait: Feminist Counter-Topographies of Sites between States’, Gender, Place & Culture, vol. 18, no. 3, 2011, pp. 381–98. 54. G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. Daniel HellerRoazen), Redwood City, CA, Stanford University Press, 1998; Gregory, ‘Vanishing Points’. 55. Agamben, State of Exception, p. 23. 56. Gregory, ‘Vanishing Points’. 57. Mountz, ‘Where Asylum Seekers Wait’, p. 386. 58. M. Low, ‘Putting Down Roots: Belonging and the Politics of Settlement on Norfolk Island’, PhD thesis, Perth, University of Western Australia, 2012. 59. G. Baldacchino, ‘Innovative Development Strategies from Non-Sovereign Island Jurisdictions: A Global Review of Economic Policy and Governance Practices’, World Development, vol. 34, no. 5, 2006, p. 861. 60. Humphrey, ‘Humanitarianism, Terrorism’. 61. H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, NJ, Harcourt Brace, 1973; Y. Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 1994; C. Calhoun, Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream, New York, NJ, Routledge, 2007. 62. S. Sassen, Losing Control, New York, NJ, Columbia University Press, 1996. 63. See also, S. Sassen, Territory Authority Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2006. 64. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism. 65. Soysal, Limits of Citizenship, p. 8. 66. Humphrey, ‘Humanitarianism, Terrorism’, p. 120. 67. McDonald, ‘Deliberation and Resecuritization’. 68. Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde, Security; McDonald, ‘Deliberation and Resecuritization’. 69. Humphrey, ‘Humanitarianism, Terrorism’, p. 123. 70. M. Dickie, ‘Australia Incognita: The Law Declares “Here There be Monsters”’, Terra Incognita: Second Global Conference: Monstrous Geographies: Place and Spaces of Monstrosity, 15–17 May 2013, Prague, Czech Republic, http:// www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/evil/monstrous-geographies/

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project-archives/conference-programme-abstracts-and-papers/session-7-terraincognita/ (accessed 1 March 2015). 71. According to international law precedent in the European Court of Human Rights, states cannot artificially deem geographical zones to be outside their territory to circumvent the application of international law (Foster and Pobjoy, ‘A Failed Case of Legal Exceptionalism?’, p. 17). Indeed Australia’s 2005 changes included an Explanatory Statement that claimed that although arrivals cannot apply for a visa, ‘appropriate arrangements will ensure that Australia continues to fulfil its obligations under the United Nations Conventions relating to the Status of Refugees and under other relevant international instruments’ (quoted in ibid.). The actions also appear to breach the well-established principle in Australian law that ‘when a statute confers power to destroy, defeat or prejudice a person’s rights, interests or legitimate expectations, principles of natural justice will generally regulate the exercise of that power’ (from High Court legal decision, quoted in ibid., p. 32). To date, these provisions have not influenced the actions of the Australian government.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Agamben, G., Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen), Redwood City, CA. Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. State of Exception (trans. K. Attell), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005. Arendt, H., The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, NJ, Harcourt Brace, 1973. Baldacchino, G., ‘Innovative Development Strategies from Non-Sovereign Island Jurisdictions: A Global Review of Economic Policy and Governance Practices’, World Development, vol. 34, no. 5, 2006, pp. 852–67. Buzan, Barry, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Boulder, CO, Lynne Rienner, 1998. Calhoun, C., Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream, New York, NJ, Routledge, 2007. Crock, M., ‘Shadow Plays, Shifting Sands and International Refugee Law: Convergences in the Asia–Pacific’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 2, 2014, pp. 247–80. Crock, M., and H. Martin, ‘Refugee Rights and the Merits of Appeals’, University of Queensland Law Journal, vol. 32, no. 1, 2013, pp. 137–55. Dickie, M., ‘Australia Incognita: The Law Declares “Here There be Monsters”’, Terra Incognita: Second Global Conference: Monstrous Geographies: Place and Spaces of Monstrosity, 15–17 May 2013, Prague, Czech Republic, http:// www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/evil/monstrous-geographies/ project-archives/conference-programme-abstracts-and-papers/session-7-terraincognita/ (accessed 1 March 2015).



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Index

KL Adelaide, 95, 108, 146, 155, 187 Afghanistan, 200, 237, 240 Aggression Acts of, 21, 36–7, 39, 44, 93–4 Guilt/shame, 14, 16, 18–19, 22, 33, 35, 37, 38, 45, 94, 133, 135, 137, 173, 227 Masculinity and, 21, 34, 47, 223 State-based, 11, 234 Anti-Jewish violence, Fear of, 142, 147–48 In Europe, 142, 146–47, 149, 151 Pogroms, 70 Andrusovo, Treaty of, 71 Arendt, Hannah, 20, 244, 246 Argentina, 58 Australia Day/Invasion Day, 12 Australian High Court, 237 Australian Imperial Force, 190 Australian Jewish Welfare Society, 146–47 Australian Labor Party, 188 Australian League of Rights, 154 Australian Workers Union, 61 Austria, 78 Anschluss, 78, 83 Vienna, 69–73, 75–76, 78–79, 81, 85

British Broadcasting Corporation, 69, 80–81 British Union of Fascists, 77 Burma, 200, 206 Burnside, Julian, 20 Butler, Brian, 19 Butler, Eric, 154–55 Cairo, 187 Care, 17, 130, 134–6, 137, 163, 170–3, 239 Empathy, 203, 206 Health, 12, 164–5, 169, 243 Calwell, Arthur, 143–145, 147–48 Canada, 12, 53, 218 Canberra, 69, 84, 111 Caribbean, 53 Ceylon, 200, 203, 206–7 Chile, 60 China, People’s Republic of, 7, 89–94, 96, 98–108, 240 Tibet, 89,106 Urumqi, 90, 95–96, 98, 101, 108, 110–11 Xinjian Uyghur Autonomous Region, 89–90, 92–98, 101, 104, 106, 108–11 Civil War, 243 Greek, 7, 127–30, 132–03 Spanish, 62

Bangladesh, 200 Britain, (see United Kingdom), 70, 72, 75–77, 81, 153, 162, 200, 202, 210 253

254 Index

Class, 6–7, 34–35, 41–43, 47, 57–58, 71, 73–75, 77, 81–82, 149, 194, 199, 202–3, 241–42 Capitalism, 55, 62–64 Labour movement, 6, 56, 59, 188 Workplace conflict, 6, 39, 53–55, 57–59, 60–61, 64, 97 Cold War, 64, 127, 209–10 Colonialism, 6, 10, 34–35, 46, 62 British Empire, 9, 54, 56, 201, 211 Dispossession, 1, 14, 38, 148, 204 Imperialism, 3, 34–35, 63, 200, 203 Colonial Sugar Refining Company, 57 Community, 7–8, 17, 46, 54, 61–62, 81, 95, 97, 99, 107–11, 127, 142, 144–47, 149, 151, 153, 155, 162–68, 170–72, 174–76, 185–86, 211, 217, 219, 222–23, 227, 234 Anarchist, 58–59, 62–63 Communist, 62, 94, 127–30, 145, 235, 246 Gay, 8, 162–176 Indigenous, 1–5, 11–15, 17–21, 39, 45, 62, 111, 234 Migrant, 1, 4, 6–7, 9, 21, 53–59, 62–64, 96–98, 108, 128–29, 137, 143–49, 217–29, 234 Radical, 56–58, 62, 223 Religious, 19–20, 71, 79, 94, 132, 147, 219 Cook, James, 3 Congo, 35 Cressbrook Station, 36–38 Crime, 6, 9, 14, 20, 37, 60, 63, 217, 219– 22, 224–28, 238, 241, 245 Behaviour, 40, 186, 189, 207, 218, 221, 227 Frontier vigilante, 12, 33, 35–38 Racialized, 219–21 Cuba, 57–58 Curtin Immigration Detention Centre, 11 Czechoslovakia, 127, 134, 136, 145, 219

Deaths at Sea, 15, 235 Department of Immigration and Border Protection, 143, 145, 238 Australian Customs and Border Protection, 14, 238, 245 Immigration Department, 13, 218, 222 Dods, Robin, 36 Dundalli, 45 Dyett, Gilbert, 186, 190, 193 East Timor, 237 Enlightenment, 70–71, 80, 234 Evans, Chris, 14 Executive Council of Australia Jewry, 145 Exile, 7–8, 16, 56, 62, 64–65, 99, 111, 237 Internal, 8 Families Children, removal of, 7, 127, 130, 132, 137 Reunited, 128, 133, 136 Same-sex, Separated, 127–37, 134 Fisher, Kathy, 19 Gallipoli, 3, 205–6 Gender, 3–4, 6–9, 21, 33–36, 39, 47, 54, 203–4, 218–19, 221–29, -based violence, 9, 33, 40, 41, 45, 221, 224–6 Cult of domesticity, 6, 35, 43 Femininity, 35–36, 39, 43, 223 Masculinity, 9, 21, 42–43, 47, 223 Genocide, 6, 34–35 Colonial, 6, 34 Shoah, 70, 81, 85, 154 Germany, 69, 71–73, 78–79, 143, 153–55 Gippsland, 35, 204 Great Depression (1929–32), 61, 63, 202, 206

Index 255

Greece, 127, 129, 132, 206, 219 Queen Federica of, 127 Guilt, 151 Anxiety, 19–20, 228 Harm, perception of, 11–13, 16, 227 Shame, 2, 17, 19, 33–35, 209, 237 Silence, 2, 4, 6–10, 64, 70, 76, 79, 101, 103, 107, 111, 142–43, 150–51, 155 HIV/AIDS, 8, 162–76 ACT UP, 163–64, 175 Bobby Goldsmith Foundation, 172 NAPWA, 175 New South Wales AIDS Council, 171 Holt, Harold, 221 Howard, John, 2, 237 Hughes, Billy, 188,189,194 Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, 14 Human Rights Watch, 12, 16 Hungary, 134, 136, 145 Hurley, David, 239 India, 8–9, 35, 55, 199–211 Amritsar Massacre, 205–6 Bengal Famine, 199, 208 Bombay, 202–3, 205, 208, 210 Calcutta, 199, 205, 208, 210 Mumbai (see Bombay), 205 Kolkata (see Calcutta), 208 Indigenous Australians, 2, 4–6, 11–15, 17–21, 33–4, 37–47, 62 Apology to the Stolen Generation, 14 Dispossession, 1, 38, 148, 204 Poverty, 18, 37, 63 Resistance, 44, 46 Stolen Generation, 2, 14, 16 Turrbal People, 39 Integration Assimilation, 12, 15, 17, 19, 69–77, 79–81, 84–85, 89–90, 108, 137, 218–20, 223 Exclusion, 4, 6, 12, 15, 17–18, 21–22, 64, 77, 169, 233, 236, 243

Multiculturalism, 11, 13, 19, 108–9, 210, 246 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1976, 18 International Workers of the World, 59 Japan, 91, 203, 210 Justice, 2–3, 5, 7–9, 12, 18, 45, 62–63, 108, 143, 191, 217, 224, 229, 237–38 Historical, 2–3 Legal, 236 Social, 2, 12, 18, 20, 45–47, 57, 62, 89–90, 101, 106, 236, 243–45 Truth and reconciliation commission, 3 Kadeer, Rebiya, 90, 98–109, 111 Keating, Paul, 14, 22 Redfern Speech, 14, 22 Lang, Jack, 144 Lawrence, Carmen, 20 Liberal Party, 221 Marxism Anarchism, 57–58, 63 Bolsheviks, 188, 190–91 Memory, 3, 7, 44, 56, 128, 130, 136–38, 150, 152–53, 164, 186, 209–10, 234 Intergenerational, 7, 130–31, 133, 137–38, 234 Of violence, 210 Trauma, 16, 56, 128, 132, 135, 137– 38, 143, 147, 150–51, 155, 163–64, 170–71, 173–75, 210, 218–19, 225 Malaysia Solution, 237, 240 Migration Austrian, 69–73, 75–76, 78–79, 81 British, 60–61, 64, 143,219 Chinese, 54–55, 89–96 German, 146, Greece, 127–29, 132, 219, 226 Irish, 60–61, 64, 219

256 Index

Italian, 54, 60–61, 145, 219 Lebanese, 54–56, 223 Maltese, 54, 219 Pacific Islanders, 54 Polish, 127, 145, 219 Secondary, 133 Spanish, 57–59, 61–62, Temporary, 62, 202, 236 Transnational, 7, 70, 128, 134–36, 138, 245 Vietnamese, 223 235 Yugoslav, 127, 131, 227 Migration Act, 1958, 238 Migration Act, 2013, 238 Military, 14, 40, 96, 110, 129, 174, 188– 90, 199, 2–3, 206–7, 210–11, 234, 239–40, 245 Australian Imperial Force, 190 Force, 40, 89, 94, 96, 98, 108, 110, 127, 191–92, 195, 200–202, 239, 240, 242 Royal Australian Airforce, 203, 208 Royal Australian Navy, 239 Morrison, Scott, 15 Moss, Irene, 154 Myanmar (see Burma), 200 Nepal, 200 New South Wales, 34, 43, 152, 164, 171, 221 Sydney, 8, 22, 34, 40, 55, 81–83, 96, 107–10, 143, 146–50, 152–55, 164– 65, 167, 169, 172, 187, 206, 217, 227 Sydney Jewish Museum, 152,154 New Zealand, 12, 146 Northern Territory, 17 Emergency Response, 17 Operation Sovereign Borders, 13–14, 16, 239 Pacific Island Forum, 99 Pacific Islander Labourers, 38, 53, 57, 64

Pacific Solution, 237 Paidomazoma, 127–30, 135–36 Pakistan, 35, 96, 200 Palestine, 206 Papua New Guinea, 16, 200, 237 Partition, 35, 210 People Smuggling, 15, 235, 245 Peoples’ Liberation Army, 96, 132 Philippines, 57 Poland, 71, 127, 133–34, 136, 145 Polemic, 2 History wars, 2, 3, 6, 12 Police, 15, 18, 33, 40–41, 45, 59–61, 96, 188–190, 193, 205, 208, 217–18, 222–25, 234, 239 Prejudice, 1, 6, 22, 37, 72, 143, 166, 168, 170, 174, 206–7 Anti-Semitism, 6, 70–77, 81, 142–43, 145–46, 154–55 Fear, 143, 168, 172, 203 Homophobia, 166–68, 170–71 Racism, 5, 12, 20, 22, 36–37, 39–42, 55, 106, 145, 154–55, 203–5, 223,229 Xenophobia, 235, 142, 144–46, 187– 88, 192, 218 Protest, 13, 58–60, 96, 98, 106–10, Peaceful, 107–9 Violent, 13, 58, 60, 96, 98, 110 Lambing Flat Riots, 56 Red Flag Riots, 56, 187–88, 190–91 Queensland, 36–38, 42–43, 46, 53–55, 57–58, 60, 62–63, 167, 188, 190–91, 199, 220, 223 Brisbane, 33–34, 36, 39–42, 44–45, 55, 57, 96, 102, 146, 187–88, 190–91 Bribie Island, 44–46 Caboolture, 45 Caloundra, 44 Innisfail, 60–61 Moreton Bay, 33–35, 43–44 Nundah, 39

Index 257

St Helena Island, 41, 44–45 Stradbroke Island, 40–1, 45–46 Townsville, 59 Racial Discrimination Act 1975, 17 Radicalisation, 57–58, 62, 223 Political, 56–58, 62 Religious, 223 Terrorist, 19, 223 Red Cross, 131, 137 Greek, 137 Refugees, 3, 7, 9, 15, 17, 19, 22, 81, 96, 131–32, 134, 142, 144, 146–48, 156, 220, 233–38, 240, 243–46 Asylum seekers, 3, 5–6, 9, 11–22, 233–42, 244–45 Christmas Island, 16–17, 233, 236–38 Displaced Persons, 143, 225, 235, 246 Manus Island, 13, 16–17 Nauru, 13, 16–17, 237 Off-shore detention, 13–14, 16–17, 20–22, 223, 233, 235–38, 240–44 On-shore detention, 11, 13, 16, 20– 22, 223, 235–36, 242–44 Post-Second World War, 7, 9, 81, 129, 131–32, 134, 142, 144, 148–49, 156, 246 Tampa, 237 Religion, 7, 72–73, 76, 142, 145, 155 Christianity, 70, 73, 76, 207 Hinduism, 206 Islam, 19, 92, 95, 102, 223, 240 Judaism, 20, 76, 85, 147 Remembrance, 5–6, 10, 56, 128, 132, 136–37, 165, 171–74, 176, 200, 209, 225 Commemoration, 152–55, 209 Practices of, 128, 132, 136, 154, 163–64, 166–72, 174, 176 Reparations Commission, 80 Repression, 76, 110, 191, 201, 235 By state, 11, 97–98, 109, 191, 201 Policy of, 235 Political, 191

Responsibility, 9–10, 12–13, 130, 132, 135, 137, 147, 152, 186–87, 191, 220, 246 Collective, 9, 132, 135, 137, 147, 186–87, 191, 220 Ethic of, 9–10, 147, 152 Individual, 13, 130, 132, 191 State, 9, 12, 171, 233, 241, 246 Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia (RSL), 8, 185–95 Revolution, 62–63, 72, 75, 155, 243 Dreams of, 56–63, 205 Romania, 134 Rudd, Kevin, 14, 91, 99, 103–104 Apology to the Stolen Generation, 14 Rwanda, 35 Ryan, TJ, 188 Salvation Army, 16 Security, 7, 9, 13, 18–20, 71–73, 81, 85, 89, 95–96, 110, 145, 148–49, 206, 210, 218, 220, 222, 234, 237, 239–40, 245 Freedom of speech, 7, 102–5 Human, 7, 13, 71–73, 85, 220, 222 Personal, 81, 148–49 State discourses of, 7, 18–20, 89, 95–96, 110, 145, 206, 210, 218, 222, 234, 237, 239–40, 245 Terrorism, 18–20, 58, 100, 102–3, 105, 107, 111, 223, 235, 238, 241, 243, 245 Sexuality, 4, 9, 16–18, 33–36, 39–46, 162, 165, 170, 217–8, 221–26, 228 Heterosexuality, 4, 223, 226, 228 Homosexuality, 4, 8, 162–68, 170– 76, 217–18, 221–22, 224, 226, 228 Violence/prejudice, 9, 16–18, 33–37, 39–46, 221–25, 228 Smith, Stephen, 99, 104, 153 South Africa, 53 South Australia, 16, 164, 222 Spain, 57, 62, 69

258 Index

Spanish-American War, 57 Barcelona, 57–59, 61, 64 Sri Lanka (see Ceylon), 63, 200, 237 Syria, 206 Switzerland, 73–74, 82–83, Tasmania, 2, 35 Port Arthur, 2 Theodore, Ted, 188 United Kingdom, (and see Britain), 62, 164, 167, 176, 201, 210, 218 London, 70, 72–73, 75–76, 78–79, 82, 165–66 United Nations, 17, 80, 106, 127, 144, 233–34 Special Committee on the Balkans, 127 High Commission for Refugees, 17, 234 USA, 7, 53, 62, 74, 82, 91, 130, 143, 146–47, 153, 155, 162–68, 170, 173, 175–76, 218 Guantanamo Bay, 243 New York, 148, 153, 164–67, 170 San Francisco, 165–66, 170 US Patriot Act, 2001, 243 USSR Russia, 71, 82, 188, 190, 224, 226 Victoria, 144, 189, 191, 193 Melbourne, 55, 82, 90, 96, 100–102, 107–8, 143, 145–46, 148–55, 165, 187, 189, 191, 193 Melbourne International Film Festival, 90, 98, 100 Melbourne Jewish Holocaust Centre, 151–52 Villawood Detention Centre, 22 Violence, Ambivalence towards, 44–46, 95, 187, 189–90 Child abuse, 2, 16–17, 20, 39, 41–42, 218, 224, 236

Coercion, 41–42, 185–87, 191, 193– 95, 225 Colonial, 2, 6, 10, 34–36, 39, 42, 46, 94, 106, 201, 204, 210 Cycle of, 13, 111, 129, 186–89 Domestic and family, 1, 8, 13, 39, 47 In landscape, 2, 4–5, 13, 15–16, 38, 70, 96,152–53, 175, 205–6, 236– 38, 243–44 In public consciousness, 5, 185–86 Passive, 9, 233–34, 241–43, 246 And Poverty, 199–204, 211 Political 94, 233–34, 239, 241 Witnessing, 4–5, 8, 16, 33, 39–40, 42, 46, 90, 96, 130, 135, 204, 208, 226 War (see also Civil War), 1–3, 6–9, 12, 19, 35, 43, 56–57, 59, 61–62, 64, 69–70, 75, 77–78, 80–81, 102, 127–33, 137–38, 142–45, 147–49, 154, 162, 169, 173–76, 185–89, 200–203, 205–6, 208–10, 217–26, 235, 239, 243, 246, First World, 3, 59, 61, 75, 185–86, 195, 200, 202, 206, 243 Frontier, 35, 37–9, 40–1, 43–5 On Terror, 19, 102, 243 Second World, 35, 56, 69–70, 81, 128–30, 132, 137, 143, 154, 174, 203, 217, 219–20, 235, 246 Vietnam, 173–75 War Precautions Act, 188 Watson, John Christian, 200 Western Australia, 11, 16, 18, 155, 169 Fremantle, 187 White Australia Policy, 21, 53–55, 57, 64, 200, 210–11, 219, 235 British Preference, 61 Whitlam, Gough, 200 Williams, George, 20 Yugoslavia, 35,127,131,133