Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  In fact, in March 1947, through Chifley’s calm insistence, Caucus accepted Bretton Woods by nine votes. Bretton Woods was finally ratified by Parliament that same month after Chifley had consoled his colleagues with an announcement of tax deductions and pension increases. All this took place in the midst of unruly and severe strikes whose radicalism was turning people towards the more anti-Red rhetoric of the now seemingly unstoppable Robert Gordon Menzies.

  WHO WILL TAKE THE JEWS?

  In 1933 there were only twenty-five thousand Jews in Australia, hardly enough to satisfy the Bulletin-style anti-Semitism. About nine thousand refugees from the Third Reich arrived between 1938 and 1940, and seventeen thousand survivors, many of them Holocaust victims, arrived between 1946 and 1954 from Europe and Shanghai. The pre-war community nearly trebled to over sixty thousand. But Jews constituted only 0.5 per cent of the overall population, and despite their persecution by the Nazi regime, the numbers were exaggerated by suburban sages and hostility expressed towards Jewish immigration. Even after 1945 there was daubing and damage to property owned by Jews in Melbourne. One could argue that all immigrants were attacked, and the extent to which general xenophobia and anti-Semitism were mixed, and what percentage of each there was, is impossible to discern. A survivor of the German rescuer Oskar Schindler’s camp, Edek Korn, meeting his wife Leosia after their first day of factory work in Sydney, heard her say in wonder, ‘They hate the Polish Catholics as much as they hate us!’

  Nonetheless, the record of acceptance of Jews showed robust anti-Semitism. Frank Clarke, president of the Victorian Legislative Council, had said without embarrassment in May 1939 of the Jewish refugees that they were ‘hundreds of weedy East Europeans . . . slinking, rat-faced men, under five feet in height and with a chest development of about twenty inches’. These men worked in ‘sweating’ factories in Carlton and other localities. ‘One group here attempted the supply of 100,000 articles of women’s silk underclothing at seven and a half penny each. No Australian factory could compete with such prices and pay awards.’ Weedy, degenerate, avaricious and satanically industrious—Clarke’s description of Jews could well have run in the Nazi paper Der Stürmer. It was feared that Jewish immigrants would form ghettos in Sydney, especially in Kings Cross and Bondi, and in Melbourne, especially in Carlton. In 1939, the Sydney Sunday Sun complained that ‘the situation that so many people said would occur has come to pass in Potts Point. Refugees from foreign persecution have taken it over like Grant took Richmond.’

  After the war, the struggle between Jewish settlers in Palestine and the British Mandate forces provided further fuel for those who were against Jewish immigration. The bombing in June 1946 of the King David Hotel—the British administrative and military headquarters in Palestine—an act of Zionist extremists, was used to paint all Jewish immigrants as associated with terror.

  One of the most vocal opponents of Jewish refugees was Henry Gullett, Liberal member for Henty, Victoria—not the far more distinguished Gullett who was killed in the plane crash early in the war. Gullett astoundingly declared, ‘Neither should Australia be a dumping ground for people whom Europe itself in the course of 2000 years, has not been able to absorb.’ He alleged that Jewish immigrants were setting up sweatshops, cornering housing and evading income tax. Oblivious to the liberties for which the Allies claimed to have fought, Ken Bolton, president of the New South Wales branch of the RSL, advocated an end to Jewish immigration from 1946 onwards. The Bulletin and Smith’s Weekly depicted Jews as incapable of assimilating, of creating sweatshops, of being moneylenders, and as controllers of the banks and the media.

  All this influenced the government to introduce quotas restricting Jewish immigration to Australia both before and after the war. After the Anschluss, the union of Germany and Austria under Hitler in April 1938, a further 180,000 Jews came under Nazi rule, and the Australian High Commissioner in London, Stanley Bruce, recommended the quota be doubled to thirty thousand over three years. The government decided against his recommendation and on 1 December 1938 reconfirmed that Australia would admit just fifteen thousand refugees over the next three years. The government took no action on a proposal by the Jewish Freeland League to create a Jewish colony in the Kimberley area of Western Australia, and despite the efforts of famed Zionist leader Dr Isaac N. Steinberg, who arrived to promote the idea in 1939, the proposal was ultimately rejected in 1944.

  When news reached Australia of the years-long massacre of Jews in Poland, the United Jewish Emergency Committee was formed in Sydney by Dr Jonah M. Machover, while in Melbourne the United Jewish Overseas Relief Fund was formed under the presidency of Polish-born textile manufacturer Leo Fink (who would lobby Arthur Calwell with great patience) to raise funds and collect goods to assist Jews in Europe.

  Jewish refugees reaching Australia from Austria or Germany in the late 1930s were interned when war broke out, initially at Hay in New South Wales and later at Tatura in Victoria. Here they joined 2400 young male Jewish refugees who had been sent from Britain on the ship Dunera, and other internees from Singapore and parts of Asia. The Dunera had been despatched from England with, as well as the group who would call themselves ‘the Dunera Boys’, two hundred former Italian Fascists and about two hundred German prisoners of war, mostly seamen. The majority of the passengers were C-class aliens; that is, classified as the least dangerous. Since the Dunera had been built for only sixteen hundred passengers, it was an appalling journey with impossible sanitary arrangements and inedible food. The Jewish refugees distracted themselves with lectures, Torah studies, and writing a constitution for their group. About one thousand of the Dunera internees remained after the war. Most of them, released towards the end of hostilities, had volunteered for service in the Australian military forces.

  In Australia House, London, after the war, the Immigration Sub-Committee had actually recommended an end to the pre-war plan for admitting fifteen thousand Jewish refugees over three years. It was felt that those already admitted were not desirable, since as much as 80 per cent of them ‘settled in Sydney and Melbourne and soon became conspicuous by a tendency to acquire property and to settle in particular districts, such as Kings Cross, Sydney’. The subcommittee claimed that professional and university-educated Jewish refugees had greater difficulty adjusting to Australia than the artisan class. In addition it felt that the Polish Jews who had arrived before 1938 and who mainly worked in the textile industry in Melbourne ‘could not be regarded as desirable types of migrants’.

  Calwell had been appointed Australia’s first Minister for Immigration in July 1945, and for the first time in Australian history non-British immigrants were considered viable and welcome as potential labour. The first secretary of the department was Tasman Heyes, who shared the anti-Semitism expressed by the Melbourne Club, of which he was a member and from which Jews were excluded. After Calwell’s appointment, Heyes met with Jewish community leaders Alec Masel and Paul Morawetz to discuss a memorandum on humanitarian Jewish immigration. The formula arrived at was that two thousand survivors of the concentration camps with family sponsors in Australia would be admitted in the twelve months from August 1945. The announcement of this agreement caused an outcry, and Calwell introduced measures to limit the proposed numbers. Charles Glassgold, the American Joint Distribution Committee representative in Shanghai, summed up their essence in 1949: ‘I have to transmit to you some information that should by now not be shocking to any Jew but which nevertheless still horrifies one. From a most unimpeachable source there comes to me a statement made by the new Australian consul in Shanghai that casts the pall of futility over the prospect of Australian immigration. The consul said to my informant substantially the following: “We have never wanted these people in Australia and we still don’t want them. We will issue a few visas to those who have relations there as a gesture.”’

  There was as well a 25 per cent limitation on Jewish passengers on all ships, and in 1948 the quota was extended to planes. Only a few hundred J
ews were permitted to emigrate to Australia from Shanghai after July 1947, following a top-secret report of the Australian consul-general, Major-General O.C.W. Fuhrman, painting Jews as the criminal element of Shanghai.

  In January 1949, the quota for Jewish immigrants was set at a mere three thousand per annum and the quota system on ships and planes was eased. But an Iron Curtain embargo in December 1949 excluded Jews who originated from countries under Soviet rule. There were also special discriminations against Jews of Middle Eastern and Indian origins, considered less desirable than the Ashkenazian Jews of Europe.

  Under the International Refugee Organization Agreement of July 1947, Calwell consented to admitting workers from the displaced persons’ camps in Europe on a two-year work contract, and 170,000 displaced persons arrived in the next four years from 1947, with a further 29,000 under personal sponsorship. Married Jews were virtually excluded from the program—only young, single Jews were permitted and they needed to sign an undertaking to work in remote areas of Australia. The definition for being a Jew was based on racial and not religious grounds, and as a Jewish member of the selection team commented at the time, ‘Hitler could not have done better.’

  The Australian Jews were anxious about what happened to their brothers and sisters after their surviving this regimen. A Jewish welfare official met every boat. In Sydney, they were taken straight to the Maccabean Hall and issued with instructions that stressed: ‘Above all, do not speak German in the streets and in the trams. Modulate your voices . . . Remember that the welfare of the old established-Jewish community in Australia as well as of every migrant depends on your personal behaviour.’

  In a community atmosphere of hostility which—for once—united Catholic and Protestant, employees and leaders of Jewish welfare in both Sydney and Melbourne were thus themselves edgy about the newcomers. No government funds were to be spent on Jews because of the fear of political repercussions. Boats were nonetheless met by Jewish stalwarts, immigrants were helped with finding employment or set up in business through interest-free loans, and there were two schemes, Save the Children and the Jewish Welfare Guardian Scheme, to assist orphan survivors of the Holocaust. Melbourne Jewry, with its stronger Eastern European origins (Sydney’s Jews having historically come in the main from Germany), was more proactive in assisting survivors.

  The businessman Leo Fink of Melbourne, who had come from Poland in 1928 with nothing and by the beginning of World War II was a textile and carpet manufacturer, as president of the United Jewish Overseas Relief Fund established to receive Jewish survivors of the European mayhem, persuaded Calwell to set aside the 25 per cent Jewish quota in the case of the Johan de Witt, which put into various Australian ports to off-load the six hundred sponsored Jewish survivors amongst its seven hundred passengers. In Sydney, the young Jewish politician and gifted organiser, Sid Einfeld, arranged the reception of the Sydney contingent, even though some more conservative Jews were uneasy about the impact of such strange newcomers on a not entirely benign public opinion about Jews. Einfeld was a champion to the arrivals. He travelled from suburb to suburb visiting individual families, looking to their wants and regularly going to Canberra to persuade ministers he knew from his prominence in the New South Wales Labor Party to ease the restrictions placed on Jewish immigration. He had the benefit of being a most amiable figure in the Jewish and wider community, including the gritty fraternity of the ALP.

  The bulk of Holocaust survivors, six out of ten, settled in Melbourne, while Sydney became home to the majority of the others. Indeed, the leaders of the Perth Jewish community, meeting ships with Jewish immigrants aboard, often persuaded the newcomers to travel on to Melbourne or Sydney, cities more accustomed to a Jewish presence, offering greater opportunities and established Jewish institutions.

  There is a telling number. Because an increasing number of refugees, especially Jewish refugees, had qualifications, in 1938 a restrictive quota of only eight foreign doctors were to be registered annually in New South Wales. This quota was still in place post-war. Thirteen European Jewish doctors completed the final three years of their medical studies at Australian universities in 1950, only to find that not all of them could be registered. Some Europeans who had hated the Jews in the old world would have agreed: too many, too threatening, too smart.

  COMMUNISTS: FRIENDS? ENEMIES?

  Throughout the war and in the early days of the peace, there were shifts in Australia’s attitude to its Communist Party. After the fall of France in 1940, at a time when Stalin’s pact with Hitler was still in place, Menzies banned the Communist Party of Australia under a National Security Act regulation guided through the House in June by Henry Gullett, who in a few months would die in a plane crash in Canberra. The states had done their best to quash the Communist Party too, as in the case of New South Wales banning the display of Communist flags in the Domain, the open ground behind state parliament where public orators spoke on rostrums on Sundays. A number of local councils prohibited Communist meetings. Arrests and prosecutions for Communists gathering illegally increased for a time.

  By 1942, however, when the Soviet Union was a cherished ally absorbing a massive amount of the shock of Germany’s assault on Europe, and when in Australia all help was welcome, Labor saw that the war effort could benefit in terms of production and military numbers from the cooperation of Communists, and the Communist Party ban was lifted by Curtin’s government in 1942.

  After informing Archbishop Gilroy that the government was about to lift Menzies’ ban on the Communist Party of Australia, Evatt wrote to the Apostolic delegate, Archbishop Panico, asking that the bishops make no immediate public statement on the decision. He explained that the Communists supported the war effort now and the ban had merely driven them underground. Neither Britain nor the United States had placed such a ban. Evatt insisted that lifting the ban did not mean the Labor Party supported Communism: ‘The Communists are often our bitterest critics.’ Evatt hoped that church authorities would wait some months before warning against Communist doctrines. But the 1942 lifting of the ban aroused considerable debate.

  Gilroy did not accept this. He decided to make his September 1942 statement opposing the lifting of the ban. He produced a forty-six-page draft pastoral letter. It said: ‘We spurn the outstretched hand of Communism. It reeks with hypocrisy and treachery. Dripping with the blood of scores of thousands of Catholics—priests, religious and laity—steeped in profanation and sacrilege, it is a thousand times over the hand of Cain.’ But the statement was also almost as strong in its condemnation of capitalism. It said that few Australians ‘had any real share’ in the wealth of Australia or ‘in the ownership and management of the industries’. It regretted that policies of ‘race suicide’ had forced the wives of servicemen into industry ‘to augment the family income’. This was a ‘crime against humanity’, it said. In the end, despite Gilroy deciding not to release the statement, Archbishop Duhig from Brisbane wrote to him asking for a joint letter from the bishops opposing the lifting of the ban. He considered that Evatt was ‘the most dangerous man in Australia . . . Evatt is an out and out Communist in sympathy’. Duhig then went on fantastically to say that Evatt wanted to be the ‘Stalin of Australia’.

  Daniel Mannix, Archbishop of Melbourne, had meanwhile—surprisingly in view of later history—written to Dr Evatt that he was of the opinion that since the ban had never been effective, its removal would make no difference. Gilroy was startled by Mannix’s position. Mannix claimed that Panico accepted Evatt’s view that the lifting of the ban might be politically necessary but suggested the bishops issue a joint pastoral letter on the dangers of Communism without actually referring to the ban. In any case, the lifting of all prohibitions took place.

  The war ended, and the June 1945 Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) Congress voted that five out of ten members on the executive should be elected by the Congress itself and its heavy Communist membership. The Sydney Morning Herald claimed that Communists had taken con
trol of the ACTU. By 1945, the Victorian Industrial Groups (of which more later) believed that Communists ‘controlled practically every key trade union in Australia’. Communist influence was undeniably substantial, but it was often exaggerated by both Communists and their opponents as a means of rallying their respective forces. The political scientist Lester Webb believed that the Australian Communist Party’s success in trade unions was explained by the energy and tactical skill of certain Communist trade-union officials, ‘and scarcely at all to acceptance of Communist ideology by the rank and file’.

  In fact, there was a leakage in progress in membership of the Communist Party. The Communist leader and Yorkshire migrant Ernie Thornton, brought to Australia under one of the child-immigration organisations, the Dreadnought Scheme, became head of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association (FIA), but returned from a trip to the United States not only supporting closer cooperation between the Soviet Union and the West, but also suggesting Communist parties should be dissolved, as the American party had voluntarily dissolved itself, becoming an educational body, the Communist Political Association.

  These propositions were rejected by the 1945 Australian Communist Party congress. Since the Australian Communist Party had returned to a rigid central control in 1943, many members, especially intellectuals, resigned in 1945, in part in protest, in part as the public mood turned from seeing the Soviet Union as ally to seeing it as the next enemy. Official membership dropped from twenty-three thousand to just over sixteen thousand. Communist authoritarianism became evident in the way the FIA’s federal executive tried to suppress a revolt in its Balmain branch. The Balmain ironworkers resented the party’s centralised control, for, as the founding branch, Balmain prized its independence, and in early 1943 had rejected the Communists in elections by a two-to-one majority. Thornton was also resentful of their attitudes, given his success in building the FIA under his earlier presidency during the war from twenty thousand to a peak of more than sixty-two thousand.