In October 1996 the headline ‘PM rejects talk of our racist past’ appeared on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. The article began as follows:

The Prime Minister [John Howard] has accused education authorities of giving children a misleading account of Australian history and said that many people were talking negatively by claiming the nation had a ‘racist, bigoted past’.1

Over seven years later and with the recent events highlighting the hysteria and scare mongering against present-day Muslim refugees, a study of resistance to Jewish refugees wishing to migrate to Australia after the second world war has a disturbing resonance. It also raises the question of whether this anti-refugee hysteria is based on religious or racial prejudice, or both.2

Until 1945, the Commonwealth government did not have a department specifically related to immigration. The Department of the Interior dealt with all immigration matters and official policy maintained the concept of keeping Australia ninety-eight per cent Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Celtic.3 The Pacific war radically changed accepted attitudes within Australia. Many policy makers became aware of Australia’s need to increase her population for reasons of defence and economic development. For the first time in Australian history, non-British immigrants came to be regarded as a viable migrant source.4 However, in the face of hostile public reactions to Jewish refugee migration, the government sought to minimise the number of Jewish migrants permitted into Australia. A series of bureaucratic measures were introduced to limit the number of Jewish immigrants, but the government denied any form of discrimination when questioned by the established Jewish community leadership. This article will explore a number of key questions including the basis of this anti-Jewish outcry, the extent to which it was based on religion and to what extent on race; and whether, for Jews, the two can be separated.

In December 1942 Ben Chifley was appointed Minister for Post-war Reconstruction and in late 1943 an inter-departmental committee was established to investigate and report specifically on immigration.5 In September 1944 a subcommittee was set up to investigate white alien immigration. It stressed that, in order to foster immigration to Australia, white aliens must be ‘regarded as an asset and not a person admitted on sufferance’.6 The committee’s report suggested that desirable nationalities, apart from the British, were, in order of preference: Americans, Scandinavians (Norwegians, Swedes and Danes), the Dutch, Belgians, the Swiss, Yugoslavs, Greeks and Albanians. They stressed that ‘Australia’s need for population is so great that it cannot afford to be too exclusive as to categories to be regarded as eligible for admission’, excluding Germans and Italians who were considered to be ‘enemy aliens’ immediately after the war. The committee suggested that to ‘ensure future safety and fullest economic development’ the Commonwealth ‘should be prepared to accept any white aliens who can be assimilated and contribute satisfactorily to economic development and against whom there are no objections on the grounds of health, character or (while the ban is still in force) enemy alien nationality’.7 These criteria became central to postwar government immigration policy. The main criteria for non-British Europeans were good health and the ability to add to the work force in Australia, especially in such activities as road building, hydro-electric schemes and other work in remote areas.

The committee proposed that the landing permit system introduced prior to the war should be continued, but that the landing money requirements should be greatly reduced, as artisans were more suited to Australia’s economic needs than businessmen. In order to avoid unnecessary delay, it was suggested that a migration staff be established in Australia House, London, with the authority to issue permits. In regard to the resumption of Jewish migration, the sub-committee recommended that the pre-war plan of admitting up to 15,000 refugees, a quota that was never filled, should no longer be operative because of changed conditions. It proposed that the Australian government should respond sympathetically to proposals from the Intergovernment Committee on Refugees and UNRRA.8 However, it was felt that the 7,000-8,000 refugees, mostly former German and Austrian Jews admitted in the 1930s before the outbreak of war, were not desirable as ‘most of them, probably 80 per cent, settled in Sydney and Melbourne and soon became conspicuous by their tendency to acquire property and settle in particular districts, such as King’s Cross, Sydney’.9 It was pointed out that professional and university-educated classes of Jewish refugees had greater difficulty settling in Australia than the artisan class. In addition, the report felt that the Polish Jews who arrived prior to 1938 and settled mainly in Melbourne, where they engaged in textile industries, ‘could not be regarded as desirable types of migrants’.10 Overall, Jewish immigrants were depicted as less desirable than any other European immigrants.

Arthur A Calwell was appointed Australia’s first Minister for Immigration on 13 July 1945. In his first ministerial statement to Parliament on 2 August 1945, Calwell stressed Australia’s need to build up her population and stated that it would not be possible to maintain and develop present population figures without some migration.11 With this first statement, Calwell began to develop the role he was to play as the architect of Australia’s post-war mass migration program. He presented his arguments for Australia’s need for an active migration program in a personal manifesto entitled How Many Australians Tomorrow?12

Calwell then set about to appoint the head of the new department. He later said that he interviewed seventeen applicants for Head of Department and the successful candidate, Tasman H E (later Sir Tasman) Heyes, was the last name to be suggested.13 Heyes was a typical upper-class Anglo-Saxon who reflected the ‘gentleman’s antisemitism’ of the Melbourne Club, of which he was a member and which traditionally excluded Jews through the blackballing method. Under Heyes’ direction, the department expanded rapidly. Among the early appointments was Noel W Lamidey, an English migrant who had arrived in Australia in the 1920s and was sent to Australia House in 1946 as Chief Migration Officer.14 During the second world war, Lamidey had acted as secretary to the Aliens Classification and Advisory Committee, which dealt with matters relating to the issues of internment and restrictions on aliens.15 At Australia House, Lamidey was to play a key role in regard to both British and continental migration to Australia.

The Australian Jewish community considered political lobbying to aid postwar Jewish immigration to Australia even before the end of the war. Many relatively recent newcomers were deeply moved by the enormity of the destruction of European Jewry and were determined to do everything possible to assist in the rehabilitation of survivors.16 Under pressure from the leaders of the Relief Fund in Melbourne, Alec Masel, president of the recently formed Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ),17 prepared a memorandum on the value of selected Jewish immigration to Australia, stressing:

The Council recognises that the final test of the policy of migration must be the needs of the Commonwealth; at the same time it feels that potential Jewish migrants, of types consistent with those needs, may be available. It feels further, that those needs are wide enough for the admission of the humanitarian motive.18

Emphasising Australia’s need for population, Masel argued that previous Jewish immigration, including the pre-war Jewish refugees, had made a positive contribution to Australia’s development. He also stressed that survivors of the Holocaust would enter Australia with a positive determination to build a new life in a land where they could forget their unhappy past.19 The memorandum was presented to Prime Minister Curtin in February 1945, but the Federal government did not respond immediately.

After Calwell’s appointment as Minister for Immigration, he met with Alec Masel and Paul Morawetz, the honorary secretary of the ECAJ. Morawetz was a refugee from Nazi Europe who had settled in Melbourne before the war and had worked as a translator for the Department of Information during the war. He had established a close friendship with Calwell, who was then Minister for Information.20 Calwell was also friendly with a number of other leaders of Melbourne Jewry, including Jacob Waks, a Bundist who had escaped from Bialystok through Lithuania and arrived in Australia during the war.21 In response to these requests, Calwell agreed to the introduction of a ‘humanitarian’ migration program whereby 2,000 survivors of the concentration camps who had family living in Australia who were able act as sponsors would be admitted into Australia during the twelve months from August 1945.

Calwell’s family reunion scheme met with a hostile reception as the ‘anti-refo’ feeling, which had manifested itself so clearly in the late 1930s, continued after 1945 in an even more intense form. This was expressed in the general newspapers, in statements by some members of Parliament and in resolutions passed by pressure groups such as the Returned Services League (RSL) and the Australian Natives Association (ANA). The term ‘natives’ here did not refer to Indigenous Australians but to the first white settlers. Anti-Jewish refugee hysteria was manifested in cartoons such as this one from the Bulletin published in December 1946. It showed Calwell as the ‘Pied Piper’ playing his flute to entice in the ratlike stereotypical Jew — fat, bearded, hooked nose and foreign — as the ‘imports’, whilst the local people, the white Australians, were being forced out as ‘exports’.22 Extreme feelings were also expressed in daubing and damage to property, particularly in areas of Jewish concentrations in Melbourne and Sydney.


Fig 1. The Bulletin, 4 December 1946, p 15.

Such negative reactions were due, predominantly, to Australian isolationism and the fear of people who had come from other parts of the world. Australian xenophobia and unfriendliness to newcomers reflected ‘a dislike of something different, a primitive fear and distrust of the new and the unknown’.23 Immigrants were resented because of the belief that they would undermine Australian living standards, the fear of economic competition and ‘their challenge to previously well-settled, easy going concerns’.24 In the case of Jewish migration there was also an added element of anti-Semitism, which became ‘a handy peg on which to hang any personal hatred or antipathy’.25

In the immediate post-war years, various reasons were advanced for public opposition to Jewish migration. Newspaper reports and leaders of organisations such as the RSL claimed that shiploads of Jews would arrive in Australia to the detriment of Australian ex-servicemen, their wives and British migrants. The fear was also expressed that Jewish migrants would be involved in smuggling opium and other contraband, and would introduce criminal elements into Australia. When the Hwa Lien arrived from Shanghai in January 1947 with 330 Jewish passengers on board, the Melbourne Herald published an article headed ‘Refugees Tricks Foiled’, which claimed:

Jewellery and diamonds worth thousands of pounds were seized by the customs at Australian ports visited by the Chinese steamer Hwa Lien. Commonwealth officials considered efforts might be made to evade customs duty and were watching the Hwa Lien before she touched Australia.

At Australian ports it was alleged today some of the refugees tried to send through the mails envelopes and small packages containing jewellery and diamonds.

Their scheme was to address the articles to relatives already in Australia in the hope that suspicion would not be aroused and that envelopes particularly would be passed through as ordinary correspondence.26

Many other newspapers published articles stressing the wealth of the Jews on the Hwa Lien and problems of contraband. Other concerns included the accusations that Jewish refugees entered the country illegally and that unemployed refugees would become a drain on the state.

The Jewish refugees were also attacked for disadvantaging ex-servicemen in finding employment and for introducing sweatshops. A letter in Rydge’s Journal claimed:

Of course they use methods that we don’t: if they can get [a] plant and labour — and usually they can — they’ll crowd a workroom with machines and employees. They’ll even work in a house or flat, and thus eliminate factory rent. Often their compatriot employees will work long hours for less than award wages and conditions which are deplorable, according to our standards, but not at all out of the way according to their standards.27

These accusations in the post-war period mirrored complaints made in 1938 and 1939.28 Although Jews were not always specifically mentioned the term refugee tended to be synonymous with Jews, as the majority of the pre-war refugees were Jewish.

Another concern was that, on arrival, Jewish immigrants would take over accommodation at a time of an acute housing shortage so that Australian exservicemen would be disadvantaged. A letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1948 stated:

First, refugees are intensely competing for and getting houses Australians would normally occupy. Many of our people have been evicted and are in great distress but no known refugee lives at Herne Bay or under canvas. Men who enlisted, leaving homes and shops, returned to find them occupied by refugees ...29

The letter also claimed that refugees were prepared to pay huge ‘key money’ bribes and that refugees who had built or bought blocks of flats often demanded exorbitant rents. The fact that the Jewish refugees tended to cluster together in certain areas, such as Kings Cross and Bondi in Sydney, and Carlton in Melbourne, was also resented by Anglo-Australians.

Strong professional opposition was also voiced, especially by doctors, and the restrictive quota of only eight foreign doctors being registered per annum in New South Wales was maintained. This created great hardship in 1950, when thirteen European Jewish doctors completed the final three years of their medical studies at the University of Sydney, only to find that not all of them could be registered. Poor health was cited as another reason for keeping refugees out.

The fear was expressed that the refugees would create political tensions. The conflict between Jewish settlers in Palestine and the British mandatory authorities in the immediate post-war period provided further fuel for those who opposed Jewish migration, especially after the bombing of the King David Hotel in June 1947 and the hanging of two British policemen in retaliation for the execution of members of the Irgun. These events aroused the ire of many Anglo-Australians, who believed that Australia should not import anti-British ‘terrorists’. A letter sent in 1946 to Prime Minister Chifley summed up what was a strong feeling in Australia. The writer, H Osborne, included a copy of an article which claimed that Jews in Palestine refused to serve British troops in cafes and spat on British troops and civilians in the streets. Osborne stated:

In view of this cutting and recent outrage in Palestine will you issue instructions that no more Jews be allowed into Australia. It is public knowledge that the Minister for Immigration favours Jews and Jews in Melbourne boast that they can obtain any assistance from him. Alien Jews are nearly all Zionists and are against we British.30

This letter briefly summed up the attitudes of many Australians who identified with the British in Palestine and objected to the entry of Jewish immigrants who, they felt, would be traitors to Britain and potential terrorists.

In addition, Zionism and Communism were often interlinked. This can be seen in a report from the Department of Internal Security, the forerunner to ASIO, in relation to Eugene Kamenka, who later became an outstanding academic at the Australian National University. Dated 19 July 1946, the report stated:

It is noted that Eugene Kamenka, born Russia 1929, is a leading activist in the Zionist Youth bodies in Sydney. He is Director of Publications, Zionist Youth Department, and one of the small group which exists in Sydney as Industrial Union League (or Industrial Union Propaganda League) and which appears equivalent to the I.W.W. The 1945 Leaving Certificate Examination results showed Kamenka to be a brilliant student. He lives with his parents in Bondi.31

With the growing Cold War hysteria in the late 1940s, this linkage between Jews and Communism added to their undesirability as immigrants.

There was also a concern about dual loyalty as shown in this poem published in Smith’s Weekly. Entitled ‘My Heart’s Right There’, it reads:

My heart may be in Palestine, but what about my brain?
My brain is where my business is, and there it must remain.
Of course, it’s rather difficult to be divided thus,
Like riding east and west at once aboard a Bondi bus.
I often wonder where I stand when I sit down to dine
My food in Sydney and my tum somewhere in Palestine.
My liver’s here. Too right it is! But what about my kidney?
It may be floating off the coast of Tel Aviv or Sydney.
I say it’s rather difficult to be divided so.
Yet it should be a cause for pride, as I would have you know.
It takes a clever man indeed, a clever man, I say,
To work his brain, yet keep his heart ten thousand miles away.32

This ditty was composed in response to a letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald which stated that Australia has no place for the type of ‘proud Jew’ whose business was in Australia but whose heart was in Palestine.33 As a result of these attitudes Calwell was faced with a consistent anti-Jewish refugee migration campaign in the general press, with the ‘yellow press’ such as Smith’s Weekly even more virulent in its attacks on Jewish Immigration.

One of the most vocal opponents of Jewish refugee immigration was H B Gullett, Liberal member for Henty, Victoria. During a parliamentary debate on the budget in December 1946 Gullett claimed that ‘men of the Jewish faith have played a very distinguished part in Australia’s affairs’. However, he stated:

we are not compelled to accept the unwanted of the world at the dictate of the United Nations or any one else. Neither should Australia be a dumping ground for people whom Europe itself, in the course of 2,000 years, has not been able to absorb.34

Gullett also alleged that Jewish immigrants were ‘setting up sweat shops, cornering housing and evading income tax’.35 On 12 February 1947 he wrote a letter to the Argus, which Peter Medding described as ‘probably the most vicious anti-Semitic attack ever made in Australia’.36 In the course of this letter Gullett claimed that:

The arrival of additional Jews is nothing less than the beginning of a national tragedy and a piece of the grossest deception of Parliament and the people by the Minister for Immigration.37

Gullet was joined in these attacks by his political opponent, Jack Lang, the former premier of New South Wales, who split from the ALP and created his own party, Lang Labor. He consistently criticised Calwell’s immigration policies in his paper, the Century, as well as attacking his policies during a number of federal parliamentary debates in late 1946 and early 1947. For example, Lang claimed that Jewish refugees stranded in the Middle East had boarded the Strathmore at Port Said, the berths so taken having been withheld from prospective British migrants.38 In reply, Calwell described Lang as an ‘Australian Julius Streicher’ and the Sydney Jewish News commented that Lang’s attack was ‘the most venomous of all references to Jews and aliens during the recent session of Parliament, including Gullett’s attack’.39

One of the strongest pressure groups within the general community opposing alien immigration in general and Jewish immigration in particular was the Returned Services League (RSL). The president of the New South Wales branch, Ken Bolton became a leading advocate for the cessation of alien and Jewish migration. He believed that these newcomers were depriving Australian exservicemen of accommodation and employment. In 1946 Bolton began his campaign with the statement ‘let us not beat about the bush — they are German Jews of the same ilk as those who have come before’.40

Leaders of the Australian Natives Association (ANA) were also critical of Jewish migration. In January 1947 the ANA president, P J Lynch, stated that Australia must not become a ‘dumping ground for European refuse now causing trouble in Palestine ... as Jews in Palestine were murdering and flogging British subjects’.41 When Calwell accused Lynch of antisemitism, Lynch defended himself and stressed that he was not attacking Jews as a race.42 At the ANAannual conference held in March 1947 Lynch again stressed that Australia was not a ‘tip for the refuse of Europe’ and stated that the ANA would welcome any immigrant, Jew or gentile, if they would give assurances of loyalty and assimilate easily.43

In February 1947 this cartoon was published in Smith’s Weekly. It highlights the main features of the anti-Jewish stereotype. These negative characteristics were by no means unique to Australia, but as one can see from the cartoon, were presented in an Australian milieu. These characteristics were represented not only in other cartoons published in Smith’s Weekly but also in cartoons published in the Bulletin from its foundation in 1880.


Fig 2. Smith's Weekly, February 1947 — State Library of New South Wales

Jews were portrayed as incapable of assimilating. They were said to stick together and represented as clannish in their behaviour. Migrant Jews created sweatshops, working long hours for low wages, and it was feared that such behaviour undermined Australian living standards. In apparent contradiction, immigrant Jews were scorned as moneylenders who controlled the banks and the media, and, by dint of not working in primary industry, were therefore undesirable immigrants. In addition, Jews were often depicted as godless people, lacking in moral principles and threatening to Christianity. Jews were stereotyped as wealthy, indicating that they were greedy and obsessed with money. The Jewish concept of the ‘Chosen People’ led to the well-known accusations of international control and world conspiracy theories. Above all, Jews were portrayed as physically undesirable — fat, ugly, with hooked noses and foreign accents. It is interesting to note that the word ‘Jew’ did not always appear on the cartoons. Yet, these characteristics made it clear that the negative message was referring to Jews and that, if they were given the chance, they would take over the country.

The negative attitudes of the Anglo-Australian public were to have important repercussions for post-war Jewish migration. In the face of prejudice, antisemitism and his somewhat insecure position within his own party and cabinet, all of which caused concern to Calwell. He introduced measures to limit severely the number of Jewish refugees arriving in Australia. In carrying out these policies, Calwell was supported fully by his departmental officers. These measures were continued under the Liberals when Harold Holt served as Minister for Immigration from 1950 to 1955. But the policy change was disguised, and when the Jewish leadership questioned the government, it claimed that there was ‘no discrimination on the basis of race or religion’ in regard to European immigration.44

When Calwell first announced the granting of landing permits to Jewish refugees on humanitarian grounds, it was presumed that a considerable time would elapse before transportation to Australia became available. This was due to the severe shipping shortage that existed after the war, and for this reason, permits were made valid for two years instead of the customary one year period. The government emphasised that refugees would not receive priority with shipping and would have to travel on non-British ships, since British ships were reserved for returning Australians, the wives, families and fiancés of ex-servicemen, and for British migrants.45

Calwell then imposed a limit on the number of Jewish refugees permitted to travel on any one ship from either Europe or Shanghai to twenty-five per cent of the total number of passengers. This quota was called numerus clausus as it was reminiscent of restrictions placed on Jews in Eastern Europe. It made travel from Europe to Australia for Jewish refugees very difficult, as few non-Jewish refugees were in the position to travel to Australia from the continent. Jewish refugees were assisted by their families in Australia and by the American Jewish refugee agencies, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), a level of support that was not comparable to gentile refugees, as there were no parallel Christian organisations. On the other hand, continentals who were in the position to finance a trip to Australia were not interested in travelling on the refugee boats, since conditions on the troopships hired by the JDC and HIAS were so appalling that they were referred to as ‘hell ships’. As a result, the Jewish refugee organisations, which sought to book passage for those who had received landing permits for Australia, found that it was most difficult to fill the remaining seventy-five per cent of the quota. When they tried to charter planes to overcome these problems, Calwell also placed the twenty-five per cent travel on all planes as well.

Since the quota system of twenty-five per cent continued to cause a lot of hardship, at the end of 1948, the Jewish leadership negotiated a new agreement with the government, which was known as a ‘gentleman’s agreement’. Under this agreement, the quota on boats and planes was raised to 50 per cent, but a limit of 3,000 Jewish survivors per year was introduced. When the Jewish community did not strictly adhere to this agreement, the government introduced a new and effective policy known as the ‘iron curtain embargo’. This policy restricted immigration for applicants from countries behind the ‘iron curtain’ and particularly impacted on Jewish applicants, most of whom came from central and eastern Europe. A similar policy of restrictions was introduced into the mass migration programs. The most important of these was the International Refugee Organisation (IRO) Program under which 200,000 non-British displaced persons (DPs) were admitted into Australia as contract workers between 1947 and 1950.

The implementation of all these discriminatory measures was facilitated by the ‘Are you Jewish’ question on immigration forms.46 The question is, how did the government define who was a Jew? This, in itself, was a very complex issue, but an illuminating episode answers this question. Early in January 1948 Noel Lamidey, then at Australia House in London, became involved in a ruling with regard to the position of the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (HIAS) on the issue of whether Jews who had converted to Catholicism should be included as part of the twenty-five per cent quota or not.47 HIAS argued that since they were not of the Jewish religion they were outside the quota, and had convinced the shipping companies to support this position. Lamidey believed that HIAS was assuming this stance as ‘a clever piece of casuistry designed to give them further advantage and as a means of bettering the 25 per cent fixed quota’.48 He flew to Paris to investigate the situation and warned the companies so involved that if there were Jewish passengers, including Jewish converts, in excess of the twenty-five per cent fixed quota, the shipping companies would be held responsible. For the purposes of the quota, Lamidey defined a Jew as:

1. Any person who is of Hebrew race will be considered a Jew regardless of any later baptismal change.
2. Any person who is of the Hebrew faith will be considered of the Jewish nationality regardless of his nationality.
3. Any person whose passages are sponsored by HIAS or any other Jewish organization will be considered as of the Jewish race.49

Lamidey stressed that such a ‘rigid interpretation’ was necessary to prevent Australia from receiving a large influx of Jewish refugees, resulting in ‘serious official and political embarrassment’.50 His definition was accepted by the government.51

Eighteen months later, this definition of Jews from a racial point of view was still very much in operation. On 2 June 1949, in relation to the International Refugee Organisation displaced persons scheme and the recruitment of Jews, the Department of Immigration defined Jews in the following manner:

There appears to be some doubt as to the meaning of the term Jew in relation to the Displaced Persons Scheme: the term refers to race and not to religion and the fact that some DPS who are Jewish by race have become Christian by religion is not relevant.52

This definition was reminiscent of the racial definition introduced by the Nazis in the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935. Indeed, the medical officer who kept a note of all regulations issued specifically in relation to Jews in regard to the IRO Program noted that ‘Hitler could not have done better!’53

The Australian government’s definition of who is a Jew begs the question of whether the postwar anti-Jewish refugee hysteria and the subsequent discriminatory measures introduced by the Department of Immigration were based on racial or religious bigotry. As has been shown in this paper, most of the anti-Jewish stereotypes were based on racial characteristics. Yet these characteristics cannot be totally divorced from religious issues. Centuries of the representation of Jews as ‘Christ-killers’ were strongly etched into Christian teachings and beliefs. This image contributed to antisemitism not only in Europe but also in Australia. The same is true of the Christian association of Jews with the devil.

In his opening paper, Professor Andrew Markus argued that while religious and racial bigotry can be two separate issues, there is a spectrum of prejudice and that at one point religious and racial bigotry overlap. I would argue that this was true for the postwar outcry against the arrival of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Australia — as well as other parts of the world. This opposition was based on both religious and racial bigotry. The same can be said about the present outcry against Muslim refugees. In December 2001 Australian cartoonist, Geoff Pryor, won the 2001 political humour competition with a cartoon based on Phil May’s cartoon, ‘The Mongolian Octopus — His Grip On Australia’, published in the Bulletin in 1886. As reported in the Canberra Times, ‘Pryor’s cartoon, Recycling’ published on September 6, this year [2001], updates and adapts May’s monster. Pryor renamed his cartoon ‘Afghan octopus’ but sought to show that ‘we haven’t changed much in our fears and anxieties’.54

Notes

1 Sydney Morning Herald, 25 October 1996.
2 There have been a significant number of studies published on Jewish migration to Australia before and after the second world war which have dealt with these issues. See Andrew Markus ‘Jewish migration to Australia, 1933–1947’, Journal of Australian Studies, no 13, November 1983; Paul Bartrop, Australia and the Holocaust 1933–1945, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 1994; Michael Blakeney, Australia and the Jewish Refugees, 1933–1948, Croom Helm Australia, Sydney, 1985; P Y Medding, From Assimilation to Group Survival: A Political and Sociological Study of an Australian Jewish Community, F W Cheshire, Melbourne, 1968; W D Rubinstein, ‘Australia and the refugee Jews of Europe, 1933–1954: a dissenting view’, Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal, vol X, part 6, 1989, pp 500–523; and Suzanne D Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora; Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia, Brandl and Schlesinger, Sydney, 2001.
3 ‘Admission of Jews: Cabinet Decisions re, 1933–1936’, correspondence files, Department of the Interior, Australian Archives Office, CRS A434, item 49/3/7034.
4 Glenda Sluga, Bonegilla: ‘A Place of No Hope’, History Department, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, 1988, p 1.
5 ‘Post-war Migration’, correspondence files, Department of the Interior, Australian Archives Office, CRS A373, item 7786/89; J Wilton and R Bosworth, Old Worlds and New Australia, Penguin Australia, Victoria, 1984, p 7.
6 This sub-committee consisted of J Horgan and A R Peters of the Department of Interior, and W D Forsythe, Department of External Affairs, memo, pp 1–19, 21 September 1944; ‘Post-War Migration’, Australian Archives Office, CRS A373, item 7786/89, p 10.
7 ibid, p 16.
8 ibid., p 17.
9 ibid, p 9.
10 ibid, p 7
11 Arthur Calwell, Be Just and Fear Not, Rigby in association with Lloyd O’Neil, Adelaide, 1978, pp 97–8.
12 Arthur Calwell, How Many Australians Tomorrow? Melbourne, 1945.
13 Calwell, Be Just and Fear Not, p 97.
14 N W Lamidey, Partial Success: My Years as a Public Servant, N Lamidey, Sydney, 1970.
15 N W Lamidey, Aliens Control in Australia, 1936–1946, N Lamidey, Sydney, 1974.
16 Interview with Mina Fink; Medding, op cit, pp 150–51.
17 The ECAJ was formed in August 1944 in recognition of the need for Australian Jewry to speak with a united voice on postwar Jewish immigration to assist the remnants of European Jewry.
18 ECAJ Memo, ‘Immigration to Australia’, 1945, p 1.
19 ibid, pp 7–10.
20 Calwell, Be Just and Fear Not, op cit, pp 101–02. In his book Calwell reported that Francis Barkman, honorary secretary of the AJWS, Melbourne, was also present but Morawetz claimed that this was not the case. Interview with Paul Morawetz (taped), Sydney, 1986.
21 Interviews with Paul Morawetz (taped), Sydney 1986; Mina Fink, Melbourne 1984 and Sydney 1985. Jacob Waks was Mina Fink’s uncle and also came from Bialystok.
22 The Bulletin, 6 December 1946.
23 New Citizen, 15 October 1949.
24 Letter by G M Berger, Sydney Jewish News, 26 January 1945.
25 W J Thomas, ‘When Do Refugees Become Citizens?’, New Citizen, 15 April 1946.
26 Melbourne Herald, 31 January 1947.
27 Letter by Lionel Andrew, Rydge’s Journal, August 1948, as cited in NC, 15 September 1948.
28 S D Rutland, ‘The Jewish Community in New South Wales, 1914–1939’, MA (Hons) Thesis, University of Sydney, 1978, pp 219–24.
29 Sydney Morning Herald, 19 August 1948.
30 Letter by H Osborne, ‘Jews Pt 3 — 1946’, Australian Archives Office, CRS A461, item MA 349/3/5.
31 Report by Galleghan, Deputy Director, 19 July 1946, Department of Internal Security, Australian Archives ACT CRS, A6126/XRI, item 35.
32 Signed by Bartadamson, Smith’s Weekly, 18 January 1947.
33 ibid.
34 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, vol 189, 27 November 1946, p 661.
35 ibid.
36 Medding, op cit, p 154.
37 The Argus (Melbourne), 12 February 1947.
38 For detailed discussion see Blakeney, op cit, pp 294–96; Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, vol 189, 28 November 1946, pp 744–55.
39 ibid., and Sydney Jewish News, 10 January 1947.
40 As reported in Abram Landa’s speech to the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, December 1946, reprinted in the CB, January 1947.
41 Melbourne Herald, 28 January 1947.
42 ibid.
43 Sun, Melbourne, 18 March 1947.
44 See for example, Tasman Heyes writing to Walter Brand, stated that ‘there is no discrimination ... between Jewish and non-Jewish displaced persons’, 10 June 1949, in VJBD corres files, Box 6, La Trobe Library, Melbourne.
45 ‘Imm: Entry into Australia. LPs for Refugees’, Cable 28 June 1946, corres. files, Department of External Affairs, Australian Archives Office, CRS A1067, item, 1C/46/31/1/14.
46 See Suzanne Rutland, ‘Are You Jewish?: P ostwar Jewish immigration to Australia, 1945–1954’, Australian Journal of Jewish Studiesl, 1991, vol V, no 2, pp 35–58.
47 See Noel W Lamidey, Partial Success: My Years as a Public Servant, Sydney, 1970.
48 Heyes from Lamidey, cable, 27 January 1948, ‘Policy with regard to DPs from various zones in Germany’, A1068, item 1C 47/31/14, cit sup.
49 ibid.
50 ibid.
51 Heyes to Lamidey, 30 January 1948, AS343, item 49/3/51, cit sup.
52 Material provided by a Jewish Medical Officer with the Australian Military Mission, Sydney, 7 July 1985. See Suzanne D Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora; Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia, Brandl & Schlesinger, 2001, p 407.
53 ibid.
54 Canberra Times, 8 December 2001.

Originally published in Richard Nile (ed), Strangers and Sojourners: Journal of Australian Studies no 77, St Lucia, UQP, 2003.