Displaced persons in Queensland: Stuart migrant camp

This article examines the lived experience and recent commemorative efforts relating to the experience of displaced prsons who were sent to Queensland in the post-war period. 170,000 displaced persons — predominantly Central and Eastern Europeans — arrived in Australia between 1947 and 1952. They were sent to reception and training centres upon their arrival before commencing a two-year indentured labour contract. Memorialisation of these camps tends to present them as the founding places of the migrant experience in Australia; however, there has been very little historical work on displaced persons in Queensland, or on the Queensland migrant camps — Wacol, Enoggera, Stuart and Cairns. This article focuses on recent commemorative attempts surrounding the Stuart migrant camp in order to argue that, in relation to displaced persons, family and community memories drive commemorative activities

Displaced persons and the politics of international categorisation(s)

Between 1947 and 1952 170,000 Displaced Persons (DPs) arrived in Australia as International Refugee Organisation (IRO)-sponsored refugees. This article sets out the international historical and political context for the migration of DPs to Australia, and interrogates the bureaucratic labelling inherent in the category Displaced Persons . The post-war refugees were presented internationally as Displaced Persons ; refugees ; political refugees ; and eventually, in an effort to solve the population crisis, as potential workers and migrants . This article will describe the historical origin of the terms Displaced Persons refugees , political exiles and migrants - terms which were, and continue to be, relevant and problematic

No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison

Book review: Behrouz Boochani, No Friend but the Mountains (Picador: Sydney, 2018)

Ukraine’s fight for its identity is more than a century old – it is not about to stop

For more than a century, Ukrainian nationalism has proved that it has not - and will not - disappear. This means that as well as refugee support the Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organisations is also calling for concrete political assistance from Australia. This includes support for Ukrainian membership in the European Union, a #NoFlyZone over Ukraine and for business leaders to divest from Russia

Cossack Identities: From Russian Émigrés and Anti-Soviet Collaborators to Displaced Persons

Cossack displaced persons who were re-settled in Australia as part of the post-war International Refugee Organisation scheme had already survived several turbulent eras. Anti-Bolshevik Cossacks refashioned their identities in the post-Civil War period as Russian émigrés and then, during the Second World War, as anti-Soviet collaborators of the Germany Army. At war’s end these Cossacks were rounded up by the British and handed to the Soviets. This paper traces the traumatic (and opportunistic) migration trajectory of one Cossack family, who escaped forced repatriations to become ‘New Australians’

China Russians with Anti-Communist and Fascist views

The project has explored the trajectories of Russian and Russian-speaking refugees who came to Australia from Harbin and Shanghai after the Second World War, with particular reference to their anti-Communist convictions and how these were manifest and expressed in the context of the Cold War.Postwar Russian displaced persons arriving in Australia via the China route. This transnational project plans to study Russian and Russian-speaking Jewish refugees who came to Australia via the ‘China’ route (mainly from Harbin and Shanghai) after World War Two. In Australia, they coexisted with the former Soviet citizens ‘displaced persons’ of Russian, Ukrainian and Baltic nationality who reached Australia via Europe. Their pre-war experiences led many of the refugees to be strongly anti-Communist, but a minority were not, and became subjects of interest both to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and the Soviet KGB. The project plans to investigate their trajectories of exile, migration and settlement, and the impact of this refugee experience on the development of Australian anti-communism in the 1950s

A timely history [Book review]

Review. Across the Seas: Australia’s Response to Refugees, a History, by Klaus Neumann, Collingwood, VIC, Black Inc., 2015, 358 pp., A$34.99 (paperback), ISBN: 978186395 7359. Publisher’s website: www.blackincbooks.com

Beautiful balts: from displaced persons to new Australians

170,000 Displaced Persons arrived in Australia between 1947 and 1952 – the first non-Anglo-Celtic mass migrants. Australia’s first immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, scoured post-war Europe for refugees, Displaced Persons he characterised as ‘Beautiful Balts’. Amid the hierarchies of the White Australia Policy, the tensions of the Cold War and the national need for labour, these people would transform not only Australia’s immigration policy, but the country itself. Beautiful Balts tells the extraordinary story of these Displaced Persons. It traces their journey from the chaotic camps of Europe after World War II to a new life in a land of opportunity where prejudice, parochialism, and strident anti-communism were rife. Drawing from archives, oral history interviews and literature generated by the Displaced Persons themselves, Persian investigates who they really were, why Australia wanted them and what they experienced

Review: James Hammerton, Migrants of the British Diaspora since the 1960s: Stories from Modern Nomads, Manchester University Press, 2017

Book Review of: James Hammerton, Migrants of the British Diaspora since the 1960s: Stories from Modern Nomads, Manchester University Press, 2017. ISBN (hbk) 9781526116574