Austrian-Jewish Refugees in Pre- and Wartime Australia

Abstract

As “strangers” in a new land, Jewish refugees from National Socialism had experienced, what has been described as “everyday otherness” upon their arrival in Australia. This paper analyses refugees’ memories of everydaylife situations to demonstrate the dynamics of self-identities and the diverse and complex ways, encounters had impacted upon their social relations and their identity formation in Australia. Located at the intersection of urban studies and the history of migration, it draws upon qualitative, biographical approaches based on the refugees’ memories of their early years after their arrival to pin down experiences of encounter. Memories on their encounter experiences offer a reflective judgment of the meaning of their experiences. They show, how refugees recalled having experienced “everyday otherness” upon their arrival, a process that, as this paper argues, sustainably affected success or failure of their transition from being a “stranger” in the contact phase towards their acculturation 1 Refugees in Australia A Historical Introduction Refugee migration to Australia has a short history compared to other states. Many factors are responsible for this, amongst others the fact that most of the refugees of the 19th and early 20th century may have “perceived the country to be too remote”, as historian Klaus Neumann puts it in his recent book about Australia’s responses to refugees.1 The country was barely touched by the major refugee movements of the late 19th century.2 Consequently, when the first Australian parliament congregated on 9 May 1900, refugee issues were not to be found on any agendas. Furthermore, three quarters of a century would pass before a comprehensive refugee policy was announced in parliament. Until the 1970s, refugees were regarded as alien immigrants thus having to match strict ethnic, and financial immigration criteria. Once arrived in Australia, “they were supposed to leave behind their experiences of suffering, and their allegiances to their native countries”3. As historian Andrew Marcus puts it, Australians, since the turn of the 19th century developed a “clear concept of themselves as [...] superior to all nonEuropean [high status]4 people”. Thus, as he claims, “discrimination on the grounds of race became normal, accepted behaviour.”5 From its first foundational meeting on, the Australian parliament designed laws such as the Immigration Restriction Bill or the Pacific Island Labourers Bill to exclude those who have been regarded as “undesirable”. As a result, Australia’s population became even more racially homogenous during the first four decades of the 20th century.6 Until 1948, its residents were British subjects. They came overwhelmingly from the British Isles, either by birth or by descent. Australia’s Chinese-born population, which constituted the largest non-indigenous, non-European minority, for example, shrank from 29,000 1 Klaus Neumann, Across the Seas: Australia’s response to refugees: A History (Collingwood: Black Inc., 2015), 5. 2 Except for some few German Lutherans who fled Prussia and the odd émigrés from Europe, see: Neumann, Across the Seas, 17. 3 Neumann, Across the Seas, 1. 4 Generally, only people from Great Britain and northern Europe were seen as high-status immigrants. Migrants from southern, or Eastern Europe usually were regarded as a distinct racial group, see: Andrew Markus, Australian race relations, 1788-1993, St Leonhard: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 145. 5 Markus, Australian Race Relations, 111. 6 Neumann, Across the Seas, 15.